ANALYZING THE LIMITS OF ACCOUNTABILITY

ANALYZING THE LIMITS OF ACCOUNTABILITY

The following essay is the concluding chapter to our book After Accountability, first published by Wendy's Subway in 2023 and republished by Haymarket in January 2025.

This volume collects many brilliant and important organizers, grappling with questions of accountability from quite varied perspectives. Each interview, in its own ways, offers considerable material for everyone trying to find better approaches to addressing intra-movement harm. But this book is not quite a manual or collection of best practices, nor is it a programmatic guide for what we think others should be doing differently.

Essential to this project are the tensions and contradictions between interviews. In the introduction, we named what we saw as an impasse in current debates on accountability, a set of intractable contradictions in debates on the topic. Overcoming this impasse will likely depend on a further advance in the streets, in the conditions of mass struggle. We hope that through placing these differing conversations alongside each other, something more can begin to emerge dialectically that would be absent in isolation. Since some of these interviews were first circulated in October 2023, we’ve had the chance to do a series of public events with contributing narrators and audiences. Those have advanced our sense that the questions that brought us to this project are crucial but not yet fully answered. This book is an effort to open up new trajectories of thinking and working between and through the tensions of these interviews.

For this conclusion, rather than closely engage the rich material of the interviews, we are setting out on a lateral trajectory, first in recognizing some of the discursive maneuvers and absences in the interviews, and then in theorizing the limits of accountability through a critique of the capitalist mode of production.

Accountability

Over the last decade, a specific framework for addressing intra-movement harm has become dominant. In its rigorous form, it is often called transformative justice (TJ). TJ has spread with the growing prominence of prison and police abolitionism and with a few high-profile and brilliant advocates. It has been taken up by many activists seeking the best available practices for addressing and repairing harms between members of a shared community. Some imagine TJ as replacing the prison-industrial complex, growing to become a primary means of addressing all forms of interpersonal harm. Already, many politically savvy people consider it the go-to standard for managing sexual abuse within movement space.

Central to transformative justice is a recognition of the destructive violence of the capitalist, white-supremacist state. For communities targeted by mass incarceration, police violence, and criminalization, calling on the police and courts is often unviable. Through groups like INCITE!, feminists of color played a major role in developing transformative justice as a framework. Their experience of simultaneously challenging police violence and intimate-partner violence made clear the necessity of other frameworks for addressing harm. Those organizing against police and prisons are particularly drawn to transformative justice as a framework. While TJ is a fairly specific set of overlapping practices, it has also inspired a more vague and expansive approach to movement harm, often termed accountability. “Holding an abuser accountable,” “an ongoing accountability process,” “a failed effort at accountability,” “being accountable to survivors”—these phrases and others like them circulate among social networks online, are taken up in conflict-ridden organizing meetings, and form the quiet gossip that constitutes many relationships between comrades when protest isn’t popping off.

They are both quite specific and quite general. They are specific in the sense that their meanings are not necessarily intelligible to those outside movement spaces, or from other generations of activists. Even the language of “harm” as encompassing manifold forms of violence and conflict belongs to a particular historical and cultural moment. Those using these phrases mark themselves as part of a specific set of milieus, a particular age range, and a few overlapping movements or the broader social networks and discursive communities around such movements. These phrases are laden with moral weight, with the accumulated baggage of experiences of pain and betrayal.

Ideas of accountability are also general in the sense that what exactly constitutes an accountability process is rarely clear, far from standardized, and constantly subject to contestation and debate. Some define accountability entirely in terms of the desire and needs of survivors. Others frame it as primarily driven by a community’s needs, by a shared or collective will. Some see accountability as a formal, clear-cut process with steps and set expectations. Others relate to it as an open-ended political confrontation, a public struggle over what sorts of behaviors are tolerated among comrades; they may consider accountability as a weapon to challenge oppressive power dynamics within movements. Some see accountability as a means of disciplining harmful behavior through imposed consequences, while others are wary of anything that suggests a logic of punishment. Some are willing to use coercion, like deplatforming, to force perpetrators to participate in an accountability process, while others see mutual consent and mutual willingness as essential for a functional process.

Accountability can be a principled moral stance, a nebulous but inspired political vision of loving movements, a commitment to ending and transforming harm within our movement spaces. Its promise is great: that movements can wage our struggles against police or capital or fascists, while within our ranks finding ways to care for each other, heal our trauma, and prefigure a world beyond prisons and courts. We can imagine success: survivors feeling protected and cared for; processes leading to substantial transformation in behavior; projects that could continue to move ahead in broader struggles, armed with a sustained internal culture that could mitigate, stop, and redress harm. Accountability is a promise to commit ourselves to transforming and learning from each other, to becoming better comrades.

Traditions

What we call the queer left is less a movement or a community than a hodgepodge of traditions made from transmitted inheritances of the politics and practices of those who struggled before us. In the absence of an actually existing community, all we have is the community that harms us and through which we must seek repair. Searching for continuity, but skeptical of normative institutions, the queer left looks to a sense of tradition—a somewhat stable repertoire of ethical practices that bind people together in common cause.

In seeking an unproblematic authority from which to claim their own traditions, many well-meaning queers have turned toward an Indigenous past as their wellspring of inspiration and intention, one that marks a kind of prelapsarian vision of another way to live. This is the recurring dream of primitive communism: a way to talk about communism without naming communism. A wish image drawn from a past reality not understood on its own terms but reanimated for transformation of the present. It’s not as exaggerated a form as playing Indian; it is more respectful than that. It may be genuine, though it is also instrumentalizing. It is a kind of mythmaking.

This mythic time obscures historical time. Romantic attachment to ideas of Indigenous practices also obscures how current-day practices of reparative justice for Indigenous peoples in Canada and New Zealand often exist within and alongside the colonial government’s legal system. Even when not operating through state institutions, Indigenous community practices to address harm do not always align with the values and politics ascribed to them by non-Indigenous proponents citing these traditions. Indigenous communities have used a variety of activities to address harm that may not be palatable or even possible for the proponents who cite them, including exile and intensive ceremonial practices, and which to properly carry out would require restoring Indigenous sovereignty over land. The recursive mention of Indigenous forms of reparative justice is one attempt to ground accountability in its concrete history, which draws from a multitude of precedents transmitted through a structure of feeling more often than through an explicit continuous political program.

It was this project’s intention to restore that concrete sense of history to practices of accountability. Not to say that our forms of accountability have gotten any better or worse. It is certainly possible that contemporary practices to address harm are shaped by the vast, varied practices of peoples living across the American continent prior to European arrival. But there are numerous other antecedents, and much more direct influences, on how we have come to consider and mobilize accountability. We began this investigation considering one hypothetical antecedent—the New Communist Movement’s influence on contemporary organizing—but found that many narrators emphasized their differences more than their commonalities or a direct lineage. Other potential lineages emerged in the course of our interviews that could have provided alternative research paths. One rich vein of theoretical and practical activity at work in the concept of accountability is the Black radical tradition; in the introduction we pointed to political-prisoner struggles and organizing against intimate-partner violence as two such relevant histories. All share the fact of a non-mythic history of the concept.

Varied Meanings

When we interviewed people about accountability, it quickly became clear that they interpreted the term in varied ways. At first many older comrades primarily spoke about their own efforts to remain accountable to a broader movement and struggle, and the particular political commitments that movement calls on. As people age, see the waning of waves of struggle, and have to reproduce themselves amid the demands of labor markets and institutions, there is considerable pressure to drift away from political activity. To remain accountable is to keep these commitments, even when they are hard and inconvenient.

In our extended political networks, people sometimes talk about accountability as an essential dimension of all camaraderie. We are accountable to each other in the sense that we are ready to fight alongside each other, fight for each other, and work through what comes up to maintain viable collaborative relationships. Accountability, in this sense, is a synonym or dimension of solidarity: I am accountable to you because I recognize we are in this struggle together and have to take care of each other. All these meanings—to be accountable to address harm, accountable to a movement, accountable to a comrade—are contrasting but also interconnected. They all are about a commitment to positioning ourselves in a particular way with respect to one another, and about a form of internalized discipline according to which one takes in the desires and needs of the other and makes them a part of oneself. An accountability process may try to force someone to agree to such a discipline, but the taking in and taking on for of accountability for oneself is always an essential step. Accountability is about ourselves as relational beings, open to the desire of others.

The Erotic

 We go to meetings to cruise. There is work to be done, of course, and many good reasons to do it. We have a protest to plan, a march to coordinate, an arrested comrade to defend, a revolution for which we want to be ready. We also show up for other, more visceral pleasures. We flirt across the room, exchange numbers. When sex isn’t what we are seeking, that same erotic tension sublimates into the excitement over a new friend. Some of us met our long-term partners at meetings. We all have a long list of exes and friends accumulated from years of political engagement.

When a protest wave dies down, the erotic is still woven in with the political. We develop a crush on someone we haven’t met from reading their excellent and incisive essay, reflecting philosophically on the limits of police reform. The erotic weaves through political action. Queer struggle has been fueled and sustained by the passionate attachments between comrades.

These attractions can also go horribly wrong. Dear friends have been raped by someone we thought was a comrade. Some boyfriends turned violent and controlling a few months in, and it takes years for us to get out. Alcohol and bad social codes blur the lines between miscommunicators and predators. Where there are exes, there are also enemies. And our enemies have allies, splitting organizations and scenes. We keep lists in our heads of bad dates, bad organizations who defend them, bad activists who harass and terrorize survivors. Sexual assault leaves survivors traumatized. It also leaves movements wrecked by betrayal and denial.

Sexual violence occupies a unique place in the litany of interpersonal harms. Sometimes people point this out critically, as if it shouldn’t be the case. There are many ways we are oppressed, many ways to become traumatized, and many structures of power and domination. But something in sex goes deep into our being. The erotic is appealing precisely because it has the potential to touch us at our most vulnerable. Desire opens us to the world, and that openness inflects and intensifies the experience of betrayal and harm. And desire isn’t always for the good, the safe, the harmless. Much of kink includes a fantasy experience of powerlessness. Those who say that rape is about power, not about sex, seem to miss that kink is so often sexy because there is a play, however consensual, with powerlessness. The erotic is dangerous, and it can hurt us like nothing else.

Strangely, in our interviews about accountability and intra- movement harm, almost no one acknowledged that people date within movement spaces. Though there is no shortage of stories about challenging rape and intimate-partner violence between comrades, the conversations often veered into other, safer kinds of harm.

There is some block to really exploring the basis and consequences of sexual harm. It is hard to talk about. It is hard because it is often where there is the most pain and the most trauma. It is hard because it is marked by a certain intimacy. Sexual harm ruptures the confines of the private and personal. But as it spills into the public, it still bears the mark of a kind of private shame.

It may also be hard to talk about, perhaps, because it isn’t easy to untangle the risk of sexual assault with our desires. We wish to find erotic pleasure in movement spaces, to be loved and to love, to be touched and to touch. We want to go to meetings to cruise. When we do, there is the potential for sexual harm that could tear through camaraderie and solidarity, leaving organizations and movements in ruins.

Failures

The promise of accountability is rarely kept. Across movement spaces, there are countless examples of failed accountability efforts. People try to hold each other to account, and so very many things go wrong.

In the face of accountability efforts, perpetrators may opt out, seeing the process as unreasonable and unnecessary. Supporters of the survivor may recognize they lack the leverage to force an adequate process and start organizing to bring together other allies to pressure the perpetrator into participating. This may take the form of personal interventions, deplatforming, banning them from various spaces, public humiliation, or threatening some aspect of their livelihood and social reproduction. These tactics may hope to force the perpetrator back into a process, or to warn others that this person is dangerous. Supporters of the perpetrator, often with considerably more resources, counter-organize and are frequently successful in forcing survivors to abandon their public life in activist spaces. When at their most determined, accountability efforts may successfully ruin an abuser’s reputation or bring an end to a project sustained by denied abuse and repeated cover-ups. More often they lead to splits, entire groups of people remembering their resentments a decade later.

Both sound preferable to inaction, no doubt, or to continuing to let abuse and harm circulate. But they are hardly inspiring and enviable outcomes. It is remarkably rare to see examples of intra-movement harm being addressed in ways that were experienced as successful. Instead, the catastrophes and wreckage of failed accountability are everywhere to be found.

So why does this process prove so impossible? An easy response, and one worth sustained attention, is that we need to get better at it. We have models to draw from, experiences to build upon, and brilliant luminaries to listen to. These all are essential, and well- deserving of praise. Pinko’s research project into accountability taught us a bit about the lineage and meaning of these concepts. There is much to say about what we learned.

Still, accountability seems difficult to achieve. Something in that difficulty needs to be thought about, something beyond the need for better models, greater efforts, more training. One possible and tentative answer we came to through our own discussions: Accountability processes often fail because they necessarily depend on the existence of what people call “the community.” Yet community, far from being something easy to rely on, poses a difficulty of its own. 

Community

Both the formalized, transformative justice versions and the vague expansiveness of references to accountability processes make frequent reference to “community.” “Community accountability” is a subset of transformative justice, referring to its most common mode of implementation. Mariame Kaba and Shira Hassan titled their transformative justice handbook Fumbling Towards Repair: A Workbook for Community Accountability Facilitators. Mia Mingus’s online guide on transformative justice contrasts the state, a source of racist harm, with the superior “possibility for transformation in our communities.” Generation FIVE includes in their definition of accountability “holding people who commit violence accountable within and by their communities.”

Community here is not just a rhetorical device. As attested to by our interviewees and our personal experiences, community is a central mechanism through which accountability processes function. These processes draw on the resources of the community to work effectively, and they may integrate the friends, extended family members, colleagues, and comrades of both a survivor and a perpetrator. These webs of relationships help cohere the process; push perpetrators to participate; support survivors; and provide the grounding, shared space that makes it all possible.

Community can help moderate and mediate the numerous tensions and conflicts of an accountability process. When perpetrators are resistant to participating, community pressure can be an essential tool. Concerned friends may express their moral judgment that the perpetrator should stay with a process. Artistic or political collaborators may threaten to throw them out of collective spaces if they do not. Community is the necessary third term that enables and structures accountability without recourse to the state.

In our interviews, people cited various institutions and scenes that function as a community in this sense. One interviewer described efforts at accountability within a punk music scene. Others referenced the importance of a revolutionary party or structured political organization to support the process. Outside the far left, we’ve seen many examples of people relying on their church, religious community, or twelve-step program to address harm without the state. Even a fantasy community of political desire can help an accountability process; interviewees comment that if all parties see themselves as part of a shared, overall political effort, accountability can be easier to engage. All these factors underline the function of the community as the third term of accountability, situating participants and enabling their mutual engagement.

Community is the stage and site of accountability. It is the leverage and fulcrum of holding to account. It is the entity that brings together survivor and abuser, participants and organizers, in order to make accountability conceivable. Community is the imagined basis and the hoped-for outcome of accountability. We can hold each other accountable because we are in community together. This dependence on community could help explain recent widespread failures of accountability, the difficulty of consistent implementation, and its frequent disappointments.

In many cases, the success or failure of an effort at accountability clearly rests on political factors in these shared contexts, organizations, or communities. Some political organizations have catastrophically imploded when it became clear their leadership had long covered over sexual harm and actively suppressed efforts to address it. In other cases, prevalent but under-acknowledged misogyny or racism may give abusers disproportionate power to undermine accountability processes. In these sorts of situations, faults in the shared reference point make accountability unlikely to impossible, and transforming those shared spaces would be the necessary foundation to future accountability efforts. Clearly we all need more spaces and groups that are more thoroughly committed in their praxis, that take harm and efforts to address it seriously, that recognize the catastrophic impact of allowing sexual harm to continue particularly in its racialized manifestations. Here we want to point toward another, more difficult possibility: that those shared communities rarely exist as they are imagined, in part due to the material structure of capitalist society.

Precarity of community

Communities struggle to persist and survive against the corrosive forces of labor-market competition, state violence, and the material necessity of survival. They may be profoundly important to us, but they often fail people when in crisis, when in need, and when trying to navigate through the treacherous conditions of working-class survival.

Working-class social life has been dominated either by the fragmentation of poverty, white supremacy, and state violence, or by the autonomization and isolation of suburbs, social isolation, and overwork. The destruction of the community can be tracked across macro levels of urban planning, Indigenous peasant dispossession, mass incarceration, and genocide. Entire neighborhoods can be obliterated over the course of a few years through gentrification and urban redevelopment. Working-class communities, particularly for people of color, are under constant erosive pressure from state policies and capitalist markets.

Often, senses of community are particularly robust for people in their twenties, prior to the full isolating effects of labor-market social reproduction. As we age, we tend to become more isolated, alone, and restricted to a narrow world of work and family. Overlapping social worlds may unravel as people retreat into a more isolated life while raising children, grappling with mental-health challenges, or overworking. People may have to move cities to find a new job, leaving behind family or friends. People are incarcerated, detained, or deported. People may go off to college, to pursue a hoped-for career, or to flee the economic despair of their region of origin. A tight-knit network of friends or comrades may be torn apart by conflict, harm, or drama.

In both macro destruction of whole neighborhoods and personal atomization, the dynamics of capitalist markets and the adjunctive role of the racial state and the nuclear family are central to this destruction of community. Capitalist development systematically undermines and upends stable communities and prevents the long-term stability of new ones. Communities under capitalism are fleeting. As Stevie Wilson put it when discussing prisoner organizing in our introduction, “[G]rowing up, they don’t feel a part of their community. They don’t feel a part of their neighborhood. You see that a lot of them don’t feel part of their family. And then you come to prison stuff, let’s talk about community. They’re looking at you like, ‘What? What community?’”

Community of capital

People in capitalist society, by and large, are divided against one another. What ties people together is not, in most cases, stable affective ties of love, care, or solidarity, but the impersonal domination of prices and exchanges. Some Marxists refer to this alienation, this erosion of community, as “separation.” The dominant community in which we live is a community of capital. Capitalism constitutes an interdependent web of social relations characterized by market dependency, by the necessity of selling to survive. Most people sell their labor power or whatever is available to them, as more informal workers; capitalists sell products and services. We are all enmeshed in markets.

The structure of universal market dependency is mediated by direct personal relationships. Those who can’t find a job can partner and depend on someone else who has one. This usually takes the form of the nuclear family or other forms of private households. Dependency on the private household to survive leaves people vulnerable to interpersonal partner violence, abusive relationships, terrible childhoods, and other issues of concern to those pursuing accountability and transformative justice. Of course, market dependency creates this same vulnerability to abuse within the workplace as well.

Community can rarely be adequate to our hopes under capitalism; it is simply not congruent with the actually existing web of human interdependency. This web, constituted by the domination of impersonal market forces, or instantiated directly within the dictatorship of the workplace, can never offer a community. This is not just because it is too cruel or too oppressive, it is also because it is always mystified, opaque, and alienated.

All other collectivities, insofar as they do not overlap with actually existing practices of material survival, are readily torn apart as each participant must seek a means of self-reproduction. Because a core activity of collective human life is so absorbed into market relations, non-market relations become hollow, shallow, and fragile. You may love your friends, but you still have to pay rent. Your community may provide housing for some months or years—through a rental party, friends offering you their couch, an independent autonomous squat, a generous roommate—but in a capitalist society, eventually you will do what it takes to go out and find a job or attach yourself in an isolating couple form to someone with housing to offer. Because property relations form the basis of stable communities, those who do not own property face the constant risk of losing a community adequate to meeting shared emotional needs.

Fantasy of community

If our experience of community is overwhelmingly disappointing, fragile, or fleeting, why, then, do we talk about it so much?

Miranda Joseph, in Against the Romance of Community, uses Jacques Derrida and Marx to question the ideological project of nonprofits— also termed non-governmental organizations, community-based organizations, and the voluntary sector. Much like accountability, nonprofits derive their legitimacy from reference to community. She writes,

Insofar as the “good” provided by nonprofits is “community,” nonprofits do not merely complement the market and the state but rather mark the absent center of capitalism [...] The common name, the fear-inspiring name, for this absence of desire for, of consent to, the “free and fair” process by which capitalism distributes power and wealth to some while diminishing the power and wealth of others, an absence of subjects properly constituted as voluntary participants in capitalism is, of course, Communism. Nonprofits make this absence present, but they give it another name, the name Community.

At its worst, community serves as an obscuring fantasy, a fiction we use to psychologically protect ourselves from the horror and despair of life under capitalism. We seize upon a given group of friends, a snapshot of a momentarily vibrant social world, and hope it can last. As it erodes, we set out to find another, or to patch it up where we can. Community serves as an ideological fiction, covering over the relentless harm of capitalist social relations and cruel state policies. It is the fantasy space for a collectivity forged through deliberate willed voluntarism, whether in the form of organizing a late-night dance party, a socialist party, or a block party. Each may form a community temporarily, but claiming it as such keeps at bay the fear it will soon be torn apart. When deployed by liberals or elite-class forces, the language of community can be a cruel deception that ultimately promotes the very forces which systematically render it impossible.

 

Abolition

Accountability, transformative justice, and restorative justice are often rooted in a politics of abolition, specifically the abolition of prisons and police. Recognizing the court system, the prison- industrial complex, and police as sources of violent harm, these frameworks seek out new ways of addressing conflict. As the underlying political commitment of much accountability work, police and prison abolition are invaluable.

Yet under the banner of prison and police abolition, we identify a few interconnected but distinct projects, all closely related to the meanings of accountability.

First, dominant in prison abolitionism is a commitment to decarceration. Mass incarceration has been a devastating horror for working-class Black and brown people, destroying the lives of millions. Much of Critical Resistance’s organizing has focused on halting new jail and prison construction, opposing prison reforms that provide political cover to expand incarceration, and pushing for policy reforms to reduce prison populations. Admirably, abolitionist organizing for decarceration has often engaged the leadership of formerly and currently incarcerated people. It has also fostered crucial analysis on the causes and dynamics of mass incarceration and associated industries, as exemplified in Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s book Golden Gulag, referenced in our introduction. Mass incarceration is a relatively recent phenomena—on the rise since the 1970s, concurrent with neoliberalism—and prison abolition is the main political articulation of a commitment to bringing this era of mass incarceration to an end.

Second, prison and police abolitionism often refer to an ethical stance in the present, a practice in relating to other people. This often includes an orientation toward transformative justice and a challenge to relating to others in a punitive way, opposed to labeling people as toxic or altogether bad. As part of not incarcerating anyone, this ethical stance often includes voicing public opposition to incarcerating high-profile perpetrators of violence, including those who are widely and justly hated. Abolitionism as an ethical stance is a rejection of the “cop in our heads and hearts”—a movement slogan echoed by our interviewees, which is also a call for personal transformation to become more principled, loving, and effective revolutionaries.

Third, prison and police abolition are a revolutionary horizon. Prison abolitionists periodically recognize that eliminating prisons altogether would require a wholesale transformation in our economy, including meeting people’s basic needs. It is through abolition that activists today most often talk of revolution and what may come after. Prison and police abolition offer the most widely shared revolutionary horizon in current mass struggles. Drawing on the rich legacy of anti-prison activists, it was then taken up in the waves of popular and insurrectionary movements through Black Lives Matter and the George Floyd uprising. It also offers one of the most substantial original contributions made by the current era of struggle to revolutionary theory. In the political conceptions of many advocates, police and prison abolition would be the fulfillment of the long history of Black freedom struggle and is inseparable with trans and queer liberation.

Yet much remains undertheorized in understanding prison or police abolition as a revolutionary horizon. Though mass incarceration and modern policing are relatively recent phenomena, they are the latest iterations of other forms of institutionalized class violence. Throughout the entire long history of private property and class society, there have been (in Lenin’s paraphrasing of Engels) “special bodies of armed men.” Police and prison expansion have been enabled in part by popular anxieties about violence and harm, leading activists to correctly point out that neither police nor prisons actually contribute to our safety. But police and prisons do not primarily exist to address conflicts of interpersonal harm. They exist as the latest iteration of a millenia-old commitment to the use of violence to defend class rule. Under capitalism, the armed defense of private property (and hence, class domination) has primarily taken the form of the modern state, with its accompanying institutions of modern policing.

The history of state socialism in the twentieth century makes it clear that not all self-identified communists recognize the need to destroy the modern state as the substantiation of the rule of capital, suggesting the historic need to develop an abolitionist critique over recent decades. However, we are unable to imagine prison abolition without the concurrent overcoming of the property form. The connection between prison abolition and communism remains grossly undertheorized and underspecified. Some abolitionists, like Gilmore or Angela Davis, are thoroughly rooted in Marxism, and no doubt understand prison abolition as a means to overcoming private property and the state. For others, however, this is far less clear.

Strangely, we find that the crucial point—that prison abolition would require overcoming class society—is almost never directly stated. This has let abolition sometimes take the place of a substantive anti-capitalist critique. We have seen, at times, people discussing police and prison abolition as if there could be a set policy reform implemented under the existing capitalist state. This is clearly mistaken. Even with much-needed victories in defunding the police or dismantling mass incarceration, the capitalist class will make sure armed men continue to exist to defend their property. Only a revolution, with the defeat of the capitalist state and collective seizure of the means of production, could provide the basis for eliminating police altogether. 

For all the major theoretical advances they offer to all revolutionaries today, prison and police abolition have largely developed after the collapse of other vibrant theoretical and political revolutionary frameworks and movements. Many anarchists, communists, and Black revolutionary nationalists turned to prison abolitionist organizing precisely because it was a way they could continue to talk about revolution in the long reactionary period that has coincided with the expansion of mass incarceration—a period when discussing revolutionary politics became especially difficult. Incarcerated people and their families faced the most brutal brunt of this reactionary era, characterized by the expansion of mass incarceration. Political prisoners, persistent in their organizing and militant resistance, acted as a politicized core to many anti-prison movements, often linking to earlier eras of insurgency. It was through a focus on prisons that something of a revolutionary horizon could survive.

Prison and police abolition (as the dispensing with the existence of “special bodies of armed men”) and communism (as the overcoming of class society) depend on each other. That they have developed as theoretic frameworks in a strange separation—despite many important theorists and activists clearly being committed to both—is an important historical puzzle and a major obstacle to the advance of our movements. To understand police and prison abolition as constituting a dimension of communist revolution is to explore their connection to a whole set of questions that have concerned theories of revolution: debates over the roles of diverse phenomena, including disciplined parties, mass democratic organizations, the contexts of war and severe economic crisis, transitional institutions, and violence in the revolutionary process. We understand prison abolition as a crucial contribution to a broader effort to conceive of, theorize, and fight for a free society, alongside and inseparable from a thoroughgoing critique of private property, class society, and capitalism.

Aspirations of community

 Often when we speak of community, we are also speaking of our own hopes for what the world can be. Though we may be mistaken about the resiliency or depth of our current social relationships, we are speaking a fantasy that expresses our political desire. Community, at its best, is our aspiration for genuine interdependence, mutual effective care, and a shared collectivity of human flourishing. We speak of community as if it has already arrived, as if it is at hand.

This community we imagine is one adequate to our aspirations: We imagine it capable of holding each other accountable, mediating our conflicts, helping us to become better people. We yearn for community as a moral force balancing and reconciling individual freedom and collective well-being. We imagine what Martin Luther King Jr. called “the beloved community”—the one generations of activists have tried to build and maintain in radical social movements.

As we’ve argued here, this aspiration for community has proved disappointing. What is often missing from this aspiration is the recognition that such a community would necessitate control over the means of production. Under capitalism, every individual has to balance their aspired accountability to the community and their actually existing and necessary accountability to their employer and to broader market demands. Only when the means of material reproduction and survival are either freely and universally available or under collective control of a community can community serve the functions we ask of it. It is easy to think of many fascist, feudal, and authoritarian collectivist regimes that integrate material survival into community in horrific ways, often under the guise of moral tutelage. But a true community, a community that meets the aspirations placed on the phrase “beloved community,” could exist only under communism. This community of communism depends on both the universal and unconditional availability of the means of sustaining life, and the democratic and collective management of the means of production. The realization of our hopes for community only can be communism.

The career of accountability shows there is an urgently felt need for an alternative way to live with others. The project of abolition builds upon these efforts to implement processes of redress and repair structurally and without state systems and carceral punishments. These practices demonstrate that abolition is a constructive process. On another level, the concept of accountability also provides a haven to protect the necessary belief in the possibility of radical transformation. Historically, this belief has suffered many blows. There is, as some of the interviewees describe, a naive belief in transformation as an instance of abused logic: “This time, things will be different.” But this is not a counsel of inaction or despair. In fact, it is only through recognizing the fundamental limits to action that a critical strategy of transformation can finally succeed.

After Accountability

An oral history and critical genealogy of “accountability,” the complex abolitionist concept that pushes us to ask: just what do we mean by “community?"

A concept just short of a program, accountability has been taken up as a core principle within leftist organizing and activity over the past quarter century. While it invokes a particular vocabulary and set of procedures, it has also come to describe a more expansive, if often vague, approach to addressing harm within movement work. The term’s sudden, widespread adoption as abolitionist concepts began to circulate broadly in recent years cast light on certain shifts in its meaning, renewing the urgency of understanding its relation to militant leftist history and practice.

After Accountability gathers interviews conducted by members of the Pinko collective with nine transformative justice practitioners, socialist labor organizers, incarcerated abolitionists, and activists on the left, and also includes framing essays by the Pinko collective in which its members situate and reflect on those illuminating conversations. An investigation into the theoretical foundations and current practice of accountability, this volume explores the term’s potential and limits, discovering in it traces of the past half-century’s struggles over the absence of community and the form revolutionary activity should take.

Contributors: Kim Diehl, Michelle Foy, Peter Hardie, Emi Kane and Hyejin Shim, Esteban Kelly, Pilar Maschi, and Stevie Wilson, and Pinko collective members Lou Cornum, Max Fox, M.E. O'Brien, and Addison Vawters.

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