Hammer and Heart: Four theses on abolitionist communism

This is an adapted written version of my talk on abolition at the weekend just gone's Festival of the Oppressed.

With these words, I want to put abolition and communism into conversation with one another, highlighting where abolition revives the lost connection between communist politics and freedom, as well as laying out some of the obstacles I think communist abolitionism faces in today’s world, particularly Britain.

The first aspect I want to make clear, drawing on Alberto Toscano’s recent essay in Salvage magazine, is that there is a generative historical relationship between abolition and communism. On the one hand, Karl Marx was profoundly influenced by the movement to abolish US chattel slavery, and it was this movement and his dialogue with an abolitionist figure like Wendell Phillips, as well as the Chartist movement, the struggles against empire in Ireland and later the Paris Commune, which all profoundly influenced a communist language not just of overcoming capitalist domination, but also of abolishing the institutions and social relations which underpin this oppressive social system. On the other hand, the germination of contemporary abolitionist politics emerges particularly in the US, both against the racialised prison industrial complex, but also as an attempt by black radicals to hold onto their radicalism in the face of the many declining carceral communisms which predominated throughout the twentieth century. It’s important to grasp this as an underlying context, with the best of contemporary abolitionist politics rearticulating the “freedom dreams” of earlier communist horizons for our movement’s practices today.

Now, secondly, when we think of the key institutions abolition communists want to dismantle, the police in this country are clearly critical. This body - which enforces ruling class control, polices sections of the population seemingly exterior to wage labour, often the racially oppressed, and murders and rapes with impunity - needs getting rid of. And as Shanice McBean and Aviah Day have demonstrated in Abolition Revolution, the police mirror the institutions of capitalism, elected government in particular, as a vehicle of domination undergoing a crisis of legitimacy. Last year, the Economic and Social Research Council reported that 40% of the population did not trust their police forces. Yet, according to a recent More in Common report, dissatisfaction with the police is often framed through their inability to deal with crime satisfactorily enough. Popular frustrations with the police’s inability to prevent drug abuse, anti-social behaviour and ‘loitering’ regularly rank higher as a concern in the North and the Midlands than they do in the bigger urban citadels too. This poses a problem for us. Class, abandonment and decline are felt differently depending on where you live. Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s classic book, Golden Gulag, which speaks to how the surpluses in labour, land, finance and state capacity born from postwar social democracy’s crisis years were absorbed by an expanding prison system, charts the evolution of what Toscano has called the “Prison Deindustrialisation Complex”.

Mimicking the abolitionist geographer’s Californian story, where I live in Stoke-on-Trent, 8 prisons encircle the city. As I traced in a recent dispatch, my estate, a place which resembles the banlieues of Paris and the ghettos of the US, is one of the city’s poorest and unhealthiest, but also most multicultural estates. On the edge of the city centre, the police and the council force vulnerable drug abusers into cells or restrict them to our estate where they sometimes encamp on the nearby wasteland. In many respects, it is the abandoned heirs of obsolescent industrial workers who have been made disposable by capital, creating the conditions for them to also abandon themselves in the process. The object of fear, paranoia and scorn amongst the estate’s simultaneously abandoned and super-exploited multiracial community, the harshness of racial capitalism and the deep-seated dread of social harm are codependent. The area has been left to rot as new forms of exploitation and oppression have come to dominate. The physical space of the city - land, ex-factories, high streets - is dilapidated. Houses lay empty. Ex-industrial land lies polluted. As Owen Hatherley has remarked, the left does better in the bigger cities in part because things change all the time: the people, the infrastructure, the effect of gentrification upon physical space. Often for the worst don’t get me wrong, but the notion that change is possible is ingrained into the cosmopolitan city’s urban interior. But, contra Marx and Marshall Berman, all that is solid doesn’t simply melt into air in a place like Stoke, and this mediates the scope for what people think is possible. It’s in this picture, where the zero-sum, declinist sense-making of neoliberal austerity reminds us that a fusion of communism and abolition is more important than ever. But how do we get there, against the growing temptation towards mutual recrimination and resentment?

This brings me to my third point: where are the alternatives? In the US, on both coasts, you have had resistance to Trump’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement squad. On the West, you have heroic multiracial worker uprisings against violent anti-migrant border squads. But on the East, as well as the protest movement, you have the curious case of insurgent New York mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani. Followers of this blog will know that I have been an enthusiast for Mamdani’s campaign for some months now. A Muslim democratic socialist, he has soared in the polls and ran an incredible ground campaign speaking to the complex ways in which class is lived by New Yorkers, through the food they eat, the houses they live in, the transport they take to work and the ways they raise their children. One of the many attack lines the press have tried to smear him with is the claim that he wants to “defund the police”, a racialised moral panic mobilised endlessly since the mass Black Lives Matter uprisings five years ago. Now, as amazing and inspiring as his campaign has been, he’s been very clear he is not defunding the police. He has said he will scrap the violent anti-protest unit and create a municipal Community Safety Team, geared towards putting mental health specialists, health workers and social workers on the frontline to help vulnerable people in desperate situations, allowing the police to deal, in his words, with serious crimes. So on the one hand, he wants to challenge one of the key ways in which police power is wielded, against the racialised homeless and poor deemed surplus by capital and the state. On the other hand, however, he is reinforcing the notion that the police do indeed solve serious crimes, and therefore do entail some broader legitimacy.

The reason I raise this example is that I think, being one of the most effective left electoral campaigns in my lifetime, Mamdani does something quite interesting. He transforms a class antagonism into a general interest: New Yorkers can’t afford the city they live in, and then around it, he aims to reinvent what psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan calls, (later adapted by thinkers of socialist strategy Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe) the “chain of signification” through which he makes common sense arguments about what might be deemed more controversial political questions, such as Palestine solidarity or reforming the police. In the latter case, he articulates in watered-down form the activist and intellectual sediments which emerged from a Black Lives Matter movement far deeper, more militant and widespread than the still impressive social movement we experienced in Britain. The question I have is how can communists and socialists do something similar, in the austerian, zero-sum conditions of Britain, but with a more robust and outright commitment to abolitionist politics? What is the scope for political possibility in our present? It seems to me that the left broadly offers little compelling stories and narratives about crime and abandonment, rarely attempts to place decarcerality on its “chain of signification” (who remembers 10,000 more police on the streets from Corbyn’s Labour!), and skirts the moral panics of the press and politicians without creating new moral economies of our own which can turn the dial on carcerality and state power. Simply put, what are the effective organising practices, stories, transitional demands, or non-reformist reforms, to get us from the moment we currently occupy, to the free social world we want to live in?

One of the challenges of our period, and my fourth and final point, is that large quarters of people simply do not believe what we argue for is possible. In 2019, the crushing weight of capitalist realism loomed large over Corbynism’s shackled efforts to capture and transform the British state. Now, in 2025, we grasp the need for a greater radicalism than was ever possible in the Labour Party, but with little of the means with which to connect that radicalism to the present in which we organise and live. I think we have to ask the question, which the left does not ask enough, what does working class life look like today? What is it about the contemporary conditions of exploitation and domination that need fundamentally changing? What abolitionist communist vision of the Good Life would compel a mass of people to fight to get there? And what demands would transform our minoritarian radicalism into a leftwing majoritarianism?

We know, as I’ve argued elsewhere, that people are broke, lonely and sick. We know that politics is rapidly polarising too. We also know that simple economics has never been enough to raise the spirits of a fighting mass of people whose lives are composed through race, gender, culture, region and age. But to make this work, we need to organise for victories that make people believe in the possibility of change, whilst also building a social infrastructure that can create a richer working class social life, retooling people with the cultural capacity for power. We need free breakfast programs, leisure centres, popular psychiatry and carnivals in our cities, at the same time as we need to win price controls over food, wage increases and impositions over the copper who wants to harass the young black kid walking down the street. We need new moral economies of our own that people live, feel and breathe. I think the challenge for contemporary communist politics, of rearticulating itself around a meaningful vision of freedom, popular sovereignty and Good Living, is given greater content by abolition’s freedom dreams. Just as I think communism opens abolition up to a set of strategic experiences and lexicons critical to radical change. The benefit of one to the other lies in the possibility that one day each of us, so long as we desire the choice, may be able to use the opportunity of our three or four-day weekend, to hang out on the street corner, chatting nonsense with our mates, smoking a joint without fear of harassment from the state, and without the worry that we can’t afford dinner.

Fred Hampton Snr, the Chicago Black Panther Party Chair murdered by the FBI in 1969, once said that “socialism is the people. If you’re afraid of socialism, you’re afraid of yourself.” Today, we might add that abolition could be the people. If you’re afraid of abolition, you’re afraid of your neighbour.

The full video of this conversation with Shanice McBean will be out online soon too!