Race Traitor

Abolition and the New Society

January 2001

      A Balance Sheet

      Abolitionism and the New Society

      So, What To Do?

... the primary creative force will be the collective actions of the mass seeking to solve the great social problems which face them in their daily lives. Intellect will play a high role, higher than ever, but it will be the intellectual activities of millions of men, dealing with realities. Intellectuals will be of use to the extent that they recognize the new forces but as a class they will recognize it only when they see and feel the new force. The role that they played between 1200 and today will be over, because the condition of that role, the passive subordinate mass, will be undergoing liquidation in the very action ofthe mass which will be creating a totally new society, an active integrated humanism. The ideas demanded and the will to achieve them unfold one from the other, and with the consciousness of power ideas, hopes, wishes, long-suppressed, because thought unattainable, but now come into the open-that is the process ... But the great masses become abolitionist now; themselves to wipe away the conditions of their own slavery. These cannot be abolished by anyone else.

C.L.R. James

It seems to me the idea of our civilization, underlying all American life, is that men do not need any guardian. Not only the inevitable, but the bestpower this side of the ocean, is the unfettered average common sense ofthe masses. Institutions, as we are accustomed to calling them, are but pasteboard, and intended to be, against the thought of the street.

Wendell Phillips

The time has come to reconsider the original premises of what has come to be known as the new abolitionist project. Thus far, that project (not yet ten years old) has attracted a good deal of media and academic attention, has influenced a number of national discussions on race, has sharpened debates in at least some quarters and has eamed a sympathetic hearing among relatively large groups of anti-white supremacist audiences. At the same time, since the initiators of the project had always intended to be guided by the axiom that “the point was to change it,” the project thus far must be considered only a very partial success. Frankly, we had hoped that, by this time, supporters of our project would have been able to establish functioning new abolitionist chapters across the country and that those chapters would have been able to develop effective public projects embodying abolitionist politics. This has not happened.

We have some questions for ourselves and for those we imagme to be more or less critical supporters. Is abolitionism sufficient for the development of a new insurgency — an insurgency that might resume where the insurgency of the 1960s left off? Is it capable of making a decisive contribution to the return of dreams of unqualified human freedom to the popular political imagination?

RACE TRAITOR, characterized by its founding editors as the “journal of the new abolitionism,” was launched in the fall of 1992. What follows reconstructs the political history of the project, evaluates its contribution and potential, and invites others to respond and to join in what might become a new project.

Since the initial publication of the journal, the editors and a relatively small number of associates have attempted to articulate an abolitionist vision for an American revolution. They did so in the context of an observation that almost all on the left who had imagined the necessity or desirability of social revolution in the 1960s and early 1970s had abandoned that goal and they hoped that a new articulation, in a distinctively American idiom, might contribute to a rebirth of radical activism.

The following are essential elements of the vision:

In addition, we have:

A Balance Sheet

Looking back upon this record, we believe that much of what we have said appears sound. Nonetheless, there are some shortcomings:

Abolitionism and the New Society

We need to reconsider abolitionism one more time. We hope that it is clear that we fully understand that the great mass of the abolitionists consisted of the slaves, the runaways and the free blacks who worked tirelessly in more or less open fashion to destroy slavery. Abolitionism was the first great moment of black liberation in this country. Then, as later, it served to inspire others not oppressed as blacks to join together with the oppressed in a common struggle for freedom and, more or less simultaneously, to embrace dreams of a new world-a world without fixed gender identities, a world characterized by new understandings of the relationship between the individual and the society, a world infused with a new understanding of the spiritual, and so forth. Consistent with the Johnsonite tradition, we believe this was no accident. In spite of the fact that the Afro-Americans were branded as no other Americans were, they nonetheless became the most fully American and, when they engaged in popular struggle, gave expression to the deepest desires of the larger American population:

The great unsatisfied desire of the American population is for social organization, free association. for common social ends, It is the only means whereby the powerful and self-destroying individualism can find fulfillment The Americans are the most highly self-organized people on earth. Every city, every suburb, every hamlet, has organizations of some sort, Elks, Shriners, Rotarians, clubs for everything under the sum. But the Negroes are the most highly organized of Americans. Government statistics show that ofsome I 4 million Negroes in the United States, over 10 million are listed as belonging to some organization. Whatever the variety of these organizations every one has openly or implicitly as part of its program the emancipation o fthe Negro people.

C.L.R. James

On the one hand, the blacks are those who express the desire of all for all and, on the other, they are the people who are often denied everything that is given to everyone else. The contradiction is an excruciating one:

Thus, on all the basic economic and political problems of the day, the Negro, segregated as he is, is an integral part of American life And it is this contradiction between this fundamental need for complete and total integration demanded by the whole modern development in conflict with the powerful interests which demand and perpetuate segregation that lies the sharpness and the intolerable strains of the whole Negro question.

C.L.R. James

So long as the issue is not confronted directly and completely, things endlessly appear to become better and worse at the same time.

... the fact above all which so demoralizes the modern world, that the greater the efforts made, the more terrible are the new forms in which the old social problems reappear.

C.L.R. James

So, What To Do?

From the beginning we have drawn support from many who, whether they call themselves communists, anarchists, surrealists, or something else, consider themselves revolutionaries. If abolitionism without a vision of a new society is incomplete, the new society without abolitionism is impossible. It follows that we unequivocally welcome the erosion of whiteness no matter what quarter it comes from, and oppose any attempts to respond to the relative weakening of the white position by rearticulating a new whiteness.

We would like to invite those who read this reconsideration and believe that it represents, however imperfectly and incompletely, a useful starting point to get in touch with us, to write in response, to come together in more or less formal meetings to discuss what we have written and to think seriously about the possibility of developing a new political project that preserves and transcends the new abolitionist one. We are especially interested in hearing from those who were active on the streets of Seattle, Washington, Philadelphia and Los Angeles.


Retrieved on March 14, 2019 from web.archive.org
Published in Race Traitor no. 12 (Spring 2001). The editors wrote this statement in consultation with Chris Niles and Joel Olson, aided by correspondence with other abolitionists.