Abolition. Revolution. Now.
Book review of Abolition Revolution by Aviah Sarah Day & Shanice Octavia McBean (Pluto Press, 2022)
By John Moore
Let me start by saying that Abolition Revolution is brilliant. Please rush out, buy it, read it, rush out again and buy further copies as gifts for your friends and comrades. It will be good for all your souls.
The book is structured around a series of sixteen theses. Each thesis seeks to set out a stand-alone argument, allowing each chapter to be read on its own. These theses are organised into an introduction and four parts: the tools of police power; roots in empire – the history of criminalisation and resistance; systems of criminalisation today; and abolitionist futures. The book concludes with a symposium which allows for the contribution of other abolitionist organisers. Overall the book is brilliant. It is well researched and confidently argued. It links historical analysis with contemporary systems of oppression, theory with activist experience, hope with realism. It is an important book, bringing a clear UK perspective to key abolitionist arguments and reflects the development of abolitionism in Britain over the last decade.
The first thesis – ‘A national abolitionist movement has erupted in Britain. Abolition is a tool to reimagine revolutionary politics’ - highlights the progress of abolitionist organising over recent years. In a 2007 unpublished MA dissertation,“What happened to abolitionism?”, Rebecca Roberts started with a 1994 quote from Joe Sim:
“Abolitionists are now regarded as sociological dinosaurs, unreconstituted hangovers from the profound but doomed schisms of the late 1960s, who are marginal to the “real” intellectual questions of the 1990s …Abolition, it seems, has failed to impact upon the direction of penal policy or the debate about crime and punishment.”
Re-reading Roberts’s essay it is clear why she chose this quote. She interviewed 10 prominent abolitionists (six based in the UK, four elsewhere in Europe) and from their contributions it was clear that abolitionism was on the defensive. Among the respondents there was no clear agreement of what abolitionism actually was and the extent to which it was a meaningful aspiration. Roberts herself was more optimistic, arguing that to dismiss ‘it because of it’s radicalism or utopianism underestimates its potential contribution’. I have cited this 2007 essay as it reflects the mood of abolitionism 15 years ago (I was one of the interviewees). It also allows us to appreciate how far, and fast, things have moved on. Day and McBean are part of the eruption they described in the book. Unlike the abolitionism of 2007 – which defined itself as ‘neo-abolitionism’ and focused almost exclusively on the abolition of prison – the emergent movement of recent years, which they coin ‘revolutionary abolitionism’ (p. 16) has its roots in a wide range of struggles – Black Lives Matter, school exclusions, campaigns against sexual violence, anti-deportation activism, the Kill The Bill Movement and many more. As abolitionist praxis has been adopted by these movements abolitionism itself has had to adapt, become more explicitly intersectional, and seeking to develop a coherent set of ideas that unites these struggles. As Abolition Revolution demonstrates, it is a process that has greatly enriched abolitionism.
Thesis two recounts the authors’ own journey to abolition through their organising with Sisters Uncut. Day was a founding member and McBean joined the group shortly after. This personal history means they never pretend to be writing as disinterested academics, observing with unsoiled hands, but are always clear that they are part of the struggles they write about. This history shows how their, and their Sisters, involvement in direct action shaped their political analysis. Through campaigning it became clear that: ‘Violence was no longer interpersonal: it was structural. The state was no longer a bystander, but a perpetrator’ (p. 26). Key to Sisters Uncut’s success was its growing diversity, and it was through the involvement of increased numbers of working-class, Black, trans and disabled women that its organising was to become more radical. The book is dedicated to Sarah Reed, whose family’s justice campaign they vigorously supported, and this involvement coincides with the beginning of the internal discussions within the national Sisters Uncut network, which was to end with the group committing to abolitionism. Day and McBean are clear that this was a challenging process that required ‘tender and careful discussions’ (p.29). Their account of this process, the need to proceed on the basis of consensus decision-making, illustrates the values that feminist organisers have increasingly brought to abolitionist organising.
Thesis three to six focus on police power. Collectively the section provides a powerful indictment of policing and why it can’t be reformed. The centrality of race to policing is forensically exposed, as is the extent to which the police rely not only on violence but on our consent. By the ignoring of ‘police diktats to stay at home’ those who attended the 2021 vigil for Sarah Everard ‘withdrew their consent to policing on a mass scale’ (p.58). This is abolitionism in practice. As they convincingly argue, the police don’t do what it says on the tin, they are ‘abysmal’ (p.64) at dealing with crime. The police do not exist for our safety, but ‘to maintain the status quo exactly as it is’ and this explains why their ‘violence will always punch downwards along the lines of gender, race, ability, sexuality and class’ (p.75). Feminists who seek to use the police and criminal justice as a solution to sexual violence will therefore always fail women, if not their own ‘glittering girlboss careers’ (p.84).
Theses seven and eight explain the links between today’s criminal justice institutions and the British empire. Histories of the English police, as well as of the wider criminal justice system, tend to present them as histories of progress, “we” got better at dealing with crime. From reading these histories you would get the impression of glorious advancement, without any connection to the British states activities in its empire. In reality the British state was a global enterprise and developed penal institutions and strategies simultaneously in the metropole and the colony with developments in one location informing innovations elsewhere in the empire. Abolition Revolution captures this process linking the oppression and exploitation of the working class in Britain with that of colonised and racialised peoples across the empire. This emphasis on the need to understand the British state and its institutions as a product of empire reinforces their arguments about the impossibility of reforming the police and other oppressive British state institutions.
Theses nine to thirteen explore systems of criminalisation today. Thesis nine highlights the key role of youth. Both indirectly, through austerity, and directly through their targeting by the police, young people bear the brunt of much state violence. Rather than trying to rein in the militancy of youth – they cite as an example BLMUK’s attempt to cancel the 13th June 2020 BLM demo – they argue for organising its collective potential. The other theses in this section highlight other major areas of state violence and criminalisation. The resistance to borders as mechanisms of exclusion – which enable not only the ‘hoarding of wealth’ but also determine ‘who will live and who will perish’ (p.144) - together with the ways in which society is organised to police them, is identified as an abolitionist priority. Whilst abolitionism may have widened its focus way beyond the prison, prison remains a key symbol of state power and is still experienced as state imposed pain by thousands of adults and children. Day and McBean highlight how prisoners have resisted state violence, both historically and currently, and recognise the importance of these struggles. The intimate links between states racism and criminalisation is highlighted by theses that deal with the Islamophobic racism of the “War on Terror” and the ongoing racist moral panic on gangs. Their analysis highlights how these are linking to the political economy of capitalism as part of a wider strategy of maintaining the status quo and its inherent inequalities. This, they remind us, means: ‘Abolition is a struggle against the whole system’ (p. 166). Abolition Revolution refers to neoliberalism and the problematic nature of the welfare state on a couple of occasions. These are, as I argued in a review of an early book in this Pluto series, Empire’s Endgame, important issues, where we need to further develop abolitionist thinking. My comments in that review could equally apply to this book.
The final three theses look forward to “Abolitionist Futures”. Day and McBean emphasise the importance of forging unity across the full range of struggles and identify the capacity of abolitionism to build links between them. Using the example of the Kill The Bill campaign, launched by Sisters Uncut, and the wide coalition it built, they highlight the ‘fierce resistance to state violence’ of the Gypsy, Roma and Traveller (GRT) communities. This is the great strength of Abolition Revolution, its capacity to understand how the coercive and oppressive institutions of the state are clear in who they target, and who they need to oppress. If a single Bill can target ‘protesters, migrants, travellers, and Black folk in one fell swoop’ (p. 179) then isn’t it obvious what alliances abolitionist organisers need to make? Their answer is the Kill The Bill’s coalition that they helped build. The book’s final part is unashamed in its focus on abolitionist activism and the strategies we need to develop if we are to build a new world. They argue:
“Abolitionist organising must connect the local to the national, and the national to international. Our work must be community-based, building shared values and radical political consensus through local resistance to state violence and police power.”
And they conclude:
“A serious project to end police violence and the siege of marginalised communities cannot be anything but revolutionary: a total transformation of the international world order, the unequivocal abolition of the conditions that give rise to policing as a rebuilding in the interests of ordinary folk – as equals, as collaborators, as comrades. Abolition. Revolution. Now.”
The book is interspersed with some brilliant poems by Kadeem Marshall-Oxley and finishes with a symposium the authors convened with five abolitionist organisers. This can be read – or used as an abolitionist organising tool – on its own and provides a good introduction to how abolitionism has become central to organisers operating in a wide range of campaigns. Their visions of what an abolitionist future would look like is truly inspirational.
In conclusion if you identify as an abolitionist, or are just abolition-curious, this book is an essential read. If on the other hand you dismiss abolitionists as ‘utopian’ or ‘sociological dinosaurs’ avoid this – reading it may just destroy your world view.