Re: Carceral State

> On Aug 2, 2026, at 08:57, Anthony Teso via groups.io <[email protected]> wrote:
> 
> A socialist critique of abolitionism from inside its strongest premises: prisons, police, and the carceral state cannot be understood apart from value, class power, and the state’s repressive function. Against both liberal backlash and moralized horizon politics, this essay asks what would be required to make abolition more than a name for where we want to go. 
> the-sentence-and-its-measure (1).docx
https://onedrive.live.com/:w:/g/personal/c3598b38f68269be/IQDCmg1NhT2lQ6xhoSjC-K1IAXaBUiYbJEieecNLpExtP9M?rtime=0ubgip_23kg&redeem=aHR0cHM6Ly8xZHJ2Lm1zL3cvYy9jMzU5OGIzOGY2ODI2OWJlL0lRRENtZzFOaFQybFE2eGhvU2pDLUsxSUFYYUJVaVliSkVpZWVjTkxwRXh0UDlNP2U9MWVidDIy
> by
> Antony Teso

I greatly appreciate this work being shared on marxmail. It deserves a lot more attention than it has gotten. Arguably, we witnessed the largest mass movement in the US since Vietnam during 2020-21, and much could be written as to why. Despite the size and depth of the movement, however, it accomplished none of its demands besides putting the owners of the Internet DNS domain, blacklivesmatter.com <http://blacklivesmatter.com/>, in charge of a very well-funded non-profit.

There are several reasons why the such a large and deep movement spent its energy before realizing any increase in its power. One key explanation that Tony cites is this:

"Dismantling the special repressive apparatus cannot mean leaving working-class people exposed to violence inside their own lives. The question is what form of collective protection could replace a professional force standing above them."

There was a remarkable debate in the 1980s between the white supremacist William F Buckley and a leader of the Congression al Black Caucus, Charles B. Rangel. Buckley smugly argued for decriminalization of drugs while Rangel argued for increased incarceration (https://reason.com/2012/05/31/how-charlie-rangels-outrage-shifted-from/). A lot of abolition literature ignores that the increase in crime and chaos brought on by the crack epidemic of the 1980s led many in the community to call for incarceration, not abolition. Portland no sooner reduced the police budget that a small group from the Black community protested it. They may have been Republicans or turned out by the Portland Police Association, but there are historical roots to Black community opposition to leaving the community more vulnerable to violence.

I have a lot to say about Tony's essay. Instead of posting a much longer note, I encourage comrades to read it. But there is a tangent to Tony's piece that I want to mention here. That is, the relationship between abolition, critical race theory, and identity politics. 

Legal scholar Amna K. Akbar addresses some of the points raised by Tony on shifting power and control from the state to the people in https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3061917.  some writers in the legal fields of critical theory and critical race theory even quote Gorz and discuss transitional demands. Akbar discusses transformative demands in the manifesto of the Movement for Black Lives (M4BL). But the demands are rooted in the community rather than in class: 

"Amid the electoral triumph of Trump, protest and people-of-color-led anti-capitalist movements have surged in activity.21 These radical movements mark the revival of anti-capitalist racial justice politics in the United States in a way that we have not seen since the civil rights, Black power, and Chicano movements of the 1960s and 1970s."

It is hard to imagine how the abolitionist movement is going to win while ignoring two-thirds of the US working class, but that is quite common in this literature. 

Mark

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