On abolition, the failures of the left, and the hope of transformative justice

1.

Recently, I attended a panel on Abolition with speakers from Indigenous harm reduction, migrant rights, and anti-war/pro-Palestinian organizations that was moderated by a writer from an online left journal. Each of the speakers were amazing in their own right giving incisive and informative histories and analysis of the systems against which their struggles are formed: colonization, borders, and the military industrial complex. As is generally the case with panels, the impact of the speakers was intensified by how these struggles all intersect and coalesce in a way that pin points the utter necessity of abolishing colonial/capitalism — a system that historically asserts itself through diverse national and global strategies of deadly violent oppression. A dimension of abolition that the panel did not address is transformative justice: the process for dealing with harms perpetrated by both individuals and organizations within the movement for liberation. This writing asserts that without transformative justice, the left will be unlikely to succeed in achieving its goals beyond the current protest movements that exist today.

The abolition panel happened against the current backdrop of climate catastrophe, the ever growing grotesque wealth gap, and the shift from US global domination to a multi-polar world order. In response, the transnational capitalist class is protecting its power, wealth, and status by deploying increasingly sophisticated repressive apparatus: policing, military and paramilitary, digital technologies, and AI. The current global crisis is also being managed through engagement with far right organizations from think tanks to street level fight clubs. But the ‘extremist’1 solutions that the far-right/fascists are presenting (immigration reform, anti-DEI and trans health care, forced addiction treatment, gigantic prisons, attacks on the poor and unhoused, AI and crypto, drill baby drill) are actually consistent with the history and values of colonial/capitalism. In the highly violent and coercive system of colonial/capitalism, the privilege of survival can only be gained through degrees of compliance — that is to say, for most people survival is something that must be worked and/or struggled for — it is not granted just because one is alive. And this struggle for survival happens in competition with others in a system where ‘failure’ means impoverishment and expendability. Not everyone can succeed; there needs to be an exploitable mass and a permanent percentage of unemployment in order for colonial/capitalism to function. Ruling forces use divide and conquer strategies along the lines of Indigeneity, Blackness, disability, race, class, lumpeness,2 gender and gender expression, sexuality, and status, to hierarchize bodies along a spectrum of exploitation/extractions to privilege. The hierarchization of bodies then primes the general population for ideologically reactionary responses that target Others as ‘problem’ to the multiple axes of global crisis. This does not mean that global capital will actually protect the interests of the far-right base who will not ultimately gain the privileges that it imagines for itself. The base will be distracted and emboldened by culture war wins while the demand for the privileges of white supremacy escalates social conflict, quite possibly, in the US, to the point of civil war and globally to the point of WWIII. In the end, far right/fascist ideologies and strategies are consistent with liberal-democracy or colonial/capitalism. Under the current global crisis, we see the broadening, acceleration, and intensification of techniques of repression usually applied to oppressed communities in at a smaller but no less violent scale. As Aimé Césaire wrote: fascism in colonialism turned inward. The common left observation regarding this moment is that right wing/fascist populism is able to flourish because of the absence of a viable left option. People are choosing barbarism over socialism.

2.

Before going into my observations on the question of why the left fails the future beyond current forms of resistance to oppression, and what this has to do with abolition and the panel that I heard, I want to suggest that the left is at a disadvantage in building a populist movement relative to the right due to the embeddedness of white supremacy in the European cum global system of colonial/capitalism and liberal-democracy; the distance from liberal-democracy to fascism is a lot shorter than most people imagined, whereas socialism or any other view of a liberated future remains shrouded behind anti-woke rhetoric. At the get go, the left has an extremely hard road towards bringing people into a struggle that moves towards a great unknown — that moves away from neoliberal conceptions of hyper-individualism and towards a recognition of inter-dependence. As one panelist pointed out, Indigenous sovereignty challenges the very existence of the white-settler nation state — and thus is classified in so-called Canada as a national security threat. In this regard, the panelists agreed that abolition is aspirational, something we need to be imaging while at the same time full of contradictions and locally complicated contexts — which, I don’t think at this point, left organizing has the wherewithal to tackle.

I have great respect and admiration for the work of all the individuals on this panel and the organizations that they lead or work for. Several of the panelists, but not all, located themselves as people with lived experience and shared identity in the struggles that they represent. To locate myself, the following thoughts and analyses arise from my almost 40 years of abolitionist work in the prison and homelessness contexts. I have white bourgeois settler ancestry and grew up with a downwardly mobile single parent who suffered trauma and related mental health issues. I identify as a queer and non-binary, and as a c-ptsd survivor with mental health and other brain struggles. I have also used drugs to greater or lesser degrees throughout my life. I have mostly survived by working at manual, casual, and informal labour while I have also managed in a very unconventional way to obtain a high degree of education. Today I am still poor and precariously housed — by some definitions, I am homeless, although not on the streets.

The issue I see that contributes to the ‘failure’ of the left in developing a populist base is its internal culture, which is often described as ‘toxic’3 something that is well known and written about. As the old joke goes, how does the left form a firing squad? It forms a circle. And I’m not talking about taking out undercover cops — that is necessary important work. I am talking about the lack of a transformative justice culture, which makes the left unable to deal with and grow from conflict and, in general, be an uninhabitable space. Let me explain.

As the panelists note, abolition is not just about the systems that we confront, it is about imagining a future without these systems. At the same time, one panelist observed that borders are everywhere and that we are all involved in reproducing them in our everyday lives by being complacent towards the two tiered system that refuses rights to undocumented migrants making them subject to brutal work conditions, hyper exploitation and extraction, immiseration and injury, denial of resources, indefinite detention and other kinds of carceral containment, discrimination, and xenophobia. Those of us with privileged dimensions to our intersectional identities are docile to these systems in order to succeed within them. Those who are targeted, while forming the base of the struggle, are also docile within them in order to basically survive — or die trying. We survive in colonial/capitalist society by reproducing it through our daily lives. Survival is visceral. Trying to survive and resist at the same time often feels like an impossible condition. That our survival is in competition with each other means that hierarchical relations of oppression are replicated. Colonial/capitalist society is built on relational harm — relational harm is how we survive or succeed as individuals and as groups. Within left culture, this condition remains unacknowledged; means of survival, while being a central concern for Marx, is not admitted as a political problem. Abolition is a philosophy grounded in the human and historical reality that everyone does harm.

Abolition isn’t only about identifying and analyzing carceral structures; it is also about creating a future society within our movements now. This means at least trying to overcome punitive and carceral treatment among movement and community members and the replication of disempowering hierarchies. Working to unify across the multiple intersectional differences that make up the left is brutally hard. From high placed academic theorists and well intending wealthy whites to disabled, unhoused, trans, elderly, Indigenous, migrant, Black, Brown, Asian, and Arab people. From the intelligencia to the autodidact, lived expert, and street educated. From working and middle class to lumpen. From liberal to left, socialist, communist, anarchist, anti-colonial, national liberation… The fabric of the left is cut through by diverse historical and geographic conflicts and contradictions that are deepened by the disempowering divide and conquer strategy of political and economic elites. Divide and conquer strategies are resisted through investigating the political economics of our relations to each other, our competing interests. Conflict and contradictions are dialectical and thus are the working material of liberation history. There are frequent reminders to leftists to pay attention to our place in the power structure: white people need to step to the back; those impacted by specific oppressions need to lead; don’t centre yourself within other peoples struggles; develop solidarity between diverse movements; nothing about us without us; believe women when they speak out against sexual violence; endure being uncomfortable when your privilege is challenged; don’t expect to be educated by oppressed people, do your own research; don’t perform allyship in order to profit from anti-oppression politics (such as those working in the non-profit industrial complex); be an accomplice who takes up the risks of the struggles alongside oppressed people… These are some among many more overarching values of the left. As a white settler, I had to learn these values and continue to do so. I also learn humility gained from facing past transgressions and the daunting work of practicing anti-oppression within an oppressive structure. How does the left deepen and expand the practice of these values in order to become a force capable of abolishing the formidably depraved colonial/capitalism-cum-fascism of this period?

3.

The values of the left reflect ideological positions, which are often produced through struggles and articulated for many through theorization. In left culture, there is a punitive tendency to treat ideological positions like a measuring stick or moral standard that tests and classifies people, and determines belonging. If one is seen as having transgressed an ideological position, the knee jerk reaction is often to school, label, and perhaps cancel that person or group. At the same time, there are many other less well articulated and defended ideological positions — and I would name classism (ironically) and poor bashing4 among them — that generally remain unaddressed in relational and left cultural terms. Even though classism is exceedingly harmful, I have never seen anyone called out, or in, for it.

Ideological positions are abstractions that operate at a distance from lived reality. Ideological rigidity leaves little room for contradiction, complexity, and questioning. When I am in everyday unhoused community, contradiction and complexity is all there is. Being and working on the frontlines should be a challenge to our ideologies and practices — that’s what praxis is, an engagement with messy everyday experiences and survival knowledge as a basis for building revolutionary theory towards resistance and revolution. The distance between ideology and inevitable real life contradictions is exactly the space in which the left needs to be critically grounded. Political correctness stunts the movement by shutting down discussion with judgement before one has integrated lived experience, nuance, contradiction, and relational power dynamics. It obstructs the process of ethics where our ideologies and values are challenged in practice by the complexity of the moment.5 The right thing to do isn’t always obvious. Ideologies offer important frameworks, but they are not blunt instruments to be used against people. If cancelling a person or group is deemed necessary by some, there should be a movement process to figure out if that is a reasonable response and, if so, what terms should be established. Political correctness without process, especially when it doesn’t respect the intersectionality of our experiences of oppression and privilege, or the political economy of our relations to each other across difference, is an assertion of power and a form of intimidation.

Anti political correctness has also become its own form of political correctness in that people accuse others of political correctness when they feel uncomfortably challenged in a discussion. Anti ‘woke’ politics has become a flash point for far-right/fascist politics and indicates a retreat into some combination of white-settler/bourgeois-cis-hetero-normative-ablist-citizen privilege. But for many, ‘woke’ also comes across as a classism. As a highly educated person, I have hurt people I work with by responding with political correctness in discussions; trying to be a white person who pushes back on racism, for instance, I have come across as patronizing. Sometimes, not being politically correct is what is needed for community members to begin to trust. Trying to balance all the dynamics and relate ethically feels like walking on eggshells. It doesn’t feel good, but this is sitting with discomfort.

Facing the seemingly insurmountable opponent that is colonial/capitalism can shut down our capacity to do the relational work of building trust and, I don’t want to say “safety” because the left is soooo far from that, but maybe openness, compassion, acceptance, presence? Or showing that we can all be accountable for our harms — that is, growing a culture of accountability that recognizes that harm goes in all directions and that it isn’t up to the ideologically initiated to correct and educate the people — that is an assertion of privilege. I understanding that building accountability into our liberation struggles may be a lot to ask of movement leaders and those working on the frontlines.

4.

There are tools within the abolition movement to address perceived, felt, and/or experienced harms whether they be political, ideological, social, inter-personal, and/or intimate. Transformative justice (TJ) is integral to abolition and offers a praxis and history of conflict resolution and accountability processing. Accountability through TJ can be a platform for people to clarify and speak out about their experiences of harm or conflict, gain perspective from others involved and those who are supporting the process, and come to a decision on how to reduce harm and create some kind of safety for those victimized. Stories of doing this work describe an often deeply engaged, grueling, potentially re-traumatizing, time demanding process that sometimes ends in failure. I can attest to this from my own experience.

To give a bit of my own experience with TJ, last year I had reached out to the abolitionist organization Rittenhouse on behalf of Voices 4 Unhoused Liberation (V4UL) to see if we could hire someone to help with a difficult, complex, and intense situation involving claims of harm that we didn’t have the skills to deal with without creating more harm. Rittenhouse trains formerly incarcerated people to do TJ and is run by a woman who is, herself, formerly incarcerated. At that time, Rittenhouse did not have the capacity due to underfunding, so we approached people from Maggie’s and they agreed to support us in a process even if some of the parties didn’t want to engage. Despite V4UL wanting to create a space to hear and discuss criticisms and harms by members and offering total autonomy to the complainants to direct the process, they declined to take part to any degree. Which is fine, except instead of engaging with us, one of the people wrote a “cathartic” email (which we did not consent to receive) trashing V4UL members and then cut off all communication (which we have respected). Then they started a deeply subjective, slanderous rumour campaign against V4UL members. What was being said diverged dramatically from our own experience and in some parts included complete falsehoods. Suddenly, people we don’t know and who had no relation to the situation we were dealing with whatsoever were confronting us. These people then continued to spread this rumour to others we also don’t know. V4UL members were to some degree cancelled, that is, dis-invited from a speaking engagement, had a project collaboration cancelled, and were attacked publicly in community and activist chat spaces. Maggie’s, for whatever most likely valid reason given the work that they do, did not follow through with their offer of support regardless of whether those making claims against us participated or not (again, we did not expect this work be done for free). In part, this whole situation resulted in the incapacitation of V4UL and the nervous breakdown of a member. Unfortunately, the unhoused community that V4UL had helped build and support were also impacted. One of the hardest parts of this is that the people involved in this rumour campaign consider themselves to be abolitionists.

While, in the letter, we were admonished to not make this about privilege, to me it did feel like there were structural power dynamics at play in this situation as V4UL members are mostly people with lived experience of poverty and/or homelessness while the people confronting us were younger law students who do come from relative privilege. I also understand that histories of gender based and sexual trauma had a significant part in the situation.

One of the foundational principles of TJ is harm reduction: to refrain from doing harm and adding more harm to a situation. Harm reduction as it pertains to pwud is a core value of the left. The vital work that has been done in Toronto and elsewhere in so-called Canada to develop this praxis cannot be overstated. Harm reduction relates to sustaining the precious lives of pwud against the social will for their death. We don’t discriminate who gets access. The panel moderator of the abolition talk mentioned Jackie Wang’s book, Carceral Capitalism,6 where she talks about the myth of innocence — that none of us are innocent of harms and that innocence should not be a basis for support. As a prison abolitionist, I have supported people who have committed, in some cases, egregious violence against very vulnerable persons — I don’t support their actions, I try to understand, and I try to support them as people. I have lived the complexity of oppression and relational violence that drives subjected people to act out in harmful ways — including by me. With TJ, everyone gets support to move through harms with the hope of accountability and perhaps some relief, even the perpetrators. In fact, this is one of the things that I was accused of — supporting a perpetrator, which was construed as protecting a perpetrator from accountability. Two completely different things. In fact, I had consistently called for a process of support and accountability for all of us based on a piling up of harms in all directions (including a youth as collateral). Harms on top of harms, which are still ongoing. Two outstanding theorists and practitioners of TJ, Mariame Kaba and adrienne maree brown, write about the hate they get for their support work with perpetrators.

V4UL had actually successfully gone through a TJ process with these same folx before and our intention was to continue to build TJ praxis into our work as abolitionists. But somehow it seemed like asking for TJ was felt as confrontational or an unwelcome challenge to which the reaction was defensively offensive. Articulating ones victimhood and being accountable is vulnerable work and being asked to be vulnerable when you are triggered or don’t feel safe can just be too much. Faced with the opposing pressures of survival through self-protection vs. facing ones capacity to do harm really makes TJ hard and deep work. But launching a slanderous rumour campaign is extra.

I watched other activists working in the unhoused community not know how to deal with the rumour campaign against V4UL members. I think that maybe bystanders, even though they didn’t take on the rumours, were afraid to support us and face conflict or getting cancelled themselves. Currently, there is no way for the activist community in which V4UL works to confront the rumour mongers with the fact that they took unilateral punitive action outside any broadly shared abolitionist values (however vague) or community interest. Arbitrarily disciplining one person or group has a chilling effect on the community as a whole. Most importantly, making an example of someone is a classic carceral strategy. It sows fear and division not compassion and solidarity. This is symptomatic of a weak understanding and uptake of abolition on the left. It is, in fact, the larger activist community that needs to step up and refuse to accept rumour mongering or cancellation simply by word of mouth. If there is to be a rumour campaign,7 it must be ethical, which means validated somehow if not by a TJ process — remembering that TJ involves a process that centres those who have been victimized.

The hardship of V4UL’s experience and those of many others whose narratives I have heard or read about doesn’t mean that TJ should be abandoned, it means that the left needs to work at it harder. Holding TJ praxis as a core abolitionist value means encouraging and supporting more people to become practitioners and/or facilitators.

5.

I believe that TJ can also inform how activists deal with the harms that arise due to blunt use of ideology, rigid values, political correct judgement, lack of ideological clarity and consistency, and the dismissal of experiential complexity and contradiction. For example, when some members of V4UL proposed the idea of building an unhoused union with funding from labour unions, another V4UL member categorically shut down the discussion because they weren’t ready to even think about paying people for their work. In my view, the unhoused solidarity work happening in Toronto is so patchy and overstretched that it is not able to sustain, deepen, broaden, and diversify its engagement with the unhoused community and confrontation with the city as a whole. Unhoused community members have daily survival concerns and take great risks when they participate in organizing that could be alleviated by pay. Despite my unpaid full time dedication to V4UL’s work and oblivious to my extensive working-class labour history, I was basically told that I should get a job at a grocery store. Not too long after this discussion, the people opposing the union idea (one who is a paid activist and the other who worked in a unionized trade) quit V4UL hours apart effective immediately with no notice leaving all the responsibility and labour on… that’s right, the precarious people in the group. There was little to no explanation, dialogue, or negotiation offered, just passive aggressive withdrawal. V4UL’s capacity to live up to our commitments in community was severely hampered. Sometimes I feel that people need to justify leaving an organization they don’t want to be in anymore by making ideological judgements so they can shift blame and then slam the door on the way out.

I mean, how is it that as anti-capitalists there is little acknowledgement of the stress of trying to balance ones individualized survival with the very demanding and time consuming revolutionary work needed to make even a slight impact on any given issue, let alone transforming the whole system. Suddenly cutting off the vital resources and community we have been providing to unhoused community is counter to the overall liberatory objective. Activist labour is taken for granted and our means of survival is not considered as a complex site of privilege/oppression at least worth a consideration. Not recognizing the survival needs of those within the movement, however politically complicated, undermines the resilience of the movement. Our economic relations to each other as activists, and to the communities we work with are an ethical challenge related to one of the dominant forms of oppression we live within under colonial/capitalism: the wage labour relation.8 TJ could provide a container for these most difficult but potentially fruitful discussions to happen.

6.

Going back to the abolition panel, an issue was raised regarding the treatment of refugees that were, in the winter months, denied access to the shelter system by mayor Olivia Chow in her efforts to morally blackmail the federal government for more funding. Many in the city and the media reacted to the scene of the refugees forced to camp outside of the downtown shelter intake office at 129 Peter Street — two people died. Community leaders launched a wildly successful fundraising campaign to provide for the immediate needs of this community and put pressure on the city to resolve the situation — which they somewhat did.

But this story has another complex layer. V4UL was organizing with residents of the Delta Hotel shelter9 when surrounding nimby condo owners began to lobby the city for its closure. In order to placate these poor-bashing property owners, the city ordered the shelter provider, Homes First, to convert the Delta into a refugee only shelter. Every resident received a letter saying that there would be no more admittance through central intake. This also meant that if you were service restricted from the Delta, you would not be allowed back in. But the Delta was one of the few shelters in the city where residents had their own room with a lock, that accommodates couples and trans people, allows pets, and had a harm reduction program. The Delta was also surrounded by encampments of people who had been kicked out but who still relied on the Delta resident community for supports and necessities. Shelters are not just shitty carceral service providers, they are social ecosystems of survival. The news of the program change to only accept refugees sent a shock wave through the Delta community. These top down decisions that impact the lives of unhoused people reinforce their sense of powerlessness, expendability, exclusion, and stigmatization.

Working with Delta residents, V4UL launched a campaign with demand ‘keep the Delta accessible to ALL unhoused people.’ In fact, there were already many refugees living at the Delta some of whom were involved in the campaign. We proposed that the city should take the money it got from the federal government and open up new shelter spaces that could be dedicated to refugees if that would better suit their needs. As the unhoused population grows, more shelters is one of the unified demands across grassroots orgs doing homelessness solidarity work alongside decarceralization, rgi universally accessible housing, migrant justice, and a stop to encampment, shelter, and housing evictions being among many others.

In wanting to launch the campaign, V4UL approached a person involved with getting the refugees outside of Peter St. into the shelter system to see if they would speak at a rally against this divisive and poor bashing move on the part of the city. But, they didn’t see the situation the same as we did. They felt that the V4UL campaign was xenophobic and divisive. While we understood how any mention the prioritization of refugees can play into the xenophobia of society at large, we were also concerned with the poor-bashing of unhoused people which is completely sanctioned and perpetrated by the city, the nimby assholes they listen to, and housed people in general. In this case, public sympathy for one excluded part of the unhoused community — refugees — was being used to exclude access to already scarce shelter space of another part of the community that is roundly vilified and under attack. There were a few emails back and forth trying to sort it out and I think some suggestion on V4UL’s part to engage in a larger process, but that was declined so a shared understanding was never reached. Because the issue was left unresolved, V4UL did not fully launch the campaign. The disagreement then circulated among the unhoused activist community which contributed to a bit of isolation of V4UL — although, gratefully, we do maintain relationships. Nevertheless, an accusation of xenophobia remains a stain.

V4UL is fully aware that xenophobia is a big issue in the unhoused community in Toronto: there are many who want to claim the privileges of citizenship to gain priority access to under budgeted resources over refugees and migrants. Reserved government funding for migrant programs, housing, and work — however inadequate — is viewed as the government ‘not taking care of their own’ first. No matter how many discussions we have as activists with community members about xenophobia, it is a persistent way that many unhoused folx understand their material condition within a competitive divide and conquer society. They are not in touch with the fact that the privileges of being (so-called) Canadian come from the economic exploitation, austerity, and wars of global capital against nations primarily of the global south — probably because those privileges don’t fully apply to them (many of whom are migrants or refugees with status). Xenophobia also exists alongside a plethora of other issues that express laterally and in all directions among unhoused community members regardless of racialization, Indigeneity, gender, gender identity, sexuality, ability, status: refusing to use chosen pronouns, using homophobic slurs, denigrating pwud, supporting Trump and/or Ford, interpersonal and domestic violence, calling the police, anti-Black racism, telling refugees to speak English, denigrating unhoused people who have white privilege as failures, viewing migrants as just more settlers on Indigenous land … and on and on. Membership in unhoused community is determined by housing status, not by ideological position or values. For me, as a housed white settler, it feels delicate to challenge an unhoused person on their political positions without triggering the asymmetrical power in the situation and feeding into the shame and defensiveness that many unhoused people carry for having their realities erased due to broad scale social hate. Divide and conquer is a tried and true tool of disempowerment which, as activists, we try to overcome by showing up and trying to co-create community based on a different set of values of respect, interdependence, reciprocity, redistribution, and sustainability.

7.

From supporting others who are navigating life within the carceral continuum, and from my own experience of abuse, being a victim can be a devastating and complicated experience that changes ones life forever. Many don’t survive. At the same time, while the #MeToo movement tells us, in the context of sexual violence, to “believe women,” it is a fact that victims are not always telling the truth. I personally know someone who accused another person close to me of sexual assault and later, after much harm was done, admitted they were lying. Believe women means take them seriously and investigate, it doesn’t mean convict a person based solely on words and feelings — which is dangerous. brown talks about how victimization is sometimes weaponized through the formation of a hive mentality to cancel those accused of harm (which is what happened to me). This is not to invalidate feelings or victims. When we have been hurt, feelings of vengeance are completely natural and sometimes retribution is the only thing that feels right. Sometimes the trauma of being victimized makes it difficult to understand oneself also as a doer of harm. As Kaba writes, feelings are not a basis for “policy” because our feelings in the moment are often different than our values and those of the movement. As abolitionists we are aspiring to move beyond the punitive social order.

Because the harms we commit are connected to our ability to actually live they are very tender parts of who we are. Everyone has a shadow side where self-centred feelings and impulses live (ambition, greed, revenge, superiority, hatred, shame..). In colonial/capitalism the pressure to present as always desirable, always employable, always smart, always on top of everything submerges our shadow sides below our consciousness. Those in leadership roles are put on pedestals where they are vulnerable to being toppled. Sometimes leaders serve their own interests and position instead of the community. For those of us with c-ptsd, our survival strategies can consist of patterns of behaviour that, as adults, are harmful to others and ourselves. I believe that, besides living in a relationally violent system of colonial/capitalism, of competitive hierarchization, that trauma has a huge impact on left culture — a topic too involved on its own to get into here. brown suggests that when we develop self-awareness around these harmful ways of operating, we can begin to collectively unlearn them. That means all of us.

I feel willing to grow my capacity for accountability for the harms I have perpetrated (I am aware of some and probably unaware of more) and I have demonstrated this to those who have, nevertheless, insisted on a punitive approach based on their feelings. In being left with no communication, no process to unpack painful experiences within the movement that claims the future, I am left with my own un-resolvable feelings of rage, burnout, alienation, and worst of all, disillusionment.

As I understand it, a transformative justice process involves creating a space where everyone is invited to fully articulate their experiences, feelings, thoughts, and actions on a given situation. Everyone is provided the support they need and everyone is listened to. Accountability is taken for harms and some kind of remedy is offered within what is possible for people. The intention with TJ is to come to understanding. TJ challenges individuals and groups to be as honest as possible and develop shared truths, which is an anti-dote to a political world of lies, subterfuge, corruption, and fake news. If resolution is possible, it comes from sharing, hearing, and empathy. If a perpetrator is asked to leave movement spaces all together — this is a movement decision made by process, not an autocratic one made vigilante style. If resolution is not possible, then strategies to reduce the risk of harm going forward are developed and safety plans are made for those who have been harmed. It may be that the safer option is to have some kind of ongoing communications, or circle, with perpetrator/s than to fuel their harmful behaviour by excommunicating them which effectively pushes them into another community to do more harm. TJ is not a practice of policing behaviours, it is not tone policing, it is care based and oriented towards repair after the storm. When repair doesn’t happen, grief is appropriate.

8.

Finally, I acknowledge that I went into this panel with some weighted needs to engage with the TJ dimension of abolition given my own recent experiences. I had formed a question in my mind but there was no time to ask it during the question period. At the end of the panel, the audience was invited to continue conversations in the lobby where there was tabling and snacks. I saw one of the panelists acknowledge me so I went over and raised some of the questions that I bring up here… how, in the unhoused activist community it’s really hard to develop cohesion across orgs perhaps because of lack of capacity to work through tough issues and/or deal with harms, and how transformative justice praxis might help develop a more resilient activist culture. I don’t know if they were tired, or if the topic didn’t relate closely enough to what the panel talked about, if it was just another weight added to the already full plate of great work they are doing, or maybe I expressed myself in an off-putting, awkward, or overly intense personal way (I tend to disassociate and blurt when trying to communicate something very meaningful to me), or maybe it wasn’t my place to raise such a question to a leader of movements representing marginalized people of colour. Whatever the case, they responded with a stream of advice I wasn’t really looking for on how to build a campaign followed by “I hope that helps.” Then they quickly excused themselves to go to the bathroom. I was left standing there with a delicious baklava in my hand, so I ate it on the way out.

If the movement has no real transformative justice praxis, there is little hope that the communities in which we organize will learn how to move beyond the structures we seek to abolish. Kaba and brown describe how their abolitionist communities are regularly asking them for TJ support so it is possible for this dimension of the struggle to exist however hard the work is. A first step towards implementing TJ would be to start to hold it as a value within our movements, up there with harm reduction — because TJ is harm reduction within the harm generating relations of colonial/capitalism. Harm reduction is a core ethic that distinguishes those movements who take it up from the spectrum of left, liberal, right, and fascist politics; a society based on care and that refrains from intentionally doing harm, full stop. The TJ process is a way for us to go back to and exercise the core value that our liberation arises from. We need to do the hard work of learning it just as we learn to navigate the police, have good security practices, provide first aid, learn protest techniques and strategies, decolonize our minds… all the skills we need to make a broad scale liberation struggle more viable — at this point, activist campaigns can only get us a certain distance, but in order to level up, the work needs to deepen, broaden, and develop sustainable infrastructure. TJ needs to be talked about in all movement spaces and public events in order to spread awareness and promote the value. In order to do this, a group to research the current literature on TJ and learn TJ skills needs to be organized and the movement needs to make sure that TJ resources such as Rittenhouse and Maggie’s are supported to do this work with us and teach us these skills. We want to win this fight, not continue to shoot ourselves in the foot trying.

postscript

Writing out these personal experiences feels pretty vulnerable and risky. I have not mentioned any of the names of those involved in the situations that I discuss, but they might recognize themselves if they ever read this — which I highly doubt. In the end, the who of it is not important, my experiences are not unique. It is not my intention to cause hard feeling or for people to feel betrayed, I am sure that I owe accountability to people, as I would also like to receive accountability. I am talking about a left cultural problem. I have spent a lot of time weighing potential consequences to myself and others before making this public. Critical thinking means orienting towards those who are negatively impacted by a theory, ideology and/or value. Criticism is vital to honing and evolving our ideologies so they serve the struggle. In the end, I decided to claim space to process my experiences as a theorist of a poor people’s revolution. I hope that these thoughts will serve the movement or at least comfort others who have experienced similar harms. Right now, as someone with c-ptsd who has been re-traumatized doing left activism, my nervous system does not feel safe going into activist spaces. I have intense anxiety and trigger responses that are helpful to no one and so I have to make a safety plan for myself in case I run into someone who is part of the rumour campaign against me. My life long commitment and desire to be a part of a revolutionary movement collides with my fears that I will be treated punitively and without understanding, empathy, or a mechanism to transform our conflicts and relational harms into knowledge, deeper solidarity, and resilience.

FOOTNOTE

1 I put ‘extremist’ in quotes because actions by the state may feel extreme to those with relative privilege while they are normal to oppressed peoples.

2 Lumpen refers to those who are not part of the wage labour system but survive off of welfare, charity, and criminalized labour. The lumpen are distinct from the working class and not considered a class in themselves. I theorize the lumpen as the intersectional poor. See: https://sidjackson.substack.com/p/recouping-the-lumpen-as-the-basis

3 I don’t prefer the term ‘toxic’ but it is commonly used in reference to left culture and is shorthand for behaviors that cause harm and derail objectives.

4 Poor-bashing is the unrecognized bigotry towards poor people by society at large and the structural production and reproduction of poverty by the state. With no real political economic analysis of the intersectional poor or lumpen in relation to class society — poor bashing is the character of the relationship. Charity is one form of poor bashing. Exploitation of poor people by cultural projects that sanitize, romanticize, or symbolize poverty without addressing the structures of poverty that produce it. On the left, I see poor-bashing occurring through segregation, tokenization, retreat into privilege when confronted with a need that one doesn’t want to fulfill, or that competes with ones own security. These are not necessarily criticisms. This is the material fact of trying to work across difference between classed strata and the lumpen within colonial/capitalism. See: Jean Swanson, (2001). Poor-bashing: The politics of exclusion. Toronto: Between the Lines Press.

5 For instance, I have felt ethically challenged as a housed person when community members are in crisis on the street and could use a place to crash. In this instance, I am coerced into performing the privilege of maintaining self-care and boundaries in order to not become homeless myself by sharing what I have instead of hoarding my resources so I can at least try to succeed.

6 Jackie Wang, Carceral Capitalism

7 In cases of asymmetrical power where confrontation is risky, rumour milling can be an effective way to challenge abuse.

8 Having to sell one’s labour as the only mode of survival allowed under colonial capitalism is a result of the theft of land from the people through privatization and commodification and thus the prevention of economic survival by subsistence and/or alternative economic arrangements. The exclusivity of the wage labour-relation creates the condition of impoverishment, famine, and disability (the exclusion of diverse bodies from wage labour) in line with historical forms of intersectional oppression. Wage labour is a control mechanism over populations who face criminalization for not allowing the use of our (sacred) labour power to enrich the colonial/capitalist corporate elites. See: https://sidjackson.substack.com/p/recouping-the-lumpen-as-the-basis

9 The Delta Hotel shelter has since been decommissioned