Abolish Incuriosity

Found a really good example of functional dishonesty that I wanted to briefly remark on:

To summarize, we have someone who does not support abolition quote tweeting another person who does not support abolition sharing an essay from someone who does not appear to support abolition (or at the very least is not very serious about it).  And all this originated from the blog of someone who does not support abolition, whose "contest" in retrospect seems like a less than good faith effort to engage with the movement.  My less generous side would even go so far as to suggest that ginning up outrage about the supposed unseriousness of abolitionists was perhaps the whole point of this exercise.  

My more generous side would like to do a less paranoid reading of the situation, which means we need to assume that no one here is outright lying and/or misrepresenting their perceptions of others' beliefs.  But even if we do this, the problem remains that all the parties involved are still fundamentally wrong about what abolition is.  But because we've ruled out dishonesty as a cause of this wrongness, we need to turn to its far more pernicious cousin, incuriosity.  The key to this diagnosis in my mind is this passage from DeBoer's post:

"To the many of you who answered that Derek Chauvin killed George Floyd before we would have instituted any de-carceral, de-policing reform, meaning that he would not have been eligible to be treated under that system… congratulations, that’s very clever. But it doesn’t help explore these issues, which was the whole point of putting money on the line."

The way DeBoer paints this argument is as something of a "gotcha."  I did not read all of the submissions, so it's entirely possible that some people did respond with some pedantic and reductive bullshit, which would make DeBoer's dismissal of them fair.  But there were others who made a similar argument that highlights the fundamental irrelevance of DeBoer's original inquiry.  I know this because that was me!  Here was my submission, with the most relevant emphasis added: 

"The simple answer is that we live under an oppressive regime which nonetheless has laws and remedies for the crime of homicide, so Chauvin should be charged as such.  The complex answer is that the question is largely irrelevant to abolition, as it is a revolutionary project that does not care about the application of capitalist laws.  And unlike political projects that do not seek to overthrow capitalism (ie. M4A) abolition is not a policy prescription much in the same way a communist revolution is not a policy prescription.  As such, it's foolish to stake one's evaluation of the project on your perception of the quality of the answer to an incidental hypothetical.

The nature of the "radicalism" of abolition is to comprehend the root cause of crime so as to be able to prevent it.  In the specific case of Chauvin, abolition ultimately seeks to indict capitalism for the murder.   Police fundamentally exist to protect private property on behalf of capital, so capitalism is where the buck stops.  Yes, one could counter by saying "why not ban chokeholds" or something like that, but such reforms do not shift the power away from capital in the slightest, leaving the oppressive apparatus of policing and prisons in place, albeit with (perhaps) slightly different tactics.  It follows that we cannot hope to regularly prevent such crimes as this without overthrowing capitalism, hence the revolutionary project of abolition.

I want to be clear that abolition is not a utopian demand.  The abolition of our carceral system does not mean a categorical rejection of carceral solutions to crime, but rather a demand that any potential carceral solutions actually be solutions.  It is abundantly clear that the carceral programs of capitalism overwhelmingly serve to imprison those that threaten capital, whether it be directly or indirectly.  It is also clear that these programs do little to prevent crime, while tacitly endorsing it within the prison walls.  Put simply, abolition is a desire to build a better society by following the path of steadfast opposition to capital that we have come to see as necessary through our earnest and thorough analysis." 

This highlights the fundamental difference between DeBoer's perception of abolition and the reality of abolition.  You cannot seriously propose the abolition of prison without understanding it as a necessary consequence of the abolition of capitalism.  You cannot excise one of the tentpoles of capitalist hegemony without bringing down the whole circus.  More to the point, a world without prisons is world with a completely different political economy, and with it a completely different set of social relations.  While such a world would not be utopian in nature, there simply would not be an analogous scenario to the Floyd murder in need of a hypothetical punishment!  That no one who opposes this seems to understand this or is even able to imagine it seems to be the proximal non-material reason that abolition has yet to reach wide acceptance.  Convincing people of this is understandably difficult, and I do not expect it to happen overnight.  So all I can immediately ask is that if you find yourself in the position of opposing abolition, you at least try to exhibit some curiosity.