D. Michael Durham

July 4 is a very good day to be at @socialismconference.org

Might we find ourselves so accustomed to repairing conflict and harm, nurturing real safety, strengthening community, and meeting our collective needs that we’ll remember criminalization confounded why we ever thought it could heal our wounds.

I wonder if recovery feels like how we’ll all experience a future without state violence, incarceration, apartheid, and genocide.

It’s about truly meeting my needs. It’s about embracing and moving through my feelings. It’s about asking for help. It’s about discovering myself and respecting the person I find. It’s about connecting with people heart to heart, not liver to liver. It’s about enjoying adventure that I’ll remember.

~Three Years Sober~
Recovery is no life free of need, conflict, or despair. Sobriety does not mean I only ever reach for wholesome antidotes to pangs of want. It does not mean that I never miss alcohol. 
But I rarely do. In fact, recovery is barely about alcohol at all.

Against a Liberal Project 2025 — D. Michael Durham There’s no such thing as a leftist billionaire.

Y’all, the Left version of Project 2025 is not it.

www.dmichaeldurham.com/writing/no-l...

Oh no, the link doesn’t work for me! Help!

Abolitionist Family Values: When Children Practice Repair — D. Michael Durham Abolition informs my parenting. And I’m an abolitionist because I’m a parent.

Abolition is my parenting philosophy. Parenting reinforces my abolitionist convictions. That’s the subject of my latest essay, inspired by @mayaschenwar.bsky.social and Kim Wilson’s stunning anthology, We Grow the World Together.
Read at www.dmichaeldurham.com/writing/abol...
#abolition #parenting

Learn more and consider forwarding this to anyone you think will be interested: bit.ly/ASNW
#anticapitalism #nonprofit #abolition

We will provide a watering hole for solidarity and storytelling that mobilize us toward liberation, experimenting within and outside of the structures we inherited to dismantle oppressive structures.

So, I’m teaming up with some beloved comrades to create a new thing. Anticapitalist Solidarity for Nonprofit Workers (ASNW) is an emerging abolitionist coalition of burning and burnt-out nonprofit workers who struggle through the industry’s complicity in capitalism.

It’s not just that our efforts fail to address the structural, economic causes of the poverty and injustice we aim to heal, it’s that our institutions reproduce the same capitalist conditions. Those of us who struggle through these truths feel stuck and alone.

Nonprofit workers suffer from the industry's reinforcement of capitalism and all its carceral cousins. This lurks at the root of so much burnout that everyone recognizes but fewer will name as such.

We’re curious about the root causes of harm and seek repair there. We revere consent. We apologize all the time. We want good for each other.
I just want that for literally everyone everywhere.
#abolition

I am an abolitionist because I’m a parent. My children could do nothing to which I would respond by removing them from our family. We always seek reconnection, healing, and wisdom gardened from our mistakes, never punishment.

Halfway through @mayaschenwar.bsky.social & Kim Wilson’s “We Grow the World Together,” I’m struck by a simple realization. Yes, I’m raising my kids with abolitionist politics. Yes, abolition touches every part of how we relate to each other in our little triad, especially in conflict. But also:

Image of a hand holding a coffee cup surrounded by fire; text: ‘twas the strike before Christmas, Dec. 20-24th

🚨BOYCOTT STARBUCKS🚨

Union baristas are calling on EVERYONE to NOT buy from ANY Starbucks store between Dec. 20 -Dec. 24 while the workers are on strike! Here’s how to support: x.com/sbworkersuni...

Brilliant.

Clemency is welcome, but the justifications always reinforce carceral logic - that cages are necessary for all but a few who demonstrate benefit to capitalism thru productivity and charity, and the lie that prisons serve the purpose of rehabilitation. This too is the prison industrial complex.

Session submissions for Socialism 2025 are now live!

Learn more about our submissions guidelines for sessions and submit your proposal before our March 1 deadline:
docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...

22% of tenants spend 100% of their income on rent.

That’s 10 million households spending everything they earn on a place to live.

The rent is too damn high and something's gotta give. The question isn’t whether tenants will revolt, but whether it’s from a place of desperation or power.

Look for the Tenant Union Those caught in the crossfire of corporate landlords and financial engineering need a regulatory agenda to protect them.

In the next four years, tenant unions will deepen their organizing. They'll win safer homes, fairer leases, and local regulatory policies, all of which can build the blueprint for national change.

Great to write some on this and more w/ @taraghuveer.bsky.social in @theprospect.bsky.social

We should focus on preventing, stopping, and healing harm rather than repurposing anti-Black and colonial concepts against capitalists. This doesn’t let them off the hook, it gets us closer to the root of violence. It inches us closer to accountability.

“War criminal” is an unhelpful framing of the violence and genocide for which Bibi, Biden, and others are responsible. It reinforces just war theory, the notion that ethical warfare can exist under certain parameters, and it reproduces stereotypes about “criminals” that are rooted in anti-Blackness.

How Not to Ignore Indigenous Teachers — D. Michael Durham How Indigenous values will carry us through the Trump era and beyond.

I may risk romanticizing indigeneity, but I’m trying to take Indigenous activists seriously when they show us a better way to be human. And it seems sound advice in this apocalyptic moment.
New essay on these notions: www.dmichaeldurham.com/writing/indi...

This meme about how you want Trump in jail but I want him AND Bush and Obama and Clinton etc in jail is not it. We can make the same point without legitimizing carceral language.