Calla

@callawalsh · Twitter · 2026-09-01 15:32 UTC

My critique of modern radical liberal "abolitionism”: Today’s self-described “abolitionists” claim to be revolutionary while tending to condemn all the means needed to make a revolution. Police and prison abolitionism emerged from the 2020 uprising as supposedly the most radical position to identify with. The impulse of this position is correct, but its essence is wrong. That is, police in the US emerged directly out of the institution of chattel slavery; the first police patrols were slave catchers; police serve as the domestic foot soldiers of imperialism, occupying the internal colonies. Of course, US prisons/police should be abolished in the sense that the settler colonial, white supremacist, state apparatus of the so-called United States should be dismantled. And of course, prisons/policing are not a pleasant experience anywhere in the world (that’s kind of the point...), and I do not doubt that there are some people unjustly imprisoned and abused in every country in the world. That does not mean that all prisons/policing across the world carry the same class or racial character as the US system, or that they are all inherently reactionary. Whether the US system should be abolished and whether vastly different carceral systems everywhere should be abolished are two very distinct questions that, I argue, do not have the same answer. Today's abolitionism in practice seems perfectly compatible with attacking imperialism’s enemies and reforming the imperialist state no matter how much it claims to want to “abolish” it. The US and its empire should be abolished. The systems leading to mass poverty, mental illness, crime, and imprisonment should be dismantled. The oppressors and war criminals at the helm of those systems should face justice and severe punishment. Prisons that do still exist in a post-revolutionary world for regular crimes should be focused on rehabilitation, not endless cycles of incarceration. Authority exists, and revolution means seizing and maintaining it by force. To reject that starting point is to have lost before even beginning to fight.