Abandoning policy cedes the political- “structures” aren’t natural or inevitable, they are the result of multiple overlapping policy battles.

(Brenna Bhandar, Senior Lecturer in the School of Law at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, and Alberto Toscano, Reader in Critical Theory and Co-Director of the Centre for Philosophy and Critical , Abolition Geography: Essays Towards Liberation)

White nationalism, with its fascist potentials, appears (in 2022 as in 1992, we might say) as a crisis ideology, which is also to say a revanchist victimology haunted by demotion and loss, by vulnerability to psychic and material dispossession: “The idea and enactment of winning, of explicit domination set against the local reality of decreasing family wealth, fear of unemployment, threat of homelessness, and increased likelihood of early, painful death from capitalism’s many toxicities.”44 Racial ideologies do political-economic work, as civilizational narratives and geopolitical imaginaries fueled by ressentiment find outlets in policy platforms, exploiting “the need for an enemy whose threat obliges endless budgetary consideration”—as writ large in the ensuing trajectory of mass incarceration. Gilmore’s words from three decades ago continue to resonate with the present: The very crisis which we must exploit—the raw materials of profound social change—is the tending toward fascism through the romance of identity, forged in the always already of the American national project. Our work is to rearticulate our own connections in new (and frightening) forward-looking moves in order to describe, promote, organize, bargain in the political arenas.45 It is this work of political rearticulation, buffeted by crisis and confronted with state and para-state violence, that requires the collective forging of “infrastructures of feeling,” embodied traditions of the oppressed—as well as new figures of intellectual work and “scholarship-activism.” Eschewing a catastrophic conception of liberation or a punctual image of revolution, it requires reinventing, while attending to the “discipline of the conjuncture,” abolitionist strategies of non reformist reform. Over half a century ago, André Gorz had defined a reformist reform as “one which subordinates its objectives to the criteria of rationality and practicability of a given system,” while a “not necessarily reformist reform is one which is conceived not in terms of what is possible within the framework of a given system and administration, but in view of what should be made possible in terms of human needs and demands.” Crucially—and this is amply explored in Gilmore’s accounts of anti-prison coalitions, Mothers Reclaiming Our Children,46 or abolitionist projects engaging in “grassroots planning” (“future orientation driven by the present certainty of shortened lives”47) across multiple intra- and international sites—Gorz set as a condition of his vision of structural reform that it be “by definition a reform implemented or controlled by those who demand it.”48 In her foreword to Dan Berger’s The Struggle Within, Gilmore has set out, with combative clarity, how that Gorzian distinction can be repurposed to define the stakes of abolition: The purpose of abolition is to expose and defeat all the relationships and policies that make the United States the world’s top cop, warmonger, and jailer. Practicalities rather than metaphors determine the focus and drive the analysis, because the scope of prison touches every aspect of ordinary life. Thus, it is possible and necessary to identify all those points of contact and work from the ground up to change them. This ambition makes some people impatient, as well it should. Abolition is a movement to end systemic violence, including the interpersonal vulnerabilities and displacements that keep the system going. In other words, the goal is to change how we interact with each other and the planet by putting people before profits, welfare before warfare, and life over death … The distinction sketched out above is the difference between reformist reform—tweak Armageddon—and non reformist reform—deliberate change that does not create more obstacles in the larger struggle. Some of the timidity in the fight against warehousing humans in cages for part or all of their lives results from the lethal synthesis of abandoned optimism and calculated convenience … Contemporary oppositional political society seems to be constantly reorganizing itself into fragments. While the assertion of particular needs, struggles, and identities must necessarily be part of the project to free ourselves, the structural effect of everyday political disintegration is fatal.49 From the earliest text collected here, with its call for “resisting and denouncing the re-objectification of the subaltern subject” and working out “the semiotics and histrionics of critical performance,”50 Gilmore’s writing is deeply attuned to the vexed question of how to foster a political culture “on our enemies’ land.” Besieged as we are by representations of the intellectual that often serve to debilitate, distract, and disintegrate—rather than to orient or organize—there is much to be gained by rethinking, along with Gilmore, what scholarship/activism as “organic praxis” might mean in the present.51 This is a present that daily reminds us that only the most capacious and intransigent vision of liberation can stand a chance against the catastrophe in permanence organized under the aegis of the anti-state state and exacerbated by its fascistic progeny. Such a vision was sketched out by Gilmore in a 2020 interview, in words that can also serve to frame this collection of interventions, inquiries, and illuminations: Abolition has to be “green.” It has to take seriously the problem of environmental harm, environmental racism, and environmental degradation. To be “green” it has to be “red.” It has to figure out ways to generalize the resources needed for well-being for the most vulnerable people in our community, which then will extend to all people. And to do that, to be “green” and “red,” it has to be international. It has to stretch across borders so that we can consolidate our strength, our experience, and our vision for a better world.52