Abolition, feminism and social reproduction

Original drawing for Ojalá by @PazConNadie.

Books • Susana Draper • April 5, 2024 • Leer en castellano

This is the second excerpt from the introduction to Free and Fearless: Feminist horizons and Alternative Justice by Susana Draper, which Tinta Limón published in February of this year. Click here to read the first excerpt.

In Latin America, popular feminist movements fighting for social reproduction have connected struggles in a way that expands and enhances how we understand violence.

Consistent with Silvia Federici's analysis of the crisis of social reproduction, knowledges generated from a multiplicity of struggles in defense of life, territories, land, food, work, desires and dignified health care have become key points in feminist organizing. 

Activists in these struggles have built bridges between the devaluation and permanent precariousness of reproductive work, the defense of territory and food in the face of state-promoted capitalist dispossession and expansion, and organizing against criminalization. 

In United States, #MeToo began as a spectacular cry from Hollywood but ended up bringing a long tradition of grassroots feminist knowledge about interpersonal and systemic violence to the fore. These knowledges, in turn, connect to the struggle for the abolition of the prison industrial complex that was reactivated under the call of #BlackLivesMatter and, later, #DefundThePolice.  

When criminalization is proposed as the response to problems generated by patriarchal and racial capitalism, the complexity of feminist analyses of violence (in the plural) is erased and a one-dimensional reading of violence against women is re-imposed. 

New attempts are made to enact individualized punishment on people pathologized by a system that criminalizes them, and to undermine the feminist struggle against rape by defining it as an "isolated" issue caused by subjectivities that are also isolated and pathologized. 

More expansive possibilities emerge when we connect the struggle to guarantee social reproduction, which lays at the center of the popular feminist movement, with the struggle to abolish the prison industrial complex. This connection rests on centering the need to sustain a dignified life via social relations outside of the notion of disposability that governs economic policy and the invisibilization of lives lived in prisons. 

If we situate our perspective at the intersection of popular feminist struggles for social reproduction and struggles to abolish the violence of prison, we can develop a more complex reading of how interpersonal and systemic violence are related. In doing so, the neoliberal framing of "security" ceases to appear as a solution. 

A key insight of popular feminisms and organizing that seeks to abolish the prison industrial complex has been to densify our understanding of violence. Part of our contribution relies on being able to translate this into imagining other ways of responding to and ending violence in multiple dimensions. 

This also requires an effort to challenge the notion of justice as the management of punishment after something has happened and, instead, to focus on the material and affective conditions needed to guarantee dignified lives without the multiple injustices that generate more violence.

Abolition at the center

Critical Resistance, a collective that advocates for prison abolition, introduced the demand for the “abolition of the prison industrial complex" in the 1990s. Their aim was to name the intersecting governmental and capitalist forces at play in the expansion of the prison system and in everyday forms of policing that negatively impact people and communities whose lives neoliberalism makes more precarious. 

The expansion of this system, along with the radical decline in the material conditions necessary for the reproduction of collective life, forged a kind of common sense in which security is equated with surveillance, policing and imprisonment. It is in this context that abolitionist activists have insisted on the capacity to imagine another way of living. 

They have asked: how can we imagine a society that does not use prison and criminalization to solve problems stemming from the violence and precariousness that the system generates? What would we need to do to make this possible? 

This enormous question can be demobilizing, especially if we focus on the idea of finding a formula or an abstraction with which to replace prisons. As Angela Davis reminds us, it is important to understand carceral society as a system, and not just to associate the materiality of prisons as something to be replaced with another similar thing (a container to hold problems). 

We must remember that prisons depend on various mechanisms. “[The prison industrial complex] is a set of symbiotic relationships among correctional communities, transnational corporations, media conglomerates, guards’ unions, and legislative and court agendas,” wrote Davis in Abolitionist Alternatives. 

Making carceral society visible as a system of relations prompts questions that allow us to develop a strategic approach and build a longer-term horizon of meaning. 

What are the long-term consequences of a series of political operations carried out in the present? What are the long-term consequences of, for example, demanding more criminalization? Who will be most affected if this takes place at a time in which social reproduction is in crisis? 

Prisons are, as a famous graffiti stated, places "where the rich never enter and the poor never leave." And abolition is "an organizational tool and a long-term goal" which creates the possibility of articulating political visions for "a re-structured society," in the words of Andrea Ritchie and Mariame Kaba.

Simultaneous interventions on multiple levels are integral to feminist struggles that place social reproduction at the center. These can include participatory budget struggles at the municipal and state level, so as to direct resources to strengthening community life through housing, education, health and culture. They can include struggles to close prisons and promote community organizations and institutions that allow us to take alternatives seriously as we confront and take responsibility for situations of conflict, harm and toxic masculinities. They can also include specific struggles at the legislative level toward decriminalization and stopping the expansion of police surveillance. 

At a time in which violence is intensifying alongside processes of capitalist expansion and expropriation, it is no coincidence that feminist struggles for the social reproduction of shared life and for the abolition of the prison system have become central concerns in multiple territories. These processes are centered on retaking and building holistic forms of collective existence in which security is understood as directly linked to the possibility of creating dignified social relations. 

In this sense, feminist (in the South) and prison abolitionist struggles (in the North), which are taking place with varying intensities and in various ways, are opening up new universes of possibility for collective survival.