The death of abolition
or: toothless, hopeless, broke, and heartbroke
The betrayal of abolition became more explicit at the Socialism conference in Chicago this past weekend. NGO directors pulling in six figures are salivating. They’ve been shivering in the shadow of a nightmare since 2020, when it was revealed that most people actually like the idea of abolishing the police, once they try it on and walk around the block in it. They had to tiptoe around their siloed specialties of reforming police violence and the cruelty of prisons, guilting for donations, hustling for book sales, spreading the vocabulary without pushing more people towards the causes that had been reborn in the streets of Minneapolis, New York, Bristol, Ferguson, Oakland, Cairo and São Paulo.
But now they can shout it from the rooftops. Abolition means Long Live the Benevolent State!
It was the cops who murdered George Floyd, Mike Brown, Breonna Taylor, and so many others. It was white supremacist paramilitaries who murdered Heather Heyer, Joseph Rosenbaum, Tywanza Sanders, and so many others. But it has been highly paid academics, journalists, and NGO directors who buried the rebellions of 2009, 2014, 2020… Biding their time, avoiding direct confrontation or truthful dialogue, changing sides or straddling the middle, they have strangled the spirit of those rebellions and with it the dream of abolition, turning it into something that will only cause more harm.
I feel old. I feel like crying. I’m thinking about the jail guard in Georgia who threw caustic chemicals on me and locked me barefoot and naked in a piss-reeking cell when I was 19. I’m thinking about Jameel, who I met a few years later through inside-outside organizing when he was in supermax prison in southwestern Virginia, and I was part of the nearest anarchist group.
(This was at a time when there wasn’t much money in prison abolition so there weren’t any NGOs on the scene; but even today, so much of the actual work being done to support prisoners, to support family members, to stand up to far Right paramilitaries, to distribute survival resources as all the crises of a dying system only get worse, are anarchists and others who don’t trust the State, who aren’t getting paid. We’re prisoners and former prisoners, loved ones of people who have died in this struggle, people with disabilities and chronic illnesses, crazy people, renters or houseless people, people who aren’t building careers off of representing and pacifying the oppressed, the marginalized, and the broken down.)
He’s supposed to be getting released in a week, Jameel. Communication has been difficult since JPay has gone buggy and the administration are fucking with him, as they usually do when someone is on their last lap. He’s been on the inside since he was a kid, in the late ‘90s. He never should have lived through any of that.
All of this has happened before. All of these debates have happened before. The same arguments, the same rebuttals, the same betrayals. Why do people continue to trust movement elites—the highly educated, the highly paid, the safe—when they claim once again that real revolution isn’t going to happen? If we have people like that in our circles, giving them another chance to act like people and not like clichés, we still need to have some warm pies at the ready for the moment they say we need to put our trust back in the State, a new State, a new arrangement of all the old lies.
In a real revolution, they’re the first ones to lose their power. They know it. That’s why they always try to corral and pacify our struggles. Why don’t we know it?
To quote Idris Robinson in “How It Might Should Be Done,” referring to these leaders, academics, progressives, and NGO activists in the context of the insurrection in 2020:
Ultimately, what they want is to block the possibilities that the revolt has opened up, to dissuade us from going further in this uprising[…]
By denying the event, they seek to obscure the revolutionary truth that was ushered in through the streets. They want to extinguish the present that we brought about. They want to sap our energy while they propose superficial palliative adjustments to preserve the system. The history of America is the history of attempts to reform race relations. If they haven’t gotten it right by now, they never will.
In Chicago, there was an academic… highly compensated, from an upper middle class background, with reformist tendencies since she was in university, but also someone who intimately knows the violence of oppression and policing. A hero and a role model to many. At the Socialism conference she claimed she was “waiting to be convinced” that we can provide “education, clean water, air, transportation, sustainable environment” through “voluntarism and association.” That’s such bullshit. How does she not see she’s throwing all her chips in with colonialism, with white supremacy? That she is participating in the erasure of all the societies in human history that have done exactly what she claims is impossible? Obviously there is no homogeneous “Indigenous position,” and plenty of Native folks also support or work with the State. But to claim that there is no evidence that human societies can create and share abundance without the State is to erase Indigenous experiences and to do so at a time when Indigenous struggles to win back or defend their land have been gaining more strength and visibility, facing heightened repression, and requiring more steadfast solidarity.
Statists are erasing the movements and rebellions of the past years in which we have shown that life is possible without the State. They ignore us just as completely when we try to meet them on their own turf, publishing research articles and entire books for little or no gain, to show that it is possible, to show that it has already been done.
It’s not just ignorance. They prove that they’re talking out of both sides of their mouths when they mention our emancipatory projects obliquely without ever giving them full, fair consideration. Without data, without the kind of research or consideration that for other topics they would consider necessary, they claim that our projects don’t have the reach or the longevity to matter, even as they help deprive us of resources, help marginalize us, and implicitly or explicitly support the repression mobilized against us.
They claim that only the State is capable of creating “something durable enough and responsive enough and pure enough to make the flourishing of life possible—including for people we despise.” Again I call bullshit. The State is the main force that occupies our liberated spaces, closes our free schools, criminalizes our mutual aid networks, pushes through the projects that poison our air and water, and that colonized the whole world in the first place.
Those of us who were in the streets, we know who was creating vast networks and infrastructures of mutual aid and resource distribution in the first months and years of the pandemic. And those of us who have been in insurrections, we know that hospitals, that the training and generosity of nurses and technicians don’t just disappear when State power disappears. In a revolution, we inherit the infrastructures along with the knowledge to make them run, as well as the opportunity to transform them or scrap them, to make them reflect our actual needs rather than the needs of profit and policing.
The academics and NGOs are “waiting to be convinced” that we can live without the State? Not only are they erasing all the evidence that supports an anti-State position. They’re pretending that a pro-State position is in any way based on a reasonable relationship with evidence and history.
They’ve insisted the State is a neutral instrument, that it can be changed from a force for oppression into a force for liberation. Time and again, they have won control of the State, they have won the opportunity to direct all of a society’s resources into the fulfillment of their plans, and the results have been shameful. From socialist majorities won through electoral means to socialist dictatorships accomplished through military coups and Party-led revolutions, they have given us dozens of flavors of failure.
These failures include white supremacist states that guarantee higher living standards for white citizens but are war profiteers that strip Muslims of basic rights or support more subtly racist policies, while also occupying Indigenous land (Denmark and Sweden); states that carry out ethnic cleansing and maintain pre-revolutionary ethnic hierarchies/ white supremacy and imperialist relations with neighboring countries and internal colonies (USSR, China, Vietnam); states that claim to represent Indigenous peoples while using police force, paramilitary violence, and antiterrorism laws to crush Indigenous resistance to major “development” projects including highways, mines, deforestation (Bolivia under Morales); states that accelerate settler colonialism to weaponize the white working class against Indigenous peoples, while empowering the military to kill off more radical anticapitalists (Chile under Allende); states that decrease economic inequality but reproduce plantation economies and pre-existing racial hierarchies and heteropatriarchal forms of violence and repression (Cuba); states that reproduce the institutions and culture of colonialism (all of them); states that repress revolutionary movements through means including imprisonment, torture, murder, and exile (all of them); states that manage economies that are extractivist and genocidal (all of them). Most of the states listed greatly expanded police forces and prison systems, all of them increased the pervasiveness of surveillance throughout society. None of them abolished the police or prisons, nor broke definitively with colonialism.
At this point we have enough data to insist it’s not just a pattern: imposing change on society through a centralized mechanism like the State is constrained to a very limited range of outcomes.
Abolish the police and prisons without abolishing the State? Seriously? How out of touch do you have to be? The police aren’t just a multiracial gang of highly armed, highly paid sociopaths waiting around to torture and execute people from marginalized and oppressed groups (though they are definitely that). The police are there in the hospitals when the doctors check our gender identity, our education level, our mental health history, our race, as they decide how much to listen to us and how much to treat us like slabs of meat. Prison is present in the school system as they categorize you, discipline you, track you, and it’s definitely present when they haul you into the office and search your backpack after you start questioning the hypocrisy at the center of it all. Those of us who have been to school and to prison have felt the institutional similarities. Those of us who have faced deportation proceedings and also applied for social services like health care or food aid have seen the overlap.
It is a waste of time to try to convince people who are making $100K, $200K, $800K a year to enclose movements, to enclose radical thinking. Some of them have done important theoretical work, and some of them are coming from a legitimate place of trying to end systemic injustice, but in the end their chosen vocation in this world is to protect the State. They’re allowed to spread any kind of radical liberal take they want, any single-issue social criticism, as long as it doesn’t touch the fundamental role of the State and capitalism. They can advocate for any kind of State, and any constraints you can imagine on Capital. Because that’s enough. The point is, as long as centralized power in some form is protected, all the rest of us have lost the power to choose and organize our own lives. It means we’re waiting for some Messiah rather than delivering ourselves. And that is a betrayal of abolition.
I guess I’m extra angry, extra sad, because I’m exhausted.
I’m supposed to be on a call now, participating in a conversation for the “Anarchist Days” event in Bremen, northern Germany. Instead I’m bundled up with my laptop: the only way I can talk today that doesn’t hurt is with eight fingers on the keyboard.
I was supposed to get two more teeth pulled yesterday, instead it was three and it hurts more than I expected. My mouth is swollen up and I have a four tooth gap, front and center, that makes it hard to talk. And I couldn’t get an appointment for the next steps until the end of the month. Next steps means getting some kind of bridge or fake teeth put in so I can chew food again. But the first appointment will just be some kind of consultation. Which probably means my Medicaid will have expired before the process is done, and I’ll have to pay for the procedure on my own. In the meantime, my food stamps are about to expire, so I have to finish my application and send it in as soon as possible.
I also need to be finding more resources and reliable comrades in Virginia to help Jameel land on his feet, because getting out is usually harder than being in. But at the same time, I’m supposed to be finding more hours at my job, since chemo is three months in the past and in theory I’m basically recovered, though for the past few days it hasn’t felt like that.
I also need to support R, to help her find more resources and treatments, as her chronic illness (rather, one of her chronic illnesses) gets worse and her pain levels increase. It’s an illness that disproportionately affects women, which means it is scarcely understood by doctors and generally ignored by health insurance providers.
In an hour I have to go back to the hospital to find out if the MRI two days ago found any new growth in my brain, and I’m spending these last minutes banging my head against a wall because people don’t do their own research, people don’t know their own history, and the motherfuckers who tell profitable lies are handed a megaphone while we have the FBI outside our (rented) houses. And still nobody knows not to trust the motherfuckers with the megaphones??
Anyway. I’m wishing death to those who profit off misery, but I’m also sick with so much hostility. So I’ll end sending wishes of love and joy for everyone who is staying true, even if it means falling apart sometimes. All of this will pass.
This newsletter is just a rant. There’s no need to share it. But we do all need to get much better at sharing and supporting radical critiques if we’re going to have any chance of not getting drowned out by the reformists and the sell-outs.
Spread that essay I quoted near the top by Idris Robinson. Buy and share these books by William C. Anderson, Zoe Samudzi, Modibo Kadalie, and Klee Bennally. Spread the words of Ashanti Alston. If you need access to a book by one of these tenured, cozy, reformist academics, steal it! (They’re often smart, even if they’re sell-outs.) Send the money to your local mutual aid network, or to projects like the Táala Hooghan infoshop and Kinlani mutual aid. Don’t cut a check to Black Lives Matter the NGO; send it to he Stop Cop City trial and bail fund, or to the prison fund in your area for people who are still locked up from the anti-police rebellions. Better yet, write one of those prisoners and send the money to them directly.
And if anyone around you says, “Hey, maybe we could give trusting the State another try, I bet they could fix things for us,” tell them to shut the fuck up. Politely, if it’s a family reunion. With a nice warm pie to the face if that’s more situationally appropriate. Your call!
If my rant about not making the same mistakes over and over again is resonating with you, check out my new book, They Will Beat the Memory Out of Us.
And if you want more reading but don’t have time for books, here are a couple recommendations:
In the wake of racist riots across the UK, more policing is not going to make anyone safer. Here’s an article another friend participated in.
https://theconversation.com/why-we-dont-need-more-policing-even-after-the-riots-236710
Vicky Osterweil wrote a good, concise piece on “How Does the Genocide End?” with framings that can help imagine different end games for the Israeli settler state. I wish more people were doing this kind of strategic thinking!
Reading about a horrible war starting over a hundred years ago, written by an anarchist and antimilitarist, felt sad and meditative.
Oh and I guess I got something else published! This is Part I, about wildfires, desertification, urban shepherds, anarchist smugglers, and social control (democratic and fascist) in the lands that became my home, people who became my family.
“Dams, Forest Fires, and the Hidden Commons – Part I: Social Control and the Ecological Crisis in Catalunya” https://undisciplinedenvironments.org/2024/09/03/dams-forest-fires-and-the-hidden-commons-part-i-social-control-and-the-ecological-crisis-in-catalunya/
Part II should come out on the 10th.
Finally, if you do have some extra cash, here’s a link to a fundraiser for the Cowley Club, a long time anarchist and antifascist social center in Brighton (UK). An old friend who also has an interview in the last book said they need some support right now:
p.s. the MRI came back stable, so I’m good for another three months. So much thanks to all the support from Ky (sorry about your car!), Wn, Dana, my mom, Camille, R (always), and so many other people. To everyone out there, take good care of yourselves!
in addition to the academic/ngo industry factor, we also are living in a time where socialism is really "in" in america, culturally. popular understanding of global events deepens the divide between socialist, anarchist, and any other perspectives (to the detriment of any rigorous specificity in understanding) as people cling to branded and reenforced narratives of what is even the problem/what is the solution. i particularly appreciate how tirelessly you've written about this phenomenon in regards to climate discourse, and also wars.
socialist and communist dismissals of '"""mutual aid""""' (said with a sarcastic/dismissive tone always) and anti-state anti-capitalist projects of all kinds is becoming more common in my immediate life, including from voices who used to never engage in that. i have thought a lot about the micro-reasons and affective textures involved in this trend (aside from the obvious question of what words can get you a salary or grants). in particular, i see more and more people who i used to consider overly dogmatic anarchists become disillusioned as their lives get worse and they feel that "mutual aid" fails to give back to them, and watch them transform into dogmatic communists with a vengeance. Or (if male) even into redpilled alt-right people, tragically. I am locally experiencing a gradual but definite abandonment of an anti-state perspective in a lot of areas, taking a lot of forms. That's why I think it's partly a cultural trend and not just an academic one.
the more betrayed and let-down people feel by their aging lives, the more likely I think they are to feel that anarchist perspective "is just a subculture", "only works for privileged people," "is just a mutation of american anticommunist propaganda/was always a psyop" "is too small and unrealistic to be relevant to anything", "has no positive vision for the world". my criticism of this is usually that the people who make this turn usually had, in my opinion, unrealistic and unexamined emotional investments in an anarchist perspective to begin with, and in the first place had inflexible/fragile dogmatism about what "anarchist" ideas even meant.
maybe i should take peoples ideas more seriously but i have never known how to do so--i just set my watch and wait for people to become dissilusioned with socialism next. I give it like 5-6 years. in the mean time I plan to just keep on plugging away at whatever.
for myself, i feel insulated from this trend because as insane as it might feel to oppose something immeasurably huge, or attempt to fight it while being tiny and unimportant, it clearly seems even more delusional to act like you found a universal "science" that will explain "how history works". my experience is that people are irrational and chaotic, no amount of formality or assertions of universality ever changes this.
and practically--who in my city gets people food, housing, medical care, education, childcare, etc? it's only ever been the anarchists doing all that. some socialists changed some brake lights in 2016 and good for them but to my knowledge that was all they did. shrug
I am certain I can speak for all of us here in Bremen when I say that we're glad you took the space to rest when you needed it. We were so engrossed discussing "the solutions are already here" until late that I almost missed the solidarity bar. Wishing you a good recovery and good times.