This is an excerpt of the introduction to our newly republished book, After Accountability, now in an expanded edition with Haymarket Books. We began the project in 2021, interviewing transformative justice practitioners and veteran socialist organizers about their encounters and trajectories with the concept of "accountability." Their conversations yielded rich insights which departed from the specific topic to provide a vivid sketch of the shape of the revolutionary left over the past half-century, and provoked us to meditate on the conditions and limits of revolutionary activity over that same period. A concluding essay turns these meditations back to the question of "community" as the missing term in this activity, hopefully clearing the way for a new conception of our terrain in a new moment.
In the George Floyd uprising of 2020—the highest and most widespread period of revolt in living US memory—certain concepts surged up from the heaving streets and shimmered aloft for a remarkable moment, catching the eye. These were political terms drawing from carefully tended revolutionary theory and practice which suddenly gained a mass, public character. "Abolition" was one, though briskly swapped for "defund" in slogans as liberals rushed to join in. But a related word kept its air for longer: accountability. This term had its path prepared for it by a homologue in robust use by legal and moral discourses, but accountability in this sense was, for the mass audience, something new. Familiar to anyone participating in left politics in the last quarter century, it brought with it a particular vocabulary and set of procedures, as well as the aspiration to address those outside of radical circles. If there was a concept that spanned the knife’s edge of the radical activity of the period leading up to this general revolt and the broad swing of its sudden uptake, this was it.
The concept of accountability also described the moment’s limits. The uprising exceeded the capacities of any existing political organization to direct it, and the state moved to harness the rebellion for its own ends. On the one hand, it carried out a vicious display of repression, beating, gassing, kidnapping, and assassinating the participants in this unprecedented global assembly against police power; on the other, it turned to its bland, brazen style of recuperation to reassert control. The infamous photo of Nancy Pelosi kneeling in kente cloth, for example, was taken at a press conference to introduce the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, whose first line stated its aim to “hold law enforcement accountable.”
The epochal nature of the uprising was plain to all observers. But at the moment of its partisans’ most dramatic turns of fortune, accountability seemed almost as often a stumbling block as an element of its sudden success. In New York City, for example, one of the largest abolitionist formations was torn apart in the heat of the summer action over a failure of accountability around sexual violence. This experience was far from unique. Across the country, and over the last several years, revolutionary organizations on all flanks of the left, from the International Socialist Organization to the Black Rose Anarchist Federation, had collided with their own inability to internally address and account for sexual assault. The widespread concurrence, it seemed, meant that this wasn’t due to any one tendency’s particular commitments, but instead represented a concrete political impasse. Accountability, usually in the form of its declared failure, was repeatedly at the center of debilitating crises within revolutionary political organizations.
Nevertheless, the concept continued to circulate among the left as something just short of a program, seeming to name the ache of proximity between crystalline, utopian promise and mundane, bleary failure. It was the companion of thrilling achievements of revolutionary organizing that summer, and also their collapse. Thrust into the position of tutors for an eager, inchoate movement, many abolitionists had toolkits, trainings, workshops, and infographics at the ready. Perhaps they didn’t have a total strategy to hand out, but then they never said they would. In this way, they confirmed themselves as heirs of the political dilemma governing the left of the last half century.
As the uprising was bludgeoned back from the streets, the drive to understand it in relation to history became more pressing. People had to reach back to the century-cracking sequences of uprisings in the 1960s and ’70s to orient themselves. Historically apt or not, this seemed to reveal a secret correspondence between the past rupture and the present that cast the intervening decades of political activity as nothing but an attempt to prepare for its return. Our collective had come together a few years earlier, partly out of a desire to restore a properly revolutionary history of concepts relating to sexual form that circulated without acknowledging this similar moment of origin. Beginning in this context, we had drawn up a list of open questions we saw in the field of queer left politics. One of these was the cluster of concepts around accountability. Every one of us had had different kinds of encounters with accountability processes in our various communities, though the way people took it up didn’t indicate a clear sense of shared meaning.
We recognized an impasse: frequent acrimonious conflicts between rival sides, which each had clear merits but advanced irreconcilable interpretations of the same circumstances. Were countercultural spaces and movements overly exclusionary and punitive towards those accused of harm, or overly accommodating of predatory abusers? Were the recent collapses of several political organizations, coalitions, and projects over debates about sexual violence necessary and positive steps in rooting out long-standing forms of abuse, or were they tragic losses to movement-building that could have been addressed differently? Do our movements need more honest confrontations with conflict or more careful resolution?
These questions and others swirled around our collective and broader networks. They suggested to us the need for more theorizing, for thinking deeper and further, and perhaps for thinking laterally to existing debates. As with our approach to other questions, we wanted to draw out the lineage of these concepts and return them to their history in specific traditions of revolutionary activity and thought. As we began working on our first magazine issue, we left the complicated topic for a later date.
We had often invoked the political context of the liberation movement of the long 1960s—one of global anticolonial uprising—as having conditioned its theorization of gender and sexuality. Now an uprising seemed to have returned, and with it, the open question of accountability appeared to demand answers. We were curious about the clash between concepts and practices that had been used to sustain the memory of these uprisings throughout the decades of reaction and how they functioned now that the hoped-for moment of revolt had arrived. What had changed? What had been preserved? We wanted to hear from people who had attended the birth of these concepts in hopes of opening up a different kind of space for theorizing. To do so we needed to talk to many people, all of whom shared a long-standing commitment to thinking about accountability, but who came to it through multiple and varied paths and often arrived at quite different conclusions.
We wanted to trace links between contemporary debates about accountability and an earlier era of struggle in the 1960s and ’70s. There were many possibilities; we could have sought such a genealogy through a number of varied possible lineages: the legacy of prisoner rebellions and prisoner organizing, or women’s organizing against intimate-partner violence, for example. One of our editors, drawing on her own political experience, hypothesized one possible lineage connecting the New Communist Movement of the 1970s to abolitionist organizations of the 2000s.
Militants of the mid-1970s witnessed both mass insurgency and movements confronting their limits—in state repression, in economic crisis, and in the ebb of broad participation. They saw the problem as how to articulate the overabundant energies of the varied fronts of self-liberation into an effective political formation before the moment passed. There were many valiant attempts. The Black Panthers may have squared this circle theoretically, but after their strangulation, some of those who were left in the New Communist Movement spent the next decade attempting to forge the proper line that would galvanize a steadily aging mass of radicals into a party.
The New Communist Movement was the name given to political activity taken by a major current of New Left radicals and others in the 1970s. Drawing inspiration from the Chinese, Cuban, and Vietnamese revolutions, they sought to find a new path to communism in the United States. Guided by what they understood of Mao and the Chinese critique of Soviet communism, they attempted to turn the popular forms of struggle against US hegemony into an organization that could exceed the role played by the diminished and discredited Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA). These militants saw themselves as “anti-revisionist,” returning to a Marxist-Leninist politics prior to a perceived deterioration by Soviet bureaucracy. This political formation barely survived the Reaganite counterrevolution of the 1980s, sustaining famished traditions of struggle in various states of open militancy and disguise.
There were reasons for us to hypothesize that the New Communist Movement of the 1970s had contributed to iterations of the concept of accountability in the 2000s. Accountability as put forth by abolitionist or transformative justice thinking shared some resemblance to “criticism/self-criticism” that characterized the Maoist movements of the ’70s and ’80s. These were remembered pejoratively as “struggle sessions”—moments of collective abuse or self-abasement, used as a metonym for the internal antagonism that seemed to limit the movement as a whole; but at their most commendable, they represented a disciplined commitment to revolutionary conduct at all times. These parallels were not just conceptual. Militants influenced by the earlier era of the New Communist Movement had participated in the formation of a number of influential nonprofits in the ’90s and 2000s. This influence, one of our editors hypothesized, might have hinged on the organization Critical Resistance. Founded by Angela Davis and Ruth Wilson Gilmore with others in the late ’90s, Critical Resistance and associated formations bridged revolutionary elders from the previous cycles of struggles and the newer engagement with notions of accountability. We were curious to explore this possible relation of accountability to this earlier attempt at revolutionary party formation, as part of a broader inquiry into the genealogy of contemporary concepts of accountability.
We took up this possible link to the New Communist Movement as one way into a broader research question on the origins and meanings of accountability as a movement concept. We hoped historicizing the concept in movement history would provide a way through what often seemed to be an impasse in its application. The recent career of the concepts associated with accountability—their wide adoption and ambivalent success at resolving sexual assault, abuse, and harm within political communities—might, we thought, be made clearer if we approached the tools used from a historical entry point. At the very least, we hoped we could discover a minor red thread, tracing a pathway from the explosion of the ’60s through the various scattered scenes, projects, traditions, and institutions it left deposited across the US landscape through a long period of defeat until now.
We studied some of the literature on the New Communist Movement and the eloquent accounts that transformative justice and abolitionist organizations had written of themselves, and discussed what we knew of the evolution of the concept of accountability. We compiled a list of transformative justice practitioners, abolitionist and communist organizers, queer and feminist community pillars, and others to interview, all representing different tendencies, histories, and approaches to accountability. We were unsuccessful in reaching every one of them, but in the end we were able to speak with members of the communist pre-party formations, Critical Resistance, Survived & Punished, Bash Back!, incarcerated and criminalized thinkers and revolutionaries, and movement professionals.
The interviews were primarily conducted over the course of a few months in spring and summer of 2021, when the George Floyd uprising was still a fresh memory but people hadn’t been on the streets for nearly a year. One interview took place later, in 2024. Some interviews were held in person and some over the phone or Zoom, and one through an electronic prison messaging system. A residency we had been awarded provided funds for transcription and honoraria for the interviewees, though most refused payment. Collective members were paired with some interview subjects they knew. Generally, these relationships were from previous periods of organizing, or between people who had neither organized nor been in community with each other for several years. As such, the interviewees are remarkably candid about the histories, limitations, and disappointments they link with the concepts associated with accountability.
We trained ourselves in oral-history interview practices and drew up a standard question sheet for every interview to follow, but planned for the conversations to flow organically. We posed the interview as one interested in the concept pair of “failure” and “accountability,” which we thought would invite a more open, critical reflection than a boosterish presentation of the tradition. We asked practitioners to place themselves in a political lineage, personally and organizationally, and to share how they thought the concept had evolved.
Of course, however alluring, concepts do not act on their own. They are the product of people thinking, criticizing, remembering, fighting, and passing down elements of their concrete situation in history and struggle. But as one of the interviewees notes, some concepts have a strange, self-reflexive aspect. The ways people analyze power when attempting to intervene in a specific political situation form a condition of what is possible to do within that situation itself. The concepts leave their mark on what people are capable of carrying out. This endows them, reciprocally, with a special openness to history, and makes them a sensitive register and arena of political struggles.
What we found in this investigation was a marked overlap in terms of individual political trajectories, continuity of scenes, basic practices, and terms. But it’s also clear that, when comparing the responses of older militants to those with a more direct hand in the formation of contemporary transformative justice thinking, the concepts and traditions referred to do not precisely coincide. Rather than unearthing a concealed history of the ’60s in the present, the responses we got from interviewees offer extremely rich reflections on the shared political dilemmas, limits, and divergent strategies that accountability was developed to address. Each of the interviewees have insightful, striking things to say about their practice and their understanding of its history. For now, a rough sketch of the history of the concept’s trajectory will give a sense of what we learned, which we present as a series of oppositions that structure the field of their thought.
Trajectory of the concept
Peter associates two different meanings of accountability with two different political periods of his life. One comes from his time as a member of a socialist organization, where it meant that your political practice was accountable to the people by following a political line determined by a collective decision-making process—effectively, it meant your commitment to democratic centralism, or adherence to political decisions voted on by the party. For the past decade or two, though, he’s encountered it in a new register, where it now means something less party-political and more personal, like “trying to think about myself as a cis-heterosexual man. The privileges entailed in that, and my commitment to grappling” with them. He locates the origin of this latter meaning in his encounter in the 2000s with a robust queer and trans liberationist movement that made him realize his unconscious biases regarding “gender and patriarchy.” This new terrain challenged him to interrogate how his political practice was inflected by male privilege, and he sees the valences of accountability as having been changed around the same time as this personal encounter.
In Esteban’s telling, Philly Stands Up was at first strictly subordinate to Philly’s Pissed, but as the work progressed tensions emerged when their understanding of accountability changed from serving as an arm for executing the demands of the survivors’ group to taking in a growing understanding of community well-being. Through study, the Philly Stands Up group gained an understanding of transformative justice as somehow related to Indigenous practices of restoration, harmony, and repair. Decentering the impulse to punish revealed the interconnectedness of all relationships, which led them to recognize limits to accountability in people’s material or social situations. Their work became a practice of creating a space for the perpetrator to simply begin communicating in a responsible way, to be vulnerable, because what they discovered was that such spaces were nowhere to be found. At this point their politics had evolved past being a subordinate affiliate of the survivors’ group to something that had its own position, which was more committed to abolition and transformation of not only the perpetrator but their community. This is what grounds Esteban’s understanding of accountability as a community practice somewhat restricted to providing a cluster of social support that can facilitate but cannot compel a personal and collective transformation.
For Pilar, abolition wasn’t “sexy at all” when she began working with Critical Resistance, but it has become disturbed by changes in the movement she identifies as coming from class-privileged “carceral feminists” who learn abolition as a topic of academic study. The language has gone mainstream beyond what was dreamed of, but now she thinks the movement might need to take things more slowly and be more thoughtful. In her account, the movement for abolition has finally received widespread recognition in the wake of the George Floyd rebellions of 2020. This recognition was attained through a
new, rapidly developed social media information mill that reduced core lessons and principles to phrases lacking important context.
She sees accountability undergoing a similar process of conceptual degradation, but it is further torqued by a change in the makeup of the movement itself. Critical Resistance had always been “a multiculti, multigenerational, multi multi multi organization,” but from the beginning, there had been a tension. She appreciated the coalition approach, but “who else is going to talk about inside the cage if not the people that have been inside the cage?” she asks. “As much as folks of color were in the movement, it was different. It was a class thing.” Pilar feels accountable to her fellow “crimees,” and thinks people talking about abolition need to use its language carefully because others look to them for leadership. For Pilar, abolition isn’t vindictiveness, it’s the fifty people who came with her when she turned herself in for a DV charge. Now, she worries that the movement has been “infiltrated” by people who “think that they’re abolitionists because they were maybe drawn to it, but they haven’t done the work” required to unlearn all the “conditioning that we’ve been subjected to.”
Despite a marked humility in the movement’s stance, which keeps even its fundamental principles general because they “recognize we don’t have the answers,” Pilar believes there are certain nonnegotiable commitments, like seeing yourself in the person who commits a bad act, not promoting incarceration, and centering the people who are most impacted by the prison-industrial complex. These were slowly formalized into a body of theory out of the experiences of people like her who had to struggle out of the clutches of the prison. Now the hoped-for mainstreaming has arrived, but with ambivalent effects: people without the context that produced its concepts can gain an inflated confidence through study, such that “vengeful” people misuse the painfully won fruits of the movement’s organizing.
Both Hyejin and Emi see accountability as carrying a number of contradictory meanings. It has an abstract, aspirational meaning, like taking serious responsibility for harm, considering impact on others, and changing behavior. They also see it as having been stripped of meaning in the organizing communities they’re in, misapplied or endowed with significance it can’t provide. In these moments, invoking accountability can become a kind of apologism for inaction or lack of courage in responding to violence, or conversely, a veil over coercive demands for silence, punishment, etc. They note that people who aren’t the survivor often project their own desires or values onto the term, turning “accountability” into a vehicle for their own internalized carceral or punitive logic.
Emi conjectures that INCITE! made a necessary disavowal of white-feminist or carceral approaches to sexual violence, but what that lost was an ability to discern or intervene in abuse dynamics, to support someone who’s caused harm, etc. Because of this loss of specificity, people are now both too quick to apply technical terms like “abuse” to situations where it may not apply, and too reluctant to invoke it, because they only know it as a kind of social bludgeon. This ambiguity lets “people just sort of wring their hands and act like they don’t know what to do and we can’t figure it out,” she says. “But the truth is that if you actually are trained to understand what to look for and how to assess the situation, it’s a little bit easier. Like if abuse means something and it is a specific pattern of behavior that is identifiable by people who have the skills and knowledge and training to do that kind of identification, then it helps both the people who are concerned about the false accusations and the people who are surviving violence and abuse, because then we actually have an agreement about what it means.”
Hyejin observes that tools for analyzing power have a reflexive quality, through which they can also structure power relations themselves. “These ideas, whether they’re around gender justice or transformative justice or racial justice or prison abolition, all these things came from the need to identify and articulate power as it is now, and also to make an entrance into it,” she puts it. For her that leads to the idea that the confusion of terms isn’t simply a question of inattentive study or hasty popularization, but itself the sign of a struggle over the power to determine what transformative justice and abuse even are. There are different camps with different stakes in the terms having different meanings. As the abolitionist critique of the prison-industrial complex becomes more widespread, and more heterogeneous, people are joining the conversation and contesting the terms for their own use. This includes complex, multipart ideas like accountability or abuse that can require specialized training to apply accurately, as well as supposedly self-evident terms like survivor.
Stevie doesn’t think that the movement is particularly skilled at dealing with conflict or practicing accountability. “Too often, groups break up because they didn’t have procedures or processes,” he explains, comparing this to “jumping off a cliff and trying to build your wings on the way down”—a variation on the sometimes positively invoked image of building a plane while flying it. “We have to practice conflict resolution before we need it.” He relates this to criticism/self- criticism, which could be integrated into regular practice. He knows we have it in us to struggle with each other because we “are struggling against massive systems of oppression everyday.”
For Peter, the vehicle for self-interrogation in the past would have been criticism/self-criticism, a practice typical of communist organizations like the Proletarian Unity League. While the idea was that this would promote members’ growth and change, “the reality was that those spaces, those criticism/self-criticism spaces were very male, cis-hetero dominated,” Peter says. He links the organizations’ lack of openness to political dissent with their heterosocial order and sees that the movement’s shift away from democratic centralism and dogmatism has made it more possible to work together through disagreement and toward an ecumenical search for truth, “whether it’s in writings of Marx or it’s in the writings of Cabral or it’s in the writings of the Combahee River Collective.” In this sense, accountability has almost diametrically changed in meaning: where forty years ago it meant a rigid adherence to a political line, now criticism will be focused on “how we treat each other as human beings.”
This change to a less dogmatic practice of criticism as accountability has been positive, in his eyes. “I don’t recall the last time some person was called on the carpet,” Peter says. “I think we have been gentler with each other over the past few decades.” He attributes that to the struggle of people who “aren’t male and white,” and is part of a men’s study group to work through what he calls “counter-education” in order to be disciplined and work under the leadership of “non-men.” On the one hand he sees this as a genuine question of organization and party functioning, but he seems to counterpose the focus on these “invisible cultural pushes” to what he sees as the proper object of self- criticism: systemic forces rather than people.
Michelle recalls how, when she served on a national leadership body of her organization, she had conversations about how older practices of criticism/self-criticism were intersecting with new training in Generative Somatics, a framework developed by “movement people” growing out of a Bay Area collective called Generation FIVE. Generation FIVE came to this framework in its transformative justice organizing to address the persistence of child sexual abuse. For Michelle, Generative Somatics captures people’s “conditioned responses,” which criticism/self-criticism can’t account for—tendencies to respond to conflict by appeasing, or trying to fix it, or fleeing. The current reluctance on the left to offer criticism or feedback, a skill or ability that people can develop, also has much to do with an “overcorrection” after a period of extreme practices of criticism in the League of Revolutionary Struggle.
To her, the criticism then sounded destructive, like “people were kind of torn apart.” At the same time, she is sensitive to the way that such practices were magnified in a kind of anticommunist game of telephone where all party organizing from the ’70s and ’80s could be reduced to one cruel struggle session. She counterposes this with a lesson she takes from Grace Lee Boggs in “Organization Means Commitment” about the need to reconcile yourself with some level of democratic centralism, but that it requires both terms. So the dysfunctional periods of harsh criticism sessions were an expression of a weakened emphasis on party democracy, which led to unquestioning cults of personality around leadership and extremely unhealthy dynamics. She sees this as continuing to have a negative influence even today, with the left “reaping the consequences” in terms of an attenuated capacity to share necessary criticism in political organizations.
The experiences of criticism/self-criticism are further away generationally and politically from the anarchist formations of the early 2000s that LV came up through. The trace of such is found though in the image of “struggle sessions,” which are still linked associatively to the idea of accountability, along with a number of other present associations LV remarks on that were all decidedly negative. These include capitalist connotations of keeping accounts in order and criminal-justice connotations of punishment, as well as connotations within radical spaces that accountability is fraught with its perceived failures. As a concept or discourse it is also too general and unspecified, LV argues, to fully address the complexities of conflict. Conflict, on the interpersonal and societal scale, is complex and delicate. “Accountability is like a sledgehammer of a term,” LV says, that doesn’t always encapsulate the multiple nuances of a conflict and its ramifications.
In what is perhaps already an instance of a post-accountability practice within the re-emergent Bash Back! formation, “braver spaces” have been developed as one way of openly handling conflict: creating a no-holds-barred environment that does not reject violence. This is associated with the anarcho-insurrectionists and nihilists within Bash Back! Another framework that seemed more recent in its development is what LV counterposed directly to the term accountability as a “harm reduction” approach to conflict. These practices do not completely supplant what we might now call more “traditional” forms of accountability. LV refers to the Creative Interventions Toolkit as a resource over the past fifteen years to the present. Across these different orientations to handling conflict is a shared sense of its centrality to societal and interpersonal transformation. This interview being the most recent in this volume (conducted several years after the others), it is interesting to note that our project itself seems to share a reflective and desirous mood with those interested in reinvigorating Bash Back! Describing the Chicago convergence in 2023, LV says, “It felt like everybody was talking about how we deal with conflict and how conflict is navigated and theorizing about the different ways that people believe that conflict should be handled and should be dealt with.”
Conceptual oppositions
Compressing the breadth of the reflections shared with us into a short synthesis doesn’t do justice to the rich texture of the interviewees’ thinking. Still, in our analysis of the transcripts, we noticed certain common topics and difficulties that characterize the discussion of accountability and often recurred in seemingly opposed pairs or groups. This invalidates neither their assessment nor the concept itself, in our view, but points to the massive scope it is asked, and which it offers, to address. Some oppositions may represent tensions latent in the concept that complicate its application; others are surely the index of its fertility. We trace some of them here. They may helpfully serve as a guide through the interviews, though more insights are certainly there to be gleaned. As a preliminary outline of what we found from asking after the concept of accountability, these oppositions draw many of the varied contemporary uses and meanings together.
A traditional novelty or a new tradition
Unsurprisingly for a project that aims to supplant the law, accountability and transformative justice draw some of their appeal from invoking a venerable lineage. Perhaps the most venerable of lineages in modernity: Indigeneity. Many of the interviewees mention that the ultimate source of the practices in question was Indigenous nations and their famed emphasis on repair and rejection of punishment. Another lineage that is often called on, with a similar but somewhat obscured relation to Indigeneity, is the Black radical tradition. We address some of the complexities of how this claim is deployed by non-Indigenous people in settler societies in the final essay. For now, we bring it up simply to note how it sits with the simultaneous recognition that what accountability aims to do is create something new—new modes of relating, a new society, even a new world.
This opposition is repeated on a smaller historical scale in the frequent claim that resolving conflict without the state is both what working-class communities of color have always done and something that needs the dedicated pedagogical effort of a movement to discover, elaborate, and generalize. That this resembles a contradiction is not, in our view, invalidating. In a society segregated by class and race, proletarian knowledge requires an organized effort to overcome its fractured, subordinate position and become a common understanding. And in the international division of labor that to this day menaces Indigenous societies with a genocidal incorporation as surplus, the overthrow of the present to bring about something globally new appears to be the only viable mode of survival. But the difficulty of thinking these two elements simultaneously seems to point to a deeper ambivalence about whether accountability overturns history—which is to say, the question of how it relates to revolution.
The organization of survivors or the survival of the organization
One of the most inspiring but difficult elements of transformative justice is its analysis of punishment as part of a cycle of harm, not an end to it. Correctly identifying the supposed rehabilitative nature of prisons to be an alibi for their violent function in class rule demands a delicate approach, then, to alternative systems of addressing harm that aim to rehabilitate a perpetrator. This difficulty is surely what motivates what some of the interviewees call a punitive, “carceral” impulse behind some invocations of accountability. It can feel like “speaking another language,” per Emi Kane, for survivors to say, “I don’t want punishment. I actually care about this person. And I would like something to happen so that this cycle of harm is interrupted.” Even within these movements, asking for accountability “gets so distorted and projected upon and turned into this ask for punishment.”
You could imagine this to be a problem of the concept’s uptake by people who haven’t been fully acclimated to what realizing it would demand. But Esteban Kelly’s experience tracked another dimension of this difficulty. He describes his group’s evolution from a collective of men who were strictly responsible for carrying out a different group of survivors’ demands into one that began to see the goal of repair as sometimes in conflict with what had been asked. This touches on a complicated dilemma: accountability only to survivors of harm may put the project of transformation at risk, while attending to larger questions of repair might alienate survivors and their supporters. Creating an accountable organization means establishing transparent processes for hearing concerns in advance of a conflict. Many times, too, organizations responding to an instance of harm will be composed of survivors, making it important to disentangle their feelings about their own past from the incident in front of them and what the survivor is requesting. All of this flows from the uncertain question: Who or what is the process for? The survivor, the organization—or the transformation?
Politics of accountability or accountability to a politics
The experiences that veterans of the Maoist parties share of their encounters with criticism/self-criticism paint it as a dynamic vehicle for analysis of political activity aimed at self-improvement, while conceding that its notoriously grim reputation has some basis in fact. But since the ’90s, they describe a different political landscape, where accountability is much more likely to be an occasion for reflection on personal conduct. This has left the organizations in better shape emotionally but may have kept them away from more volatile political engagement out of an atrophied capacity for productive disagreement. On the other hand, the transformative justice practitioners more often mention coming to articulate their politics in an explicit way after already organizing around concrete campaigns or projects. Here the politics of accountability develop precisely in the absence of abstract commitments to a program or line, which allows it to pursue real developments in the political configuration of the world, but might become paralyzed when contradictory demands—like a survivor’s wish for punishment, for example—conflict with the goal of abolition. For LV, who came up in anarchist scenes and pursues accountability as a dialogic social process, accountability is about a revolutionary “commitment to dialogue with yourself and with your comrades and sitting with [conflict] and working through that.” For the more insurrectionary and nihilistic tendencies within Bash Back!, the politics of accountability are somewhat irrelevant to the desire to amplify antagonisms, not necessarily with the hope or will for resolution.
For Hyejin Shim, working with incarcerated survivors gives accountability another, pressing meaning: a mode of equitably relating to the person they are advocating for when the relationship is premised on their captivity. This informs answers to highly consequential questions for her: How do you tell the person’s story in the way they want it told, while pushing back on elements that are unstrategic or even harmful? Accountability here seems to name the subordination of individual responses to a larger political goal. Kim Diehl describes her experience working through this as a process of “principled compromise,” which, of course, requires some agreed- upon principles. Keeping these principles in sight helped Critical Resistance navigate what might otherwise have been fatal conflicts.
Sometimes the outcome was an undesirable one: a closed chapter, for example, but for the good of the organization’s longevity. Yet for the transformative justice movement, discovering what those principles might be seems to have been facilitated by precisely this freedom from foregone political commitments. This returns us to the question of how the traditions the movement is working in determine its capacity for discovering something new.
Generalized adoption or adoption of generality
Related to this question is a tension in how the body of knowledge circulates. All of the professional transformative justice practitioners share feelings of ambivalence about the ways their hard-won understandings of accountability have been taken up by an enthusiastic public that may not share the context for how they were developed or meant to be applied. Pilar Maschi goes so far as to say that someone who only comes to transformative justice through study—that is, without the direct experience of criminalization or harm that it was formed to combat—won’t know what to do with it in a conflict. The concept’s widespread adoption has led to serious enough misuse that Pilar wonders whether this was the right strategy: “The movement has changed. So now I’m trying to grab a hold of it and bring it back just a little bit, just a notch.”
This disappointment is a sign not only of the risk that the critical, challenging thrust of the concept could be lost in its popularization, but that the theory of how to change society by sharing this knowledge—a notable, and admirable, dimension of the movement is its commitment to popular education—might need more specification. If the concept can be so maimed in its use by people without the necessary experience, how should it teach the people it needs to teach without losing its meaning in the process? This goes for movement specialists too: Emi’s own experience as a survivor going through an accountability process after years of facilitating them challenged much of what she thought she knew. This has further implications for the theory of coalition or conspiracy between people with different levels of exposure to the carceral state collaborating to overcome it. The missteps they mention underscore the weight of the commitment to centering the people most impacted by the prison system. Doing this with proper care might impose a real limit on the movement’s spread outside of it, but without attaining some level of popular support, social transformation is impossible.
For LV, the widespread adoption of any one accountability practice in particular is less important than devising practices in prolonged and expansive dialogues with communities, revolutionary spaces, radical formations, etc. This is framed as the necessary work of addressing conflict. In fact, LV describes this need as parallel to the infrastructural and basic demands of creating any viable collective. “At this point, every collective that I enter into, every movement space that I enter into, I try to tell people we need to approach conflict in the same way that we approach food or feeding massive groups of people.”
Class fractions or fracturing of the class
This leads us to the final opposition in which all others are refracted: the class character of the movement. Pilar offers one pole: she understands herself to be accountable to her “fellow crimees,” expressed here not primarily as accountability to survivors as such, nor women, nor the community, nor the left, and so on. Tracing the history of the movement as it came to assume its organizational form illuminated how responding to this tension gave it its current structure. Stevie Wilson pithily captures the situation facing organizers in Black working-class communities: “We had to make something from nothing while being told we ain’t shit!” Other practitioners describe the early abolitionist scene in similar terms, coalescing slowly out of prison reentry programs and punk music scenes until a semi-professionalized layer could gain enough of a foothold in academia and nonprofit organizations to secure larger grants and more funding. These professionalizing advocates turned the small network into a career-sustaining infrastructure. Even those outside of those semi-professionalized layers may be in conversation with the methods they devise, an overlap illustrated by the circulation of the Creative Interventions Toolkit in radical anarchist circles and indeed spaces that refuse or resist formalization.
Kim Diehl observes that the Black trade-unionist circles that trained her politically didn’t overlap with the abolitionists. She puts this down to its character as an academic or bourgeois-lumpen coalition, as opposed to “folks with jobs organizing in their shops and the public sector.” She herself embodies the movement’s attempt to straddle this divide, seeing her role as a “co-conspirator” to people like her brother, who had done time in prison. In a similar key, Peter Hardie appraises the nonparty movements as drawing from “new knowledge” not based on the literature of the revolutions nor the communist tradition but “the real-life experiences of people who decided that they are tired of oppression.” This encounter has reciprocally enriched the communist formations, but he sees its lack of familiarity with this literature as a failing on the part of the communist organizations to meet these newer organic projects where they’re at.
All of these interviewees describe a similar situation—one of organized working-class militancy increasingly reduced in size and potency, and at a distance from a new coalition of the fractions of a disorganized working class held together by meager access to bourgeois patronage, all the while subject to the ever-louder drone of predation by the prison system. This is, in effect, the situation mapped most decisively by Critical Resistance cofounder Ruth Wilson Gilmore in her 2007 Golden Gulag, which traces the massive, rapid expansion of the prison-industrial complex in California to the stalling out in the 1970s of the model of growth that, for much of the century, had seemed to project the steady incorporation of waged workers into the industrial production process far into the future. This model had also formed the premise for most revolutionary organizing against it but encountered a crisis of profitability around the same period as the historic, time-cracking revolts, leaving the state with idle excess capacity and workers the capitalists had to shake off their balance sheets. While there was a deliberate capitalist-class project to shatter the social bases of proletarian militancy, profit imperatives, too, weighed on the possible paths out of this moment of crisis for the capitalist state. The outcome was the transformation from a society with a mass industrial proletariat to the more class-polarized, prison- industrial society that abolitionists diagnose as the salient form of capitalist misery today.
Working after the failure of the global revolts of the ’70s to cohere into a systemic challenge, Gilmore and others attended to the political decomposition of the working class by following it where the state had dispersed it: out of the point of industrial production and into the “hell factories in the field,” as a pivotal article by Mike Davis on prison construction puts it. The seeming disappearance of the collective agent of change, which the parties all had hoped to organize, took with it the horizon of revolution. One sign of this dispersal came in a previous interview we conducted with Stevie Wilson.2 Discussing the difficulties organizing fellow prisoners, he notes that “growing up, they don’t feel a part of their community. They don’t feel a part of their neighborhood. You see that a lot of them don’t feel part of their family. And then you come to prison stuff, let’s talk about community. They’re looking at you like, ‘What? What community?’”3
In the organizing that became transformative justice, a dimension of the occluded revolutionary horizon had been preserved after its disappearance in the ’80s counterinsurgency, the trace of which can be seen in the now common use of abolition to describe the aspiration for what in the past may have gone under the name of communism. It was this sensitive attention to the concrete location and composition of the class that allowed the abolitionist movement to anticipate the form in which generalized revolt would return, almost fifty years later. But as the interviewees lament, anticipation does not on its own unify the scattered class into a self-acting political force. As a contemporary descendant of “survival pending revolution,” accountability practices offer many deep gifts, not least of which is the capacity to proceed, caringly and inventively, from failure. Reflecting on their own understandings of its failures, the following interviews may contain the seeds of whatever productive failures we can hope to discover next.
⊱