This is how the former revolutionary socialist cum “democratic socialist” reformist-opportunist Paul Heideman phrases his version of the reactionary backlash against carceral abolitionism, which is displayed in its perhaps most developed (and frankly racist and class-prejudiced) form in a recent article by celebrity sociologist Loic Wacquant in the New Left Review titled, “Against Abolitionism.”
(Also see my article on the related topic of the Mamdani campaign’s embrace of the NYPD and rejection of the “defund the police” demand).
What is remarkable about Heideman’s article, and the broader trend — most pronounced in the white “democratic socialist” left — of attacking the anti-carceral abolitionist movement, which is an historical expression of recent struggles led by Black people in the US against systemic racial oppression, is what it demonstrates about the truly corrosive effect that reformist opportunism has on the political brains of so-called socialists.
These are “socialists” who have effectively abandoned revolution, and thus consequently the goal of abolishing capitalism, in a quite poor mimicry of 20th century [Eduard] Bernsteinism. In thus turning to the mere “surface modification” of the existing system (to use Rosa Luxemburg’s phrase in her important polemic against Bernstein’s reformist opportunism) using the mechanism of the bourgeois electoral process, these “socialists” have not only abandoned the idea that socialism represents a distinct society to that of capitalism — rather than a mere variant state of capitalism (liberal-welfare) — but have opened the floodgates for the wholesale abandonment of nearly every principled political position that would truly distinguish a revolutionary-emancipatory working-class program from that of a bourgeois or petit-bourgeois “democratic liberal.”
To put it analogously, once the fight to abolish slavery itself is abandoned — posited as “ultra-left,” far too radical, incapable of winning mass electoral support, or some such — then the reformist Whigs are left recapitulating all the backward “humanitarian” gambits of the “liberal” wing of the master class, who want to keep slavery but just make it more refined and “civilized” than those on the brutish right wing. They have resigned themselves to the idea that slavery is here to stay, so the slave system must be just made better — its violence and indignities must be rendered “minimal.”
Let’s look at a few passages from Heideman’s article:
There is overwhelming evidence that police, and the threat of imprisonment they carry, do prevent crime. Much of this evidence is presented in social-scientific studies that can be intimidating for lay readers, but the basic line of reasoning is clear enough: people who commit crimes respond to incentives like anyone else, and when the costs of committing a crime rise (because, for example, it is likelier that the perpetrator will get caught), people commit fewer crimes. Police, through both their simple presence in areas where crimes are committed and their role in solving crimes after the fact, raise the likelihood of being caught, which leads to people committing fewer crimes….
Carceral minimalism contends that the coercive apparatus of the state should be radically reduced rather than abolished, in order to protect the rights of the weakest…. Carceral minimalists, by contrast, argue that the law of the weakest will often require devoting more resources to penal institutions. Take prisons. American prisons are plagued by violence, including sexual violence. This violence is an outrageous violation of the rights of the incarcerated. But all the evidence suggests that what is needed to prevent this violence is more resources spent per prisoner — a demand entirely compatible with, and in fact easiest to meet alongside, a far smaller prison population.
Heideman states that socialists ought to support more funding for police and prisons as a reformist measure. The logic is sound on the reformist grounds of someone who is fully wedded to the perpetuity of the capitalist system. After all, if slavery is here to stay, then shouldn’t the state perhaps subsidize the plantation system so as to ensure that the slaves get at least a daily minimum of calories, or perhaps enable the plantations to hire more overseers, with better training, so as to reduce to a minimum the need to make recourse to the lash?
We need more police, he argues, because the presence of more police stops crime. This is the logic of the overseer, who is thinking about how to manage the slave system. (This, incidentally, is also why the “democratic-socialist” experiment in running capitalist metropolises, e.g., Mamdani’s NYC, is so corrosive, and trains “socialists” — especially the more sycophantic ones like Heideman — into thinking less about how to end oppression than simply how to manage, or administer, it).
It’s true that putting more overseers on the plantation will likely have the effect of reducing “crime” — whether that be defined as violence between and among the slaves, or crimes of theft, subterfuge, poison, escape, murder, or insurrection aimed at the master class. It will also likely lead to the increase in violence, harassment, and death of the slaves at the hands of the overseers. (This is the unspoken secret behind Mayor Mamdani’s praise for the NYPD in keeping crime at “historic lows,” viz. the increase in the utterly racist and routine harassment, violence, extortion, arrest, incarceration, and oppression of overwhelmingly Black and lower-income people of color).
But this ignores the central contention of the principled abolitionist argument: to reduce “crime,” social discord, oppression, and violence on the plantation, we must abolish the plantation system; that is, abolish slavery.
A similar argument holds when talking about any hierarchal, oppressive, exploitative, or despotic system. “Order” can be maintained by increasing the reach and breadth of the repressive police state … or by empowering and emancipating the most marginalized, oppressed, disempowered, desperate, and socially-excluded (i.e., those who are disproportionately impelled towards activities deemed illicit — though in truth no more violent than many activities deemed licit — by the dominant and middling strata of society).
A similar logic applies to the question of prisons. Prisons are overcrowded, dangerous, dehumanizing edifices of corruption and repression. Prisons are disproportionately populated by those who come from the social strata of the poor, lower income, socially excluded, and racially oppressed. But rather than simply solving the problem by putting far less people in prison, pursuing mass decarceration, and fighting to overturn the prevailing oppressive social hierarchal system, the “pragmatic” opportunist reformists say that the answer is to build more and better prisons!
(Again, the corrosive logic of those committed to defending every aspect of Mamdani’s mayoralty in NYC is plain to see. Because Mamdani is focused, above all else, on “governing well” in the eyes of the upper-class commentariat of the city, he has made the decision to prioritize pursuing limited economic reforms while maintaining “order” by allowing the police and carceral state apparatuses to continue functioning as ever. Mamdani’s “democratic socialist” epigones thus have to figure out how to rationalize his maintenance of the carceral status quo by simply reclassifying the entire repressive edifice as “protect[ing] the rights of the weakest,” as Heideman argues in the quotation above.)
The notion that the capitalist system, the capitalist state, or the US police and prison system in particular, are animated by an imperative to “protect the rights of the weakest” is not only completely “[in]congruent with socialists’ deepest values” (pace Heideman), it is a thoroughly white-supremacist bourgeois falsification! Besides, any actual socialist — or to put it a finer point on it, ‘democratic communist’ — knows that the only way that the “weakest” will ever secure real protection is when they themselves are empowered to secure their own collective protection. “Protection” will never be assured insofar as it is dependent upon the effective noblesse oblige of an otherwise superordinate strata within a hierarchal, internally class-riven society premised on the organized exploitation of one class by another.
Of course, revolutionary abolitionists are also advocates of any genuine measure or reform that actually does diminish, defund, demobilize, or otherwise ‘minimalize’ the repressive power and reach of the police-carceral state. We are for shrinking the overall number of overseers and diverting the resources that go to pay their upkeep directly towards the immediate improvement of the living conditions of the overseen. This is congruent with a pathway toward revolution and abolition; toward the replacement of the prevailing social system of oppression and exploitation with one that is premised upon the direct and collective rule of the formerly disempowered.
But the “penal minimalists” do not support both genuine “minimalization” as well as abolition, as the abolitionists do, because the penal minimalists ultimately have an odd definition of “minimalism,” in which reform means augmenting and spending more on police and prisons, as Heideman explicitly states.
To put it bluntly, you are either for a carceral-police state of “socialism,” which in every respect resembles ordinary racialized liberal-welfare capitalist policing, or you are for something else … you are for the abolition of the existing capitalist social relations and with it the particularly capitalist form of policing and state repression corresponding thereto. You are either for “socialism” as a description of social relations premised upon the emancipatory negation of capitalist class hierarchy, or you are for “socialism” as a description of a variant form of capitalist class hierarchy.
Finally, to repeat, insofar as all of this ideological corrosion and devolution within “socialist” politics is a function of the urge on the part of some “democratic socialist” reformists to sycophantically narrate the “success” of the Mamdani mayoralty — which is explicitly committed to maintaining the NYPD status quo as well as advancing the construction of five new jails across the city in coming years — above all else, then what we are witnessing is the failings, for the umpteenth time in modern capitalist history, of the “municipal socialist” gambit.
The Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), of which Mamdani is a member, claims to now have over 120,000 members nationwide. Such a feat, in absolute numbers, has not been seen in over 100 years, at least since the Socialist Party (SP) of the 1910-20s, which claimed nearly 150,000 members at its peak. (Although, put in relative terms accounting for population size, an equivalent membership size to that of the SP would today be around 500,000 members).
During the early decades of the last century, the US also saw an explosion in experiments in “municipal socialism.” “Although the Socialist Party never won more than 6 percent of the vote nationally,” writes historian Eric Foner, “it gained control of numerous small and medium-sized cities between 1900 and 1920.”
This was, however, soon eclipsed by the rise of a revolutionary working-class left (the Industrial Workers of the World, Communist Parties, Trotskyist and Musteite parties, etc.), which ultimately mobilized millions, and promised not a variant of capitalist state administration but its complete abolition.
But if we are now recapitulating in some rhythmic form the trajectory of 100 year ago, then we would do well to consider the left-wing criticisms of those who quickly realized the dangers of a “socialist” movement placing itself in charge of administering a capitalist system.
A young Walter Lippmann, upon resigning from the 1911 mayoral administration of George Lunn of the Socialist Party in Schenectady, New York, had this to say: “I have often thought of the slashing articles the Socialists in Schenectady would write about the present administration if they weren’t responsible for the administration. As it is, they have to pretend that what they are doing is wonderful, epoch-making and beyond criticism. Reform under fire of radicalism is an educative thing; reform pretending to be radicalism is deadening.”
Every Jacobin article i see is against my will and I always wish I never read it