What is Abolition?
Abolition is a social contract in which we agree that everyone deserves to exist. Everybody deserves a place to call home. That translates to everyone having the shelter they need. We should live in a world where no one is without housing unless they choose to be.
If you were asked, “Would you agree to have less (if it was still enough), if that meant that someone else who doesn’t have enough could survive?” most people would probably say “Yes”. If that’s true, most people are already abolitionist in spirit!
Where we need to start is by increasing empathy. It may be hard to imagine how to solve many of our social problems because it’s not that you don’t want people to thrive; it’s that you think it will cost you too much for someone else to get more.
We have the tools to create an abolitionist world; we just need to use the tools we have to raise up the bottom of society. No one has all the answers, and it will be a process that unfolds as we do it, but we need to do it because the goal is so worth it. In that way, abolitionists are people who haven’t given up on the world.
Abolition yields a world in which we can all thrive. We would all have our basic needs met. In this system, social supports make up what people cannot secure for themselves. For example, disability benefits could be commensurate to how much a person can work. If you have the capacity to work 60% of full-time, you should get 40% disability benefits. This is not how the current system works, and it leaves people in dire straits. In fact, hopefully we can re-imagine a society that frees us from dependence on the wage entirely!
We need a culture of connection. Capitalism causes alienation. What if we assumed people deserve everything and work backwards from there? Even when people fail to meet your expectations, it is often because they are drowning in this system. When you get frustrated with slow service, you aren’t seeing the service worker on the edge of tears, trying their hardest and barely making rent.
The underlying assumptions of abolition are:
We all deserve to live
We are all doing the best we can at any given moment with what we have
There are reasons that inform every action
We can get to a better world
Thus, abolition requires cultivating an ongoing practice of empathy. If we incorporate empathy in every action, we can build abolition from the ground up.
The Root of the Word
This movement is called abolition because it continues the work of abolition of slavery. We fight to abolish modern slavery, which includes policing, prisons, surveillance, and dependence on the wage.
Abolition in Practice
So what does this actually mean for policy in Santa Cruz?
One example of applying abolition here in Santa Cruz would be to replace Neighborhood Watch signs with signs of who to call for help. This would incentivize people to reduce calls to police for “suspicious activity.” 50% of the police budget is spent on patrol. Officers get burned out from long uneventful shifts. One officer reported 80% of calls are calls about houselessness. What if instead we had a City number on signs that routes to your district’s neighborhood action network?
This demonstrates the tearing down alongside the building up. We need to provide care, not implement carceral solutions. Calls should be for services like community mediation or more city waste receptacles instead of calls to criminalize people just trying to survive.
Imagine not needing the police as much since you could have neighborhood support. The City could invest in the development of these community action networks, such as by hiring the Conflict Resolution Center of Santa Cruz County to do de-escalation trainings in various neighborhoods. The City could help support these neighborhood pods form, build leadership, and gain needed skills and training. Perhaps they could subsidize CPR/First Aid training for the public. This brings the bottom up, and creates a level of connection that works to remove the alienation imposed on us by capitalism. A model like this would inherently include disability justice and increase survivability. Much of the funding for these new initiatives could come from what is currently wasted on police resources that these programs would help replace!
How Do We Afford Abolition?
Most of the money in the economy bubbles up to real estate and is paying for artificially-increased land value. If we stop catering to real estate interests, we actually could have enough to provide for everyone. Our current system is modern feudalism, enslaving us through rent and mortgages.
Think about anything that is too expensive, like rent. Why is rent so much? Well, the landlord will say they need the income to pay their mortgage. Why is the mortgage so high? Because many houses are selling well above what they are worth, due to the rising cost of land. This then necessitates that wages go up and up for people to be able to afford to live (which doesn’t even happen). We need a new, more sustainable system that ideally doesn’t rely on money, and certainly doesn’t have ever-inflating value.
A common retort to the abolitionist vision is a concern that people will be lazy and end up doing nothing. In studies of psychology, it is shown that most people are inherently motivated and want to contribute and create. As for jobs that “no one wants to do”, we can rely on the use of automation. Automation doesn’t have to be a bad thing if it is not coming at the cost of people’s survival.