We can’t wish away the state

This commentary thinks with Kass and Dunlap's ‘Rioting as Legitimate Abolitionist Practice’, which draws on Joy James’ (2005) distinction between procedural, insurrectionary, and autonomous abolitions to argue against the former in favor of the latter two forms of abolitionist praxis. While the authors argue in favor of an insurrectionist thesis and view the riot as a space of ungovernability, I offer two sympathetic critiques: first, the argument reproduces procedural, insurrectionist, and autonomous abolitions as ontologically distinct forms, as if each marks a discrete and distinct practice of abolitionist struggle, operating in separate realms of the social movement ecosystem when their boundaries are in fact more blurry. Second, in placing only one of the three approaches on the side of counterinsurgency, the authors set up a dichotomy between procedural, insurrectionary, and autonomous abolitions, even as the latter two forms, far from remaining ungovernable, elicit countervailing responses from the state and civil society that insurrectionists cannot ignore in foregrounding a prefigurative politics. Given that abolitionists cannot wish the state away, I draw a tentative conclusion that we need multiple strategies in any revolutionary transition, ones equipped to address the recursive cycles of co-optation that infect multiple expressions of struggle and that require corresponding reassessements of tactics and strategy in the struggle for the abolition of prisons and police.