GROWING INTO ABOLITION
Esteban Kelly reflects on anarchism, transformative justice, and critiques of prefiguration.
ISSUE 1: THE UN/MAKING ISSUE
In their latest conversation, for Fortunately, they discuss the daily practices and long-term trajectory of the Solidarity Economy Movement. Sruti and Esteban talk about how building through and beyond resistance, whether in the garden or in the cooperative space, heals us from the wounds of the binary.
Spend your idle time imagining things in your wildest dreams! Then you’re not surprised when people show up... when the community are the ones taking care of each other.
Esteban Kelly: I dropped my kid off for her carpool to school. Along the way, I passed a few small community gardens in my neighborhood. I picked some flowers and put them in a vase when I got home. For the last couple years, I've been arranging bouquets of wildflowers as a little grounding treat or flourish of beauty for my house.
For breakfast, I went out to my garden to harvest whatever was ripe. My garden is bigger than a tiny backyard garden but smaller than a proper big community garden. Before the pandemic, we had a bunch of volunteers who participated in gardening, weeding, watering, harvesting, and planting. That number thinned out with social distancing, but my friend Alison and I (she is the real skilled gardener) are working to build that crew of friends back up– of volunteers who want to get their hands dirty.
Today I harvested my breakfast from things I'm growing. I have okra, hot peppers, sweet peppers, thyme, basil, tomatoes, cucumbers, mustard greens, kale, arugula, and scallions. I threw all that in a scramble. I also harvested some of the flowers from the Jerusalem artichokes (also known as sunchoke). They look a little like a sunflower (they are cousins). I snipped one of them to add to the collection in the vase on my kitchen table right now.
I should shout out that the seedlings for my garden come from a Philadelphia program called City Harvest run by the Pennsylvania Horticulture Society. There’s so much amazing urban agriculture in Philly. These come from a greenhouse at Bartram’s Garden, one of the country’s oldest public ‘preserved greenspaces.’ City Harvest starts the vegetable seedlings over the winter and deals with nurturing and sprouting the seeds. Then, they have days when community gardeners come and pick up these plants for free—as long as you distribute or feed your neighbors with the food you grow inside the city (which I do) and participate in volunteer work down at the farm (which Alison does, bless her heart). We almost always have extra ‘starter plants’ of whatever we're growing, so I share extra seedling plants with friends and neighbors for their gardens as well. In Philly, it's about centering communities of color and Black liberation as part of food systems and cultivation, like what Sankofa Farm does at Bartram's Garden.
It sounds like gardening in this way is something you look forward to—it’s a daily healing practice.
Absolutely—it’s a mental health connection to land and earth. When I’m not traveling, my work is pretty confined to being on Zoom, all the time. I find gardening really grounding. It instills a longitudinal practice of noticing, “Okay, this okra is not ready today, but it will be in a day or two.” This helps me have a mental map of where I need to go. What needs more water or pruning. I'm almost like a pollinator; I float to where my attention needs to go.
We're studying with the hands; we're studying with the heart about the world we're trying to live in.
A couple things happened to me at an opportune age. One involved versatile grassroots organizing as a teen, and the other was a highly structured student co-op in college. First, when I say I was involved in grassroots, autonomous anarchist-collectives, I really mean that I was being organized. I was not the organizer—although that's part of how these things work: Once you're in, things rotate, and soon it's your turn to design the agenda, orient the next person, and onboard them. I was involved in a collective in New York, where I grew up, that had a spokes council structure1 .
When you look at diagrams of the Solidarity Economy, it illustrates how there's different elements that we need to attend to. That was the structure of this collective of collectives: there was an anarchist reading group, a women's collective, an environmental justice group, programming for leftist media, guest speakers, and social justice film screenings.
It also involved a ‘chapter’ of Food Not Bombs, which was both mutual aid as well as food justice with a solidaristic practice, where I met immigrants, recent arrivals, and undocumented workers who were food insecure. My friends and I would post up at the Long Island Rail Road, and we would distribute vegan food that we’d made. Some of that work was about regenerative economics, food waste diversion—dumpster diving and getting seconds that wouldn’t be sold on the shelves—but all of it was about being able to practice mutual aid through these kinds of programs.
And then we also did some direct action and protest mobilization—like Reclaim the Streets and solidarity rallies for Mumia [Abu-Jamal]2. For Mumia, we would load up in buses and come down to Philadelphia for demonstrations.
I think these experiences oriented me toward an organizing structure—what does it take to build something, even if it's an institution that's not meant to last long?
Through engaging with organizing and an anarchist reading circle, I knew the critiques of capitalism and everything else, but I was curious about the visions [for the future]. Often in political spaces, it starts with the utopian thing—it’s compelling for people to ask, “What does a liberated world look like?” That gets us at visions of communism, anarchism, and the abolition of property. This is what we're looking for: a classless society. But what are we doing if it's all just resistance that doesn't really square up and build towards that vision for the future?
So I’d developed an orientation to anarcho-syndicalism, community and worker ownership, and cooperatives. After moving across the country to California as an undergraduate student at UC Berkeley, I was part of what's now called the Berkeley Student Co-ops. I didn't get heavily involved right away, but after a few months of being there, I decided in the middle of the semester to move into a vacant opening in one of the housing co-ops out there. Since all the new member orientation things had already happened, I just got started with things in my own house. It took a long time before I really had a sense of the wider co-op system and its governance. I was oriented to the responsibilities of my own co-op’s meetings and work shifts. At minimum, every member had to do five hours of work per week.
As an aside I should highlight that the way I describe this co-op is different from how I was oriented and different from their self-description. To me, it seems kinda silly that this student co-op was and is still [primarily] self-identified as “housing.” Sure, that was their origin; they were set up as boarding houses for college students to access education affordably, outside of the dormitory system. But even from when they started in the 1930s, they had systems set up that contained several different forms of cooperation. Systems for bulk purchasing, and later food distribution, shared labor. We had 25 permanent staff, separate from the student-residents and our handful of “work shift” hours each. These were grown adults who were employed by us with real jobs with benefits and salaries sufficient enough for them to put their own kids through college. Now I organize worker co-ops nationally and internationally, and I can tell you, this was also a type of worker co-op, on top of being a housing, dining, and shared purchasing co-op.
So, I got a sense, in practice, of us doing what the anarchist theory I had been reading about was postulating—and yet those cooperative members, even ones who were anarchists, largely weren't in touch with the larger left organizing community in the Bay Area. And the younger anarchist organizers in the Bay Area at large weren’t as linked up through relationships, campaigns, or resource solidarity as they could have been to be effective. The anarchists inside the co-ops weren’t leveraging things we were learning about cooperative stewardship and solidarity economics to connect it with Bay Area organizing. That didn’t make any sense to me. The more I learned and got oriented to our own structures in the Berkeley Student Co-ops, the more that organizational process stuff came up again. Lessons for how to really govern our own institutions.
In the Berkeley Student Co-ops, we were all students. There's high turnover, but there we were: stewarding tens of millions of dollars’ worth of assets and resources, and being responsible for long-term maintenance, earthquake safety, drug safety, and so much more. I mean, a lot of serious things were going on! There were tragic overdoses. Twenty-three buildings for over a thousand students, and each house or apartment building had to pass kitchen inspections with the Health Department. It goes beyond the smaller things of chore wheels and group decision making.
However often we could, we’d have house meetings led by an elected House President. Each house had its own democratic decision-making process, with its own bylaws, culture, and constitutions. For some (really very few actually), the process was consensus-based—I lived in one of those at one point. Most used just a simple majority voting system, or some had a modified consensus process. But what did it look like to have this sense of relationship? It meant sharing certain roles, such that there was a meaningful democratic process and participation.
This is what I learned—understanding what kind of intentional education was involved and what kinds of systems and structures were necessary. You couldn't just show up and wing it, and you couldn't just be structureless and flat. You had to have formal leadership roles and rules and policies and norms and standards. You couldn't just decide that you wanted to shrug off or ignore what the health department wanted; they would shut down your kitchen, issue citations, and you wouldn’t be able to feed yourselves. Students have been running that system for over 90 years now.
This demonstrated to me—and I often cite this—that between those two experiences with grassroots anarchist organizing and the Berkeley Student Co-ops, I was able to connect the dots, which landed me in the Solidarity Economy Movement.
We've been socialized around an idea of capitalist consistency where Monday through Friday—week in, week out—you go to the grocery store and get the same selection of things. That's all an illusion.
Well, I think there are contributions from our movements—and there’s a major critique.
There is a critique from the “resistance”-oriented left that the Solidarity Economy is just utopian thinking and thus ignores the real conditions and problems of the current moment we live in. This critique centers on the idea that the Solidarity Economy movement prefigures the world, emphasizing right relationships, harmony, balance, and trying to live in the practice of those elements now.
But! There's things that we offer that really transcend the navel-gazing, “alternative,” opting-out critique of Solidarity Economy organizing. One is that those same people who critique the idea of prefiguring are the ones who are burnt out, who talk about how their work isn't sustainable or how they struggle to maintain hope. And I don't hear that shit in the solidarity economy space—I mean, I just told you about my morning grounding practice of going out to my garden; and yet it's not like I'm not engaged with real world things as well!
There is something that is more sustainable and clarifying about what we are trying to build. It's not like we're opting out and practicing these things as little experiments—it is real study! We're studying with the hands; we're studying with the heart about the world we're trying to live in.
It's one (important) thing to advocate for environmental sustainability and to get out there and block a pipeline, but does doing any of that work mean you have any sense of how ecology works? We've been socialized around an idea of capitalist consistency where Monday through Friday—week in, week out—you go to the grocery store and get the same selection of things. That's all an illusion. What I just told you about my garden this morning—that's something I had to learn when I was living in the student housing co-op, because that house in particular maintained a policy, instilled before I even moved in there, of only sourcing our produce from the local farmer's market and never sourcing any fresh food out of season or outside of our local agricultural system. That's a helpful lesson about how commodities work, even as the most committed materialist Marxist: understanding seasonality and the ebb and flow of scarcity and abundance in the natural world and how that needs to shape our lives.
There is no version of resistance that gets us to a single [realized vision of the future], not even academic theory. You can theorize ‘till the cows come. At a high level, decontextualized theory is not the thing we most need. We are impoverished for praxis itself, and that requires real world practice and studied reflection informing our strategy and theory. That’s especially true nowadays when everything has been abstracted and digitized.
So, sure, you can get a slide deck on Instagram or a webinar, but that is the idea without the actual engagement of the praxis. Our movement’s primary contribution—the thing that I think is precious and ought to be celebrated for the value it offers for our liberation—is that we're laying the foundation for real post-capitalist futures. This is part of why I no longer call our work an “alternative”—I don't believe in our self-marginalization. I'm amazed that people have not learned that lesson from the failure of the 1960s-1970s, when it looked like the left was trying to opt out of society as opposed to engaging it. Building the Solidarity Economy is not about retreating from the world to run a little alternative project for yourself. We actually want to mainstream all of these models, where communities and workers own and control housing, food, labor, etc., all of the things—that's the whole fucking point!
We did not begin with abolition. We landed there. We began with people, with solidarity, with mutual aid, with our own politics of not engaging the criminal legal system—and never fucking calling the cops, even if that's what a survivor wanted.
Yeah, transformative justice is directly tied to that. As you gain a sense of cultivation and stewardship, it gives you a sense of the non-disposability of people in relationships, which is how I got involved in transformative justice work.
I was very involved in a transformative justice collective called Philly Stands Up, working directly with people who had caused harm in sexual assault situations. I jumped into that work before the language, frameworks, analysis, and jargon really existed. We just were doing this as praxis.
Before the term “transformative justice” was part of movement language, we were just called to do this work and hold accountable people who had caused tremendous harm through sexualized violence and sexual assault within our own community. This involved people who we had some sort of relationship with. Even if we didn't know them personally, it wasn't knocking on the door of a random neighbor and being like, “Hey, your neighbor said you suck.” It was people within the anarchist organizing community, the punk community, the queer community, the trans community—it was our people. And through that, not through coercion or threats of turning them in to the cops. We said, “Hey, these are our shared values and principles. Can we call you in to work on it in a non-punitive space where we're going to be the ones who accompany you on that?”
We felt deeply rooted in our values and principles– centering survivors, believing survivors, not calling the cops, not perpetuating harm and punishment. So what does it look like to engage with that? What does it look like to be asked by and to work with a bunch of angry and hurt survivors who are saying, “We want this person shamed!”? This was our culture in the 1990s and 2000s: “We want this person publicly humiliated. We want this person beat up. We want them banned from spaces.” At Philly Stands Up, we looked at all of the different tactics and options and would say, “Some of these things are legit and some of these things are not. There's just [going to be] further harm.”
So yes, ban a person from a space so that the survivor community has immediate safety. But also, ask, “What's our work in actually understanding, not that this person is toxic, but rather what this person’s patterns are and where they are struggling?”
For example, most of the time we saw that a person had a flaw inside of relationships, but they were not going to hurt random people; that wasn’t their pattern. So maybe they don't need to be banned from all public spaces; maybe all that people need to know is to be careful when dating this person and to look out for some things—whether it’s a substance abuse issue or a mental health circumstance.
We arrived at transformative justice by pulling on that thread and not cropping out who a full person was, not cropping out the societal context around them. “You have no job, you're basically homeless, and you have an addiction problem—so should we be surprised when you're lashing out in all these other ways? No fucking shit! You're experiencing instability.” So now our work becomes finding this person housing, connecting them to coaching or counseling.
We provided a certain level of support, but we were like, “Cool, what's your plan? Let me help you be accountable to you.”
Often transformative justice wasn't about interpersonal communication. So much of it was that people needed stuff and we're not raised in that culture of mutuality and care.
What does it look like to show up for somebody who was the source of so much harm? Well, that's what abolition is. We did not begin with abolition. We landed there. We began with people, with solidarity, with mutual aid, with our own politics of not engaging the criminal legal system—and never fucking calling the cops, even if that's what a survivor wanted.
Simultaneously, it was working very strongly with a new survivor support system that actually embraced more aligned restorative and transformative justice politics. This is what comes out of this work, and it comes up when you are living cooperatively. It's not going to come up when you're in a traditional capitalist corporate workplace, or a patriarchal single family living arrangement, or an isolated apartment complex with individual living structures. Those aren't the places where these things come up.
If we're talking about building the society we want, whether that's centering abolition, or worker and community ownership, or whatever version of some liberated socialist future you're seeking, then there's so much structure in traditional heteronormative, capitalist, patriarchal society and structures in the West that needs to be attended to. There are roles that we need to step into and skills we need to cultivate to live another way. Then, we're able to talk about power explicitly. We're able to negotiate these relationships and figure out what needs to happen next so that we can continue collaborating.
I no longer call our work an “alternative”—
I don't believe in our self-marginalization.
We actually want to mainstream all of these models. That's the whole fucking point!
I don't believe in our self-marginalization.
We actually want to mainstream all of these models. That's the whole fucking point!
Oh, it's hard. I want to say kind of conflicting things, and that's maybe part of the point—we’re meant to grapple with contradictions and not obscure them the way that the capitalist system does. We should engage with them directly and struggle with the complex hypocrisies that are around us. On the one hand, it's like, yeah, deal with that stuff, grow those skills, lean into relationship-building and do not devolve into navel-gazing and narcissism.
I mean, what is this nonsense that is happening at the moment? People turn to rest and care and sustainability and conflict resolution, but then we fail to appropriately calibrate what is at stake and we lose the bigger picture that extends beyond this one moment of conflict. Suddenly, it's like, because there's space to name conflict, now all we're doing is in-fighting as opposed to being like, “Hey, that's actually a small thing that we can set aside for the sake of solidarity work with Haiti,” for example.
How do we then calibrate our sensitivity? Of course, there are spaces and relationships that we can and should be sensitive to and hold. Like, don't disrespect me. But I think a lot of people struggle with what it means to apply different standards in different situations and contexts… but that's what abolition is. It is not “one size fits all.” It means we're living in a world where there is not one set of rules—that's fascism, that’s hetero-patriarchy and Christian hegemony.
We need to be able to say that it’s not hypocritical to insist that we have different expectations in different relationships. When we’re in a relationship, we share values. I know your politics. I know you care about me, or that we even come from the same culture, so I hold you to a different standard than my next door neighbor who's going to mispronounce my name, use weird pronouns, or be weirded out by the idea of pronouns altogether. And that's actually okay.
Despite the differences in relationships, I'm still going to feed them the things I'm growing in my garden and invite them into that. And if they're skeeved out by certain things that I'm growing and not by other things, that's cool. You want the collard greens and the tomatoes, but you don't want to have anything to do with weird kale? That’s fine. Live in the contradictions; recall the stakes.
I would love to have enough sophistication to not be surprised when crisis hits! When the US empire has a tantrum! When government fails us! Wasn't this our whole critique the whole fucking time? Why are we acting surprised? Don't act surprised when they're union busting. Don't act surprised when they're arming the Zionists. We've been critiquing this the whole time. We knew that this has been and was going to continue to happen. And at the same time, don't act surprised when people show up with solidarity!
We walk around saying, inherently, people are on the same side. I find it disappointing when people are like, “Never in my wildest dreams did I imagine…” and you can fill in the blank. Spend your idle time imagining things in your wildest dreams! Then you’re not surprised when people show up, when there’s a breakthrough, when something works, when there's immediate mutual aid, when the community are the ones taking care of each other during the aftermath of a hurricane or of a public health crisis or water contamination.
“Spend your idle time imagining things in your wildest dreams.” Because of time constraints and all the shit that's going on, I want to know: What will the rest of your day look like in that context? I know you’ve got a kiddo to go pick up. How do you invite her into this?
Well, in a few minutes I'm entering a union bargaining meeting. I’m on the management side, since I’m the Executive Director [this is in the US Federation of Worker Co-ops]. Our bargaining is a positive, good faith, interest-based bargaining session3. It's collaborative and there's not really any animosity. That's one of the things that I'm about to do.
Then, it’s childcare. I'm going to cook dinner, go back out to the garden, feed my kids, help them with homework, dig into some reproductive labor. It’s a school day. That's what my day is.
All of those regular things are interwoven with the headiness of organizing—of course, you're doing a union bargaining meeting and then cooking dinner, maybe at the same time. To go back to the seasonality, to the false idea that things exist either in full light or in full darkness, we see there is no binary. We're doing all this shit, while we're doing all the other shit. Some of it is going to be in contradiction to another thing that we do, but that is the reality of living under capitalism. That is also the charge of the Solidarity Economy: to get you slowly to change the proportion.
NOTES
1. According to Participedia: “The spokes council model is a structured, democratic process used within organizations and protest movements including the Zapatistas, the Women’s Movement, and Anti-Nuclear Movement. The spokes council works like the spokes of a wheel. It is designed to allow for large group participation and small group discussion to work together with consensus. Each committee, caucus, or outside organization consensus on a representative, a rotating spokesperson or ‘spoke’ who meets in the middle with the other spokes to form the council. The committees, caucuses or outside organizations sit directly behind the spoke for direct consultation on decisions being made.” (Participedia, "Spokes Council Model," https://participedia.net/method/518).
2. ed. Reclaim the Streets (RTS) began in London in 1991 as a direct-action movement focused on expanding community-owned gathering spaces and promoting alternative transportation over dominant car use. The movement has since expanded globally and is now associated with the tactic of reclaiming major roads, highways, or freeways to stage protests and gatherings. See Julia Ramírez Blanco, "Reclaim The Streets! From Local to Global Party Protest," Third Text: Critical Perspectives on Contemporary Art and Culture (July 2013), https://artactcolab.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/2013_Julia-Ramirez-Blanco_Reclaim_the_streets.pdf.
Mumia Abu-Jamal is a Black writer and journalist who led the Black Panther free breakfast program for schoolchildren in Philadelphia and advocated for the MOVE organization. In 1981, he was convicted of murdering a police officer and sentenced to death; he now serves a life sentence without parole. The legal proceedings that led to his conviction and death sentence violated minimum international standards for fair trials and capital punishment cases. See the Free Mumia Abu-Jamal Coalition (NYC), https://freemumia.com/.
3. ed. "Interest-based bargaining" is defined as "a method for helping two sides to reach agreement by trying to find ways in which both sides can get what they want. Interest-based bargaining can be contrasted to traditional negotiation, where at the end there is a winner and a loser" ("Interest-Based Bargaining," Cambridge Dictionary, n.d.).
1. According to Participedia: “The spokes council model is a structured, democratic process used within organizations and protest movements including the Zapatistas, the Women’s Movement, and Anti-Nuclear Movement. The spokes council works like the spokes of a wheel. It is designed to allow for large group participation and small group discussion to work together with consensus. Each committee, caucus, or outside organization consensus on a representative, a rotating spokesperson or ‘spoke’ who meets in the middle with the other spokes to form the council. The committees, caucuses or outside organizations sit directly behind the spoke for direct consultation on decisions being made.” (Participedia, "Spokes Council Model," https://participedia.net/method/518).
2. ed. Reclaim the Streets (RTS) began in London in 1991 as a direct-action movement focused on expanding community-owned gathering spaces and promoting alternative transportation over dominant car use. The movement has since expanded globally and is now associated with the tactic of reclaiming major roads, highways, or freeways to stage protests and gatherings. See Julia Ramírez Blanco, "Reclaim The Streets! From Local to Global Party Protest," Third Text: Critical Perspectives on Contemporary Art and Culture (July 2013), https://artactcolab.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/2013_Julia-Ramirez-Blanco_Reclaim_the_streets.pdf.
Mumia Abu-Jamal is a Black writer and journalist who led the Black Panther free breakfast program for schoolchildren in Philadelphia and advocated for the MOVE organization. In 1981, he was convicted of murdering a police officer and sentenced to death; he now serves a life sentence without parole. The legal proceedings that led to his conviction and death sentence violated minimum international standards for fair trials and capital punishment cases. See the Free Mumia Abu-Jamal Coalition (NYC), https://freemumia.com/.
3. ed. "Interest-based bargaining" is defined as "a method for helping two sides to reach agreement by trying to find ways in which both sides can get what they want. Interest-based bargaining can be contrasted to traditional negotiation, where at the end there is a winner and a loser" ("Interest-Based Bargaining," Cambridge Dictionary, n.d.).