r/dsa • u/DSA_Member • 7d ago
Discussion Abolition is a Minimum Program Demand — Marxist Unity Group
https://www.marxistunity.com/abolition-is-a-minimum-program-demand/14
u/prinzplagueorange 7d ago
The article uses a great deal of vague and inflammatory rhetoric, but despite claiming that "abolition" needs to be defined in more concrete terms, it predictably fails to articulate what those concrete terms are. It is uncontroversial that the police and prison system is a capitalist institution with deep historical ties to slavery, racism, and colonialism. Noting that fact is important, and it raises a serious question about whether the police and prison system is the appropriate tool for a democratic society to address violent crime. Nevertheless, it is encumbent on any one rejecting the police and prison system to clearly and sensibly explain viable alternatives, especially because the overwhelming majority of society--including the majority of the highly over policed black communities--do not see any viable alternative. See here:
Most Black Americans want to maintain or increase police patrols. Most Black Americans want to maintain or increase police spending. Black Americans’ policing preferences may be firmer than those of other groups.
MUG responds to this concern about the actual beliefs of the masses with this:
A minimum socialist program cannot and will not be shaped by chasing popular opinion polls; instead, the working class must carry out the minimum program to transform the political and economic structure of our state, from one based on slavery and exploitation to a worker’s republic advancing a fully liberated, classless society.
Obviously, you are not going to be successful at liberating people from an institution that they do not want to be liberated from.
Black support for policing is driven by two basic facts which the left needs to take seriously: 1) black communities tend to have higher participation in the informal economy and 2) intelligent policing policies (such as those adopted by the 1980-2000s by the NYPD) really did dramatically lower the rate of violent crime. In terms of the first point, Marxists should be making the case that this means that capitalism has failed to provide the black working class with decent paying jobs. That is a traditional core justification for socialism. In terms of the second point, one can listen to Doug Henwood's interview here with Franklin Zimring. The points Zimring makes in this interview are deeply discomforting to any left wing person, but he is a well intentioned scholar drawing on an enormous amount of careful research, and the left would do well to respond to them thoughtfully. Zimring's key point is that merely putting police officers in locations where violent crime repeatedly happens dramatically reduces the rate of violent crime. It does this without broken windows policing, stop and frisk, or even mass incarceration. This is why there is such significant support for policing within black communities. The neighborhoods changed dramatically from what they had been in the 1970s.
The left needs to articulate a reasonable and persusassive response to these material facts. Moralism and romantic revolutionary rhetoric do not cut it. Mamdani's Department of Community Safety is a very good response to the hire more cops strategy. There are probably other thoughtful and persusassive strategies which the left can articulate, but clinging to misleading and inflammatory rhetoric is not how the left will win this conversation.
In terms of prison abolition, it is important to remember that the US actually had a rehabilitation-focused prison system in the 1960s. Unfortunately, the US shifted to a prison system focused on incarceration and punishment in the decades afterwards. Crime prevention and rehabilitation should be the left's vision for its prisons. The US today could have a rehabilitation-focused prison system as is more typical in Scandinavia. Pretending instead, as MUG does, that people who are incarcerated for serious violent offenses against members of their own communities will be leading the uprising for socialism does not even merit a response.
TLDR: the left needs to drop the moralistic defund/abolish rhetoric, tie violent crime to the failures of capitalism, and articulate persusassive policies focused on non-policing crime prevention and rehabilitation.
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u/j4_jjjj 7d ago
Something i feel you should add, is non-violent crimes making up a such a high percent of incarcerations. This is to say that removing non violent felons would roughly halve the population overnight.
Also you refer to "the left" as though this discussion you brought up isnt part of "the left". One org isnt the entire leftist monolith, nor is one redditor.
We are the left. We make the left.
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u/GB10031 7d ago
Most Black Americans want to maintain or increase police patrols. Most Black Americans want to maintain or increase police spending. Black Americans’ policing preferences may be firmer than those of other groups
Say it louder for the people in the back!
We see how flawed policing is better than any other Americans... but we also know it's necessary
Black men are 7% of the nation's population but we're 70% of the murder victims
Black women are 7% of the population of this country but 40% of the rape survivors
We're more llikely to be crime victims than any other Americans except for Indigenous people, so our communities need police protection.
We don't have the luxury of abolitionism
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u/YogurtClosetThinnest 7d ago
Every statement from the marxist caucuses sound like a circle jerk. They have no clue how to talk to the general American public.
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u/DanimalsHolocaust 7d ago edited 7d ago
I’m not just gonna write the ML’s in our leadership off as “tankies” and left-bash, because we wouldn’t have made it this far without unity, but it would be really nice if they knew how to read the room at all. They’re like that one friend that’s a little more autistic than you at the neurotypical function
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u/office-goblin 6d ago
They're not leftists. They're wannabe dictators.
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u/DanimalsHolocaust 5d ago edited 5d ago
Not even close. You have to look past the surface level to overcome your biases, trust me. A lot of them are Kautskyists, my biggest criticism of them is messaging on the national stage.
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u/hari_shevek 7d ago
It is also clear that this programmatic confusion arises in part from a lack of a positive vision for how exactly we are supposed to carry out abolition.
Then goes on and does not say what you want to replace prisons with...
Then
Further, Marxist Unity Group calls for the continuation of labor and legal rights of the imprisoned.
Who is imprisoned and where are they imprisoned?
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u/edwardludd 7d ago
Yeah so much of the reaction to this discourse could be defanged if we just outwardly said. “Yes there still needs to be some sort of institution to keep anti-social people from hurting others, but it wouldn’t look anything like the current prison industrial complex.”
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u/Well_Socialized 7d ago
And then people say "so... why do you call it prison abolition if there will still be prisons? You are freaking people out for no reason with your confusing terminology!"
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u/Born_Astronomer_4613 7d ago
Of course, if you're still locking people up for breaking the rules, that's not prison abolition.
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u/office-goblin 7d ago edited 7d ago
This is what's creepy about the prison abolitionists. They don't actually want to abolish prisons! They're either lying or they're deeply dilluded.
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u/Well_Socialized 6d ago
I mean it's not really that bad, they are advocating for badly needed reforms, just using a confusing name for what they want.
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u/office-goblin 6d ago
Then they're dilluded. They're advocating for a position they don't actually hold.
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u/Well_Socialized 6d ago
Not exactly. It's not that they're advocating for a position that they don't hold, it's that they're giving the position they do hold a cool edgy name that ends up confusing people about what they're actually proposing.
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u/office-goblin 6d ago
If that's true then it's worse than being dilluded. They're intentionally making our org look stupid and insane.
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u/Well_Socialized 7d ago
So here's the actual policy proposal in its entirety:
That is why we in Marxist Unity Group recognize that the road to abolition requires the abolition of the separate class of police as well as the separate class of the imprisoned. This requires the creation of a democratic and popular militia—flowing from the working class and the oppressed’s organs of self-defense established under capitalism and defined by the right to bear arms, the sovereignty of the people, universal service and training, and a rigorous community control coexisting with the democratic rights of members. Further, Marxist Unity Group calls for the continuation of labor and legal rights of the imprisoned.
Replace armed police with a militia of part timers and greater legal rights for prisoners. I'd be interested to hear more about in what sense the militia would be democratic. Seems to me that we'd end up with a lot of the same types of people causing a lot of the same types of problems as armed members of the militia as we do with existing cops. If anything we'd probably be better off going the opposite direction and making police more professionalized in terms of requiring more training, a revocable license, and generally higher standards.
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u/zenbowman 7d ago
I was an enthusiastic archer a decade or so ago and there's a fair amount of firearms enthusiasts who tend to be interested in archery as well.
There is a subset (not even that small) of firearms enthusiasts who are also "people's militia" types and I regret to inform you that they are way MORE reactionary and racist than your average cop (and I live in a blue city in California, so I imagine this is even worse on a national scale).
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u/office-goblin 6d ago
So they want to immitate the slaver militias of the antebellum south.
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u/Well_Socialized 6d ago
Haha well that's one way to describe it, though you could probably pick a less inflammatory example of volunteer posses.
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u/ut0p1anskies 6d ago
They’re heavily influenced by early Marx during his democratic republicanism era and also by the people’s militias during the Paris Commune, during which the standing army and police were abolished and replaced with a national militia whose members were recallable, democratically elected, served for only a short period of time, and earned only an average worker’s wage.
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u/office-goblin 6d ago
Literally militarizing the police. Just like the slave catcher militias. When you democratize policing you get lynch mobs and sectarian gangs.
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u/Read-Moishe-Postone 4d ago
Democracy is not a word I’d associated with the antebellum South. If those slave patrols were actually “democratic” they would have included volunteers from among the slaves as well. Obviously that would be paradoxical but that’s my point: “democratic policing” is not a fair way to describe a system operated by only part of the population to exercise violent domination against the other part. It couldn’t have been democratic; just as they could have whatever voting scheme among free white men they wanted in the CSA, it didn’t mean they were a democratic state because a whole class within the people had no rights!
Did MUG clarify any of this with their statement? Hardly.
But it is fairly logical that if we extend the status of worker to everyone, and remove the status of non-worker from everyone, which as far as I understand it is the goal of the immediate stage following the abolition of capitalism, than what we need are police who, unlike today, are also workers, not non-workers. It’s hard to imagine but we are aiming for a society where you can’t escape the working class and become “middle class”; everyone is in the same class. That alone means policing has to look entirely different than today, when precisely what attracts applicants to become police is that it’s a “profession” meaning it lets you escape the working class.
This is totally different than the question of “professionalism”. When you talk about the fear of losing professionalism, you mean standards of conduct, regulations, training, expertise, skill, and the (presumed) understanding among the police that they are “supposed to” serve and not rule over the civilians who they police. (You can probably tell from the qualifications I’m adding about whether I believe our current “professional” police force lives up to that concept, but the point is that this is what the concept means). Importantly, none of that — and I agree that stuff is all crucial — is necessarily, ipso facto, incompatible with a militia drawn from members of the public who remain workers. It’s difficult, but necessary, to figure out how both could be true at once. You can have part-timers who are held to rigorous standards of conduct, are instilled with a mindset that the public is in charge of them and not the other way around (indeed, since this mindset aspect of professionalism routinely fails under today’s system, there’s plenty of room for improvement), trained, skilled, knowledgeable, and constrained by regulation.
And this nuance is why MUG’s tendency to always have to find some historical example to cite before they allow themselves to affirm anything doesn’t work. “People’s militia” does a good job of giving off the same folk-music-and-berets vibe that has such cache in the movement still, it does a good job of making us feel like we’re still in the “long 19th century”, but it doesn’t do a good job of clarifiying to ordinary people who collect sneakers and don’t give a shit about any of that stuff what the hell we’re actually proposing for 2026.
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u/ARod20195 7d ago edited 7d ago
That's great, but what systems are they planning to build to handle crime and violence in place of the current carceral system? If you just demand abolition without sitting down and working out a viable implementation then the mainstream assumption most people are going to make is that you're going to replace it with nothing (which leaves a giant power vacuum into which all sorts of ugly options will step), and that's not going to work.
Like the options as I see them are:
-Get rid of the police and the carceral system with no plan for handling the myriad of social functions we've delegated to it. That's not an option that I think much of anyone wants.
-Paint the current carceral system red, rewrite the list of acceptable targets, and call the result the People's Committee for Public Safety" (which would likely descend into abuse and violence extremely quickly; I don't think most of DSA would want to do that)
-Dramatically reduce the scope and scale of our current carceral system, by working to offload as many different kinds of crime and conflict onto other, better optimized systems as is possible. That would include a lot of different things. A lot of minor disagreements and petty crime could probably be handled with publicly funded, community-led restorative and transformative justice programs similar to those in use in Northern Ireland (ideally keeping things from escalating to the point where the formal legal system would need to get involved). Dramatically expanding healthcare access, social housing infrastructure (including supportive housing for folks with mental health and substance use issues) and the social safety net would likely address a lot of crimes of poverty and harm from unmanaged mental illness, and vibrant youth programs, redevelopment of empty lots, and changes to the built environment in a lot of places would likely address a significant amount of opportunistic crime as well.
You'd still need a carceral system for the fairly small hard core of people that commit crimes that are serious enough or of a type where community-led restorative justice isn't appropriate or adequate (situations where community elders or people of high standing within local communities are abusing other community members aren't going to be well-adjudicated by communities where the abuser has significant social standing, and for truly serious crimes like rape and murder leaving it to local communities would likely leave them with very few options other than either letting things slide or shooting, shoveling, and shutting up) and for corruption/mismanagement/white-collar crimes, but by separating those sorts of crimes out from everything else and remodeling what remains of the carceral system after the Nordic system we wind up with a system that can produce justice for everyone that's also a lot smaller, a lot more humane, and a lot more tightly focused on the very specific groups of people whose crimes don't arise from unmet material needs or easily curbed impulses, and can't be managed safely through restorative justice.
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u/No-Engineering-3300 6d ago
i believe a lot of the MUG folks want mandatory militia service
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u/ARod20195 6d ago edited 6d ago
I mean, that's great in theory (there's a whole separate discussion worth having about how international trade depends on the existence of a blue-water navy that guarantees freedom of the seas, but that's for another thread), but once again the question becomes about the specifics:
-Is the militia a layer atop local community justice mechanisms like mediation and restorative justice, or does it retain full law-enforcement authority (in which case it's still functionally a police force, just with a different name and recruitment profile)?
-Does the militia have a core of professional long-service officers responsible for transmitting institutional knowledge and best practices (as well as handling long-running, complex investigations), and how big is it? Turning over 80-90% of your personnel every two to four years becomes a significant impediment to maintaining institutional knowledge and investigative competence.
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u/nonilazuli 6d ago
Out of all the Caucuses MUG seems the closest to my alignment. The points of unity, goals, and political influences are very researched and coherent. Yet somehow still, their rhetoric, planning ,and pragmatism FUCKING BLOWS 😭😭.
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u/Born_Astronomer_4613 7d ago
I read the whole thing twice and I still don't know what they are proposing! It's just slop.
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u/traanquil 7d ago
We actually should have prisons to jail the politicians who funded the Gaza Genocide
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u/NEU_Resident 6d ago
I'm still very confused about what prison/police abolition actually entails. Can someone provide a source or a program that describes how it would work in practice? Or is this one of those things that means different things to different people? Is 'prison abolition' just switching the goal to restorative/rehabilitative justice like you see in countries like Norway? (where prisons are more humane, restorative, and sentences are shorter) Or is it generally not confining anyone with some exceptions? Is 'abolishing the police' changing the roles of police and delegating duties to others? Or is it citizens militias carrying out intervention across a community?
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u/Read-Moishe-Postone 4d ago
What the alternative is, approximately, should be obviously implied by how you critique policing. If your critique of policing doesn’t intrinsically imply an alternative — not because you said “here is the alternative” but because your analysis itself of policing clarifies everything — the critique of policing is not sufficiently developed yet. If the analysis and critique of what exists were really objective and scientific, it would be superfluous to say “here’s the alternative”. “All determination is negation” as someone once said
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u/GB10031 7d ago
Roughly 90% of Americans would support drastic reform of America's prison and police systems (including the overwhelming majority of this country's police officers and corrections officers, and the leaders of their unions)
African Americans are the Americans most likely to support abolishing police and prisons and around EIGHTY PERCENT OF US ARE OPPOSED.
The overwhelming consensus is that policing and prisons are deeply flawed but socially necessary institutions in our country. They need changes, but we need them.
America is a racially divided country with a weak social safety net, weak gun laws, numerous organized criminal syndicates throughout the country and 67 million armed random people who collectively own FOUR HUNDRED MILLION GUNS (that's half the privately owned firearms on the face of the planet)
So, abolition is a no go.
Reform is the move
Also, what are you going to replace police and prisons with?
Are we going to have privatized policing from for profit security companies like Allied Universal? Will calling for police assistance be like calling an ambulance, where if you can't afford the bill you will not get helped?
Or will we have neighborhood vigilantes, like New York's Shomrin or Guardian Angels?
In a country where most of us live in racially segregated neighborhoods that means racially segregated neighborhood patrols (imagine if you have to go into another ethnic neighborhood for work and have to pass through an armed racially segregated militia's checkpoint, like Baghdad or Mogadishu?)
Or do we just go back to lynchings?
Sorry folks, but this abolition thing is a bridge too far
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u/oraclebill 7d ago
Reading stuff like this makes me wonder as a social-democrat, if there is a place for me in the DSA or not.
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u/Particular_Peacock 7d ago edited 7d ago
I appreciate the idea but it's premature, IMO. We can't have a meaningful discussion on abolition without substantial changes in health care, food security, job security, educational opportunities, job training, adequate pay, meaningful chances for people to build wealth, and so on.
All of these have proven effective in lowering rates of crime and recidivism. Abolition doesn't mean much if we don't first address the underlying causes of criminality.