[Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s Abolition Geography is written to be
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PORTSIDE CULTURE

ABOLITION AS METHOD  
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Kay Gabriel
October 1, 2022
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_ Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s Abolition Geography is written to be used.
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_Abolition Geography: Essays Towards Liberation_
Ruth Wilson Gilmore
Verso
ISBN: 9781839761713

The long hot summer of 2020 integrated abolition into political
agendas on a previously unprecedented scale. Since then, journalists
and activists with questions about the meaning, vision, and practice
of abolition have repeatedly turned to the geographer and organizer
Ruth Wilson Gilmore. In her scholarship, Gilmore has rigorously
exposed the political and economic forces that have led to the
incarceration of over 2 million people in the United States. In her
organizing, Gilmore, along with many other activists, has forcefully
challenged huge increases in prison construction, the vast expansion
of domestic police forces, and the common sense that treats these
violent institutions as catch-all solutions to social problems.
Gilmore’s work has made it possible for abolitionist concepts to
resonate widely, enlivening collective imaginations about how life
might be lived without mass punishment. But abolition itself remains,
for many even on the political left, a perplexing concept: Why
“abolish,” rather than reform, violent and racist institutions?
Why embrace abolition when media and political elites insist that
“crime” is the dominant social problem of the moment? And what
does abolitionist organizing have to do with struggles that seem far
removed from the prison-industrial complex and its deadly force? 

These questions have gained urgency as the political terrain has
shifted. Over the past year, crime—rather than racist violence,
austerity, ecological catastrophe, anti-democratic political
institutions, or extreme wealth inequality—has become one of the
most popular explanations for crisis, even as, according to official
statistics collected and distributed by police departments, crime
levels in fact remain at historic lows. Gilmore’s _Abolition
Geography_, a collection of essays authored over the past three
decades, offers an immense depth of resources for understanding the
force, threat, and causes of freshly inflamed concern over crime.
Since the start of the long decline of U.S. capitalism in the late
1960s, Gilmore argues, fear of crime has allowed right-wing political
factions to draw down or abandon social programs, blunt or break the
force of redistributive political agendas, and generate a common-sense
understanding of social crisis as a problem of dangerous individuals
doing bad things.

Gilmore treats the category of crime as what the political theorist
Stuart Hall called a displacement—a “discrepanc[y] . . . between
threat and reaction,” in Hall’s words, that takes the form of a
mass moral panic. At most a distant proxy for only some of the ways
that violence and instability beset people’s lives, “crime” is
an ideologically freighted term with calculated political effects. To
take a notable example: as the public defender Alec Karakatsanis has
argued, wage theft is typically not treated, prosecuted, or even
legally categorized as a crime, although the scale of wage theft in
the United States is several times greater than all other forms of
theft combined. Harsh criminal penalties for theft have crammed jails
and prisons with “modestly educated people in the prime of life,”
in Gilmore’s phrase, but do nothing to stop the pillaging of working
people’s meager earnings.

Gilmore’s history of the crime panic and the political agendas it
has enabled makes it possible to see criminalization—the social,
legal, and political processes that have snagged tens of millions of
people in the United States in their deadly dragnet—as class war. At
the same time, Gilmore invites her readers to study the tools at our
disposal both to understand and to change these dire conditions. She
documents some of the ways that people have creatively, patiently, and
desperately organized to create the conditions for freedom in their
own and others’ lives, and she urgently pushes toward other
approaches not yet widely taken up. In a period of dizzying
emergency, _Abolition Geography _is written to be used.

Gilmore’s essays offer an array of entry points for readers who are
new to abolitionist ideas. We see unionized public-sector workers
joining with anti-prison organizers to put a stop to prison
construction in California, which until the 2000s led the country and
the globe in prison expansion; the workers reasoned that the resources
that go toward locking people up could just as easily go toward the
schools or other public facilities that employed them to care for
people’s needs. We see Black and Chicana women in Los Angeles
gaining the makings of a movement through fighting to free their own
and others’ children from the decades-long prison sentences that
they had become increasingly subject to. We see the children of union
families draw on a felt history of radicalism to guide them as they
develop the skills to change their conditions. And we see rural
organizers for environmental justice working in coalition with urban
anti-racist activists across divides of place and identity to win the
development agendas necessary to sustain their communities. For
readers on the left with questions or confusion about the meaning and
vision of the abolitionist current, _Abolition Geography _makes it
possible to see how their own political projects in unions and
communities can fit into—and indeed be strengthened by—broader
visions of social transformation toward a world without the mass
caging of human life.

 
If the waves of protest, from Brazil to St. Louis to Nigeria, against
murderous policing are relatively recent, the social processes that
have cemented organized violence into contemporary statecraft are
not. _Abolition Geography _analyzes how and why forms of state
violence, including but not limited to policing and prisons, have come
to seem like common-sense solutions to crises whose origin lies in the
contested trajectory of capitalist development over the last
seventy-five years. In the process, Gilmore documents how racial
capitalism’s “changing same”—a phrase drawn from the poet
Amiri Baraka—unevenly distributes risk, fatality, and access to
resources across different social groups over time. Throughout her
work, Gilmore draws on Cedric Robinson’s category of racial
capitalism to demonstrate how capitalism continually and necessarily
exploits group-based differences to cement social hierarchy, justify
inequality, and facilitate dispossession. But while capitalist society
necessarily produces and requires inequality, the highly organized
state violence that has characterized social life in the United States
is unprecedented in scope and scale. Gilmore asks how prisons and
policing came to figure so prominently in contemporary social and
political life—and what the changing shapes of racism, capitalism,
and militarism tell us about the task of abolition.

Focusing mostly on the United States, the arc of Gilmore’s
historical argument runs from the first third of the twentieth century
up to the present. Gilmore argues that the economic programs of the
New Deal inaugurated an era of military Keynesianism, redistributing
the social wage by bolstering the state’s capacity for war-making.
Gilmore’s account sharply contrasts with an idealization of the New
Deal as the birthplace of social democracy in the United States,
painting it instead as a period of class compromise wherein
capitalists gained “extensive insurance” for labor control and
regional domination, while higher social wages for some working people
were largely achieved through military buildup for the Second World
War and the Cold War. As profits started to decline in the late 1960s,
capitalists struggled to preserve the spoils of the period, while
workers fought to universalize the benefits of the welfare state under
deteriorating conditions. 

The formation that Gilmore calls the “anti-state state” was
constructed out of this ferment. She argues that, beginning with
Nixon’s law-and-order campaign in 1968, the right transferred blame
for social unrest from the wealthy and powerful to poor people of
color. Criminalization became the main instrument by which an
anti–New Deal conservatism broke apart social programs, suppressed
radical anti-capitalism, scattered the coalitions of the civil rights
era, and incapacitated the left. This paradigm shift, which both built
on and renovated already existing forms of racism, laid the
ideological groundwork for the transition to what Gilmore refers to as
post-Keynesian militarism: the “short-lived _welfare_ partner to
the ongoing _warfare_ state” withered, while the state overall
increased its capacities for organized violence to contain the effects
of organized abandonment. Criminalization, formulated in explicitly or
implicitly racist terms, provided ammunition for political coalitions
from the right to the center-left to lay the blame for social problems
on various segments of the working class while relentlessly
transferring wealth upward, breaking the power of and protections for
organized labor, and vastly increasing economic inequality. 

For Gilmore, this outcome was by no means inevitable. She disputes the
hegemonic explanations for mass incarceration—chiefly, the false
assertion that the prison population expanded because of crime, which
had already begun to decline in California in the early 1980s by the
time the prison boom began. She also departs from explanations that,
however understandably, mistake effects for causes. While mass
incarceration has had devastatingly racist consequences, and while
prisons, like chattel slavery before them, strip people of freedom,
Gilmore disagrees with popular theories that mass incarceration
developed specifically to reinforce already-existing racist norms or
to reinvigorate slavery under a different guise. 

Gilmore demonstrates that the steep increase in the number of people
in prisons followed, rather than preceded, the steep increase in
prison construction. To understand why so many people suddenly found
themselves forcibly displaced from their communities and living in
freshly constructed cages, we need to ask why those cages were built
in the first place. Focusing on California, Gilmore argues that prison
expansion became possible because of four surpluses: formerly
agricultural land was idled by drought and debt, finance capital was
searching for a productive return on investment, workers—which is to
say, people—lost their jobs to deindustrialization and abandonment,
and state capacity, which had scaled back on social protection and
redistribution, sternly held by its prerogative to contain and
suppress. The “prison fix”—a complement to the geographer David
Harvey’s category of the “spatial fix”—recombined surpluses in
land, capital, labor, and state capacity in new and deadly ways. “By
absorbing people, issuing public debt with no public promise to pay it
down, and using up land taken out of extractive production,” Gilmore
says, “the state also put to work . . . many of its fiscal and
organizational abilities without facing the challenges that were
already mounting when the same factors of production were petitioned
for, say, a new university.” By making it possible for the
post-Keynesian militarist state to flourish, the prison fix resolved
problems for capital, enabling resources to flow abundantly for some
by freezing others in place, all while draining the life from the
working-class people who found themselves living increasingly and
thoroughly in the shadow of prisons and police.

 
To confront the inequality, injustice, environmental catastrophe, and
sheer human sacrifice that prisons unleash on people, Gilmore invokes
what she calls “radical abolition.” But Gilmore’s historical
understanding of racial capitalism’s “changing same” has
produced a theory of abolition that means a great deal more than
enabling people to walk free from prisons. Since, in Gilmore’s
argument, state violence is a form of class warfare, the purpose of
abolition isn’t only to end the moral catastrophe of incarceration,
but also to create a society in which freedom and abundance are
universal relations. As Gilmore puts it, abolition’s “goal is to
change how we interact with each other and the planet by putting
people before profits, welfare before warfare, and life over
death.” 

From this perspective, abolition isn’t reducible to, although it
encompasses, a series of fights to disarm specific forms of state
violence. Gilmore condenses this critical insight into a concise
formulation: “Insofar as abolition is imagined only to be
absence—overnight erasure—the kneejerk response is, ‘that’s
not possible.’ But the failure of imagination rests in missing the
fact that abolition isn’t just absence. . . . Abolition is a fleshly
and material presence of social life lived differently.”_ _In that
sense, classic examples of abolitionist fights that work to erase the
carceral state include organizing inside and outside prison walls to
stop new prison construction, end solitary confinement, decriminalize
drug use or sex work, stop the practice of prison gerrymandering and
re-enfranchise people with currently disqualifying records,
disaffiliate labor unions from police professional associations, and
reallocate municipal budgets from policing to social services. But
these negative projects do not exhaust the program of abolition. For
Gilmore, guaranteeing housing and healthcare as materially secured
rights rather than market-regulated commodities, advancing land reform
and redistribution, struggling for a socialist transition to a green
society, or vastly developing the power of organized labor would all
count as part of the abolitionist project.

This expansive, positive approach makes it possible to answer some
good-faith concerns about abolition’s meaning and vision. Abolition,
as the writer and organizer Mariame Kaba has insisted, does not mean
abandoning working-class people to violence. Instead, it involves
recognizing how the conditions of our highly unequal society ruinously
guarantee that poor and working people lead lives overwhelmingly
characterized by violence and deprivation. Abolitionists want the
opposite: social relations that guarantee universal access to the
resources we all need, which is, in a sense, what people really mean
by safety. Further, because abolition is both a positive and a
negative project—building out the institutions and capacities that
sustain people and places, undoing the racist force of organized
violence—it’s possible for organizers to advance on two fronts at
once: some of us will do the work of fighting for the “nonreformist
reforms” we need to break the criminalization machine, and others
will fight for transformations to put power and resources in the hands
of poor and working people. 

For those who propose a “reform” agenda against what they see as
abolition’s heady utopianism, Gilmore’s book overflows with
examples of the dangers of merely tweaking the prison-industrial
complex. Efforts to build more humane prisons, like Progressive-era
reforms that designated separate prisons for women and young people,
ended up throwing more people into prison; efforts in the mid-2010s to
reform police forces have largely resulted in a counterinsurgency
strategy of “police humanitarianism” whereby elites aim to win
popular consent for massively resourced, murderous police departments.
Finally, for those on the left who embrace a radically redistributive
program but have doubts about the principle or strategy of fighting
criminalization, Gilmore offers a stark empirical reminder: 70 million
adults in the United States have a conviction or arrest record that
disqualifies them from various forms of public protection, like public
housing, and makes it difficult for them to find work, since employers
regularly require background checks and refuse to hire people with
arrest or criminal records. Combined with the millions of immigrants
who don’t have documentation to work, the figure totals half the
entire labor force of the world’s largest economy. If half of the
working class in the United States has been subject to
criminalization, then the entire class is potentially subject to its
deadly force. Gilmore’s keenly honed sense of scale helps to
demonstrate how abolitionist thinking can help to win a free, just,
equal, and ecological society, and should just as equally warn
skeptics about the dangers of departing from an anti-criminalization
program for the sake of political expediency. 

Gilmore’s perspective aligns with her fellow abolitionist organizers
Mariame Kaba and Rachel Herzing, who write that “there will be no
magical day of liberation that we do not make.” Gilmore insists that
people with few resources can develop the power to change their
conditions, and maintains that there is no way out of the present and
its crises except through organization. In a sense, her work also
helps to show the limits of the huge protests against police violence
that have shaken cities around the world but have not yet produced a
rupture significant enough to diminish, much less disband, the force
and violence of the anti-state state. If we’re serious about that
goal, then our task is both more specific and more vital than
periodically demonstrating rage. 

Gilmore maintains a welcoming ecumenism about organizational form. In
one especially memorable example, she discusses a hunger strike
organized by prisoners locked up in Pelican Bay, California. The
prisoners were confined to the Secure Housing Unit, an especially
severe form of frequently indefinite solitary confinement. They could
neither see nor touch each other; yet at its peak, the strike spread
across racial divisions to 30,000 people on the inside of
California’s prison walls. Among other results, the prisoners forced
a 2015 legal settlement that ended indeterminate solitary confinement
in California, and enabled forms of multiracial organizing and
power-building that the state had previously attempted so vigorously
to prevent.

This last story exemplifies Gilmore’s insistence that dispossessed
people can change the places where they live using whatever they have
at their disposal. The project of abolitionist organizing is therefore
to create places that make freedom tangible by bringing people from
wherever they are, including “the very groups who imagine they have
some ‘structural antagonism,’” into common cause. Even so,
Gilmore argues, abolition is not a blueprint: it orients people in
struggle, but it doesn’t tell us what we have to do. Nor is it a
faith to which people need to express adherence. Instead, we can think
about abolition as a method that shapes and informs the thinking and
practice of people struggling for an equal and just society, even as
conditions change and change again.

“If unfinished liberation,” Gilmore writes in the collection’s
title essay, “is the still-to-be-achieved work of abolition, then at
bottom what is to be abolished isn’t the past or its present ghost,
but rather the processes of hierarchy, dispossession and exclusion
that congeal in and as group-differentiated vulnerability to premature
death.” More than explaining or urging any single scalar change in
social life, the purpose of _Abolition Geography_ is to develop the
ability of its readers to study the transformations of racial
capitalism, figure out what to do about them, and follow through with
enough patience to withstand the enormity of the task and enough
urgency to get it done.

KAY GABRIEL is a writer and organizer. She lives in Queens.

* Prisons
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* abolition
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* Politics
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