Abolition seeks to abolish oppressive and harmful systems like prisons, policing, borders, and, more broadly, capitalism as a whole. Crucially, abolitionists don’t seek to replace these systems with similar systems that are slightly less harmful, like “prisons-lite” or “reformed cops.” Rather, abolitionists seek to make the reasons these systems came to exist in the first place obsolete, instead replacing them with “a constellation of alternative strategies and institutions, with the ultimate aim of removing the prison from the social and ideological landscapes of our society.” (Angela Davis, Are Prisons Obsolete?)
These are huge, lofty goals seeking to upend the ways in which all of our lives within capitalism are surveilled, policed, jailed, oppressed, harmed, and exploited. So how do we organize around them?
These are the questions we’ve been reckoning with in Connecticut DSA since the scaling up of ICE violence in the U.S. in the Winter of 2026. In my last piece for the Nutmeg Socialist, I wrote about what the word “abolition” means, attempting to ground the struggle to abolish ICE within the broader struggle to abolish the carceral systems of capitalism, as well as the capitalist state itself. Today, I’ll recap how we’ve been attempting to organize towards these goals, specifically within the Hartford Branch of CT DSA, covering the work we’ve done between February and July, as well as how our recent endorsement of Maryam Khan’s campaign fit into our Branch strategy.
Hartford Branch-level organizing
At the Hartford branch meeting following CT DSA’s emergency abolish ICE rally back in February, we met to plan how we can organize around the goal of abolishing ICE. We used these three categories as frameworks for brainstorming the work we’d like to do within the Hartford community to work towards abolishing ICE:
- Material conditions – Organizing to directly fight for, improve, or protect the material conditions of the working class. This could include things like mutual aid, court support, rapid response, fundraising for vulnerable people, child care, language support, etc.
- Consciousness raising – Organizing to build our collective understanding of the systems that oppress us and how we can create alternative systems together. This could include political education, discussion circles, member development, skills trainings, etc.
- Relationship building – Organizing to build connections between all of the various organizations and communities in this fight, as well as to engage new people and communities into the work. This could include coalition work, community outreach, partner org coordination, social events, etc.
We explained the three categories in the beginning of the meeting, and then we asked people to self-select into breakout groups based on the category of work that most interested them.
From those breakout discussions, each group came up with ideas for organizing projects with an orientation towards abolition that we could start working on right now, within our communities. Here’s a summary of the work we’ve done within each category:
Material conditions
In the current moment, our orientation towards abolition is specifically to abolish ICE as an institution, keep ICE agents out of our communities, and keep our community members safe.
With this focus in mind, the primary material organizing we’ve been engaging in within the Hartford branch is supporting the expansion of the Hartford Area Rapid Response (HARR) network. The branch, in solidarity with HARR, is working to build out neighborhood “nodes” connecting trusted people within neighborhoods or workplaces. People within these nodes receive training on how to respond when ICE does enter our communities and attempt to kidnap community members. Training includes how to monitor, document and respond to ICE activity.
We’ve been investing in training members in bystander skills within the Hartford branch and building more and more neighborhood “nodes.” These nodes all connect to HARR in an effort expand the reach of trained responders in Hartford county and beyond.
We set a goal to train 30% of our Hartford Branch members in rapid response and know your rights, which is about 120 people. Thus far, we’ve trained about 15%, so we still have some work to do. There are two upcoming trainings being held in July and August. If you’re a DSA member in the Hartford area and haven’t been trained yet/joined a node, reach out to us and we will get you connected to the trainings or help you host a neighborhood/workplace training for a node of your own!
Consciousness raising
The consciousness raising discussion yielded three separate prongs for organizing to raise our collective consciousness: political education, emotional peer support, and organizing for joy. I’ll talk about each in turn:
- Political education
In an unhappy coincidence, we had been running a political education series focused on abolition prior to the escalation of ICE violence this year. The series used the book Abolition and Reconstruction: An Emergent Guide for Collective Study, which was put together by the W.E.B. Du Bois Movement School for Abolition & Reconstruction, based out of Philadelphia. I like to refer to the book as a “greatest hits” of socialist thinkers, with a focus on: foundational socialist texts from Marx, Luxembourg, Lenin, etc.; Reconstruction-era analysis, with a heavy focus on Du Bois; and modern thought about abolition, from Angela Davis, Erica Caines, The Red Nation, and others.
The book does a wonderful job putting foundational socialist texts in conversation with modern thought that challenges or adds nuance to these frameworks. For example, chapter 10 of the book includes abstracts from Lenin’s The State and Revolution, and it puts them in conversation with the concept of the “captive maternal” that Joy James wrote about in 2023. Lenin advocates for the necessity of a violent revolution and a “dictatorship of the proletariat,” and James says maybe the most revolutionary thing we can do is learn to take care of ourselves and each other.
We ran the series as a hybrid reading and film series: we met every other week, alternating between reading discussion and film screenings. Bob, one of the main organizers of the series, chose six films which engage with questions of racial capitalism, colonialism, and the lived experience of Black and colonized peoples oppressive systems. Watching the films in conversation with the book helped us reflect back on the texts we read compared against the lived experiences we saw on screen.
We averaged about 15-20 attendees each session. Over the course of the series, we’ve seen newer members engage with challenging socialist ideas, and I believe we’ve empowered this group of people to lead and direct organizing work in the Hartford area.
We concluded the series at the beginning of July, and where we go from here is an open question that we’re actively working through. We have thoughts about training new facilitators, co-developing new materials to read together as a group, and running our “Socialist Essentials” introduction to socialist theory course again in the Fall. If you’re interested in helping us figure out what we do next, come join us.
- Peer support
Life within capitalism robs us of our emotional capacities. Racist and colonial histories of domination, oppression, theft, and violence underscore all aspects of the world we currently inhabit. With those histories come legacies of loss, grief, and trauma. To grieve loss and heal from trauma takes time, space, reflection, knowledge, and community. And yet, the lives we live within capitalism demand that we sell our labor as a commodity, performing the tasks of workers rather than living as humans, and foreclosing opportunities for healing and restoring our own humanity and communities. Further, social media and cell phones gobble up our attention to be bought and sold to advertisers, transforming our free time from opportunities to reflect into an endless stream of notifications and a bottomless pit of content.
The mental health crisis within the U.S. is well documented, yet the mental health system in our country was created in service of and is maintained by capital. Mental health care as a practice, generally, individualizes mental health struggles, making the problems about the people who experience and deliberately avoiding connections between individual mental health struggles and systemic sources of harm.
Mental health challenges affect our ability to organize together. Anxiety might keep us from responding to a message from a fellow organizer or attending an organizing meeting. Trauma responses like fight, flight, or freeze might turn an otherwise healthy interaction into an argument or source of miscommunication. Unprocessed grief might affect us all in unseen ways, especially with the scale and frequency of harm unfolding in front of our eyes in recent years.
So what do we do about it? If we can’t trust the mental health system to help us heal, who can we turn to? As socialists, we believe we can turn to each other.
This is where peer support comes in. Peer support means, in short, peers within a given community coming together to share about their lives, the emotions they’re experiencing, and hold space for one another. Peer support has a long history, dating back to 18th century France. It exploded in the 1970s after the closure of psychiatric institutions in the U.S., leaving mental health patients with no one to support them but each other.
In our efforts, we connected peer support to consciousness raising, making space to connect the challenges we’re facing in our lives to the systems which oppress us. For our kickoff meeting, we put together a summary of materials influencing how we’d like think about this work. The sources we reviewed included peer support materials from Intentional Peer Support and eCPR, quotations from Judith Herman’s seminal work Trauma and Recovery: The aftermath of violence—from domestic abuse to political terror, Paulo Freire’s The Pedagogy of the Oppressed, and consciousness raising materials from the women’s liberation movement of the 1970s.
In total, we’ve held four peer support meetings between March and June. Emotional spaces of this kind have inherent challenges, like what to do when someone gets emotionally triggered, and how to make space for everyone to share while also making sure everyone gets a chance to participate. We’re still figuring these pieces out, but we’ve seen 10-15 participants join each session, and we’re learning as we go. As a next step, we’re looking to train more facilitators to help us expand the work.
- Organizing for joy
Just like life within capitalism robs us of our capacities to grieve and heal from trauma, it also transforms our collective capacities for joy into commodities to be bought and sold. Joy within capitalism gets sold to us as a nice car, a big house, a trip to Europe, drinks and food at a bar, or going to an expensive concert, or what have you.
Just like we can turn to each other to grieve and heal, we can also turn to each other to find joy. So much of our organizing work focuses on just that: work. People come to socialist spaces because they’re angry about the world around them. They’re also often isolated, alienated, and exhausted from the lives they lead. When we put them straight to work on an organizing campaign of some sort, that work can become an outlet for the anger and frustration they might feel in their lives. It also might replicate the same alienation and exploitation they experience in the workplace or at home.
Creating intentional spaces within which we can discover joy and our shared humanity together can help people feel connected to one another and to themselves. These connections, in turn, help us expand our reach in the organizing work we do. The relationship is dialectical: doing organizing projects builds community, and building community expands our organizing projects.
To help with these efforts to organize for joy in the Hartford branch, we thought a good starting point would be running game nights. Admittedly, and perhaps predictably, this prong of the consciousness raising efforts has received the least attention. We’ve run two game nights between February and June. With that said, we’re planning a dance party event for the end of July, and we’ve included plenty of social time after each of our political education sessions. Reflecting on the work we’ve done this year, this is the area I intend to shift my focus to the most.
Relationship building
The final aspect of our Hartford abolitionist organizing strategies seeks to build relationships both within DSA and between DSA and other organizations. We have a large DSA chapter for such a small state (~1,200 members), but if we want to abolish ICE, abolish police and prisons, and build socialism, we need tens of thousands of people. The more people we can pull into our work and get connected, the bigger we can grow our movement, and the more we can scale up our demands and organizing goals. That’s why we decided we need a focus on relationship building.
Connected to the lack of attention the organizing for joy aspect of consciousness raising has received, relationship building had the least effort and direction attached to it. Most of the relationship building we’ve done this year has come incidentally through the rapid response work we’ve done, as well as some community building efforts run in partnership with the First Presbyterian Church of Hartford.
More recently, however, one of our Hartford-area members brought a project to the branch to explicitly focus on building relationships. The project is called “Socialism is the People,” and it’s based on an NYC DSA project of the same name. From a description included in an NYC DSA event RSVP, here is how they define the project: “a new branch-based initiative aimed at building deep relationships with local multiracial institutions and their members. Branches are encouraged to launch Community Solidarity Committees, which will work to map the community-based organizations in our neighborhoods, build relationships with them, and work collaboratively to find ways to partner.”
The work in Hartford is in its early stages, but the vision is promising.
Maryam Khan endorsement
At our June Branch meeting, Maryam Khan came to the Hartford Branch asking us to endorse her campaign. She spoke to us about the goals of her campaign, her history as a politician, and how her goals fit in with ours. Maryam is a DSA member and a fierce advocate for the issues driving our organizing: abolishing ICE, supporting Palestine, and empowering working people. We convened as a branch, asked her a few follow up questions and ultimately decided to endorse her. Electing her strengthens our movement’s presence in the state legislature while expanding our reach into the communities where we’re already building.
A DSA endorsement means something particular: it’s more than putting a DSA logo on campaign flyers; when a DSA branch endorses a campaign, it means we’ll be getting people out to knock doors on their behalf all throughout their district, which is exactly what we’re doing now. We’ve started a canvassing program throughout the Hartford area.
Canvassing for Maryam is an extension of the same work we do every day: talking to our neighbors, understanding what’s weighing on them, and connecting those experiences to a broader vision of what’s possible. We’re using canvassing as an opportunity to do more than just turn out votes. It’s a way to make connections in our communities and to help people find their place in our movement.
If you want to get involved, we’d love to have you canvassing with us.
Common threads
Across all of these organizing efforts in Hartford, we see a few consistent themes arising: people connecting to each other, building community, and building networks of mutual support and solidarity. That list reads to me like shorthand for a vision of the socialist future we want.
It also reads like striving towards building the “constellation of alternatives” that Angela Davis describes as necessary to abolish oppressive systems by making them “obsolete.”
In this way, we’re both prefiguring the socialist future we want to build, while also attempting to tackle the “notable omission of emphasis on the practical process of ‘building towards,’ overshadowed by a prevailing idealism” that an article included in Abolition & Reconstruction highlights within strains of abolitionist organizing.
Where do we go from here?
The last line of text in Abolition & Reconstruction is “Where do we go from here?” We’re asking ourselves the same question.
We just held our CT DSA chapter convention on June 27th, and we have a new crop of branch leaders elected to our Hartford branch organizing committee. I’m hopeful these new leaders, as well as the emerging leaders we’ve brought up through our organizing work this year, can carry forward this work.
As always, we should challenge ourselves to articulate our visions for socialism and test the organizing we’re doing against those visions.
