English Ep 0: Abolition is creation
*Text in italics has been translated.
[00:00]
BBC: Cities across the United States remain in a state of high tension tonight as the country braces itself for another wave of protest over the death of George Floyd.
Radio Canada: Black Lives Matter, Montreal continues to repeat.
Global News: We begin in New Brunswick where for the second time this month, police have shot and killed an Indigenous person.
Reporter: A call to cut the Montreal Police’s annual budget of 662 million dollars right in half. This was the message of the protest.
Speaker: Marginalised communities that need services. That is the new common sense revolution. And we need to keep in the streets until it’s realised.
Protesters: No Justice. No Peace. Defund La Police.
[01:00]
Alia: In the wake of these global protests, community members came together to form a Defund The Police Coalition in Montreal. The mission was simple: defund the police and invest in community care and safety.
Alia: Three years later, as major cities across Canada continue to increase police budgets, the fight is more urgent than ever. Montreal is facing numerous public safety crises, as social inequities deepen.
Alia: Today, the Defund the Police coalition brings together over 80 member organisations and hundreds of activists who are fighting to create new visions and practices of collective safety in Montreal.
[2:06]
Alia: You’re listening to Brûler Bâtir.
Karl: A new bilingual podcast produced monthly by the Defund Coalition.
Alia: I’m Alia.
Karl: I’m Karl.
Alia: And we’ll be your hosts.
[02:20]
Alia: So often, conversations around defunding are framed as negative calls to action that seek to take away or destroy.
Karl: However, calls to defund the police are foregrounded on the recognition that real public safety is created through systems of community care and support that centre meeting people’s needs and addressing harm in transformative ways.
Alia: The carceral systems that currently claim to provide “public safety” are based in logics of punishment and fear that on the contrary are themselves major sources of harm and violence that create an infinite cycle of injustice and criminalization.
Karl: Transforming the ways we address community violence and harm can feel like a big and daunting undertaking. But meaningful systems of community care and support already exist all around us, in so many forms, and much more could be done with adequate resources.
Alia: We want to showcase this work, with all its challenges and triumphs right here, where we are, in Montreal. In doing so, we want to emphasise the generative and reconstructive dimension of defunding campaigns.
Karl: The fight isn’t to simply abolish certain things but to create new responses that will render the police, prisons, and carceral institutions obsolete.
Alia: Alongside activist Mariame Kaba we want to begin with the question “What [else] can we imagine for ourselves and the world?”
[03:47]
Alia: Hi Karl!
Karl: Hey Alia.
Alia: Usually we’re gonna be interviewing other people together. But today to get things started we’re gonna interview each other together.
Karl: Yes. First of all, I want to say thank you for inviting me to join this project. I’m really happy to participate and really excited about the people we’re going to interview and with how the project is going so far. What prompted you to get this project off the ground? What was your vision?
Alia: There were few intertwining motivations for this project. I organise with the Defund Coalition. I mostly do work with the communications team. And at the time a lot of the work we were doing was focused on researching and exposing the violence and harm of police operations around the city. And there was kind of talk about putting forth a project that centred a little more of the hopeful and generative side of defunding demands. We’d heard of the One Million Experiments Project that takes place in the States and we thought they had a really exciting model for doing this sort of imaginative abolitionist work.
So after many months of thinking and planning we put together this team and here we are. And when we talked about finding hosts for this project your name just kind of came up and I kind of cold emailed you. So I guess I’m kind of curious about what made you decide to join the project?
Karl: I remember exactly the moment when I received your message. I was like, Oh so nice! I had cut myself out of civilization for a week and a half. I was on a sailboat. At that moment, I wanted to get involved again in organizing, so it was perfect timing. I really liked the project, the idea of giving voice to the defund campaign's demands, and of discussing how community workers experienced it. It was also connected to something that I think about a lot in my personal activism: how to speak with people who don't necessarily agree with defunding the police or re-imagining care. I saw that the project could lead to that: showing that it's not just theoretical or utopian, but rather that concrete alternatives already exist. It's about building alternative systems, to think about providing care and support to everybody. That's what spoke to me. We've touched on many themes of "abolition", without necessarily naming it – but we should address it directly. So I was wondering, when did you hear about abolition for the first time? And what does it mean for you today?
Alia: I don't know that I remember like the first time I heard the word abolition. But it was definitely during 2020 and the Black Lives Matter Protests that I really started to bring abolition into a more foundational framework of how I think about politics in general. For me, it's really about reinvesting and creating an economy of care over an economy of punishment and violence, and so we're using the words like defund or abolish, which are kind of destructive words, but it's really about what happens as you do that, which is always a re-making or a funding of other things. And so on one hand, this political framework structurally requires organising and fighting for the creation and maintenance of places that provide meaningful support and care for our communities which is a really wide ranging list of demands. Then it also has this more personal everyday dimension where it speaks to the ways we show up in our interpersonal relationships and how we relate to people and care for them. I think of this as a motion that constantly requires labour and energy and struggle: trying and then trying again when we fail. What about you Karl? Do you remember when that word came into your life and what does it mean to you today?
Karl: Well, it’s interesting that you talk about 2020. I think that 2020 was a turning point that exposed us to police violence and how it unfolds. In 2020, I was an outreach worker for people involved in sex work. During the public health crisis, it just became clear that our work was directly at odds with that of the police. To help people, to carry out interventions, we always had to calculate how the police would respond. Like, what will the police do? And are the police going to stop us? Then in 2020, at Carlton, they put an end to the internships with the police at the school of criminology and it really echoed with me and where I was in my career when I had to choose a professional internship and a research project. Then I did my thesis on intervention work, in the context of the COVID crisis, specifically how community workers negotiated with the police. I heard dozens and dozens of testimonies on how the police were counterproductive for this work which really crystallized for me how the police cannot be a source of safety for marginalized communities and how they really amplify a lot of the problems they’re trying to address. To return to what you also mentioned about personal ethics. I think that abolitionists’ invite us, not to use the term abolition from a theoretical point of view, but to really make it a personal ethic of life. A lot of abolitionists emphasize that we can not, on the one hand argue for abolition, and then on the other engage in punitive logics in our personal relationships. Abolition has to touch how we respond to what hurts us, and how we respond when we hurt others. So it’s a bit about the way you live your life, how you are in community, and how you work in community. I think we're both talking about the importance of abolition in both our own lives but also in our intellectual path.
Alia: Yeah, it's interesting how you speak about your experience of 2020 as a time where a lot of these ideas felt they had the potential to be really transformative. Part of the motivation for this podcast was remembering how in 2020 these abolitionist ideas felt mainstream and how many people, for the first time, were behind ideas about defunding. Since then some of that hope of systemic change has felt farther away and so part of the idea of this podcast was to bring some of that energy and really practical work back into view.
Karl: It's Mariame Kaba who says: Hope is a discipline.
Alia: Yes, hope is a discipline and I hope we can kind of keep this sentiment alive throughout our interviews. For me, at their strongest, articulations of abolition aren't abstract or distant political projects, but are things that have stakes for how we understand ourselves and the ways we navigate all of our relationships and it's also a politics that is alive and open to transformation and criticism. I think as these ideas come more into the mainstream, or at least get funded, we are always negotiating what these things mean. Figuring out how to transform harm is not simple and the answers are not fixed or always present the first time. I guess that's a nice segway into our last question, which speaks about this transformation, riffs off the name of our podcast, and the spirit we really want to bring to these conversations namely that defunding work is a twofold commitment of undoing carceral structures and formulating alternative social relationships, which are detached from these institutions. So the question is: what carceral system or structure do you want to burn down, and what would you like to build up in its place?
Karl: Well, I think that if we see abolition as a horizon to which we commit, and if we follow the propositions that tell us to think of non-reformist reforms, we can either expand carcerality, or work to diminish it until it's abolished. I think that it would be really important to deconstruct the punitive tendency of the past 40 years which has inserted logics of control and surveillance in social services, and to return to a social work that is really focused on care. How about you, Alia?
Alia: I've been thinking a lot about the nation state and colonial borders, because of the genocide that's going on in Gaza and this illusion of military-backed borders, being a sense of safety. Borders are themselves violent and often create this false sense of peace in the lives of some at the expense of others. And there's this illusion that people’s safety is in competition, that the safety of the Israeli people requires constant violence against Palestinians. An abolitionist lens would emphasize how everyone’s safety is actually connected. One of the biggest lies of the colonial state has been to convince people that that's not the case. And then, a more ground thing we can build that gives me a sense of joy and safety in my life is spaces where I can feel connected and in community with my neighbours, even my neighbours who I don't know, who are very different from me. For me, that's the coffee shop that I go to down the street and like there's a bunch of people with ranging ages and backgrounds that I have come to know and talk to. I'm a grad student and some of the research I do is on these kinds of third spaces or community spaces, and I think of them as sites where solidarity and meaningful recognition of people's needs are possible. So I'm kind of thinking about those two things which are in some ways really not related, but I think in other ways quite connected.
Karl: We should go to that café down the street! I’d be interested. Thank you, Alia, for this first episode. I think it's a little presentation of who we are, and of our link with the Defund Coalition.
Alia: Thanks for being here and also for, you know, all the work that's gone in making this possible. And also we should just thank our team, too, who has helped us think through these ideas and continues to do a lot of work behind the scenes.
[13:52]
Alia: Thanks for chatting Karl.
Karl: Thank you Alia, talk soon.
[14:43]
Karl: Brûler Bâtir is produced by Alia, Karl, Abby, Zo, and Orlando.
Alia: Our outro song is by Kimmortel off their new album Shoebox and is linked in the show notes where you can find a full transcript of the episode in English and French. We do this work in Tiohtià:ke on the unceded lands of the Kanien'kehá:ka.
Karl: Subscribe and share! Thank you for joining us and we’ll see you next time.