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Title: Against Carceral Communism, For Abolition Communism! Author: Simoun Magsalin Date: 2022 Language: en Topics: abolition, self-abolition of the proletariat, communization, communism, prison, anti-prison, prison society, police, anti-state, state socialism, Bolshevism, Philippines Source: Retrieved on 2022-03-29 from https://haters.noblogs.org/post/2022/03/26/against-carceral-communism-for-abolition-communism-by-simoun-magsalin/ Notes: Written for Haters Magazine by Simoun Magsalin. To be featured in the forthcoming second issue. Zine version will be available when we finish it. Author’s note: I thank all reviewers, both my friends and anonymous reviewers, for their comments on this text.
This text is dedicated to the communists who are abolitionists and the
abolitionists who are communists.
While the anarchists and abolitionists exclaim “ACAB! All Cops Are Bad,”
the pitiful spectacle of the carceral communists would instead amend
“ACAB” with drivel saying, “it’s ACCAB, All Capitalist Cops Are Bad.”
They continue, “socialist cops are not bad because they are proletarian
in character and protect the proletarian State.” Such convolution is
mistaken in its belief that police can somehow have a proletarian
character when historically the institutions of policing and
incarceration were established to cement the rule of capital over
proletarians. Not to mention that the notion that “socialist” cops
protect the common good against criminal or “counterrevolutionary”
elements is identical in content to bourgeois police apologia.
Likely nobody would identify as a carceral communist—much like nobody
would identify as a carceral feminist—but carceral communists exist.
Carceral communists are the people who would defend mass incarceration
and deportations under the former Soviet Union and in the current
People’s Republic of China. Carceral communists merely oppose these
police and prisons and wish to propose their own “people’s” police and
prisons.
Carceral communism is a marriage of a spectacular image of “communism”
with carcerality. By “spectacular” we mean in the sense of Guy Debord’s
The Society of the Spectacle where the real is substituted by reified
images of the false. Meanwhile, “carcerality” is the logic of the
systems of policing and incarceration. A spectacular image of communism
is the images and aesthetics of “communist” States: righteous people’s
armies, waving red flags, and tightly planned economies. This
spectacular image of communism is not communism itself; it is merely a
false image of it—a Spectacle. Ultimately, the Spectacle presents this
false image of communism to obscure what communism actually means in
practice—the movement to abolish the current state of things. In a
certain sense, this spectacular image is already infused with
carcerality from the 1917 Russian Revolution onward where communists
thought that carcerality could be used for proletarian ends—abolishing
only the bourgeois statesmen but retaining all other features of
capitalist society.
Carceral communism has so far been the main narrative of communism due
to the prevalence of “communist” States from the former Soviet Union,
the People’s Republic of China, other socialist States, and their
aligned Western parties. After the Bolshevik coup during the Russian
Revolution, the party of Lenin constituted a secret police—the Cheka—and
even set up their headquarters at the Lubyanka, built on the same site
as the secret police of Czarina Catherine. While the revolutionary
upsurge emptied the Czar’s prisons and forced labor camps, the party of
Lenin reconstituted these as gulags which Stalin would later inherit to
incredibly bloody effect. Carceral communists such as Lenin, Trotsky,
and Stalin may have opposed the Czar’s police and prisons, but only for
the sake for their own institutions of oppression. What Lenin and the
Bolsheviks failed to realize is that communism is intrinsically a
movement of proletarians struggling to abolish their class. By
reconstituting “communist” police and prisons the Bolsheviks merely
reproduced institutions of proletarianization and all that entailed.
Bolshevik “communism” merely universalized the proletarian condition
instead of its abolition and married this proletarianization with the
spectacular image of communism. ACAB means “communist” cops too.
Abolition means abolish “communist” police and prisons.
When the question “who polices?” is posed, the abolitionist group
Critical Resistance identifies right-wing and fascist militias as those
who take part in policing in the so-called United States. Here in the
Philippines, fascist and right-wing militias do take part in policing,
but there is also a para-State entity that espouses communism while
reproducing carcerality: the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP)
and their armed wing the New Peoples Army (NPA). In Nettie Wild’s 1988
documentary about the communist movement, A Rustling of Leaves: Inside
the Philippine Revolution, party cadre in a guerrilla front had to deal
with a young man who defected from the NPA. The young man, codenamed
“Batman” in the documentary, was ordered by his uncle in a right-wing
militia to defect from the NPA and provide intel for the military.
Batman was eventually recaptured by the NPA. While the cadre who
captured Batman made a show of giving the local community a voice in
their trial of Batman in a People’s Court, the NPA headquarters found
the people’s verdict unsatisfactory. In the end, NPA cadre were
ultimately Batman’s judges, jury, and executioners. It mattered little
that Batman was coerced into defecting; the cadre decided he should die
that and was that. Then in the 90s, the CPP-NPA detained hundreds of its
own cadre and systematically tortured and executed scores of them in
what became known as the anti-infiltration purges. The CPP-NPA were not
actually infiltrated by government agents, but by the time the cadre
found out, hundreds were already executed and mass graves are still
being found today. The survivors are still tagged as
counter-revolutionaries by the CPP up to today. More recently, after the
2016 elections which saw the fascist Rodrigo Duterte win the presidency,
the CPP-NPA wholeheartedly backed Duterte’s War on Drugs with the NPA
even conducting their own drug raids in support of Duterte’s fascist
agenda. In all three of these cases, it is clear that even without
taking State power, communist movements can reproduce carceral logic to
lethal conclusions. Abolition in the Philippines will also mean
abolishing the New Peoples Army alongside the Philippine National
Police, the military, and paramilitary groups.
Even anarchists are not immune to reproducing carcerality. There have
been moments where revolutionary anarchists in the Spanish and Ukrainian
Revolutions reproduced policing with militants of the Federación
Anarquista Ibérica even operating a concentration camp for fascists.
More recently, we have seen carcerality reproduced in radical projects
like the Capitol Hill Occupied Protest. There, individuals who took it
upon themselves to act as the new people’s police shot and killed Black
teens. It matters not if the anarcho-concentration camp was leagues
better than Stalinist gulags or if the anarcho-police are somehow
better; abolition means the doing away of the anarcho-police and
anarcho-prisons as well.
What explains the endurance of carcerality among supposedly communist
movements? Even for radicals, the ideology of police and prisons
presents itself as natural, even inevitable. In this sense, carcerality
is similar to Mark Fisher’s conception of Capitalist Realism from the
book by the same name. While the perspective of capitalist realism
constantly propagandizes that “there is no alternative to capitalism,”
capitalist realism has only been generalized with the fall of so-called
actually existing socialism. In comparison, carcerality has presented
itself as natural long before, to the point where Bolsheviks considered
it only natural that the dictatorship of the proletariat necessarily
includes police and prisons.
As Fisher argued,
emancipatory politics must always destroy the appearance of a ‘natural
order’, must reveal what is presented as necessary and inevitable to be
a mere contingency, just as it must make what was previously deemed to
be impossible seem attainable. (Captialist Realism)
The truth of the matter is that carcerality is historically
contingent—it did not always exist nor has it always been generalized to
exist everywhere. In the Philippines, carcerality was introduced with
colonialism; in the United States, it was introduced with slave patrols;
in Europe it was implemented to control the working class. Carcerality
has always meant the social control of the proletarianized. The term
“carceral capitalism” is redundant for capitalism cannot exist without
carcerality. Capitalism needs carcerality to allow the enforcement of
wage-labor. This is the key contribution in “The Anarchy of Colored
Girls Assembled in a Riotous Manner” by Saidiya Hartman where Black
women who resisted working had to be criminalized by the State under
vagrancy laws to enforce the regime of proletarianization upon them.
That the Bolsheviks found nothing wrong with combining their spectacular
image of communism with the false “realism” of carcerality allowed the
reconstruction of bourgeois society in communist aesthetics. A society
without carcerality was inconceivable for the Bolsheviks, just as it was
impossible for them to imagine a world without authority and the State.
Without prison and police abolition, communists will never transcend
capitalist ideology.
In her 2014 article “Against Carceral Feminism,” the anarchist and
abolitionist Victoria Law described carceral feminism as “an approach
that sees increased policing, prosecution, and imprisonment as the
primary solution to violence against women.”In short, carceral feminism
is the idea that cops and prisons can keep women safe, yet as Victoria
shows, women and queer folk are often subjected to police violence when
they call on the police to help and are at times themselves
incarcerated. Abolitionists understand that police and prisons do not
keep women safe and instead exacerbate harm. Against carceral feminism
is an abolition feminism that struggles for the abolition of policing
and incarceration and argues for measures such as transformative justice
that can keep women safe.
In a certain sense, carceral communism is alike with carceral feminism
in its unwavering belief that systems of policing and incarceration can
be used benevolently; it cannot. That is to say, carceral communism is
the belief that police and prisons are compatible or even necessary for
communism. Just as carceral feminism is incompatible with feminism due
to exacerbating violence against feminized bodies, carceral communism is
wholly incompatible with a coherent vision of communism. Police and
prisons cannot possibly be communized, proletarianized, decolonized,
indigenized or what have you as these are features that are ultimately
tied up with the development of capitalism and the modern State system
and are features of capitalist society that proletarianizes. In the
Philippines, as in many parts of the world, police and prisons are
instruments of colonization and counter-insurgency and up to this day
indigenous communities feel that prisons divest their communities of
true justice.
Communist measures requires the abolition of police and prisons.
Communism is ultimately a movement that abolishes the current state of
things, that state being the constant proletarianization that marks us
as proles in this capitalist world. Because communism is the
self-abolition of the proletariat, communist measures are activities and
actions that attack proletarianization. Thus abolitionist steps that
assault policing and incarceration are ultimately communist measures.
Proletarianization is ultimately a social relation imposed by capital
and is the class distinction that distinguishes the proletariat. As a
social relation, proletarianization is the imposition of wage-labor, the
imposition of work as a separate field of human activity, and the
alienation from their fruits of production. Proletarianization is a
hierarchical condition of domination where capital, the State, and the
ruling class dominate the proletariat.
In their 2020 booklet, Our Communities, Our Solutions: An Organizer’s
Toolkit for Developing Campaigns to Abolish Policing, Critical
Resistance defines policing as “a social relationship made up of a set
of practices that are empowered by the state to enforce law and social
control through the use of force.” As a social relation, Critical
Resistance points out that policing “reinforces oppressive dynamics”
such as slavery, segregation, racism and enforces compliance among
criminalized communities. It is in this sense that policing is also a
social relation that reinforces proletarianization. The proletarianized
have always been a criminalized class. Witness the difference in
policing among different classes: if a worker steals food they are sent
to prison, but if bosses steal from workers usually nothing at all
happens for wage-theft is a daily occurrence. It is in this way that
policing forms part of proletarianization.
Keeping the proles in line has always been the function of policing
since it was invented. Indeed, whether in bourgeois or “communist”
States, the police have always been used to combat militant
proletarians. This is indeed the case in imperialized countries whether
in the Philippines or in former Soviet Poland. Whether it be the
Mendiola Massacre in the Philippines or the harsh suppression of
Solidarność in Soviet Poland, the same regime of carcerality reigns.
As radical traditions, abolition arose from the Black radical tradition
while communism from the European proletarian milieu. Both abolition and
communism share roots among dominated classes, one enslaved, and the
other proletarianized. While anti-state communists have always had an
implicitly abolitionist consciousness in their desire to eliminate
policing and incarceration, the fusing of communism and abolition has
rarely been articulated.
To talk of an abolition communism is in a way a redundancy because
regimes of policing and incarceration could not possibly exist in a
society that has done away with classes and the State. After all, both
abolition and communism aim to abolish the current order and establish a
qualitatively different kind of life. In this way abolition and
communism are alike. However, because communist politics has become
imbued with carcerality for more than a century, it becomes necessary to
explicitly articulate a communism that wholly rejects carceral logic.
Counterpoised to carceral communism, abolition communism necessarily
opposes the tradition of carcerality within communist thought and
necessarily opposes the carcerality of “communist” States. To paraphrase
Bobby Seale: We do not fight carcerality with carcerality; we oppose
carceral capitalism not with carceral communism, but with abolition
communism. Mao once said that “without a People’s army, the people have
nothing,” yet counterbalancing the New Peoples Army against the
Philippine National Police does nothing for liberation if both
institutions reproduce carcerality. Qualitatively new forms of social
relations that break with carcerality is needed to definitively combat
policing and incarceration. What was once presented as necessary and
inevitable must be shown to be mere contingency, and what was once
impossible must be shown to be attainable.
“Communist” States considered it necessary to institute carcerality to
protect proletarian gains, but this is illusionary. To paraphrase Gilles
Dauvé: To think that proletarian police and prisons are necessary to
combat bourgeois police and prisons is to think of the proletariat in
bourgeois terms, in doing so one introduces everything that the
insurrectionary movement had overwhelmed. The institutions that a
proletariat-in-abolition builds cannot possibly look like bourgeois
society. To reinstitute carcerality is to reconstruct bourgeois society
within the spectacular image of communism. That the carcerality of
“communist” States are mere mirrors of the carcerality of bourgeois
society is proof enough of their embourgeoisement. How communism deals
with harm cannot possibly take the bourgeois forms of police and
prisons, else this is not communist at all.
Abolition communism is not a qualitatively new form of communism but
rather an integration of abolitionist and communist consciousness.
Abolition communism is the idea that communist measures must
simultaneously be abolitionist steps. This does not mean that
abolitionist steps such as the defunding of police and decarceration of
prisoners are necessarily communist measures, though these steps do make
communist organizing under capitalism easier. Rather, communist measures
implemented by abolitionist communists dismantle systems of policing and
incarceration simultaneous to dismantling wage-labor, the State, work,
et cetera, precisely because policing and incarceration are central to
the rule of capital. The freeing of the prisoners and setting fire to
the prisons does more for the proletariat than a hundred programs.
While abolitionist communists such as Angela Davis can articulate a
vision of police and prison abolition as a State divorced from
carcerality, abolitionists who are also anarchists understand that
carcerality is part and parcel to the State system itself. Anarchists
are under no illusion that State power and its monopoly of violence can
be used benevolently. It is idealism to think that with the right people
in charge of the State’s police and prisons that these these will cease
to be maleficent, or that the State can peacefully dismantle police and
prisons. Just so, violence is the very raison d’être of the State and
there has never been a non-violent State. To deprive the State of its
articles of violence fulfills the old communist prophecy: the
proletariat abolishes itself as a class and in doing so abolishes the
State as State.
If communists cannot then indulge in fantasies of lining up capitalists
onto walls to shoot them or to incarcerate them en mass in “reeducation”
gulags, what then? Instead of mass executions and mass incarceration,
abolition communism takes seriously the task of excarceration. If
decarceration is the reduction of the number of incarcerated bodies by
setting them free, excarceration is the doing away with imprisonment,
policing, and carcerality altogether. Excarceration includes measures
such as transformative justice, harm reduction, and community
accountability that can build strong communities capable of dealing with
harm in a healthy way. Excarceration potentially becomes the means by
which proletarians-in-abolition deal with harm as opposed to using
inherently bourgeois forms like policing and incarceration.
The perennial question presents itself: What is to be done?
To quote the Prison Research Education Action Project at length:
As Frederick Douglass came to see, the source of power did not rest in
the slavemaster, but in the slaves—once they realized they could refuse
to be slaves. Similarly, striking prisoners have demonstrated that the
power of prisons does not lie in prison managers but in the prisoners
who give their consent and cooperation in making prison life possible.
When that consent and cooperation is withdrawn, prisons cannot function.
Those of us outside the walls need to recognize that we give our consent
and cooperation to prisons. (Instead of Prisons: A Handbook for
Abolitionists)
In the same way, the proletariat also gives its consent for capitalism
to continue functioning. As Proletarios Revolucionarios noted in “The
Self-Abolition of the Proletariat As the End of the Capitalist World,”
the proletariat is also the class of capital and for the continuation of
proletarianization. Just as prison and police reformism perpetuates and
reinforces carcerality, the reform of rents and wages perpetuates and
reinforces proletarianization. The communist insurrection must break
with proletarianization and carcerality together.
In the meantime, the continuing dominion of carceral communism on the
psyche of the far left must be continually challenged by abolitionists.
In the so-called United States, there are some tendencies within the
Black radical tradition that could be considered abolitionist communist
in orientation or as fellow travelers, even without an explicit
articulation of an abolition communism. These implicit abolitionist
communists have a unique position to challenge carceral communism which
still persists in the larger milieus of that country. In the
Philippines, carcerality runs rampant throughout Maoist, National
Democratic, social democratic, and independent leftist milieus, though
we abolitionists are slowly forwarding abolition. We must be
abolitionists to the communists and communists to the abolitionists.
Combat carcerality, spread anarchy, live communism.
Yet it will not be enough to merely propagandize our position, to shoot
cops like the NPA do, to decarcerate and excarcerate, or to burn police
stations like Black insurrectionists do. While carcerality and capital
continue to reign, we struggle for abolition by pushing to decarcerate
the victims of cages and construct systems of excarceration that can
deal with harm in a productive way. But abolition communism ultimately
means the destruction of carcerality and capital. We agree with Bakunin
that yes, destruction is also a creative urge, but destruction is not
enough. As Gilles Dauvé suggests:
The question is not: who has the guns? But rather: what do the people
with the guns do? 10,000 or 100,000 proletarians armed to the teeth are
nothing if they place their trust in anything beside their own power to
change the world. Otherwise, the next day, the next month or the next
year, the power whose authority they recognise will take away the guns
which they failed to use against it. (“When Insurrections Die”)
Thus it will not be enough to wage insurrection. If the NPA shoots cops
but carcerality is still reproduced by the shooters, then nothing
creative is unleashed by the insurrection and the insurrection dies.
After all, the CPP-NPA Maoists have been waging a guerrilla war for
decades, yet carcerality reigns supreme on both guerrilla fronts and
bourgeois strongholds. The NPA does nothing to challenge the legitimacy
of policing and incarceration and instead reproduces policing and
carceral patterns. What will be required is the generalization of an
insurrectionary break from which there can be no return to the status
quo ante, where carceral systems of police and prisons can no longer be
reconstituted. This is what insurrectionists have so far been unable to
accomplish, whose possibility remains tantalizingly close in these end
of times. Though there have been moments such as in the burning of the
Minneapolis Third Precinct where carceral logic had been thoroughly
smashed and the forces of the State went into retreat, the carceral
status quo was still restored. While it is in such moments that the
necessity of abolition becomes a reality, such moments have failed to
generalize and move to a point to which there could have been no return.
What is clear, however, is that without abolitionist steps, the
communist insurrection risks embourgeoisement. This is what happened in
Nepal where the Nepali Maoists were able to route the King’s forces. Yet
in the shadow of the retreat of the royalist police, a new Maoist police
took its place. In doing so, the possibility of a qualitatively
different life was extinguished and bourgeois society reconstituted
itself in Nepal, where now Maoists reign in name only. Such is the fate
of the Maoist “Philippine revolution” if the carceral Communist Party of
the Philippines is left in charge of it. After all, a revolution cannot
be directed on high by any communist party, nor by any party of
abolitionists, communists, or anarchists, but by the self-action of
proletarians striking at the world that marks them as proletarians.
This, of course, includes striking at the police and prisons.
In this respect, carceral “communism” is but the other side of the coin
of carceral capitalism for it is merely the reconstitution of bourgeois
society. Abolition communism is communism aware of its task to abolish
the current state of things. Abolitionist communists are proletarians
aware of their task to abolish themselves as a class and to strike at
all that proletarianizes, especially the cops. Abolitionist communists
are prisoners of this proletarian society ready to smash this prison.
This is the communist insurrection that abolitionists work towards.
Our comrade Alfredo M. Bonanno says it best:
Hurry comrade, shoot the policeman, the judge, the boss. Now, before a
new police prevent you.
Hurry to say No, before the new repression convinces you that saying no
is pointless, mad, and that you should accept the hospitality of the
mental asylum.
Hurry to attack capital before a new ideology makes it sacred to you.
Hurry to refuse work before some new sophist tells you yet again that
“work makes you free.”
Hurry to play. Hurry to arm yourself. (Armed Joy)