Maurice BP-Weeks | 2022-2024 Fellowship

The past few years of campaigns against anti-Black state violence have shown the need for a particular focus on how capitalism is a crucial piece of the policing arm of the state. Several angles of this connection deserve more focus including how financial realities affect particular communities through debt and targeted wealth extraction, how money moves in and around policing and prisons, and how particular wealthy actors prop up policing. Anti-capitalist analysis is key to abolition and we must focus on it more to expand our movement for a new society on the left. As our fights expand, our analysis and creativity in this area must as well. 

From 2022-2024, IC hosted a Labor & Abolition Fellowship, which linked together anti-capitalist and abolitionist analysis and campaigning through narrative intervention, campaign support/technical assistance, and the building of lasting infrastructure for anti-capitalist fights in various subsets of work connected to abolition.

IC’s Labor & Abolition Fellow was Maurice BP-Weeks, who also held office hours during the duration of the Fellowship for practitioners of all kinds looking to strategize about labor’s role in abolition, taking on corporations, police unions, or just transition of workers.

The Labor & Abolition Fellowship, along with the affiliated Labor & Abolition Office Hours, concluded at the end of 2024.