Unconscious Abolitionism: Beyond the Reform or Revolution Debate

I had the uncommon pleasure of hearing Ruth Wilson Gilmore speak twice last semester, once at my alma matter and once at a conference.

In speaking about the then-ongoing Chicago Teachers’ Strike, Gilmore remarked that ‘whether they knew it or not, the Chicago teachers were doing the work of abolition.’

In its immediate context, it seemed that Gilmore was referring to the way in which fighting for social reforms, like access to healthcare or education or housing, redirects budgetary expenditures away from policing and prisons. Or, moreover, that, in militating for increased access to social institutions, the CTU was refusing neoliberal austerity, cutting at the logic of what Beth Richie has called “the prison nation,” which requires a deeply punitive societal orientation toward marginalized peoples in general as one precondition for the dizzying rate of incarceration.

Gilmore’s comment provoked a new insight: we who are involved in the fight for social justice often understand that it is not only possible but likely, that one can do the work of oppression without knowing it; we rarely consider the reverse: the idea that one could be doing the work of abolition or liberation without knowing it.

We have good reasons to think that we can and often do the work of oppression without knowing it. Indeed, this propensity is what the concept of ideology intends to mark – because ideas are social and material,  the repressive and oppressive structures of the world give rise to ideas that legitimate rather than challenge this order. The concept of ideology is at work across multiple theories of power including the Marxist-Althusserian version (capitalism generates ideology), the Foucauldian version (power works best when it hides itself), as well as in various liberation movements grounded in identity politics. Multiple approaches to organizing prioritize consciousness-raising as a strategy precisely because we recognize that it is possible for people to enact and confirm structures of oppression without knowing it. Consciousness-raising as the central facet of organizing is grounded in the idea that through greater knowledge about structures of domination will come greater resistance.

Less often considered, however, is the provocative idea that without knowing it, people could also be doing the work of liberation.

This is a somewhat different claim to the one made by Rancière and the multiple movements that denounce the elitism of certain forms of consciousness-raising. They argue that workers already know they are exploited, and that, à la Freire, somewhere deep inside oppressed people is the understanding of their own oppression, even if they don’t express that in the kind of jargon-laden language theorists would recognize. Another version of this approach can be found in feminist and woman of color theories of experiential knowledge like standpoint epistemology that position those who experience oppression as its experts. Women are the experts on sexism, just as people of color are the experts on racism, whether or not they express this knowledge in the same terms or with the same kind of analysis that academic specialists in these fields would. But in this approach, the assumption is that people really do know when and how they are doing the work of liberation; their knowledge is just often denied and mischaracterized because of the epistemological violence that ruling ideas enact.

Gilmore’s claim is different than any of these: it is that we might be doing the work of liberation without any knowledge of it at all, that in fact, we might even intend to do the opposite, that we could be contributing to abolition or liberation, despite ourselves.

This insight helps us interrupt the idea that activist work is somehow unproblematically clear, that is, in an ironic inversion of Marx’s dictum, that ‘activists make their own history exactly as they choose.’ But of course, they/we don’t; we all live in a world of futural wagers and unintended consequences, and under such conditions, it must at least be possible that at least some of the time, even if only a minute portion of the time, those unintended consequences advance radical political projects rather than hinder them.

But Gilmore’s claim goes deeper: coalitional politics, especially with ‘unlikely partners’ depends on the idea that it is possible to do radical work without knowing it.

Coalitional politics depends for its success on bringing together strange partnerships and improbable alliances. Coalition work is often understood as a matter of expediency, meaning that radical groups often strategically assess that, in order to win their campaign, they might need to work with other groups whose interests momentarily converge even if, in the long term, their visions remain antagonistic to one another. This is sometimes the case in coalitional politics. But under this conceptualization, working with these groups can only be thought of as a kind of unfortunate but necessary recognition of internal weakness.

Such a view of coalition work implicitly revives the binaristic framing of ‘Reform or Revolution’, a framing that pits one strategy against the other as antagonistic forces. While in the grand scheme of political orientation, this antagonism might be necessary (it is very different to have a reformist horizon of politics rather than a revolutionary one), decades of theorists and organizers have argued that in practice, the lines are not always so clear; some reforms are revolutionary. Revolutions certainly entail passing for and fighting for reforms. Only accelerationists doubt this. The question is whether or how one engages with the process of fighting for reforms: how does a campaign for reforms build toward revolution? What kinds of commitments are we bringing to a campaign? What is our horizon of vision? How can we engage with reforms-based campaigns to make the argument that wins are only secure under a system structured otherwise?

If we reject the reform-or-revolution framing, embracing rather a reform-toward-revolution perspective, then the question of coalition-building under these conditions shifts. The project of building unlikely coalition partners is not only a calculative question (though surely it partially remains that); it also becomes a question of how to bring people into liberationist and abolitionist politics, perhaps even without them knowing it (or perhaps, in the best-case scenario, coming to know it through the process of political work).

If it is possible to engage in a reform-toward-revolution politics, then coalition partners may be participating in a political process that does the revolutionary work of abolitionist liberation without knowing it. In this sense, anyone who contributes to the reform part of the reform-towards-revolution strategy may be an unknowing accomplice in the struggle for abolition and total liberation. Much of intersectional and transnational feminist scholarship has emphasized the power and necessity of working in these kinds of coalitions. This has been a common theme in the work of Chandra Mohanty, Angela Davis, and Elizabeth Martínez, among many others.

This epistemological insight is crucial for engaging in political struggle in an engaged way that refuses to engage either in a navel-gazing politics of purity or in a tepid vision of lowest common denominator thinking.

Much of the last few decades on the US radical left has been oriented around biting sectarianism over conflicts frequently more theoretical than practical. Movement work has been, in many spaces, oriented towards preaching the good word about whichever evil we are fighting at the moment, often to less than sympathetic ears. For those of us scholar-activists who spend much of our time in the classroom, many of us have spent the last years constructing syllabi designed, explicitly or implicitly, to convince our students of the ‘right’ way to think about social problems. In other words, in our organizations, in our classrooms, and in the streets, the left often acts as if, in true Gramscian style, it is fighting a ‘war of position.’ This both-and approach to politics I suggest here entails re-assessing many assumptions about the role of theory and analysis in social movement work.

In one way, I’m sympathetic to the claim that radical ideas need to be more widely available; I’m no critic of left propaganda. But the assumption that radical ideas alone will unproblematically lead to the implementation of those ideas is a thoroughly idealist understanding of the relationship between thought and practice. After all, the 11^th thesis didn’t read ‘Philosophers have yet only interpreted the world, and that’s all that was needed in the end.’

Ideas are important. Theories are important. Values and commitments are important.

The problem is: they aren’t enough.

I see that more and more often, my students enter my classroom with a highly developed critical analysis. They are conversant in intersectionality. They know human beings don’t belong in cages. They want to decolonize everything. They, like so many young people, oppose capitalism.

All of that is to say that despite the increasing acceptability of leftist positions and an increasing cultural facility with radical concepts, neoliberal settler colonial capitalism seems to be accelerating rather than in a period of decline. And part of the explanation of this phenomenon is that merely holding the ‘right’ positions isn’t enough on its own to unmake the deep-seated structures of oppression and exploitation in the world. Holding the ‘right’ political positions isn’t even enough to prevent us from reproducing the harms of the systems that made us. This phenomenon is particularly striking in academia, where revolutionary pronouncements are valued, but the expectation is that we all continue acting in line with the reactionary structures of the feudal-cum-neoliberal structure that constitutes contemporary academia. And in activist spaces this is no less true; as putatively radical groups contend with the multiple ways in which racism, sexism, transphobia, ableism, and Islamophobia continue to plague spaces that understand themselves to hold liberation politics.

For those of us who are both scholars and activists, the impact of the idea that one can do liberatory work without knowing it is crucial. For those of us who teach philosophies of liberation, Gilmore’s insight should have wide-ranging effects on our pedagogy. As philosophers in the current conjuncture, it’s imperative that when we think about what it means to change the world, we don’t limit the horizon of our thinking to promulgating radical ideas or developing ever-subtler analyses of the world. We do need radical ideas, sensitive analysis, and bombastic, galvanizing theory. It’s just not the only thing we need.

We need abolitionism and projects of liberation that proclaim themselves as such; we might just also need a world in which people do the work of abolitionism without knowing it.

Ashley J. Bohrer is an academic and activist based in Chicago. She holds a Ph.D. in philosophy and currently serves as Assistant Professor of Gender and Peace Studies at the University of Notre Dame. Her book, Marxism and Intersectionality: Race, Class, Gender, and Sexuality under Contemporary Capitalism, was recently published by Columbia University Press.

The Women in Philosophy series publishes posts on women in the history of philosophy, posts on issues of concern to women in the field of philosophy, and posts that put philosophy to work to address issues of concern to women in the wider world. If you are interested in writing for the series, please contact the Series Editor Adriel M. Trott.