Abolition &

the State
A Discussion Tool
2

Table of Contents

Introduction 2

What is the state? 8

What shapes our understandings of states? 18

How do we navigate the state in the meantime? 21

Moving Within, Against, and Beyond the State 24

What lies beyond the nation-state? 27

How do our responses shape what we do now? 29

Acknowledgements 30
3

Introduction
As movements to defund and divest from policing and invest in community
safety expand in the wake of the 2020 Uprisings, abolitionist organizers are
increasingly grappling with questions around the role of the state in
abolitionist futures, including:

What do we imagine/advocate for instead of police

and policing?

What actions and behaviors do we think should be

regulated by the state? How should they be regulated
- who should be involved? What should they be
empowered to do?

How do we think resources should be distributed?

By whom and how?

These are not just theoretical questions - they shape the demands we
make and the sites of struggle we choose. For instance:

Where do we want funds diverted from police budgets to go?

Into other institutions currently controlled by the carceral state, to
subsidize the creation of new state entities, or into community-based
organizations?
For instance, do we want money from police budgets to be redirected to
existing highly policed, low-quality, overcrowded public housing? To
demand high quality publicly controlled, non-policed public housing? To
subsidize the creation of social housing? To create community-land
trusts? How might each of these options result in some form of policing
of private and public spaces, as well as of hierarchy and exclusion in new
forms?
How might seeking and accepting state funding require community-
based organizations to engage in surveillance, policing, and collaboration
with punitive institutions?
How do we imagine diverting police funding toward universal access to
public goods like clean air and water, high quality accessible education,
health care, libraries, green space, etc.?
4

Introduction

How should we relate to participatory budgeting, government

public safety task forces, and other “co-governance” models?
What lessons can we learn from experiments in “co-
governance” that might inform our occupation of institutions or
building new institutions or other forms in an abolitionist future?

Can “community control” of police serve as a step toward

abolition or does it inevitably re-legitimize and deepen
investment in policing?

Where should we turn to seek justice for police violence?

What options are available to us now?

What economic systems and forms and

practices of governance could
bring us closer to abolitionist
futures?
5

Introduction

The stakes of debates and decisions among abolitionists about how to relate to the
nation-state, as well as to regional and municipal governments and institutions - and to
state power as a whole - are high. In the U.S., abolitionist organizers are grappling with
these questions in the context of Right wing efforts to seize control over public
institutions like public schools in order to either dismantle or remake them in service of
bringing into being a Christian theocratic state. These realities render abandonment of
state institutions as a field of contestation a potentially dangerous proposition under
current conditions, and can obscure the potential pitfalls of demands that inadvertently
increase opportunities for privatization of social resources through community-based
organizations such as private Christian schools.

There are no universally agreed-upon answers or responses to these questions

among abolitionists - to the contrary, there is a diversity of perspectives about
which forms of governance and what relationship(s) to state power, state
institutions, and levels of state government get us closer to the world we want. We
don’t all have to agree - abolitionist frameworks, including the Dismantle. Change. Build.
framework offered by Critical Resistance, create space to work on many different fronts
to confront racial capitalist carceral states, change the way we think, organize ourselves,
and relate, and to build new social and economic relations.

The goal of this tool is to move beyond debates between

ideologies focused on:

(1) seizing state power to transform state institutions under

a traditional socialist approach, or to create conditions under
which a capitalist state will gradually be replaced by
communal forms of governance under a traditional
communist approach, OR

(2) immediate and wholesale dismantling of nation-states

under a traditional anarchist approach.
6

Introduction

It seeks instead to ask and explore generative questions that open up a multitude of
possibilities both drawing from and moving beyond existing analyses and frameworks.
It is an invitation, to paraphrase Robin D.G. Kelly, “to think beyond the binary between
state and non-state,” to look to collective ways of organizing ourselves
within and beyond nation-states, and to imagine and rehearse new
possibilities for governance and economic and social relations.

“Revolution becomes a problem if we believe that the state is

the site of struggle - we take the state and overturn social
relations. We have learned that this is not necessarily the
case. We need a new way of thinking… an independent way of
thinking that the state is the problem, there is clear
evidence of that. What does revolution mean in a discourse,
in a framework in which we are questioning the state as the
primary or the sole source of actually making things happen?”

— Robin D.G. Kelly

7

Introduction

“[W]e ask ourselves what additional possibilities emerge

if we move beyond the dichotomy of capturing or
dismantling the modern Western state. What if our goal is
not to seize the carceral state in an effort to transform
it, but to seize power and resources from the police
state to create conditions under which new economic
systems and forms of governance can emerge?”
— No More Police: A Case for Abolition

“We can think about other models at this time,

and not only turn toward the past…”
— Robyn Maynard, co-author of Rehearsals for Living
(Haymarket 2022).

This tool is intended to help abolitionist organizers sharpen our analysis around
these questions through individual reflection and collective study and discussion.
It starts from the premise articulated in No More Police: A Case for Abolition:

1. the carceral, settler-colonial, state cannot be

reformed or captured and repurposed; and
2. abolition and racial capitalism cannot coexist.

and invites us to explore the question of “what then?” alongside a diversity of

responses drawn in part from conversations hosted by Interrupting Criminalization
in the fall of 2021 and winter of 2022.

This is the first in a series of pamphlets on this subject. It is intended as an entry

point into deeper conversations, collective study, and debate to inform how we move
under current conditions and those to come, offering more questions than answers.
Discussion prompts are intended to be used for individual study and reflection, as well
as to spark and support collective conversation. You are invited to form study groups
with fellow organizers to grapple with these and other questions about the state(s)
relevant to your abolitionist organizing, and to share your reflections and
responses with us at [email protected].
Please see the resource sections for further reading.
8

What is the state?

I. Begin by journaling in response to the question:

How do you define “the state”?

How is a nation-state distinct from a nation?
How does this distinction matter?
How is a racial capitalist state distinct from a socialist state?
What is a carceral state?
How is the state distinct from government(s)?
What is governance and how is it distinct from government?

Then, review the definitions below - which ones resonate with you? Why?

“A state is a territorially bounded set of relatively

specialized institutions that develop and change over time
in the gaps and fissures of social conflict, compromise, and
cooperation.” — Ruth Wilson Gilmore and Craig Gilmore,
authors of “Restating the Obvious,” in Abolition Geography:
Essays Toward Liberation

“Analytically, states differ from governments: If states are ideological

and institutional capacities that derive their legitimacy and material
wherewithal from residents, governments are animating forces -
policies plus personnel - that put state capacities into motion and
orchestrate or coerce people in their jurisdictions to conduct their
lives according to centrally made and enforced rules.” — Ruth Wilson
Gilmore and Craig Gilmore, authors of “Restating the Obvious,” in
Abolition Geography: Essays Toward Liberation

“centralized political governance: a privileged

“the condensation of a group makes the decisions for everyone else
relationship of forces” and upholds those decisions with military and
— Nicos Poulantzas police forces, the judiciary, and prisons.”
— Klee Benally, (kleebenally.com)

“A technology of extraction”
— Dean Spade, author of Mutual Aid
9

What is the state?

“A parasitic form of “A collection of institutions and

governance…[that] extracts from practices that is shaped by people
poor and working-class people who inhabit and enact them, as
of color through policing, fee and well as by the historical moment,
fine farming, the privatization of place and conditions in which they
public goods, the fining of evolve, rather than a fixed
welfare applicants, and the structure disconnected from the
siphoning of public money into people who make it up.”
the financial sector.” — No More Police
— Jacqueline Wang, author of
Carceral Capitalism (MIT Press
2018)
“The nation-state requires the
dispossession of Indigenous
peoples’ lands and lives; it requires
the destruction of Black peoples’
“..states interact with lives, our flesh, our personhood,
individuals and with other our timelines of otherwise.”
types of institutions (for — Robyn Maynard, co-author of
example, religious, familial, Rehearsals for Living (Haymarket
corporate, union), while at the 2022)
same time seeking to maintain,
through consent or coercion,
supremacy over all other
“A weapon whose design
organizational forms in the
mandates oppression”
social order”
— William C. Anderson, author
— Ruth Wilson Gilmore and
of Nation on No Map: Black
Craig Gilmore, authors of
Anarchism and Abolition (AK
“Restating the Obvious,” in
Press 2021)
Abolition Geography: Essays
Toward Liberation
10

What is the state?

“the state is both a manager of relentless violence and … a mechanism for the
redistribution of hoarded life.” — Eric Stanley, author of Atmospheres of Violence:
Structuring Antagonism and the Trans/Queer Ungovernable (Duke University
Press, 2021)

“The nation-state is an impossible container for us to liberate ourselves within - it

has a necessary border to maintain who belongs and who does not belong. We
need a transnational way of thinking about freedom, not a bordered one.” — Robyn
Maynard, co-author of Rehearsals for Living (Haymarket 2022)

“The carceral state…[is]...the multiple and intersecting state agencies and

institutions (including not-for-profits that do the regulatory work of the state) that
have punishing functions and effectively regulate poor communities: child and
family services, welfare/workfare agencies, public education, immigration, health
and human services, and more.” — Erica Meiners
11

What is the state?

"The state is built within particular political economies to manage

particular economic and political demands of the ruling bloc of society.
It does not exist outside of that political economy context. Which begs
the question about what kind of state from below could be produced
by replacing the economic system of racial capitalism with the
economic system of 21st century socialism? What kind of new social
relations and governance structures would new economic
arrangements and economic logic make possible?" — N’Tanya Lee, co-
founder and National Secretary of LeftRoots.

“The state is not something that can be destroyed by a revolution, but

is a condition, a certain relationship between human beings, a mode of
human behavior; we destroy it by contracting other relationships, by
behaving differently.” — Gustav Landauer

“the state is a contradictory object and subject of struggle. We should

be wary of fetishizing the state. Fascists fetishize the state for a whole
set of purposes; and anti-fascists tend to fetishize the state as well.
The state does not think and do. People in various configurations of
power (including from below) enliven states to think and do.” — Ruth
Wilson Gilmore, Making Abolition Geography in California’s Central
Valley
12

What is the state?

The Cliff Notes*:

Nations are cohesive groups of people who share common values, practices,
languages, histories.

States are sovereign, territorially bounded entities that monopolize certain functions
(use of violence, creation of money, regulation, distribution of resources and
information) within the territory they control and create bureaucracies to implement
their objectives.

A nation-state is a sovereign territorially bounded entity that is formed, populated and

governed by a group of people who share a common national identity (i.e. a nation)

Governments staff state institutions and enact state functions.

* We recognize that these summary definitions do not capture nuances and

differences in how these terms are understood across time and space within
different political economies.

Resources for further study and discussion:

Ruth Wilson Gilmore & Craig Gilmore, Restating the Obvious, in Abolition
Geography: Essays Toward Liberation (Verso Press 2022).
State, an Introduction, libcom.org (with links to additional resources)
Jacqueline Wang, Carceral Capitalism (MIT Press 2018),
see excerpt at thenewinquiry.com/carceral-capitalism
Harsha Walia, Border and Rule (Haymarket Books 2021)
Robyn Maynard and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, Rehearsals for Living
(Haymarket Press 2022)
William C. Anderson, Nation on No Map: Black Anarchism and Abolition
(AK Press 2021)
Abolition Beyond the State, Apr 7, 2021 with Eric Stanley, J. Kēhaulani Kauanui,
Zoé Samudzi, and Sadie Barnette.
Seizing the State with Ruth Wilson Gilmore, September 14, 2022
13

What is the state?

II. Make a list of all the functions you can think of that states currently performs
(i.e. water distribution, public transportation, education, law enforcement,
incarceration, etc).

Then, ask yourself:

Which of these functions do we want states to perform? What do we get from

the state that we cannot directly provide for ourselves and our people?

For the functions you want states to perform, can you imagine a way to perform
them without policing of some kind?

Can you imagine another way of performing the functions you want a state to
perform? What stands in the way?
14

What is the state?

How have we become disconnected from each other and the skills and
relationships we need to support each other directly to survive individually and
collectively? What have we delegated to the state? Why?

Is a nation-state possible without a border and a prison?

What is power? Can we be there for each other without holding power over one
another?

What is the scale at which we are thinking? How can we build the solidarity and
community that we need to scale?

What ways can we organize and make decisions that are in harmony with our
diverse lifeways?
15

What is the state?

“Through the exercise of centralized rulemaking and redistribution, a state’s purpose

(at whatever scale - municipal, county, national and so on) is to secure a society’s
ability to do different kinds of things: such as tax, educate, support, connect, exclude,
criminalize, segregate, equalize, make war, and make profits.”

— Ruth Wilson Gilmore and Craig Gilmore, authors of “Restating the

Obvious,” in Abolition Geography: Essays Toward Liberation

Part of me believes the state will always be repressive and should be overthrown . . . part
of me thinks that if we are stuck with the state, we should demand Medicare for all,
social housing, free college, the cancellation of student debt, and so forth. The anarchist
part of me thinks we should abolish the family. The pragmatist thinks that cash
payments to families could go a long way in ending child poverty. The pragmatist thinks
a federal-jobs guarantee could help a lot of people, the anarchist retorts that we should
abolish work itself. The anarchist part of me believes that mutual aid is necessary for
building collective social bonds, for experimenting with new forms of life, and modes of
being together, modeled on community and care. The pragmatist replies that not
everything can be solved with mutual aid, given the level of investment required to
address environmental racism and upgrade our crumbling toxic infrastructure. For me
the ultimate aim is the abolition of the state as it currently exists…At the same time, I
support the organized provisioning of public goods, though I reject the surveillance
component of the welfare state.
— Jacqueline Wang, author of Carceral Capitalism (MIT Press 2018)

Art by Emily Simons

16

What is the state?

III. Take some time to journal in response to the question:

Do states have a set of essential core characteristics?
(i.e. borders, citizenship, etc.)

Can they be shaped to support abolitionist futures?

Or are states inherently carceral?
Can you think of/imagine an example of an abolitionist state?
17

What is the state?

“Does the state have an essence, or is it a field of contestation

open to revision?” — Jacqueline Wang, author of Carceral
Capitalism (MIT Press 2018)

“Is there an abolitionist form of “stateness”? What might a state

look like if it’s unyoked from the system of racial capitalism and
explicitly organized around abolitionist priorities? Can we shape
the state in a way that’s consistent with abolitionist values,
transforming it into what Angela Y. Davis and the authors of
Abolition. Feminism. Now., building on the work of W.E.B. DuBois,
calls a present-day “abolition democracy”? — No More Police

“The border is less about a politics of movement per se and is

better understood as a key method of imperial state formation,
hierarchical social ordering, labor control, and xenophobic
nationalism.” — Harsha Walia, author of Border and Rule: Global
Migration, Capitalism, and the Rise of Racist Nationalism
(Haymarket Press 2021)
18

What shapes our

understandings of states?
I. Take some time to reflect and journal around the question:
when and how did I first learn about states? What did I learn about them?

How is our understanding of what states are and can be shaped by

the dominance of the US/Western/Global North carceral state?
How does what we know of 20th Century socialist states shape our
understanding of states?
What other historical and contemporaneous state models can we
imagine/learn about?

“Given that Western settler colonial states emerged

for the purpose of wealth accumulation in service of
racial capitalism and imperialism, it is challenging
to disentangle our ideas about the state from the
white supremacy, colonialism, extraction and
exploitation they represent and facilitate.”

— No More Police

Resource:
David Graeber and David Weingrow, The Dawn of Everything
19

What shapes our understandings of states?

II. What do you know about collective governance models that exist
beyond the nation state? How can you learn more?
 20

What shapes our understandings of states?

“non-statist forms of governance are actually

alive today, even within nation-state structures”

- Harsha Walia, author of Border and Rule: Global

Migration, Capitalism, and the Rise of Racist
Nationalism (Haymarket Press 2021)

Art by Emily Simons

Resources:
Paula X. Rojas, Are the Cops in Our Heads and Hearts, Scholar and Feminist Online.
Harsha Walia, Border and Rule: Global Migration, Capitalism, and the Rise of Racist
Nationalism (Haymarket Press 2021)
21

How do we navigate the

state in the meantime?
I. Make a list of how states exercise power to regulate behavior
and distribute resources.

Review your list and identify potential sites of contestation for power - in
other words, where and how can we fight to create conditions for new social
and economic relations and possibilities for collective governance to emerge?

How can we extract power & resources from the carceral state by
organizing to defund & divest from carceral institutions and avoiding
organizing strategies that empower and legitimize the carceral state?
22

How do we navigate the state in the meantime?

How can we bolster institutions that perform functions that

improve material conditions and distribute resources - like
public schools, health care, housing, infrastructure, environmental
protection, corporate regulation - against efforts to dismantle them
from the Right, while simultaneously eliminating their policing
functions?

How do we protect our experiments and efforts to build beyond

the state from state repression? From private interests and
people who would seek to destroy them?

Is all coercive power exercised by the state problematic?

For instance, can we imagine capping carbon extraction & consumption
to stop catastrophic climate change without coercive state action?
How do the ways states are currently responding to climate crises with
increasing securitization/militarization and decreasing care, emergency
services, and disaster relief shape our understandings of what the state
is now, and what potential we think it can have to be a force of care or
support. How should these understandings shape how we engage with
state(s) as we prepare for and respond to emerging crises?
23

How do we navigate the state in the meantime?

“It's important to think about the "If we are stuck with the state form for
state less as a consolidated monolith the time being, then we should do
and more as a terrain of struggle. everything in our power to move
How do we imagine exploiting the resources away from the military and
internal contradictions of the state prison industrial complex and toward
against itself in order to meet our social programs that would enable
goals? How do we pit parts of the people to flourish."
state against one another as part of
an inside/outside strategy to ensure — Jacqueline Wang, author of
that resources do NOT go to more Carceral Capitalism (MIT 2018)
cops, more jails and more prisons,
and to erode their power? That in
and of itself is a victory.” “We need to make demands on the
state that will have maximum
— Woods Ervin, Communications mobilizing effect and make more
Director, Critical Resistance people into active participants who
have the capacity to co-govern our
lives and work”

— Dean Spade, author of Mutual Aid

(AK Press 2021)

Resources:
So is this Actually an Abolitionist Proposal or Strategy? bit.ly/OrganizingBinder
The Demand is Still Defund the Police, bit.ly/DefundPoliceUpdate
What’s Next? Safer and More Just Communities Without Policing, bit.ly/WhatsNextGuide
Navigating Public Safety Task Forces, bit.ly/NavigatingTF
24

Moving Within, Against,

and Beyond the State
We can learn from frameworks, elaborated by organizers in the Global
South resisting neoliberalism and most recently popularized in the U.S. by
the group Mijente, which focus simultaneously on:

contesting for power within the state,

defending our communities against the state, and
dreaming beyond the state to create more conditions of possibility, to
imagine new forms of governance that bring us closer to abolitionist
futures, to create fertile ground on which to practice them, and to build
the skills, relationships and infrastructure needed to increase our
collective chances of survival and well-being.

In the video Building Power Sin, Contra, y Desde el Estado (Building Power
Without, Against, and Beyond the State), Mijente defines these
simultaneous approaches as follows:

“Moving without the state [means] understanding in our bones

that the state is not a legitimate mediator between us and
the land, each other, our livelihoods, or our belonging.”

“Defending our wins and the dignity of our people.”

“Using the tools and resources that exist within the state to
benefit the many, and not just the few…bring back the tools for
our people, who are often excluded from government, to
participate and lead. Using the mechanisms of the state to
protect and build the power of the people.”

“We are not just waiting for the state to meet our demands, we
are taking what is rightfully ours…We need what they’re taking,
and more, to get their damn boots off our necks and to get the
support for our lives we need.”
25

Moving Within, Against, and Beyond the State

This approach problematizes the state, and the corporate interests it

represents, and the system of racial capitalism it upholds, without limiting
the field of contestation or exercise of power to the state, and intentionally
creates spaces to experiment, practice, and expand our capacity to
collectively govern ourselves beyond the nation-state.

It invites us to draw on the best thinking of multiple political tendencies and

understandings of the state, and to focus more specifically on the process of
transition to the world we want - how do we meet our individual and collective
needs now? How do we expand our imaginations and experiment with
different approaches to governance? How do we extract power and resources
from the state to make them real? How do we defend our communities? How
do we organize ourselves into the societies we want?

And, it is essential that we deploy these strategies in close coordination -

otherwise, it is possible that organizing within the state can undermine or
operate at cross-purposes to organizing against and beyond the state,
including by creating conditions that make it more difficult to practice and
experiment with new forms of governance beyond the state. For instance,
organizing within the state can:

Legitimize harmful practices like surveillance, policing, punishment, family

regulation and separation, exclusion of non-citizens, and restrictive
conditions on social benefits and entitlements;
Create categories of people who can and can’t engage in certain kinds of
activities. For instance, legalizing marijuana under state regulation can
create conditions under which individuals operating beyond state-approved
institutions and regulations are criminalized. Strict regulation of health care
provision has excluded traditional midwives and doulas.
Create bureaucracies that interfere with our ability to adapt and meet
people’s needs directly in ways that reflect their particular needs and
conditions.
26

Moving Within, Against, and Beyond the State

Illustrated by Noah Jodice

Resources for further reflection:

Paula X. Rojas, Are the Cops in Our Heads and Hearts,
Scholar and Feminist Online;
Mijente, Building Power Sin, Contra, y Desde el Estado
(Building Power Without, Against, and Beyond the State)
Mijente, Sin El Que?
27

What lies beyond the nation-state?

What forms of governance make abolitionist futures more possible?
How are we practicing/can we practice them?

What possibilities lie in engaging the state at regional and local levels?

How might municipalism offer new paths forward? To what extent do we see
actors within municipalist movements in Jackson, MS or Barcelona, Spain
working against the nation-state? To what extent are those efforts
compromised, or even doomed from the beginning?

How can we practice new forms of governance beyond the state through
organizing, collective care, mutual aid and transformative justice?
28

What lies beyond the nation-state?

Art by Emily Simons

“Defund campaigns can be places to build power to

liberate resources from the state and to practice
governance and liberation at the same time.”

— Jamel Campbell-Gooch, Black Nashville Assembly

“How do we prepare for the life we want to live? What is the work of liberation?
What is the psychic work, the relational work, the institutional processes that
need to take place in, around and between us for that liberation to manifest?
What kind of schooling and skilling or readying is necessary to practice self-
governance? What do we need to make way for liberatory relationships?”

— Kelly Gillespie and Leigh-Ann Naidoo

Resources:
“The Municipalist Moment,” Dissent, www.dissentmagazine.org/article/the-municipalist-
moment
The People’s Movement Assembly, www.peoplesmovementassembly.org/
Black National Assembly, www.blacknashvilleassembly.org/
Jackson People’s Assembly, https://jxnpeoplesassembly.org/about/
Dean Spade, Mutual Aid (AK Press 2021)
MST (Movimiento Sin Terra), https://mst.org.br/english/ and
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AgZj4YgYqsc ( Portuguese)
29

How Do Our Responses

Shape What We Do Now?

Make a list of your current organizing strategies and demands.

How do they align with your responses to the questions above?
30

Acknowledgements

This discussion tool was developed and drafted by Andrea J.

Ritchie in collaboration with Mariame Kaba, drawing from their

co-authored book No More Police: A Case for Abolition and a

series of conversations hosted by Interrupting Criminalization in

2021 and 2022 on the role of the state in abolitionist futures.

Deep gratitude to everyone who took the time to review and

offer comments on it, including Ruth Wilson Gilmore and Craig

Gilmore, Trishala Deb, Woods Ervin, Jacinta Gonzalez, Mimi Kim,

N'Tanya Lee, Dean Spade, Maria Thomas, and Harsha Walia, Kelly

Gillespie, Leigh-Ann Naidoo, and Lewis Raven Wallace, and to all

of the brilliant thinkers whose wisdom is quoted in it, and to Eva

Nagao (creative direction) & Emma Li (design) for making it

beautiful.

Illustrated & designed by Emma Mei Li

www.tigerstepmom.com
wwww.interruptingcriminalization.com