Angela Y. Davis: The Meaning of Freedom: And Other Difficult Dialogues. San Francisco: City Light Books, 2012. (Hereinafter designated as MF.)
Angela Y. Davis: Freedom Is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine, and the Foundations of a Movement. Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2016. (Hereinafter designated as FICS.)
Angela Y. Davis, Gina Dent, Erica R. Meiners, and Beth E. Richie: Abolition. Feminism. Now. Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2022. (Hereinafter designated as AFN.)
Angela Davis became one of the most prominent participants in the New Left movement of the 1960s, a status for which she was well-prepared. The daughter of Communist Party members, she studied with Herbert Marcuse at Brandeis University and later at the University of California, San Diego. Marcuse arranged for her to study with another celebrated Frankfurt School neo-Marxist, Theodor Adorno, who had returned to Germany from the United States after the Second World War.
The ‘neo’ in neo-Marxism derives from its expansion of the field of Marxist dialectic. Marx held that the course of human events proceeds ‘dialectically’—specifically, through the ‘contradiction’ or struggle between a socio-economic ruling class and a rival class which challenges its rule. Social and political phenomena other than class—contradictions between or among ideas, countries, races, and the sexes are driven by the class struggle, which unfolds according to the Hegelian thesis-antithesis-synthesis logic according to rationally (and indeed scientifically) ascertainable laws toward a predictable conclusion: worldwide communism, which issues from a previously triumphant worldwide socialist state. There had been socialists before; Marx’s proudest claim was that he was the first genuinely scientific socialist, no mere sentimental dreamer.
A couple of decades into the twentieth century, however, some Marxists began to have doubts. True, the Russian Communist Party had founded a socialist ‘dictatorship of the proletariat,’ but the expected revolution had stalled. The Great War hadn’t sparked the expected revolution in Europe. And in the more thoroughgoingly capitalist major European countries—Great Britain, France, and above all Germany—there were communists, to be sure, but no revolution. The Great Depression seemed to portend the predicted collapse, but despite Stalin’s maneuvers, capitalism rebounded triumphantly in the years following the Second World War, limited not by economic weakness but by the political control of Eastern and Central Europe and China by communist parties.
It had become harder to argue that economic struggle understood as ‘dialectical materialism’ adequately explained, let alone predicted, ‘history’ or the course of events. Some of the supposedly derivative ‘cultural’ factors looked as if they had the status of independent or perhaps interdependent variables. How ‘scientific’ Marxism really be? How materialistic should it be? The neo-Marxists began to take ‘culture’ more seriously; Marcuse, for example, added Freudian psychoanalysis to the toolkit. The socialism and the yearning for communism remained, as did the dialectic. The ‘harder’ dimensions of Marxist thought were supplemented.
As Davis writes in the 1990s, when socialism again had stalled after the collapse of the Soviet empire, “the crisis has been produced in part by our failure to develop a meaningful and collective historical consciousness”; “transformed circumstances require new theories and practices” (MF 19). To be sure, the new theories and practices must not issue from any one thinker or practitioner. That would only reinforce the grip of capitalism, even if intended to oppose it. “Social meanings are always socially constructed, but we cannot leave it up to the state to produce these meanings, because we are always encouraged to conceptualize change only as it effects individuals,” a tendency “not unrelated to the possessive individualism of capitalism” (MF 132). She might have added that the one undeniably great literary figure ‘produced’ by the centralized state of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn—a decidedly great individual, and one decidedly unsympathetic to the state socialism which had ‘produced’ the Gulag Archipelago. She needs a socialism that does not depend upon any state, a socialism that does not need the dialectical clash between the ‘capitalist’ states and the (now failed) ‘socialist’ ones to emerge triumphant, a socialism that emerges from the civil societies framed by modern states and may not go through a ‘statist’ phase at all to reach fruition. Indeed, it may never reach fruition at all, instead resisting long-lasting institutional structures, remaining in a condition of joyful Heraclitean flow—the notion of ‘permanent revolution’ advocated (although she doesn’t mention it) Leon Trotsky, not Lenin, Stalin, or Mao.
Davis retains Marxist historicism. When Hillary Clinton ran in the Democratic Party primary against Barack Obama in 2008, she reacted to the slogan “Black Lives Matter” by insisting that “all lives matter.” Davis pounces: “Does she not realize the extent to which such universal proclamations have always bolstered racism?” (FICS 87). For example, to say with the American Founders that “all men are created equal” has in practice meant that women, “people of color,” and other groups were regarded as less than fully human. This exemplifies “the tyranny of the universal,” whereby apparently abstract moral claims have “been colored white and gendered male.” Not universal nature but concrete history is the better source of moral and political guidance. As a young student reading Frederick Douglass’s autobiography, “I had not yet learned how to recognize the extent yet which the equivalence of ‘freedom’ and ‘manhood’ meant that women were excluded by definition from enjoying the full benefits of freedom.” Thankfully, “my training in German philosophy” eventually gave her “the conceptual tools that allowed me to analyze the complex trajectories from bondage to freedom (using, for example, Hegel’s approach to the relationship between master and slave in the Phenomenology of Mind)” (MF 194) undermined her esteem for Douglass’s natural-rights convictions, although it took the experience of incarceration and her study of the role of American slave women in their communities which brought a new ‘consciousness’ of the ineluctable historicity of human life.
Hence “we” (i.e., Davis and her fellow neo-Marxists) “are interested not in race and gender (and class and sexuality and disability) per se, by themselves, but primarily as they have been acknowledged as conditions for hierarchies of power, so that we can transform them into intertwined vectors of struggle for freedom” (MF 197). Power: The Nietzschean, more than the original Marxist socioeconomic framework, frames neo-Marxist analysis, but of course neo-Marxists seldom openly profess their indebtedness to Nietzsche’s thought, with its hope for a ‘planetary aristocracy.’ It is a quasi-Nietzschean analysis with Marxist characteristics, at the service of a radical egalitarianism. Because “social realities always exceed the categories that attempt to contain them,” “we keep changing our vocabularies” (MF 198). This means that the Marxist claim that ‘history’ marches toward a predetermined ‘end’ disappears; neither state socialism nor the state capitalism that defeated it in the late 1990s is the ‘end of history.’ Francis Fukuyama is as mistaken as Marx. She prefers W. E. B. DuBois in his later, Communist Party, days, whose “theory of history” “relied neither on teleology—the idea that human history would inevitably lead toward social improvement—nor [Heaven forfend!] theology,” divine providence (AFN 56). Davis remains a steadfast Communist Party operative in at least one way: “Despite its failure to build lasting democratic structures, socialism nevertheless demonstrated its superiority over capitalism on several accounts: the ability to provide free education, low-cost housing, jobs, free childcare, free health care, etc.” (MF 33). That this is nonsense, a reprise of Soviet propaganda, does not faze her.
This air of unreality is in a way principled. Having rejected the historicist rationalism of Hegel and the historicist scientistic materialism of Marx, Davis needs some other intellectual guidepost for her own non-teleological historicism. She finds it in imagination. “A necessary step to winning greater freedom and greater justice is to image the world as we want it to be,” to “imagine a world without war,” without prisons and police, and without social, economic, and political hierarchies of any kind (MF 132-133). In this, she is very much a child of the Sixties, replacing Lenin with Lennon, scientific socialism with Beatlemania socialism. We must “transcend the limits of nationalist patriotism in order to imagine ourselves as citizens of the globe,” a globe apparently to be devoid of national states or even a world state (MF 149).
This leads to some fascinating historical imaginings. We should “use our imaginations to try to come up with versions of democracy in which, for example, the practice of Islam does not serve as a pretext for incarceration in an immigration detention facility or in a military prison” (MF 149). Since the practice of Islam isn’t the reason for such incarceration—suspicion of links to Islamic terrorist organizations is—it doesn’t take much imagination to conceive of due process of law, which has proved rather more difficult to obtain under socialist regimes than under democratic-capitalist ones. Imagination can also lead one to fanciful conclusions in historical research, as when the Marxist historian Orlando Patterson, cited approvingly by Davis, claims that “the very concept of freedom must have been first imagined by slaves” (FICS 67).
Whereas Marx and his followers scorned utopian socialism, the valorization of imagination enables Davis to exult in it. “We ardently embrace” the “utopian dimension” of the movement to abolish prisons, for example (AFN 15). But this dreaming is doable. “Far from utopian, this world is ready at hand, already underway” in the practice of neo-Marxian socialists, who continue to develop, dialectically, “political methods and practices” fitted “for these times” (AFN 1-2). These new and ever-renewing practices recognize, uncover, and forge “interconnections of race, class, gender, sexuality” against “racism, sexism, and imperialism” (FICS 18). There have been “those of us who by virtue of our experience, not so much by virtue of academic analyses, recognized that we had to figure out a way to bring these issues together” (FICS 19). Since there is “no finish line, no firm resolute end” to these interconnections and these struggles against power hierarchies, “we are our road map” (AFN 166). Admittedly, “the dominant power structures will attempt—often successfully—to absorb our labor and demands” with tactics of co-optation, “yet we still forge new language and practices, and we work, anyway,” inviting others to “write and to organize,” as “freedom is a constant struggle” (AFN 172-173). The eschaton of the ‘Left’ historicism is at once imagined and fully immanent.
This gives Davis plenty of room to say more or less anything she wants. She may well like it that way. Although she associated herself with the New Left, she maintained her ties with the Old Left, running as the vice-presidential candidate of CPUSA on two occasions and happily receiving the Lenin Peace Prize from the Soviet Union in 19XX. As Soviet propagandists would say, that was no accident. And she remains unapologetic. “During the McCarthy era, communism was established as the enemy of the nation and came to be represented as the enemy of the ‘free world'” (MF 41). One must pause to admire the tactical use of the passive voice and of scare quotes in that sentence. But to continue: “Because of the moral panic that proclaimed communists to be enemies of the state, countless numbers of institutions were purged of communists, their allies, and people who simply believed in democracy” (MF 75). The fact that the genocidal tyrant Josef Stalin remained at the head of the Soviet Union during the “McCarthy era” remains absent from the Davis radar screen, decades after even the few remaining Old Leftists have admitted his crimes.
Later, during the civil rights movement, “many of us thought we were changing the world,” “joining the revolutionary impulse that was happening around the world” in Cuba and in “the liberation movements in Africa and Latin America” (MF 131). That is, by “revolutionary impulse” Davis means Castroite tyranny and the tyrannies desired by other Soviet-backed “liberation movements.”
Later, “the U.S. war in Vietnam lasted as long as it did because it was fueled by a public fear of communism,” a fear stoked by “the government and the media,” entities that “led the public to believe that that the Vietnamese were their enemy,” that “defeat of the racialized communist enemy in Vietnam would ameliorate U.S. people’s lives and make them feel better about themselves” (MF 42). Communism, you see, was really the friend of the American people; to think otherwise was to become a dupe of capitalist propaganda. (“Karl Marx revealed the manipulations underlying the equation of capitalism and democracy in chapter 6 of Volume I of Capital“) (MF 102). When South Vietnamese people took to seas to escape the Communist takeover, Davis must have been distracted by some more pressing issue.
This means that interpreting Davis’s writings requires a dual task. One must attend to the arguments she actually makes and respond to them in the terms she makes them—a duty owed to any writer. One must also keep in mind the distinct possibility that this is only her latest ‘line,’ a rhetorical adaptation to current circumstances.
One of those circumstances is “the rise of global capitalism and related ideologies associated with neoliberalism” (FICS 1). In Marx’s time, and even in Davis’s earlier career, most capitalist corporations did the bulk of their business within the borders of their home country; even the major corporations were limited in their scope to ‘the capitalist world,’ largely excluded from ‘the socialist world.’ Now, the operations of those corporations are much more thoroughly worldwide in scope. At the same time, the corporations continue to promote “capitalist individualism”—holding up an Elon Musk, a Steve Jobs, for public honor, as an estimable human ‘type,’ a model of what a person should be. This also permits capitalists to perpetuate its system of law enforcement and punishment of those ‘criminalized’ by it. For example, campaigns “to convict individual police of white supremacist, misogynist, and transphobic ‘bad act’ have not resulted in contracting the power of policing or rendering it less repressive” (AFN 153). Only a mindset free of individualism will bring the downfall of capitalism and its ideology.
“This insidious promotion of capitalist individualism” presents “dangers” to the human race. Because “U.S. corporations have economically undermined local economies through ‘free trade’ agreements, structural adjustment, and the influence of such international financial institutions as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund,” tens of thousands of displaced persons leave their homelands, “often travel[ing] along the same routes that have been carved out by migrating corporations,” “simply retrac[ing]” those routes “in reverse,” only to be faced with criminal charges when they attempt to enter the United States (MF 47, 64). “It is the homelessness of global capital that is responsible for so many of the problems people are experiencing throughout the world,” as the corporations “evade prohibitions against cruel, dehumanizing, and exploitative labor practices”—a “freedom to do virtually anything in the name of maximizing profits” (MF 64). [1] That is, what parades as individualism lurks as corporatism.
It also parades as democracy. “Our system of capitalism eschews economic democracy even as it proclaims itself to be the vanguard of democracy around the world” (MF 102). By economic democracy Davis means the provision of ‘free’ education and health care, “services we all should be able to claim by virtue of our humanity” (MF 102). To be sure, publicly funded education already exists in the United States and Europe, but “a juggernaut of privatization of public services” in the Southern Hemisphere threatens them there, and even in the United States rumblings about privatizing Social Security may be heard. “As crucial as voting rights may be”—that “may” in tantalizing—we “have long recognized that the right to vote by itself does not guarantee democracy,” “since elections can be subordinated to the power of money” (MF 90). Such are the ways of “bourgeois democracy” (AFN 46).
All this was understood by W. E. B. DuBois (again, in his later, Marxist phase), as seen in his 1935 book, Black Reconstruction in America. As Davis summarizes his argument, when the postwar Reconstruction of the political regime of the former slave states was terminated in 1877, “the crushing force of the property-holding elites” quickly prevailed in the American South in the form of laws enforcing racial segregation in a way that subordinated the ex-slaves. (AFN 54). DuBois saw that “capitalism cannot be understood outside of a relationship of power and race” (AFN 55). True revolutionaries must understand that “it is inevitable that mainstream political responses to [social-justice] movements will attempt to reject radical understandings of social problems such as he the prison crisis and the gender violence pandemic” (AFN164). The existing regime of worldwide capitalist oligarchy must be replaced, not reformed.
Appeals to nationalism will fuel the capitalists’ resistance, although they themselves have not a patriotic bone in their bodies. According to Davis, the Bush Administration’s ‘War on Terror’ was racist, having nothing to do with Muslim fanaticism (MF 75-76). Oh, “how quickly so many people who considered themselves to be progressive and radical took refuge in this idea that we as Americans had to consolidate ourselves as a militarized nation, which inevitably meant excluding all of those who were not Americans” (MF 112)—although in fact immigration continued under tighter restrictions. But don’t interfere when Davis is on a roll: We should have “reflect[ed] on community formations that extend beyond the borders of the nation” (MF (73), “imagining ourselves as citizens of the planet” (MF 98). If one were to answer that American policymakers did in fact do as Davis recommends, “reach out and create community with people in other regions of the world” against the terrorists (MF 73), well, that was the wrong kind of networking, networking among capitalist regimes. Against “the circuits of capital” we need “other kinds of globalities,” globalities “disentangled from the agendas of global capitalism” (MF 98). Such “new social relations are possible,” linking “human beings around the planet not by the commodities some produce and others consume, but rather by equality and solidarity and cooperation and respect,” relations defined by “a radical multiculturalism” (MF 102). Why are they possible? She does not say. It is a matter of the imagination, again.
Racism is the enemy of radical-socialist multiculturalism. While legal racial segregation no longer exists in the United States, “deep structural and institutional” racism remains (MF 129). Her main evidence of this is the differences among incarceration rates among the black, Hispanic, and white populations. According to a 1991 study, 5.1% of all U.S. citizens would be imprisoned at some point in their lives, if current rates of incarceration held—9% of all men, 1.1% of all women. (Davis doesn’t hold this up as evidence of bias against men, for some reason.) Of the men 16.2% were black, 9.4% were Hispanic, 2.5% were white. One problem with using statistics this way is that things may change; they did. And not the way Davis wanted her readers to believe. “If trends continue,” she wrote, “50 percent of young black men could be behind bars in ten years’ time,” and “in another twenty-five years it might be as much as 75%” (MF 29). She is counting on readers not knowing that simply extending a line on a statistical chart often does not result in an accurate prediction of future events. It didn’t. Between 2006 and 2020, incarceration rates fell in all racial categories, 34% among blacks, 26% among Hispanics, 17% among whites. Blacks still go to prison more often than Hispanics or whites, but that may be a measure of crime, not of racism. The same 1991 study also anticipated that five out of six Americans would be victims of violent crime at some point in their lives, so the desire of the general population to lock violent criminals away may well register an interest in self-defense rather than prejudice. Don’t think that way; not when Davis stands by to assert, “Prisons are racism incarnate” (FICS 107).
No such thoughts enter Davis’s mind. According to her, resistance to crime has “already become so implicitly racialized that it is no longer necessary to use racial markers” when talking in favor of it (MF 27). President Bill Clinton, for example, “is lauded as the quintessential warrior against crime, with his shrewdly racist policies divested of all explicit racial content,” policies concealed by “a rhetoric that focuses on victims of crime” (MF 24). Clinton used the murder of a “white girlchild” by a white man as his example of the kind of violent crime he intended to fight, but no matter: “there is enough socially constructed fear of crime entangled in the national imagination with the fear of black men” that the murderer was “perceived as one white face representing a sea of black men who, in the collective mind’s eye, comprise the criminal element” (MF 24). Hence “law-and-order discourse is racist” MF 30). No one can accuse Davis of being unclever, although one must note that in this instance she presents “imagination” as malign. Orthodox Marxism reigned in imaginings of all sorts by its (attempted) rationalism, its claims about the iron laws of history, its dialectics. The only discipline imagination finds in Davis’s thought is the rhetorical exigencies of the moment.
Such imagining may be seen in her racialized account of the Union victory in the Civil War. Following W. E. B. Du Bois’s argument, she claims that “it was the decision on the part of slaves to emancipate themselves and to join the Union Army—both women and men—that was primarily responsible for the victory over slavery” (FICS 36, italics added). This, Du Bois and Davis claim was a successful “general strike”—an anticipation of workers of the world uniting—which transferred the slave’s labor “from the Confederate planter to the Northern invader” and “won the war” (FICS 70). This rather minimizes the role of the white Union troops, who did most of the dying and, even more pertinently, most of the killing of Confederate soldiers in that war.
No matter to Davis, she’s on to a larger point. “Black struggle in the US serves as an emblem of the struggle for freedom” in all areas—not only race but struggles over class and gender (FICS 39). “Black history, whether here in North America, or in Africa, or in Europe, has always been infused with a spirit of resistance, an activist spirit of protest and transformation” (FISC 112). [2] Indeed, “people all over the world have been inspired by the Black freedom movement to forge activist movements addressing oppressive conditions in their own countries,” whether in South Africa, in India, or in Palestine (FICS 114). In turn, the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King “was inspired by Gandhi” (FISC 114). This is the new Internationale Davis would oppose to the international capitalist networks. Those networks in the United States do not merely incarcerate. They kill, massively. We know this because in 1951Communist Party attorney William L. Patterson and Communist Party member Paul Robeson submitted a petition, “signed by luminaries such as W. E. B. Du Bois,” “charging genocide with respect to Black people in the US” (FICS 132). The petition received backing from the Soviet Union and its satellites, then commanded by Comrade Stalin, criticism of whom for actual commissions of genocide was, she has assured us, little more than McCarthyite capitalist propaganda.
When it comes to ‘gender,’ Davis admits that she and her fellow Communists were a bit late to the game. “There was some measure of resistance from women of color, and also poor and working-class white women, to identify with the emergent feminist movement,” which initially seemed “too white and especially too middle class, too bourgeois” (FICS 95). But eventually her native ingenuity didn’t fail her. “Anticapitalist, antiracist internationalism” could be brought to drive feminism in resistance to “heteropatriarchy” (AFN 91, 95). Yes, “the more closely we examine it, the more we discover that [gender] is embedded in a range of social, political, cultural, and ideological formations” (FICS 101), “so much more than gender equality” but “involv[ing] a consciousness of capitalism, and racism, and colonialism and postcolonialities, and ability, and more genders than we can even imagine, and more sexualities than we ever thought we could name” (FICS 104). This is the new way to understand “the old feminist adage that ‘the personal is the political,'” a new pathway toward “recraft[ing] ourselves” (FICS 105). The effort at conquering nature, especially human nature, based not only on class struggle but on denying the primacy of male-female sexuality is “a Marxist-inflected feminist insight,” after all, with a dash of Foucault’s critique of the “carceral state” (FICS 106). What this new, anti-bourgeois feminism must resist is the tendency to desire the incarceration of “those who engage in gender violence” (i.e., rapists); such feminists only “do the work of the state”—the capitalist state (FICS 138).
What is needed, Davis contends, is “abolition feminism,” by which she means a feminism that aims at ending the prison system of the capitalist state; “gender justice will not be realized without the incorporation of abolition praxis” (AFN 82). “Women have always been the major supporters of those in prison not only as organizers, but also as anchors of families and kinship networks deeply affected by incarceration practices. This is especially true of women of color.” (AFN 45). Prison abolition forms the centerpiece of Davis’s project of neo-Marxist regime change.
Why prisons? Because a critique of prisons “can help promote an anticapitalist critique and movements toward socialism,” a “society in which people’s needs, not profits, constitute the driving force” (FICS 6-7). Imprisonment, you see, is a strategy of “bourgeois democracy” (AFN 46) to deflect attention away from the “underlying social problems” of “racism, poverty, unemployment, lack of education” (FICS 6). Once again, Du Bois saw it. “His analysis” in Black Reconstruction in America “offers a challenge both to historians of the period and for the present in which he wrote” (AFN 55). He “call[ed] for dismantling institutions that are overtly causing social and civil death” by “broadening the liberatory agenda to include apparatuses of oppression beyond those specifically understood to be carceral” but at the same time “linking contemporary abolition praxis—or theory plus action and reflection—to questions of racial capitalism,” all seen “with an internationalist lens” and “always hinged to challenging capitalism” (AFN 55). [3]
Why capitalism, specifically? Because the “conception of justice” seen in “bourgeois democracy” “assumes that justice is retributive,” that “punishment is the very essence of justice,” a “proportional punishment” intended to rebalance “the aftermath of harm” (AFN 47). But this isn’t justice; it is only vengeance. And it is capitalistic vengeance because it is “individualistic,” focused on the criminal and his victim “in isolation from larger social contexts” in which alleged crimes are committed (AFN 47). We Marxists must “convinc[e] enough people that crime [is] not the unqualified cause of punishment” and (linking this now also to feminism) “central to this process of rearticulation [is] the recognition that race, gender, class, and sexuality were more important determinants of who goes to prison than simply the commission of a crime”; “this is especially true of women, both cisgender and trans[-gendered]” (AFN 47). This, Davis avers, is so much so that people in prison should be called “criminalized,” not “criminal” (AFN 48). How, indeed, could it be otherwise, if the economic, social, and political rulers and their institutions themselves are the real criminals? The regime of bourgeois democracy, the public order of capitalist statism, and the international network of capitalist corporations define criminality in terms of laws that bourgeois democrats make, laws that reinforce and both literally and figurative legitimize that regime, that order, and that network. In the new, socialist international and regime order, crime will be entirely redefined, even abolished along with the prisons built to enforce those laws.
As “a tradition, a philosophy, and a theory of change,” prison abolition dates back to the early 1970s (AFN 50)—perhaps uncoincidentally, when the Nixon Administration’s abolition of conscription took the wind out of the anti-Vietnam War protests, which had been the centerpiece of New Left agitation in the years immediately prior. The movement drifted but then revived in the late 1990s linking prison abolition with increased funding for education. This was a shrewd move, as it forged an alliance with the now-powerful teachers’ unions which had supplanted the ‘proletarian’ industrial unions as the best-organized and most active labor organizations in the United States. Part of the proletarians’ weakness derived from “the deindustrialization of the US economy, which led to the elimination of vast numbers of jobs,” throwing many black men out of work (AFN 41). Although the jobless men, some now in prison, might have seemed the likely target for socialist organizers, Davis and her allies focused on the “decarceration” of women, especially those ‘criminalized’ for such nonviolent actions as prostitution and shoplifting, quite likely because their release from prisons would be a less intimidating prospect than the release of men.
But this is only a start, a relatively minor reform, the thin end of the proverbial wedge. One must never forget “the root causes of injustice and the impact of other systems of oppression, including, in the first place, global capitalism” and its attendant “racist and heteropatriarchal structures” (AFN 58-59).
In the meantime, the decarceration of women should be supplemented by the abolition of the death penalty, which “remains a central issue” because “it incorporates historical memories of slavery,” memories of slaves being hanged for “very minor offenses” (FICS 30, MF 116). More, American bourgeois democracy “relies fundamentally” upon it, along with prisons (MF 56). “Today,” she writes in 1991, “there are more than 3,500 people on death row in the United States” (MF 57); this miniscule number of Americans, (admittedly, most of them white men) drawn from a population of more than 300 million, all convicted not of minor crimes but of murder, remains central to Davis’s polemic because guidelines for the application of the death penalty now “reflect the abstract individualism associated with liberalism and especially neoliberalism” (MF 107). Individualism, you will recall, serves as the ideological mask for corporate-capitalist class domination. And you will also recall that oppression in the form of punishment of white men stands merely as a signifier of punishment of black men, in the imaginative mind of Angela Davis. Even violent crimes committed by black men on other black men and on women must be explained as results of the racist order (MF 30). In this way, “institution of punishment have served as receptacles for structures and ideologies of enslavement” and racism, long after the abolition of chattel slavery itself (MF 140).
“So how does one persuade people to think differently? That’s a question of organizing.” (FICS 22). As Foucault remarks, prisons as ‘penitentiaries’ arose with the criminal justice reform movement spearheaded by the Quakers, “around the same time as the idea of a society in which citizens are defined as rights-bearing subjects” (MF 59); prison “is the quintessential democratic institution, because it provides you with the negation of that upon which the whole concept of bourgeois democracy has been developed,” namely, the right to personal liberty (MF 143). Instead of killing or wounding the bodies of the ‘criminalized’ with torture, those bodies would be deprived of liberty, a “conception of punishment…only possible in a society that recognized its citizens as rights-bearing subjects” (MF 59). Imprisonment “was thought to be humane and democratic, especially because it replaced corporal and capital punishment” (MF 59). A humanly-designed and implemented criminal justice system that was once reformed, even revolutionized, can be revolutionized once again, even abolished altogether. It is only a matter of persuasion.
“When you look at the population of death row prisoners, you see that almost every single person there is poor,” whether white or black (MF 63). Prisons “thrive on class inequalities,” “racial inequalities,” and “gender inequalities” (MF 142). (If women are oppressed, however, why are there not many more women in jail?) For this reason, “the hidden danger of relying on incarceration as the major solution to behaviors that are often the by-products of poverty is that the solution reproduces the very problem it purports to solve” (MF 142). In this way, Davis can steer the argument back towards the more fundamental orthodox Marxist insistence on class conflict as the driver of ‘history.’ After all, the “carceral machinery” emerged not only around the time of bourgeois democracy but, perhaps more significantly, “around the time of industrial capitalism, and it continues to have a particular affinity with capitalism” (MF 82).
How so? Because prisons are increasingly being ‘privatized’ at least in the sense that private corporations build and profit from them. The “prison-industrial complex,” feeding off the “structural racism” of American bourgeois democracy (MF 84), “has become so big and powerful that it works to perpetuate itself,” devouring “immigrant youth and youth of color throughout the world” (MF 148). That is, “prisons catch the chaos that is intensified by de-industrialization,” as capitalists build more prisons and incarcerate more people, “thus creating the momentum for further expansion and larger incarcerated populations” in the “so-called free world,” which thereby retains “obvious vestiges of enslavement” (MF 49, 51, 52).
The prisons will be replaced by “educational institutions,” institutions which, as one anticipates, will be animated by a new, socialist spirit. For example, Davis recounts her pedagogic technique in a class she ran at the San Francisco County jail. Although her students from her class at San Francisco State University were expected to help her teach the prisoners, but when they arrived, Davis “position[ed] the prisoners as teachers”—a “reversal of assumed hierarchies of knowledge [which] created a radical and exciting learning environment” (MF 53).
Such a reversal must finally be “systemic,” not piecemeal (FISC 32). Not only prisons but police should be abolished. The first step will be “community control of the police,” by which Davis doesn’t mean bourgeois control but “community bodies that have the power to actually control and dictate the actions of the police”—a new sort of dictatorship of the proletariat, if you will (FICS 32). Since, “at this moment in the history of the US, I don’t think that there can be policing without racism,” (FISC 48), the communities in question will be populated by persons of color. According to Davis (and she is lying), police today “are encouraged to use violence as a first resort” (FISC 32), as “police are trained to use force rather than to prevent or address root causes of violence” (AFN 116). As a matter of fact, police are trained to de-escalate potentially violent situations whenever possible, but the interesting phrase here is “root causes of violence.” Davis seems to be suggesting that a new form of non-police policing will enforce “community” efforts to outlaw racism, sexism, classism, and, above all, capitalism. The slogan is “Care not cops” (AFN 66). This may be understood as yet another instance of ‘dialectic.’
Divide and unite: Davis shares the old hope of establishing ‘one big Left,’ a notion at least as old as the Popular Front of the 1930s. “We’d better figure out how to build a resistance movement together” (MF 26), since “in today’s era of global capitalism, resistance to racism can only be effective if it is anchored in global communities of struggle” (MF 80). this means organizing racial, sexual, and class communities around political goals (MF 118-119). “Internationalist engagements are imperative to illustrate the continuing and global repercussions of colonialism and imperialism embedded in police and carceral institution” (AFN 22-23).
This can be accomplished by establishing “accessible, free, and horizontal political education” (AFN 144) by the relevant groups, an education—suspicious minds might take it for propaganda—that contests “the public-private dichotomy” of the capitalism state (MF 33). The heuristic technique deployed in this task will be what the “critical race theorist” Mari Matsudi calls “ask the other question” (AFN). For example, “When I see something that looks racist, I ask, ‘Where is the patriarchy in this?’ When I see something that looks sexist, I ask, ‘Where is the heterosexism in this?’ When I see something that looks homophobic, I ask, ‘Where are the class interests in this?'” (AFN 3). This aids coalition work; one big Left requires one comprehensive account of all grievances, giving the one big Left one big, if multifarious, target for its dialectical struggle.
Davis laments the fact that “despite years of relentless work, by the 1990s the gulf between [prison] abolitionist perspectives and gender work was widening, and many survivors were falling into the dangerous space between two movement” (AFN 103). “Issues of racial injustice, sexual exploitation, pernicious state violence, and the analysis of linked forms of oppression became incompatible with an emerging conceptualization of gender violence that relied exclusively on gender essentialism,” by which Davis means the dichotomy of male and female and its attendant impulse to lock up male rapists (AFN 103). The Clinton Administration-backed Violence Against Women Act put this “essentialism” into law, thereby using the capitalist state to divide one oppressed class (women) against another (black men). One purpose of LGBTQ+ agitation on the Left is to break down a dichotomy that divides the Left, a ‘dialectic’ that works against it, and to replace that ‘dialectic’ with one that unites the Left against the enemies of socialism. “Key to this abolition feminist ecosystem are networks, organizations, and collectives. This work is never a solo project. Individuals tire, fade. Movements deepen and continue.” (AFN 13).
Or so “movement” operatives like to think. As a matter of fact, movements also tire and fade. For now, deprived of an appealing socialist state to rally around, Davis and her allies direct their efforts at civil-social organizing aimed at undermining the formidable institutions they decry. They may hope to skip the Marxist ‘stage’ of state socialism altogether and instead proceed directly to the communist stage directly, once global capitalism collapses. Davis’s own unstinting celebration of state socialism throughout the years leading up to the collapse of the Soviet empire makes one wonder at her bona fides. Such wonder is longstanding. In his speech before the AFL-CIO in July 1975, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn offered a ‘critique’ of his own—a critique of Marxism. Rightly describing Marxism as a pseudo-science, he observed that regimes animated by Marxism rule not by some scientific method but by abolishing political and economic freedom and state-sponsored terror, very much including a massive network of prisons. He told the story of how Davis, after her release from prison in America, toured the Soviet Union and rested in its resorts. When Czech dissidents appealed to her, asking her to back the release of prisoners held in the prisons of the communist regime in their country, Davis said, “They deserve what they get. Let them remain in prison.” In a later speech at East Stroudsberg University, Davis denied the story.
Assume that Davis is telling the truth, that Solzhenitsyn believed a false claim. Nonetheless, Davis never once condemned the prison systems of the Soviet bloc or of China. She has had plenty of time to do so. She has instead proved a faithful daughter of her Communist parents. Prisons deserved no condemnation when Communist regimes maintained them. They deserved condemnation only when instituted by ‘bourgeois democracies’—the regime the Communist Manifesto denounces as the most dangerous threat to the socialist regime of proletarian dictatorship. Solzhenitsyn’s theme in 1975 was that Communist tactics change but Communist ideology remains steady at its core, through its various Marxist, Leninist, Stalinist, Maoist, even Brezhnevian permutations. “The Communist ideology is to destroy your society. This has been their aim for 125 years and has never changed; only the methods of changed a little.”
Notes
- This sort of ‘critique’ has its limits. According to Davis (following longstanding Marxist polemics), capitalism causes war. “Why, in the aftermath” of al-Qaeda’s terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, “have we allowed our government to pursue unilateral policies and practices of global war?” she asks, rhetorically. You will understand this if you take President George W. Bush’s “recent speeches” and “systematically replac[e] the words ‘freedom’ and ‘democracy’ with the word ‘capitalism'” (MF 89). This proves that if you change the words in a sentence, you will change its meaning—supposedly revealing its true meaning thereby. A certain circularity of logic prevails in this move, but that’s ‘deconstructionism’ for you.
- Carried along by her rhetorical momentum, Davis does not pause to consider that postcolonial “African” politics has been as much about war and tyranny as resistance.
- The definition of Marxist “praxis” as theory plus action plus reflection is orthodox Marxism. If, as Marx claimed, an idea isn’t a passion of the head, a longing for noetic apprehension of the whole, but the head of a passion, a mere instantiation of some underlying material self-interest, then theory has no intellectually independent status. Instead, there is a ‘unity of theory and practice,’ as one commentator called it—a materialist version of Hegelian immanence which denies that the separation of ideas from ordinary reality is possible. The only rationalism remaining must keep theory and practice united but with theoretical reasoning and practical reasoning (“reflection”) overcoming self-interest. In orthodox Marxism, this process will be hastened by the ‘consciousness-raising’ vanguard of the proletariat, those who understand the historical dialectic and can point the workers in the correct direction; in the neo-Marxist formulation, feminism, antiracism, and, in Davis’s case, prison abolition are added to the dialectical mix.
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