Abolition Is A Constant Struggle: Five Lessons from Minneapolis

What seemed impossible has suddenly become possible. After the police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, after thousands came out of quarantine and into the streets, after the city burned, people began to see what many Black and Indigenous people have understood for a long time: the police must be abolished, not reformed. Reformist measures—understood as regulations to curb the seemingly peripheral exceptions of, rather than eliminate altogether, punitive prison-backed policing—had been the primary demands in the Twin Cities after the police killings of Jamar Clark in 2015 and Philando Castile in 2016. This time, abolition was in the air. A veto-proof majority of the city council vowed to dismantle the Minneapolis Police Department (MPD). The Parks Board, University of Minnesota, and Minneapolis Board of Education severed their contracts with the MPD. On the streets, mourning and euphoria mixed in the air. People greeted each other with “Fuck 12.”² Seemingly overnight, everyone had become a prison or police abolitionist.

What made these wins possible? And why now? As I write, the COVID-19 death toll nears 900,000 globally and each day brings a new onslaught of terrors: pending global economic collapse, corporate bail-outs, intensified state repression, increased housing precarity, police killings, right-wing militias, and wildfires abound. In their face, we are also witnessing a “counter-conflagration” of “fires being set against the state.”³ When the Minneapolis Police Department (MPD)’s Third Precinct burned, the uneven geographies of economic inequality laid bare by the COVID-19 crisis became both a tinderbox for the uprising and a condition of possibility from which new abolitionist worlds grew. With real unemployment at nearly one-fifth of the US working population, 40% of renters across the US facing eviction, families receiving little if any economic relief, and months spent in social isolation, the rage in the streets of Minneapolis seemed to emanate from a mass of people whose wounds of abjection and exclusion had festered since long before the epidemic. For Black youth who experience both white supremacist state violence and dimmed prospects of a secure integration into waged work—felt even more acutely in a faltering pandemic economy—the riot expressed collective anguish on both a political and [End Page S-127] economic register, against a state order that long ago exchanged the social wage for racialized violence and policing as plunder.⁴

This quick movement from lockdown to uprising was far from coincidental. The pandemic prompted a global revelation: capitalism, which has never sustainably provided for our collective needs, was laid bare as a system that distributes not daily needs, but uneven life chances. In the imaginative space opened up by the intensified revelation of capitalism’s inadequacies, mutual aid networks flourished. Across the world, they attest to a mass re-imagination of systems of collective care. In Minneapolis, as stores and banks burned, many looters chose not to hoard but to give away: teenagers walked out of the looted Target with armfuls of diapers and food that they gave to families affected by store closures. Others stacked cases of alcohol and beer outside of looted liquor stores for the community to share, imagining (if only momentarily) through these actions what a world of plenitude for the many might look like.

The convergence of pandemic and riot have also exposed the fault lines of longstanding struggles over housing. In the US, as rent moratoria expire en masse and various arms of the police have helped to enforce evictions, even white liberal middle-class has begun — if only nascently — to understand what poor and working people of color have long known: that police violence plays a key role in dispossession, gentrification, and the protection of private property interests. Connections between housing struggles and abolition were particularly prominent in Minneapolis. On the day after the precinct burned, social workers walked into a hotel emptied out by the pandemic and the riots, and moved 300 unhoused people into the vacant rooms. It is noteworthy that this occupation was only possible because rentier capitalism had made a luxury structure available through its own failure to...