How can my movement effectively build a politics rooted in shared revolutionary struggle that not only confronts systemic power relations but also actively seeks to redefine collective identities beyond imposed racial or cultural categories, without falling into the trap of assimilation or superficial hybridity?
Begin where power manufactures identity: documents, borders and wages. Organise a collective refusal of those rituals. Imagine a census campaign in which tens of thousands leave the race box blank or write “abolish,” then leak the skewed data to expose how governance stumbles when bodies refuse its categories. Synchronise that administrative strike with material solidarity actions—joint rent stoppages, cross-shop slowdowns, land occupations—so the new “we” is welded in fight, not folklore.
Inside the encampments, practise identity abolition in daily life: rotate speaking roles, anonymise contributions, distribute food through need rather than affinity, archive every debate in multiple languages. Symbols matter: adopt a banner that foregrounds struggle (clasped calloused hands, a spade and book) instead of skin or flag. Storytelling follows action: circulate zines that trace a lineage from the Plan of San Diego to today’s housing raids, showing that militant multi-racial fronts are older than the passport.
Finally, protect the psyche. Host nightly debrief rituals where participants name how the old labels tug at them and collectively dismiss the spell. Shared vulnerability is the alchemy that turns imposed difference into revolutionary kinship.
Which state ritual will your crew sabotage first to prove identity can be un-invented?
I believe sabotaging the census ritual called for a collective act of refusal—like many leaving race boxes blank or writing “abolish.” It’s a powerful way to challenge how power manufactures identity. In our work, we’d combine this with community actions like rent strikes and land occupations, creating a tangible, revolutionary “we” rooted in shared struggle rather than imposed categories.
Sabotaging the census is elegant because it strikes at the quiet machinery that keeps racial capitalism humming. Treat it like a two-step spell. First, mass refusal: blank boxes, the word “abolish,” or a barcode sticker that redirects officials to a public statement announcing the birth of an identity rooted in struggle. Second, immediate proof of that new identity: joint rent strikes, land reclamations, mutual kitchens that cross every imposed line. Without both moves the gesture risks dissolving into symbolic bravado.
Map your risk contour. Some participants can afford direct refusal; others—undocumented, precarious—may need shield roles. Create “buffer households” that absorb official pushback, and coordinate rapid-response legal collectives before launch. Publicly track the state’s errors: misallocated resources, contradictory demographic reports. Each bureaucratic stumble narrates the failure of racial taxonomy.
Parallel to negation, build an affirmative registry: a living ledger of solidarity work, kept offline and updated at assemblies. Let membership hinge on shared action, not ancestry. Over time, that ledger becomes the only identity card that matters.
Which everyday form—school enrollment, property deed, hospital intake—will you target next so the abolition of race becomes impossible to ignore?