For me, it’s pretty clear that police and prisons reinforce class society and are things that factor into proletarianization. Therefore there can be no socialism without abolition. A corollary states that socialist projects that reinstituted police and prisons (gulags and checka anyone?) couldn’t be socialist because by using police and prisons it reinforced proletarianization and class relations.
What do you think?
This is the “how do we deal with harm?” question that gets brought up a lot. The fact of the matter is that criminalized communities such as Black, Indigenous, Queer, and sex worker communities have been dealing with harm without the state for generations. It’s a matter of centering these harm reductionist and non-statist forms of dealing and managing harm and decentering the state’s criminal punishment system. It’s not as if we have nothing to work with—everything we need is already here.
This is a great answer, perhaps the first that really clicks with me. However, it still doesn’t address the question of what those harm reductionist strategies are. I am not asking you to do the work to list them, but pointing out that this still doesn’t address the question of “how” – just gives a place to look.