Abolition Communism

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No social state is really annihilated, except when it is replaced by another.

– Wendell Phillips, ‘War and Our Leaders. Speech at the celebration of West India emancipation’, 1 August 1862

The George Floyd rebellion of 2020 seemed to have rent asunder, for a time, the ideological integument of the US racial capitalist order. Long gestated by struggles both practical and discursive, abolitionism surged into public consciousness. As with any such insurgent ideas, the loss of marginality is fraught with ambivalence. Abolitionism’s sudden currency can be seen both as triumph in a long war of manoeuvre against the racial and carceral state and as the symptom of a domestication and institutionalisation of its radical challenge. In arguments about the dangers of abolitionism’s reformist capture – often orbiting around the limits of ‘defunding’ the prison-industrial complex as a tactical imperative or strategic horizon – the question of abolitionism’s affinity or even identity with communism has served to emphasise and advance the necessarily systemic scope of abolition. It has meant underscoring how abolition cannot limit itself to the destitution of the police or the dismantling of prisons but requires a radically egalitarian remaking of the social world – pitted against any attempt to corral it into an indefinite horizon of piecemeal reforms. As Ruth Wilson Gilmore recently observed, abolitionism may be understood as ‘the elaboration (not novel but distinctive) of small “c” communism without a party’. Though, as she also suggests, the small “c” also found a home in big “C” parties, whose discipline – if not hierarchies and pathologies – we perhaps miss today.

Contemporary invocations of an abolition communism are hardly arbitrary. Not only do many of the political biographies of abolitionist scholar-activists intersect with communist movements and parties – especially with the powerful nexus of Black liberation, prison struggles and Marxist revolutionary politics from the 1960s onwards – but the very genealogies of communism and abolition are profoundly entangled at multiple levels. In an unpublished article from 1951, WEB Du Bois observed:

The abolition of human slavery and the advocacy of the communist state both arose in the same decade of the nineteenth century. It was common in the forties to hear Abolitionists called communists and to hear communists accused of abolitionism. The two reforms finally separated just as today the labour unions are trying desperately seeking to repudiate all accusation of the red tinge; while communists accuse the unions for selling their birth right for a mess of pottage. In the mid-nineteenth century, the abolitionists, often property holders and even small employers, repudiated all thought of disturbing the current industrial system, but declared that the system should not include slaves. On the other side, the communists and radicals drew away from abolitionists and declared they were forgetting the white wage slaves for the interests of a few black slaves who were not worth freedom. It was not until after the civil war that Karl Marx drew these separating ideologies together.

Marx championed the abolitionist politics of Wendell Phillips in his writing in the New York Daily Tribune, and some of his comrades in the International Working Men’s Association threw themselves into the militant and military work of abolishing slavery, but we can also see this drawing together in Marx’s theoretical vocabulary. 

Precisely where Marx seems most indebted to the lexicon of speculative philosophy, in his usage of the Hegelian term Aufhebung – often translated as ‘sublation’ or ‘overcoming’ – is also where he is channelling the impact of abolitionism. The targets of Aufhebung are legion. In the Communist Manifesto alone: class antagonism; the scattering of means of production; bourgeois individuality, independence and freedom; the family and the exploitation of children by parents; the role of women as mere instruments of production; prostitution, exploitation (of man by man, of one nation by another); the town-country distinction, etc. Objects of Abschaffung (the term used in German for the abolition of slavery) are, inter alia: feudal property, personal property, nationality, eternal truths, religion, inheritance, and bourgeois relations of production. 

These negations are summed up and crystallised by the abolition of private property – in Marx’s mature lexicon, of the capital-relation. And what was the general strike of the enslaved if not the greatest act of property abolition, the most momentous stranding of assets that the world has ever known? To emphasise the deep affinity of Marx’s talk of Aufhebung and Abschaffung with the revolutionary fact of the (self-)abolition of chattel slavery is also to question the notion, widespread among more reformist-inclined interpreters of Marx, that his Aufhebung is to be thought of as the kind of supersession or overcoming that conserves much of the reality it is nominally set on negating. By way of proof: in French translations approved by Marx, Aufhebung was rendered most frequently as suppression, abrogation or abolition, while in English ones checked by Engels it is rendered as abolish, do away, destroy.

In his posthumously published American Civilization, CLR James identified nineteenth-century abolitionist intellectuals, like Phillips, as ‘an American anticipation of the most radical political action that the nineteenth century and twentieth centuries have known’. James went so far as presenting abolitionism as the embryo of a truly ‘American’ Bolshevism, matching the latter’s ‘breadth of view, the revolutionary conception of democracy, and political ruthlessness.’ But CLR James’ focus on intellectuals has the downside of scanting the organic links between Marxian politics and the nineteenth-century abolitionist movement. As Manisha Sinha narrates in her history of anti-slavery politics, The Slave’s Cause:

After the [US Civil] war, an abolitionist–labor alliance found organizational expression briefly under Marxist auspices. Former abolitionists, Chartists, Owenites, utopian socialists, followers of Proudhon, labor, and ‘free love’ advocates like Andrews and Victoria Woodhull joined the First International, begun with Marx’s formation of the IWA in 1864 in London. Despite Marx’s criticism of utopian socialism in contrast to his own brand of allegedly scientific socialism, many of these reformers were the first converts to Marxism. Abolitionists such as Richard Hinton, a follower of John Brown who led a black regiment during the Civil War, and William West, who had brought up the plight of wage slaves in the pages of the Liberator before the war, were prominent in the First International, which earned the support of Sumner and Phillips. Andrews translated and Woodhull published Marx’s Communist Manifesto (1848) in the United States for the first time in her newspaper, Woodhull and Claflin’s Weekly. … After the suppression of the [Paris] commune, the IWA, now headquartered in New York, held a huge demonstration in sympathy that included an all-black Skidmore guard named after Thomas Skidmore.

These intertwined Black and Red genealogies would continue for another century, all the way to the revolutionary thought and freedom dreams of Black political prisoners in the US, the most proximate precursor to the reinvention of abolitionism in the context of movements against the prison-industrial-complex and what Geo Maher terms ‘police fascism’.

Having acknowledged the intimate bonds and episodic convergence of abolition and communism, it behoves us to inquire into what might be learned from their points of dissension. Are there ways in which abolitionism and communism might still operate, to cite Du Bois, as ‘separating ideologies’? I think the most fruitful approach, in view of an eventual ‘drawing together’, is to contend in tandem with abolitionist critiques of communism and communist critiques of abolition. My wager, to paraphrase an old philosopher from the Baltics, is that communism without abolition is empty, abolition without communism blind. 

The former, the abolitionist critique of communism, is prima facie the more glaring and more compelling critique. It can be summed up in Simoun Magsalin’s formula: carceral communism. Even if we reject the totalitarian amalgam that would subsume all communist politics under the crushing weight of Stalinism, the association of historical, big ‘C’ Communism with enormous systems of captivity and coercion (the Gulag archipelago and its epigoni) does suggest the imperative to submit both communist histories and communist imaginaries to the test of abolition. It is worth noting here that the philosopher most strongly associated with the critique of the prison, Michel Foucault, in his 1970s activism straddled, on the one hand, French proto-abolitionist prisoners’ movements that also turned their attention to Attica, George Jackson, and Black communist liberation politics, and, on the other, efforts to mobilise against the Soviet system of incarceration, in particular against the generalisation of psychiatric internment as a response to political dissidence. 

The revolutionaries of the 1970s, whether clearly or dimly aware of the tragedies of the 1920s and 1930s – best crystallised in the novels and memoirs of Victor Serge – were faced with a question that haunts the communist movement: would the prisoners turn into jailers? The Italian Red Brigades (Brigate Rosse) referred to the clandestine locations where they held kidnapped industrialists or politicians, like former PM Aldo Moro, as ‘people’s prisons’ and to the groups deciding the maiming or murder of their opponents as ‘people’s tribunals’. Conversely, Toni Negri – who spent some of his time as an inmate with a Brigate Rosse bounty on his head – in one of his prison writings from 1980, Communism and War, defined the ‘proletarian constitution’ as one defined by ‘the destruction of every fixed figure of power, the disappearance from the scene (and were it possible from the very historical memory of humanity) of all the special organs of capitalist repression. No prison will any more be erected, not a single one, ever, after the communist destruction of the Bastille!’

It is all too tempting, but also too easy, to try to extricate communism from the historical burden of the Lubyanka and Kolyma by affirming an abolitionist communism as a panacea or antidote. The fact that prison-breakers turned into prison-builders, just as the revolutionary conjuncture turned Robespierre from death-penalty abolitionist to advocate of the guillotine, requires greater pause, less of a rush to wash one’s hands and conscience clean. 

In polemical articles rebutting ‘autonomist’ or ‘anti-authoritarian’ Proudhonists published in 1873 in Italian (and only forty years later in German, to then serve as a key reference-point for Lenin in State and Revolution), Marx and Engels reasserted the need to look with sober senses at the place of violence in the revolutionary transition – that is, in the movement for the abolition of bourgeois society. Marx mocked:

If the political struggle of the working class assumes revolutionary form, and if the workers set up their revolutionary dictatorship in place of the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, they commit the terrible crime of violating principles, for in order to satisfy their wretched, vulgar everyday needs and to crush the resistance of the bourgeoisie, they give the state a revolutionary and transient form, instead of laying down their arms and abolishing the state.

Engels lectured:

Have these gentlemen ever seen a revolution? A revolution is certainly the most authoritarian thing there is; it is an act whereby one part of the population imposes its will upon the other part by means of rifles, bayonets and cannon, all of which are highly authoritarian means. And the victorious party must maintain its rule by means of the terror which its arms inspire in the reactionaries. Would the Paris Commune have lasted more than a day if it had not used the authority of the armed people against the bourgeoisie? Cannot we, on the contrary, blame it for having made too little use of that authority?

While hardly on the immediate agenda of abolitionist politics in our not-yet-revolutionary times, the questions posed here, namely what is to be done with the organised means of coercion – both with the existing ones (prisons, armies, police, the judicial system) and with the ones emerging from revolutionary upheavals (popular militias, etc.) – remain critical to the junction of abolition and communism. They draw our attention towards transition as the common terrain of these emancipatory practices of social, material, and ideological negation. In so doing, they also force us to attend to the horizon of climate emergency and collapse in which any abolitionist or communist projects are fated to flourish. Once we fully contend with the sheer infrastructural ubiquity of fixed fossil capital – the refineries, the rigs, the pipelines, the tankers, etc. – and with the enormous economic, military and state powers arrayed to consolidate, defend and accelerate extraction and combustion, it is amply evident – as Andreas Malm has not tired of stressing – that the dismantling of said infrastructure, the epochal stranding of these assets, their abolition as capital, requires – in terms of both scale and speed – the deployment of concentrated means of coercion. In other words, it requires the state, in what would need to be an unprecedented ‘revolutionary and transient form’. 

Addressing the question of abolition’s revolutionary politics, Anna Terwiel has recently made a related observation: ‘it is difficult to imagine carrying out the large-scale abolitionist transformation of the social, political, and economic order without recourse to the state’s coercive and administrative power to, for instance, impose progressive taxation and similar measures on reluctant or hostile elites.’ And we should not ignore, though I cannot do it any real justice here, the specifically indigenous articulation of ecological and abolitionist struggles. As we read in The Red Nation pamphlet Communism is the Horizon: Queer Indigenous Feminism is the Way: 

We will never free life on this planet from the death grips of capitalism or colonialism if we do not abolish carcerality, nor will we ever wage a successful socialist revolution in these lands if we do not center the peoples and traditions who have resisted carcerality since capitalism and colonialism touched down: Black and Indigenous people.

There is a painful but very material tension at work here, even an antinomy, which marked (stained, we might say) the actual history of communist politics, namely that the sheer inertial and intractable scale of what demands abolishing seems to call forth the deployment of means of coercion whose own sedimented history and logic – that of the state as a condensation and articulation of violence both physical and symbolic – pulls communism from abolition towards domination. Is it possible to wield revolutionary coercion and authority – in pursuit of abolishing capital as a relation and capitalists as a class and the juridical-policing-punishment system as their medium of control – while inoculating communist politics against the lure or telos of the carceral and the punitive? The decarceration of the victims of the bourgeoisie (workers, revolutionaries, ‘deviants’, ‘aliens’) and their recarceration as enemies of the people is a grim pattern that does not bear repeating. Truly to metabolise an abolitionist critique of carceral communism while not opting for the escape hatch of pacifist bad faith (the feeble illusion of liberation without conflict or compulsion) is a formidable task, and one that leftist and revolutionary movements have not excelled at, to put it mildly. It would mean facing up to the transitional necessity of coercion or repression without either adopting the extant instruments and institutions of punishment wholesale or inventing repressive apparatuses still devoid of the antibodies that might prevent the emergence of recombinant forms of punishment, prison and policing. 

Sometimes, as Foucault warned in his famous debate with French Maoists on the wisdom of instituting people’s tribunals to adjudicate capitalist crimes, even the furniture bears within itself the punitive logic of repression and judgment. In a provocative reference to the September Massacres during the French revolution, with their ‘wild’ acts of popular vengeance, Foucault tells his neo-revolutionary interlocutors that the men of the Commune of Paris set up courts with judges behind a table – symbol and spatial technology of the impartial ‘Third Party’ – establishing truths, eliciting confessions and deliberating upon what is ‘just’. On this stage, according to Foucault, we see at work the three ingredients of a state judicial apparatus which expropriate the very process of popular justice: ‘(i) a “third element”; (ii) reference to an idea, a form, a universal rule of justice; (iii) decisions with power of enforcement. It is these three characteristics of the courts which are represented in anecdotal fashion by the table, in our society.’ With reference to this small revolutionary stage of the law, Foucault poses a question that his Maoist interlocutors will ultimately elude:

Can we not see the embryonic, albeit fragile form of a state apparatus reappearing here? The possibility of class oppression? Is not the setting up of a neutral institution standing between the people and its enemies, capable of establishing the dividing line between the true and the false, the guilty and the innocent, the just and the unjust, is this not a way of resisting popular justice? A way of disarming it in the struggle it is conducting in reality in favour of an arbitration in the realm of the ideal? This is why I am wondering whether the court is not a form of popular justice but rather its first deformation.

But are we willing or inclined to smash the table? And is the price to be paid for inhibiting the rise of a state apparatus that of a far more deregulated, agonistic violence, a horizontal justice without vertical law (something that would chime with the paeans to ‘civil war’ by Tiqqun or the Invisible Committee)? Or, as Geo Maher and others have suggested, are there resources in the practices and histories of communities (subaltern, indigenous, racialised) in but not of the state that can open up horizons of normativity, and even coercion, which eschew the carceral and the criminal?

If the abolitionist critique of communism can prod us into confronting the thorny and tragic question of coercion in the midst and in the wake of revolutionary processes, what we could term a communist critique of abolition may compel us to think through what it means to build abolitionist politics amid not the ruins and sediments of bourgeois society but under capital’s full dominion. Where the former questions the rebirth of the carceral state under the cover of its withering away, the latter interrogates whether the reformist penchant of much contemporary abolitionism might not result in fatal capture and domestication. 

Much of this critique, in the US, has recently orbited around the apparent articulation, but arguably ultimate disjunction, between the insurgency against policing in the aftermath of the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and many, many more, on the one hand, and the institutional demand to ‘defund the police’, on the other. Charmaine Chua – who has also provided a bracingly lucid on-the-ground assessment of the promises and pitfalls of abolitionist mutual aid, outside and against the state – puts it pithily in her 2020 essay ‘Abolition Is A Constant Struggle: Five Lessons from Minneapolis’: ‘the emergence of “defund” as the uprising’s primary demand should give one pause, enfolded as it has already become into the reformism desired by the dominant system’. In A World Without Police, Maher stresses – in terms that resonate with our earlier discussion of the problem of state abolition in communist thought – that the abolition of police must be approached without simply disavowing the problem of coercion: 

Especially as abolitionist discourse enters the political mainstream, we need to be clear that just as abolition is not a suburb [a reference to an unfortunate quip by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez], nor is it an abstract ethical critique of violence or a purely prefigurative gesture – building the new world without fighting the old. Abolition is a material struggle, one that entails destroying the old and building the new. And for those most vulnerable to the many interlocking violences of our world, this means securing the community in order to rebuild it. This doesn’t mean the police, of course: self-defense by and for the community has nothing at all in common with those professional armed outsiders sent by the state. It’s about new, community institutions born of the struggle against policing. 

Perhaps the most forceful statement of what, by way of shorthand, I’ve called the communist critique of contemporary abolitionism is formulated by Jarrod Shanahan and Zhandarka Kurti in their States of Incarceration. As they observe: ‘The strengths of abolitionism are also its weaknesses; the emphasis abolitionists place on practical activity in the here and now has led to an underdeveloped conception of what a revolutionary transformation of society along abolitionist lines would actually look like.’ They go on to declare:

Regardless of where you stand, it’s undeniable that abolitionism has captured the spoils of the George Floyd Rebellion. Moving forward, its partisans must clarify the relationship between abolitionist tactics in the present, and the future society abolitionism hopes to bring into existence. The task ahead of them is steering the current momentum abolitionism enjoys into channels that, rather than simply serving as correctives for liberal democracy to fix its problems with the help of avowed anti-capitalists, actually constitute viable counter-power.

Can abolitionist organizing scale up from the interpersonal and the communal substitution of repressive or reproductive state functions and move towards a horizon of replacing capitalism itself? For Shanahan and Kurti, these are questions that cannot be posed by activism that operates under the banner of ‘non-reformist reforms’ – a formula coined by André Gorz and popularised by Ruth Wilson Gilmore within the abolitionist ambit. 

But a communist critique of abolitionist reformism needs to be precise about its target. In Shanahan and Kurti’s telling, non-reformist reforms are ones that ‘must not strengthen the power, social scope, and funding base of the carceral state’; but, they retort, in the final analysis ‘non-reformist reforms scrutinize whether a demand will weaken carceral apparatuses, not its direct relationship to waging revolution.’ Yet if we turn to Gorz’s own formulation, we can see why it might be attractive for a radical abolitionist politics that rejects treating the capitalist state only as an object of acquiescence or of immediate insurgency. In his Strategy for Labor, Gorz asked: ‘Is it possible from within – that is to say, without having previously destroyed capitalism – to impose anti-capitalist solutions which will not immediately be incorporated into and subordinated to the system?’ Whereas a ‘reformist reform is one which subordinates its objectives to the criteria of rationality and practicability of a given system’, a ‘not necessarily reformist reform is one which is conceived not in terms of what is possible within the framework of a given system and administration, but in view of what should be made possible in terms of human needs and demands.’ Though Gorz’s talk of ‘limiting mechanisms which will restrict or dislocate the power of capital’ may recall a view of reform as katechon – a way of holding back capitalist evils that inadvertently serves to perpetuate them – it is the political meaning of structural or non-reformist reforms that should hold our attention.

For Gorz, to discipline capital is to empower labour; a structural reform is ‘by definition a reform implemented or controlled by those who demand it’. In other words, what is at stake is the possibility of political re-composition, re-skilling and emancipation that is channelled by reforms whose aim is not merely to restrain a degenerative process or to benefit from a progressive one, but to, at one and the same time, make concrete gains within capitalism which permit further movement against capitalism. This is why the question of control is so central to non-reformist reforms. Shifting to abolitionist terrain, if the implementation of demands under a ‘defund’ rubric simply avoids strengthening the carceral state it could still, by Gorzian parameters, constitute a reformist reform, if it is not also accompanied by gains in control by the policed, the incarcerated and the criminalised, and if it does not also create a true rupture – even if not yet a revolutionary one – in the political space of possibility. Non-reformist reforms should not be equated with gradualism, in the sense suggested and castigated by Shanahan and Kurti when they write that ‘plots to escape capitalist society in a piecemeal fashion don’t make sense’.

As I’ve argued at greater length in Terms of Disorder, this subjective and potentially ruptural dimension of non-reformist reforms takes them out of the two polarities that define reformism. The first, what I refer to as katechon or lesser evil-ism (the dominant contemporary variant), depends on the pessimistic principle of a piecemeal resistance against an otherwise inevitable catastrophe. The second, reformism as telos (which persists as zombie social-democracy), relies on the optimistic principle of piecemeal victories that accumulate as advances, alongside the grain of history. A politics of non-reformist reform, or of reforms without reformism, relies instead on a practice, devoid of guarantees, of bringing together the antagonistic needs that grow out of defensive tactics. It incorporates this practice within a broader strategy of federating all those struggles that consciously constitute themselves as limits to capital, and, in terms of abolition, to a carceral racial capitalism in particular. This does not, of course, refute or obviate Shanahan and Kurti’s challenge: to think a revolutionary abolitionism that does not just burn out in spasmodic insurgencies or is forever mired in state-work, one which can confront the present tasks of eliminating interpersonal harm without disavowing or wishing away the harms (and, I would add, the coercion) that comes along with struggles for justice and equality. 

It should be obvious by now that at the nexus of abolitionism and communism lies the question of the state – not just as the condensation of capitalist coercion, but also as the organised materialisation of social capacities. An abolition-communist theory and practice of the state cannot flatten the latter onto government, to borrow a crucial analytic caution from Ruth Wilson Gilmore and Craig Gilmore, who remind us that: 

If states are ideological and institutional capacities that derive their legitimacy and material wherewithal from residents, governments are the animating forces – policies plus personnel – that put state capacities into motion and orchestrate or coerce people in their jurisdictions to conduct their lives according to centrally made and enforced rules.

Those capacities, including coercive ones, are also potentially revolutionary materials – if we don’t delude ourselves into imagining them as neutral instruments unsullied by material histories of domination. As Quinn Lester has recently argued in a reading of Du Bois’ abolition democracy against the current of the contemporary anti-statist reflex, for the author of Black Reconstruction it was only the conjunctural deployment of the coercive capacities of the state, in the wake of the general strike of the enslaved, that opened up, for a time, the horizon of liberatory struggle against a racial order of capitalist domination which, in Du Bois’ words, ‘cannot be expected to yield save to superior power’. The only abolition democracy the US has known flourished under a sui generis state of exception or ‘dictatorship’, and the military curtailment of white power. Of course, precisely because this remained through-and-through a capitalist state, the counter-revolution of property – which eventuated as the Compromise of 1877 – was always in the wings. But this doesn’t refute the fact that the epochal abolition of property in human beings required a formidable deployment of coercive (and some carceral) capacities. 

There are no analogies in that bygone scenario for us, and the metastases of organised violence in the century-and-a-half since give no credence to fantasies of occupying the ‘commanding heights’. But at its barest, and this is all I’ve been striving to suggest, the problem of the role of coercion in systemic and revolutionary transitions seems to me to be the critical hinge between abolition and communism. There is no resolution to be had, no easy bringing of the ‘separating ideologies together’, at a purely theoretical level, but it is becoming evident that it is in the distinct if interlocking contexts of the politics of climate and of abolition that contemporary communist thought is forced to rethink – but also to reinvent – some of its founding problems, perhaps above all that of the state and revolution.

Alberto Toscano teaches at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver and is the author of Terms of Disorder and Late Fascism.