Thread by @PeterGelderloos

Some concerns regarding abolition.
A thread.

Obviously, abolishing prisons and police would be a wonderful thing, but I'm finding certain problems in the framework of "abolition" that are setting us up for failure.
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Reading the following from Saidiya Hartman crystallized it for me. The 19th century abolitionist movement was controlled by white progressives. They didn't want to talk about taking the war to the bankers, merchants, & landowners nor to center armed resistance by enslaved people.

They wanted to use morally exemplary individuals, some sacrificed victim as posterchild, to appeal to their compatriots' conscience and allow the State to enact a change.
But slavery had become essential to the new economies of Africa and the Americas,
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and it continued after the transatlantic trade was abolished. Abolishing slavery inside Africa was used a justification for the full colonization of the continent in the late 1800s. "Bringing civilization" in the European imaginary.
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A pragmatic anticapitalist in 1790 would have been unable to imagine global capitalism without the slave trade, to predict the prison-industrial complex or the Berlin Conference. But abolition, as opposed to total insurrection, paved the way.
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Nowadays, those of us in the know realize you can't have capitalism without police and prisons. Abolition is really just a code word for revolution. So why don't we talk about revolution, about taking the war to bankers, real estate investors, and tech billionaires?
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Why do so few abolitionists center the struggles of prison rebels and antipolice rioters?

I think universities and NGOs have played a huge role, convincing abolitionists to particularize their desires, to favor legal over fiery language, and to present separated areas of analysis and action that, in the end, can become demands.
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In effect, translating it into a language legible to power.

Will this come back and bite us? Do we really want to tempt the future and find out what could be even worse than police and prisons?
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2020 already showed us the slippery slope from revolution to abolition to defunding to decreased funding, now an uninspiring-enough rallying cry that the movement fizzles and leaves the door open for the right-wing reaction (and newly increased police budgets).
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We're not being realistic by not talking about revolution or trying to appear sober and respectable (to whom?). Total revolution *is* the realistic path. Everything else is negotiated surrender.
We want to get rid of all of it. Every last vestige of the State and capital. Own it.