Sorry, apparently police abolitionism is cancelled due to the lesbian bar incidentπ€¦ββοΈ
I really donβt follow the logic here: we canβt address wealth inequality as the root cause of crime & eliminate the need for armed property protectors b/c then Iβd have to spy on my neighbors?
On some level, abolition is a vision of the world not without police, but where everyone is asked to be police, all the time.
Your time constantly occupied with monitoring your neighbors, βholding them accountable,β counseling them, βeducatingβ them, shaming them, and punishing them.
Iβm not interested in that work or in that world. I do not think the best vision of life is where weβre all constantly enmeshed that deeply in an interminable act of mutual βaccountability.β Most of the time, I want to leave my neighbors alone; I want them to leave me alone. I want to have a place that is a refuge from βthe community,β because βthe communityβ is often (usually?) just the self-appointed individuals who claim to speak on its behalf, and who have the sociopathic ambitions required to defeat other challengers and scare off dissent.
In other words, while capitalist atomization has robbed us of many positive social bonds, it has in fact liberated us from many negative ones. The work of a socialist project should certainly involve trying to revive or renew positive sociality, but I do not actually want to return to the βcommunityβ dynamics of a medieval peasant village, or a nomadic band on the steppe.
I would like *some* measure of privacy and autonomy, and I do not want to be police. I do not want to live under the totalitarian thumb of βthe communityβ any more than I want to live under the totalitarian thumb of capital.
And so I am not an abolitionist, because that is what abolition actually offers.