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?
I’m not an abolitionist because “abolition” doesn’t go far enough. It’s no accident that abolitionists mostly talk about “abolishing” visibly repressive arms of the state but not so much the nation-state system in its entirety, or the European cultural base it rests on. Most of them shy away from even fighting to abolish the nation-state they live in because then they wouldn’t be able to demand policy changes from it.
That doesn’t sound right. The abolitionists I follow absolutely do want to abolish not just policing and incarceration but everything that stands in the way of true safety and what causes people to commit crimes. These include cisheteropatriarchy, settler-colonialism, racism, capitalism, heck many even want to abolish the state.
Who are the abolitionists you follow? By using the word “follow” I’m guessing you’re talking about highly visible or well-known abolitionists, but correct me if I’m wrong.
I’m an abolitionist and an anarchist and I’m not sure I agree with your analysis. I know of anarchists who still envision prisons or something like them, and I view my abolitionism as opposing that even in an anarchist society.
I mean…I wouldn’t expect an abolitionist to agree with an analysis that says abolition doesn’t cut it.
I’m not sure, I like to think of myself as an abolitionist but the more I think about it the more I can’t make my mind up.
I think a socialist society is going to need some form of police or a rapid response service like firefighting, and ambulance to get to emergencies but I don’t think this service needs to be wandering the streets like the police does today and also removing what they do to only dealing with violent crimes like someone getting attacked for example everything else they do should be its own service like a mental health response team, a road accident response team etc
Ideally most crime should be “solved” because everyone would and should have all their needs met and a similar start in life with the same opportunities without worrying about if you can afford it or not.
pretty clear that police and prisons reinforce class society
That’s pretty clear, yeah. In a capitalist controlled government a police state exists primarily to uphold a system of law that is designed to protect class interests.
However, while there may not always will always be people who cannot or will not uphold their end of the social contract, it seems like a pretty safe bet that these will exist in most non-trivial societies, and a healthy society ought to be capable of handling people like this without collapsing. How do you propose your society handle these people?
This gets brought up a lot and I think so much of the solution is actually just addressing social and structural drivers of crime - addressing housing issues, providing a UBI or other means of effectual social support, addressing social exclusion - a lot of this goes a long way. For everything else, it’s looking at transformative justice - it’s pretty well documented that incarceration doesn’t actually reduce crime or recidivism, but a community-driven model that looks at the whole person as well as the factors that lead to harm can not only provide support to the victim or those hurt, but support those perpetrating harm in not continuing it in the future.
That solves a lot of problems yes, but assholes exist. People who hurt other people or act out for no other reason than it feels it gives them power over others, even though the primary person they are harming is themselves. Think people like the kind of people who roll coal. I’m all for punching fascists, but shouldn’t there be a more systemic way of dealing with and preventing the sorts of harm they cause.
I’m not confident that the revolution won’t erase racism or fascism. The sorts of thinking required for these -isms to exist seem to be part of human psychology reinforced by evolutionary pressures that only recently disappeared. In groups vs out groups. For every revolution there will be counterrevolutionaries. And unless we flip a switch on the entire world (seems unlikely) those counterrevolutionaries will have aid from any remaining capitalist government.
There isn’t an immutable human nature. Things like authoritarianism is learned, produced, and reproduced. Abolition doesn’t mean that counterrevolutionaries get a free pass, it means unlearning these hateful things on an individual and social level.
I didn’t say it was necessarily immutable, certainly we can learn to be civilized people. However, we do have 3 or 4 current generations who have widely learned this behavior*, and unlearning a behavior is far more difficult than learning one.
Furthermore, there’s a chicken and egg problem, we likely cannot begin learning to be better people until we have a better society. (Hurt people hurt people, and all that.) This would seem to imply that complete abolishion is only workable after about 50-60 years (at least) after worldwide revolution. (Of course, “workable” and the structure of society that is building towards abolishion are not binaries. But I hope you understand my meaning.)
* (As a side note: while I’m making people mad at me, this is why I disagree with anti-electorialism. There are studies that show the more people are exposed to ideas while growing up, the more they have those ideas when grown up. So if Republicans are allowed to control the airwaves legally using positions of influence and power then not only capitalist but also fascist rhetoric will be part of the cultural mileau of new generations. If we cannot stand up and crush them, we will never have the political conditions necessary for revolution, as our talking points will be continually usurped by them. This is not a vote blue no matter who statement, you should also be attacking and fracturing the Democrats. Primarying them. Filling their seats. Pushing for electorial system reform (Score voting, approval voting, IRV) to make them less important andrelevant to a leftist strategy. Fighting them tooth and nail for power.)
The most important thing is having people aware that there is a better way, and we can’t do that if we don’t have people in prominent positions. I don’t think we can “out elect” Dems and Republicans. But we don’t need to. I don’t think elections are a viable tool for performing revolution, we will certainly need more than that, but I do think they are an important tool for widespread awareness, and not just a harm reduction strategy.)
This is correct yeah.
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.