The Victims of Democracy: An Alternative Genealogy of Abolition Democracy

• In Event: Theorizing Democracy and Sovereignty from within the Abolitionist Horizon

Abstract

Contemporary abolitionism has become increasingly popular in recent decades as an explicit response to the post-civil rights defeat of Black Power and the growth of mass incarceration and criminal justice as social control. While abolitionism has been closely defined in relation to prison abolition, many abolitionists in practice also oppose policing. However, when taken seriously police abolitionism creates several new issues that demand theoretical attention in ways that are rarely taken up now. For police abolition strikes at the core questions of politics: who constitutes a community, who has authority and who has power, what is the relationship between coercion and consent, and so on. Police abolition also directly raises the question of if to confront and transform the state’s violence requires the use of violence as well. In the context of the US state as what I call a policing democracy—where formal commitments to democracy for some are enmeshed with police control of others—police abolition also raises the specter of a revolution against democracy itself.
The response to a policing democracy may be encapsulated in an abolition democracy. W. E. B. Du Bois first coined the term abolition democracy to describe the incipient social formation in the Reconstruction South of Black freedmen working together with white laborers to establish a labor democracy. In recent years the term has reappeared in the explicitly prison abolitionist advocacy of Angela Davis and the political theory of Joel Olson, among others. Yet in this reappearance, the rich, multi-faceted and complex social formation that Du Bois describes becomes reduced to a generic endorsement of democracy itself as the answer as the prison-police-military industrial complex. In this paper then I argue that Du Bois’s discussion of abolition democracy in Black Reconstruction is not a simple origin story for advocates of abolitionism today, and that excavating abolition democracy as a particular and historically contingent social formation also complicates contemporary abolitionist politics. For, when taking a deeper look at Du Bois’s invocation of abolition democracy, we also emerge with a messier—and perhaps less palatable—vision of democracy. What I find in Black Reconstruction is not simply the story of the “beautiful failure” of Reconstruction and the abolition democracy, but a multi-faceted, violent struggle over the shape of American democracy. In order to complicate this origin story of abolition democracy, I will highlight two under-examined aspects of Du Bois’s theorizing in Black Reconstruction: 1. How Du Bois’s own vanguardist and elitist conception of democracy clashes with contemporary commitments to radical democracy and abolitionism, and 2. The problem of state violence and abolitionism as a battle for control of the state itself. For what Du Bois highlights so well in his work is that abolitionism cannot be simply what is oppositional to contemporary state power and its practices—or simply an emphasis on democracy as what is radical, fugitive, consensual, or to-come—but that any abolition democracy itself will be a complex arrangement of consent and coercion.

Author

• Quinn Lester, Johns Hopkins University