Toward autonomous abolition ecologies: Lessons from Stop Cop City at the end of liberal democracy

Abstract

The Stop Cop City movement in Atlanta highlighted that increasingly militarized policing was a reaction to ongoing and entangled social, political, economic, and climate crises. As it articulated the interconnectedness of policing and environmental degradation, it raised strategic questions about how movements should orient to the state as they work to transform the social relations that make possible police violence and polluted land, air, and water. Scholarship on abolition ecology, which has similarly raised questions of how and to what extent to utilize the tools of the racial capitalist state, provides a way forward. Grounded in an understanding of how racialized uneven development transforms human and nonhuman nature to make and remake place, abolition ecology locates the origins of state violence in the social relations of production/reproduction of capitalist society. As racialized uneven development enshrines in space the inequality required by capitalism, it breeds crises, prompting the state to adapt to preserve capitalism. Inspired by WEB Du Bois and Stuart Hall, this article engages a political economic analysis of our current conjuncture to understand the character of the twenty-first century US state. I position the erosion of liberal democracy in the US as a right-wing response to the crisis of neoliberalism, which is being enacted both by the right and the center left. In considering the effects of the state's increasingly authoritarian tactics on the movement to Stop Cop City, I argue that those struggling for liberation in urban areas should build autonomous abolition ecologies, self-governed and directly democratic, that fill necessary social functions, replace the coercive functions of the state, and serve as groundings from which people can sustain the fight for liberatory urban futures.