If you don’t see it, build it

Season 1 Episode 1: If you don't see it, build it

with Geo Maher from the W.E.B. Du Bois Movement School for Abolition & Reconsturction

If you don’t see it, build it.

To kick off our series, we are talking with Geo Maher from the W.E.B. Du Bois Movement School for Abolition & Reconstruction - a school for collective thinking and learning about injustices and political change to empower movement organizers of all ages and backgrounds to challenge and transform oppressive systems.

We talk about what is salvaged in the process of understanding and reconstructing the world through a personal and communal study of injustice. We talk about how collective study beyond conventional university ecosystems can sustain and reimagine scholarly traditions committed to resisting capitalist exploitation and hierarchy - rather than reproducing them.

The W.E.B. Du Bois Movement School for Abolition & Reconstruction is a political education program for aspiring revolutionaries and movement leaders from those communities most impacted by poverty, policing, and mass incarceration.

Through participatory and collective study of political economy, the history of global resistance movements, and the theoretical and practical aspects of social change, they aim to teach a new generation of organic intellectuals not only how to understand the world, but more importantly, how to change it.

Geo Maher, Ph.D., is a writer, organizer, and popular educator who has taught in colleges and universities, in prisons, and in the barrios of Caracas, Venezuela—learning an immense amount from his students in the process. Growing up poor in the Maine woods, he was taught at an early age to despise oppression, and found early inspiration in local and global struggles against capitalism, colonialism, imperialism, and white supremacy—and in the revolutionary internationalist vision for a new world that those who fight continue to carry in their hearts. He is the author of five books, including A World Without Police and Anticolonial Eruptions.

Time Stamps:

• Intro (0:00)

• What is the Abolition School? (2:37)

  • Impact of 2020 Protests on Abolitionist Discourse (2:37)

  • The Challenges of Sustaining Abolitionist Momentum (4:21)

  • Abolition and Reconstruction: Learning from History (7:35)

• Building Alternative Structures in Abolitionist Education (12:21)

  • We need to create the kind of society in which these institutions do not make sense (12:44)

  • The capitalist system does not want you to study together (15:23)

• Participatory Education: Principles and Practices (19:21)

• We're all intellectuals: The organic intellectual (33:09)

• Academia is going to shit quickly (38:25)

  • How can I continue to study because I value study because I want to understand the world? (44:19)

  • Creating Alternative Educational Systems and Global Collaborations (46:21)

  • If it's not there, build it (51:00)

• Are you engaging with community? (52:52)

• Outro (56:57)

Show Notes and Credits:

In this episode, we reference the following thinkers, organizations, and resources:

• Communist Party's Jefferson School in New York

• The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study by Fred Moten & Stefano Harney

• The Black Jacobins by C.L.R James

• Frantz Fanon School in Durban

• Highlander The Movement School

• Center for Political Education

• Kansas City Defender

• B-Real Academy in Kansas City

• Abolition & Reconstruction: An Emergent Guide For Collective Study/ The W.E.B. Du Bois Movement School for Abolition and Reconstruction on Common Notions Press

Support the Abolition School:

Learn more and support the Abolition School here: bit.ly/abolitionschool

Music:

Huge thank you to Devon Church for making music available from his album All That’s Solid Melts Into Air. Check out more of his music here.