Abolishing Race Through Collective Struggle

Building revolutionary solidarity beyond imposed identities and state categories

Introduction

Every few centuries, humanity invents a new lie to explain inequality. For the last five hundred years, that lie has been race. Modern power learned to sort bodies and assign value through pigmentation, ancestry, or mythic origin. Entire economies formed around this fiction. Racial capitalism is not a moral failure but a strategic design: subordinate some lives so that others can appear free. Yet the persistence of rebellion across lines of color and nation proves that identity has always been a battlefield, not a birthplace.

The struggle ahead is not to polish diversity within hierarchies but to abolish the hierarchies themselves. Movements that mistake representation for liberation inherit the same cages they seek to repaint. Activists must therefore reorient the question: how can struggle itself become the medium through which a new collective identity emerges—one rooted not in blood or bureaucracy but in comradeship? To pursue this path means confronting the machinery that manufactures difference: census forms, border regimes, schools, and markets.

This essay argues that a politics of shared revolutionary struggle must both negate and create. It must refuse the scripts that power assigns—“minority,” “citizen,” “white,” “migrant”—while simultaneously inventing social bonds that transcend them. Drawing from militant histories like the Plan of San Diego of 1915, which dared to unite the oppressed of multiple nations in armed revolt, activists today can revive a world-making impulse buried beneath racial categorization. The path forward is neither assimilation nor superficial hybridity but the construction of a new “we” that emerges from struggle itself.

The Machinery of Race: How Power Manufactures Identity

Race did not descend from the heavens; it emerged from bureaucracy. Empires required categories to justify extraction. From colonial censuses in the Americas to caste codes in Asia, power needed labels to measure, tax, police, and divide. Every checkbox is a ledger entry in the grand accounting of subjugation. The census, the passport, the property deed—these are the sacred texts of racial order.

Consider how the census arranges the world. Each decade, millions obediently classify themselves according to the state’s taxonomy. Even when they identify as multiracial or refuse to choose, the data is reabsorbed and monetized. Racial identity becomes a governance tool that determines funding, policing, and political representation. Behind the harmless act of box ticking lurks an immense infrastructure that disciplines populations and predicts resistance.

Bureaucratic Rituals as Political Theater

Every bureaucratic ritual teaches obedience. The census says: you have a race; the passport says: you have a nationality; the payroll says: your labor equals this number. These are not neutral records but participation ceremonies in the cult of separation. Abolishing race therefore demands more than symbolic empathy—it demands sabotaging the rituals that reproduce inequality.

In activist terms, refusal must target the administrative heart of identity. The mass act of leaving blank the race box or writing “abolish” transposes rebellion into the state’s own script. It forces governance to choke on its data dependence. This administrative strike is subtle but corrosive. Once enough citizens reject categorization, the algorithmic layers that allocate wealth, policing, and surveillance begin to fail.

The Profit of Division

Capitalism thrives on gradations of value. Differential wages based on racial sorting are ancient tactics of labor control. As long as workers imagine themselves divided by blood, they bargain separately and lose collectively. Race is therefore not simply ideology but technology—a way to fragment solidarity. To abolish race is to render that technology useless by making cooperation irresistible.

The antidote lies in action built across imposed lines: rent strikes joining migrants and citizens, land occupations involving urban poor and rural farmers, worker cooperatives ignoring nationality. Through shared struggle, new identities materialize that the state cannot code. When the census asks who participated, there will be no field for the answer: everyone who refused.

Transitioning from critique to creation, the next step is to imagine how revolutionary solidarity reconstitutes the “we” without defaulting to assimilation.

From Mythic Roots to Revolutionary Kinship

Every nation-state constructs a myth of origin: one people, one destiny. Yet these myths always erase internal diversity. The United States sells its “melting pot” while burning away the ingredients. Mexico clings to the fiction of mestizaje—racial mixture as harmony—while masking anti-Indigenous violence. These ideologies seduce by promising inclusion through absorption. In reality, assimilation is slow erasure.

To reject both racial essentialism and assimilationist myth is to stand in the difficult space of non-identity: a place where solidarity is forged through doing, not being. The Plan of San Diego embodies this stance more vividly than any theoretical treatise.

The Plan of San Diego: A Radical Blueprint

In 1915, amid the chaos of the Mexican Revolution, militants in South Texas drafted a plan for insurrection. They called for freeing Black, Mexican, and Indigenous peoples through coordinated uprising against U.S. rule. Their goal was not nationalism but liberation from empire itself. The conspirators envisioned a republic of the oppressed stretching from California to Louisiana, united by shared struggle rather than shared ethnicity. Although quickly suppressed, the Plan of San Diego terrified authorities precisely because it inverted racial hierarchy instead of negotiating a place within it.

What made the plan revolutionary was its understanding that “Mexican” or “Black” were categories imposed by the same colonial management. True liberation meant not taking pride in those identities but abolishing the system that produced them. The new “we” was whoever picked up the struggle—not whoever shared a bloodline.

The Lessons of Abjected Solidarity

Activists often romanticize unity as harmony. But solidarity is rarely tranquil. When people from disparate backgrounds organize, contradictions surface: privilege, mistrust, internalized hierarchy. The genius of a movement like the Plan of San Diego lies in transforming these tensions into creative fuel. Disagreement becomes the crucible of authenticity. A “we” worth fighting for is one that has argued through its fractures.

Movements today can adopt similar principles. Instead of measuring inclusion by identity representation, measure it by shared risk. Who shares the consequences? Who takes the beatings, the evictions, the arrests? Race loses power when struggle distributes danger equally.

Yet solidarity cannot survive on opposition alone. After negation comes creation: building structures that reflect the world to come.

Inventing a New We: From Refusal to Construction

Refusing racial categories is half the equation. The other half is building institutions that embody post-racial sovereignty. Without material infrastructure, identity abolition devolves into lifestyle politics. The task is to replace the ledger of race with a ledger of cooperation.

Constructing Parallel Infrastructures

Start locally. When communities share kitchens, clinics, and schools without regard for ancestry, they perform an act of social rewriting. Mutual aid networks become laboratories for a new order. Each collaborative structure is a counter-registration—proof that people can govern themselves without state mediation. The communal project is the passport of the future.

History offers analogues. Maroon settlements of escaped enslaved people created multiethnic republics across the Americas that functioned independently for decades. Their governance was collective, their citizenship fluid. Palmares in Brazil, for example, hosted Africans, Indigenous allies, and defected Europeans. These were not utopias of purity but practical federations of fugitives. They demonstrated that identity is not destiny but design.

Anonymity as Solidarity

Administrative refusal must be paired with anonymity in action. When activists anonymize their contributions—rotating speakers, writing collectively, donating anonymously—they chip away at the cult of individual representation. Movements thrive when no one can be tokenized. This practice not only shields participants from repression but symbolically erases the racial markers that power craves.

At assemblies, distribute responsibilities through need rather than identity. Use multilingual documentation to prevent dominance by a single culture. The goal is not colorblindness but intentional deconstruction of privilege. In such spaces, solidarity feels less like inclusion and more like invention.

Storytelling Beyond the Flag

Abolishing race also requires a narrative language capable of carrying experience without category. Long before social media, insurgent presses circulated stories of interracial uprisings, worker unity, and borderland cooperation. Resurrect this tradition through zines, podcasts, and encrypted archives that chronicle struggle without succumbing to spectacle. The most subversive story is one the algorithm cannot categorize.

These practices birth a collective identity grounded in shared risk, daily cooperation, and political imagination. The next obstacle lies in managing the system’s inevitable retaliation.

Facing Repression: Guarding the New Subject

Power responds to identity abolition with both coercion and co-option. States will criminalize refusal as fraud or sedition, while liberal institutions will rebrand it as diversity innovation. Expect both reactions. Activists must cultivate psychological and organizational resilience to survive the counterattack.

Shielding the Vulnerable

Not everyone can risk administrative confrontation equally. Undocumented migrants, dependents, or those under probation may face severe penalties. Radical strategy demands layered protection. Organize “buffer households” that bear official scrutiny and create mutual defense funds to absorb retaliation. Legal collectives should prepare documentation showing the protectiveness of civil disobedience as free expression.

Transparency within the movement prevents infiltration. Open decision protocols make it harder for authorities to pit factions against each other along racial lines. Every challenge becomes another opportunity to strengthen the collective “we.”

Psychological Armor

Abolishing race is not only political; it is psychological warfare against centuries of conditioning. Internalized hierarchies do not dissolve overnight. Movements should institute rituals of decompression—shared meals, reflective circles, creative workshops—to process the emotional aftermath of confrontation. These spaces regenerate trust and prevent burnout.

Rituals of release are political acts. They demonstrate that liberation is not only resistance but recovery. The revolution must heal as it destroys.

Measuring Victory Beyond Headlines

Power will try to dismiss refusal as symbolic. Movements must therefore document concrete effects: misallocated state resources, contradictory demographic statistics, administrative confusion. Each governmental error is proof that the racial logic is fracturing. Publish these findings widely. Turn quantitative collapse into spiritual momentum. When census data becomes unreliable, the narrative of racial governance shakes at its core.

Resilient movements balance secrecy with spectacle, refusal with creation. The final challenge is transforming these victories into sustained transformation.

Beyond Assimilation and Hybridity: The New Horizon

Assimilation promises peace at the cost of memory; hybridity promises novelty without revolution. Both retain the framework of difference as commodity. A politics of shared struggle rejects these bargains. It seeks not to merge identities but to transcend the need for identity as a controlling social grammar.

The Trap of Representation

When movements pursue visibility through the language of race, they strengthen the system’s cultural economy. Diversity programs, identity branding, and multicultural marketing all function as pressure valves, releasing revolutionary energy into recognition politics. Recognition offers applause instead of sovereignty. Activists must discern when symbolic wins mask structural losses.

Representation has its uses—it can open access or affirm dignity—but when it becomes the horizon of struggle, rebellion turns decorative. The goal is not to appear in the master’s census but to render the census obsolete.

Revolutionary Hybridity Versus Cultural Fusion

Some thinkers celebrate hybridity as rebellion against purity. Yet under capitalism, hybridity is easily commodified. Fashion, music, and cuisine become proof of tolerance while inequality deepens. Revolutionary hybridity differs: it is not aesthetic mixing but political fusion born of struggle. When people risk together, they dissolve boundaries through practice, not marketing.

For example, during the 1930s Scottsboro solidarity campaigns, Black and white workers in the American South organized side by side against lynching and economic exploitation. Their alliance, though fragile, momentarily abolished the color line through collective defense. The product was not a new hybrid race but a temporary revolutionary species defined by shared defiance.

The Sublime Risk of a New We

To live without racial identity is terrifying precisely because power has trained us to equate category with safety. But the future demands courage to anchor belonging elsewhere: in mutual reliance, in accountability, in joy forged by resistance. The abolition of race is not erasure of difference; it is emancipation from fixation. It opens an infinite field of relations where solidarity replaces genealogy.

As crises of ecology, migration, and economy converge, this redefinition becomes urgent. The same infrastructures that categorize by race also determine who eats, who migrates, who burns. Movements that dismantle racial governance also dismantle extractive capitalism. The struggle is one.

Transitioning from theory to practice, consider how to apply these ideas concretely.

Putting Theory Into Practice

Transforming identity abolition from concept to campaign demands coordination, creativity, and courage. The following steps offer a roadmap:

1. Design an Administrative Refusal Campaign

   • Target a state ritual that reinforces racial or national identity, such as the census, school registration, or border checkpoints.
   • Coordinate mass refusals or symbolic interventions (e.g., writing “abolish” in race fields).
   • Publicize errors and contradictions generated by this refusal to demonstrate the fragility of racial data systems.

2. Build Solidarity Infrastructure

   • Establish community-run food networks, rent strike committees, and health clinics that operate beyond identity categories.
   • Emphasize need-based distribution and rotating leadership to practice equality in everyday logistics.

3. Create a Living Ledger of Struggle

   • Maintain a secure offline record of collective actions and mutual aid.
   • Let participation define membership; ancestry becomes irrelevant.
   • Use this ledger as proof of an emerging polity based on cooperation.

4. Develop Protective Ecosystems

   • Organize legal defense pools and rapid-response teams to aid those most exposed to retaliation.
   • Create “buffer roles” for allies who can absorb bureaucratic penalties more safely.

5. Narrate the Movement

   • Craft independent media that documents the unfolding abolition of race.
   • Circulate multilingual testimonies to connect local actions with global anti-capitalist and anti-colonial struggles.
   • Focus storytelling on collective victories rather than charismatic leaders.

6. Institutionalize Psychological Care

   • Regularly host reflection circles, art workshops, and collective rituals to process trauma and sustain morale.
   • Recognize that abolishing race involves unlearning nations, religions, and inherited fears. Healing is strategy.

These actions convert theory into tangible rebellion. Each small refusal adds friction to the machinery of categorization, while each cooperative structure erodes dependence on the state.

Conclusion

To abolish race is to strike at the nervous system of capital and empire. The project requires more than moral enlightenment; it demands organized disobedience intertwined with creation. Every refused census box, every shared meal across lines of difference, every occupation that unites strangers in common purpose chips away at the architecture of separation.

The movement must measure victory not by representation but by autonomy—how much of life operates outside the logic of racial governance. Success looks like self-managed neighborhoods, hybrid councils of caretakers, federations of workers and refugees ruling themselves. The final abolition is not blankness but abundance: a collective life impossible to categorize.

Revolutionary kinship begins the moment struggle redefines who counts as “we.” The question is not whether the state will understand but whether you will dare to live uncategorized. What ritual of obedience will you interrupt next so that humanity may finally see itself unboxed?