Social movements to reduce police killings of unarmed people and to abolish prisons has succeeded in capturing global attention in the past few years. These movements are also building collective organizations and structures to replace the state bodies responsible for the police killings and unequal incarceration of Black and other community members.
A broad transformation of both policy and everyday lived social relations is the goal of The Black Lives Matter movement, like the older abolition movement to abolish prisons in the United States. So these movements are not limited to defunding the police and abolishing prisons in the United States and other countries.
Transforming social relations in this approach is tied to the ethical challenge of justice, as in the term “transformative justice” preferred by some in these movements. And this transformative work is widespread. Groups like Sister to Sister (173-8) in Brooklyn, New York and the Bay Area Transformative Justice Collective have been doing the work for many years, while the explosion of mutual aid organizations and other grassroots efforts in 2020 have expanded exponentially the range of these organizations.
The goals of these movements may also be summarized by the phrase, “Transform Harm.” They work to reduce not only the harm of state organizations, like the police and the courts, but also individual harm (such as domestic violence) and broad systemic harms (like those of colonialism and white supremacy).
What does this look like in practice?
Collective organizing is used to direct attention away from the privatized individualism that is typical of many European-derived modern movements (capitalism; electoral democracy; human rights; etc.). This also allows the movements to emphasize the importance of building new social structures and systems rather than focusing on the individual harms that come about through policing and prisons.
By working in decentralized networks (83ff, 93-7, 230), the abolition movement accomplishes several goals. This horizontal structure avoids the inequality of such centralized, hierarchically organized institutions as the nation-state, the corporation, and the modern school. Spreading decision making powers among all participants through consensus and other practices (230-36), rather than centralizing them in leadership, also forces the collective group to work with group participants who have diverse experiences and perspectives, broadening the range of wisdom and knowledge contributing to the group’s direction. And decentralized networks are also well-known for the difficulties they present to those who would destroy them through attacks by the state or other opposition organizations.
The work takes concentrated, sustained efforts to identify and redirect those parts of our lives that make us complicit with the pervasive violent modes (139-47) of social relations in modern societies, including not only acts of interpersonal violence but also everyday forms of violence (82-101).
It also requires a retooling of the imagination to begin to live outside the limits of what modern societies teach as possible, training ourselves to practice social relations that center care for the other rather than preservation of the self. Through these practices democracy can come to represent all, including the most marginal and those the nation-state would rather lock away or destroy.
