Whose democracy in which state?: Abolition democracy from Angela Davis to W. E. B. Du Bois

Abstract

Objective: This article argues that a better understanding of the history and reception of W. E. B. Du Bois's abolition democracy helps elucidate contemporary debates by abolitionists about how to engage with the state. Methods: Through a close reading of Du Bois's Black Reconstruction I show how contemporary focus on abolition as abolishing the carceral state and building alternatives elides viewing abolition democracy as an engagement with and challenge to state power. Results: Viewing abolition democracy from this longer history allows scholars today to view debates among abolitionists themselves as a conflict between transforming how the state work and carving out autonomous spaces of freedom away from the state. Conclusion: By recognizing the confliced history between DuBois's use of abolition democracy and its invocation by contemporary activists, I show how abolition itself is a fundamentally contested concept deployed for multiple political discourses and struggles.Abolition politics has become increasingly popular in recent decades as an explicit response to the post-Civil Rights Era growth of mass incarceration. Often explicitly focused on the abolition of prisons, police abolition rarely received much attention within mainstream discourse. However, the 2020 murder of George Floyd by the Minneapolis Police Department and subsequent burning down of a police district building catapulted police abolition into the mainstream like never before. Suddenly news and opinion outlets were debating the merits of defunding police departments, moving money into community development, and even whether defunding itself is a suitably radical goal. Apart from these discussions of the tactics and strategy of police abolition, the goal of police abolition may be encapsulated in one form as an abolition democracy. Used today to name the ideal of a democracy free of police and prisons, W. E. B. Du Bois first coined the term in his monumental Black Reconstruction to analytically describe the incipient social formation in the Reconstruction South of Black freedmen working together with white laborers to establish a truly egalitarian democracy across race and class (Du Bois, 1998) . While abolition democracy is oftenThis is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License, which permits use and distribution in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, the use is non-commercial and no modifications or adaptations are made.

Geography’s abolitionist turn: Notes on freedom, property, and the state

“…For scholars of abolition geography, however, the role of the state remains a pressing theoretical concern. Indeed, and as Quinn Lester (2021) has argued, the role of the state is a key point at which Du Bois and Davis’ conceptions of abolition democracy diverge. For Du Bois, the state was crucial to ushering in and ensuring liberation under abolition democracy, whereas Davis employs what Lester calls a “thin” definition of abolition democracy that resists blueprints or straightforward historicization and critiques the imperialist character of American democracy (Lester 2021: 3082).…”

“…Indeed, and as Quinn Lester (2021) has argued, the role of the state is a key point at which Du Bois and Davis’ conceptions of abolition democracy diverge. For Du Bois, the state was crucial to ushering in and ensuring liberation under abolition democracy, whereas Davis employs what Lester calls a “thin” definition of abolition democracy that resists blueprints or straightforward historicization and critiques the imperialist character of American democracy (Lester 2021: 3082). For Du Bois, the state failed to fully incorporate freed slaves into the project of democracy; for Davis, the state is not the appropriate actor to achieve liberation.…”

Carceral reckoning and twenty-first century US abolition movements: Generational struggles in the fight against prisons

“…For example, in the span of a few years, historical events transformed even the most ardent liberal reformers into revolutionary abolitionists. Most recently, Quinn Lester (2021) has similarly argued that according to Du Bois, “abolition democracy” was not simply about incorporating newly freed people into liberal bourgeois society but more about how the struggle for Black freedom held the potential to usher a “dictatorship of the proletariat” where working class across the color line would take state power and abolish class society (2021: 4). The “dictatorship of the proletariat” was cut short by ruling elites that codified white supremacy into laws that restricted Black labor and offered up wages of whiteness to white workers as part of the consolidation of the northern industrial economy and state retrenchment that prevented guaranteeing even the most basic civil rights (McQuade, 2018; Shanahan and Kurti, 2022).…”

“This Unfortunate Development”: Incarceration and Democracy in W. E. B. Du Bois

“…26 For Du Bois, political equality enables democratic agency, in turn imbibing politics with the energy of popular participation (Basevich 2019). This idea is most firmly articulated through the concept of abolition democracy introduced in Black Reconstruction in America ([1935] 2014), a revisionist account that centered Black political agency, rather than political corruption or incompetence, in the history of Reconstruction (Lester 2021). Abolition democracy is a multiclass, multiracial movement waged by both laborers and capitalists—political equals—committed to the abolition of slavery and subjugation.…”