The W.E.B. Du Bois Movement School for Abolition & Reconstruction

Abolition / Organizing

The systems we confront don’t want us to study–and they definitely don’t want us to study together.

Abolition and Reconstruction is the product–and the process–of the first year of work at the Du Bois Movement School, a community education project that came together in the wake of the 2020 uprisings. While the media embraced the language of abolition–if not the revolutionary practice–the state used violent tactics to repress activists as we fought in the streets and in public opinion for the abolition of prisons and police, of state violence and capitalism. Out of this moment a question emerged: What do we really mean when we say “abolition”?

Searching for the answer to this question required conversations with organizers and educators, the development of concrete organizing skills, and most of all a deeper understanding of history, economics, and power. In this pocket-sized volume, Abolition and Reconstruction offers a framework for 12 weeks of study on revolutionary abolition, decolonization, and struggles past and present, giving readers the tools to understand oppression and domination, and work together to build knowledge and solidarity.

We study the world in order to change it.

What you are holding in your hands is not a finished product. But it is the product of the first year of our work at the Du Bois Movement School. And what a year it has been. The Du Bois Movement School was the product of a particular time and place. We came together amid the long wake of the 2020 rebellions, which mobilized hundreds of thousands nationwide and pushed abolitionist narratives into the mainstream. This raised pressing questions for abolitionists across the country and the world, and more than any other, the question was this: what do we mean when we say abolition?

The system had two responses to this question: co-optation and counterinsurgency. While sectors of the political and media apparatus have embraced the language of abolition (and decolonization) to water down and co-opt them, the state has also subjected revolutionary abolitionists to severe repression—we experienced both in Philly. In this context, we engaged in conversations among movement educators and radical organizers across the city to ask what kind of political education would help to take abolitionist struggles to the next level. We realized that this required not only training in concrete organizing skills but real understanding of the world, history, economics, and power. We realized that we need to study our world if we want to change it.