Angela Davis’ Reformist Delusions: a fiery wreck at the intersection of identity, abolitionism, and imperialist ‘socialism’

Angela Davis is literally the poster child of the Black liberation struggle. But she’s much more than that. At her best, and most widely recognized, she was an associate of the Black Panther Party. Since then she has become a prolific academic, a celebrity of the left, claimed as a leader and an inspiration by everyone from the heads of the Women’s March to the old decrepit Communist Party USA, to anarchists and socialists, proponents of intersectionalism, and anyone and everyone in between. She was briefly a political prisoner and has taken various important stands throughout the years — for example, against the Iraq war and for the rights of Palestinians. All of this is why it’s so disheartening and honestly so dangerous that Angela Davis’ body of work diverts good people with good sentiments into perpetually reformist dead-ends that leave this nightmare for humanity intact. In this historic moment rife with potential advances for the revolution and the grave imminent danger of fascism, and as the Democratic Presidential Primary Campaign season kicks off in earnest, the kind of thinking that Angela Davis concentrates and represents plays a key role in ushering many on the precipice of diving into the revolutionary current back into the shallow choppy waters of bourgeois politics to get thrown upon the jagged rocks and battered by the waves. Her classes, speeches, articles, and books over the years, most especially “Women, Race, and Class,” her autobiography, and “Are Prisons Obsolete” have influenced generations. Just this past month, the Washington Post published a feature in their Style section entitled “Angela Davis is beloved, detested, misunderstood. What can a lifelong radical teach the resistance generation?” This article aims to use “Are Prisons Obsolete” to tease out what it is about Angela Davis’ method and body of work that leads those who follow her into the swamp, why it has such mass appeal, and ultimately to answer the question: Should Angela Davis’ thought be obsolete?

Reform Vs. Reform Vs. Revolution

“Are Prisons Obsolete” contains a lot of the ingredients that one would use to put together a path to liberation. It has a lot of facts and figures about the history and current day reality of prisons and portrays the horror of life behind bars. It talks about how prisons affect different groups of people and some of the ways that incarceration reflects, impacts and is impacted by society at large. But then it has a few key ingredients missing and some that just don’t belong. By the end of the recipe, you’ve definitely learned some things but you’re going to have to go back and start again if you actually want to end up putting together anything good.

The first section is entitled “Prison Reform or Prison Abolition.” This sets the tone for the book — and in a certain way for Davis’ body of work as a whole — by creating the allusion that she is arguing for something other than reform. In this section she calls for ending incarceration without fundamentally dealing with the capitalist-imperialist system that the incarceration she talks about serves. An eye-opening comparison is provided by looking at this section and putting it up next to the article by Bob Avakian titled “Reform or Revolution. Questions of Orientation, Questions of Morality.” Avakian deals with the most pressing questions facing us all — namely how can a person actually contribute to making the world a radically better place when so much cries out to be done with such urgency. He talks about people who volunteer with Doctors Without Borders in order to provide that kind of extraordinary relief where they can. And he poses that courageous action on the one hand against the basis that exists to emancipate humanity and the work imperative to overcome the need for an organization such as Doctors without Borders to even exist in the first place on the other. But in Davis’ work the urgency, the passion, the connection to liberation, and the science all fall away. Reform vs. abolition here would be more accurately posed as ‘making prison more livable’ vs. ‘making capitalism generally more livable’ except that it’s so entirely based in delusions about how the world works that it cannot even address that question in any significant way. With her conception of abolition we replace the whole conversation of ‘how can we win a better world,’ and ‘what can I contribute to that’ with an approach of ‘wouldn’t it be nice if.’

“Our” Prisons?

She ends the section by posing “The most difficult and urgent challenge today is that of creatively exploring new terrains of justice, where the prison no longer serves as our major anchor.” This line should leave us all wondering “whose major anchor?” Because prison isn’t our major anchor on the terrain of justice — WE don’t have any prisons right now. We aren’t the government or the ruling class, or the wardens or even the guards. We, if anything are the incarcerated, or more generally the billions of people who live on this planet who aren’t the ruling class of part of the machinery of the state. Prison is capitalism’s major anchor in the realm of justice. This is the crux of Professor Davis’ problem — no matter what she might believe in her heart, her work cannot deal with the fact that there is a fundamental antagonism between those who rule this society and those who are ruled over in this society. And it’s clear throughout the book that she sees us all — the dictators and the dictated to — as being in this together.

Flip to almost any page of this section and you will find Davis asking why it is that “we” keep imprisoning all these people. One comrade said: “It reminds me of when i was small and my older sister would grab my arm and smack me with it and yelp ‘why are you hitting yourself? Stop hitting yourself!’”

“Why do we take prison for granted?”

“People wanted to believe that prisons would not only reduce crime, they would also provide jobs and stimulate economic development in out-of-the-way places.”

“Why do prisons tend to make people think that their own rights and liberties are more secure than they would be if prisons did not exist?”

“When many young people decide to join the military service in order to avoid the inevitability of a stint in prison, it should cause us to wonder whether we should not try to introduce better alternatives.”

“The most difficult and urgent challenge today is that of creatively exploring new terrains of justice, where the prison no longer serves as our major anchor.”

Dictatorship or not?

We are living in a dictatorship: the dictatorship of the capitalist class. Everything about our survival in this society — whether you have a home, where you can live, whether you have a job or money, whether you can eat or feed your family, whether you can afford medicine or to see a doctor — all of it is dictated by capital, it’s political representatives, and it’s repressive apparatus. It is dictated by whether someone can make a profit off of you, or whether you can make a profit off of someone else in a vast landscape of exploitative and oppressive relations. This is not just the way things are or have to be. This is not some unchanging and unchangeable human nature. These are the historically evolved generalized production relations at this point in history. And they are enforced by the most massive apparatus of brutality, death, and destruction the world has ever seen. Davis mentions capitalism a few times in the course of the book (although never imperialism). But her conception of this is superficial, as just another -ism, a kind of systematic greed. As we go on we will see more how her conception of capitalism in particular diverges from reality. But this is integral to her misconception that somehow “we” have some share in these prisons. The responsibility that we, the vast majority of humanity, bare is that we have not overthrown that shit yet. But these jails belong to the ruling class, not us. So in that context what does it mean to abolish prisons?

Think about it this way — should we cure everyone’s cancer right away? Or should we cure it in stages? Clearly right away is preferable. But… shouldn’t we do the work to figure out what the cure is first? The abolition movement and this book in particular skips over figuring out what the goddamned cure is, and then acts like that’s besides the point.

Davis acts as though describing the problem in great detail and talking about alternatives for prison answers the question but that would only be true if we had power, or were negotiating with reasonable people, not going up against a bloodthirsty system. She takes a few stabs at it, but misses what drives this whole system. So let’s get down to it — what is the problem that we are trying to solve? When we ask whether prisons are obsolete, we first have to ask: what function do they serve?

Fundamentally, like the police and the courts and the prosecutors, the penal system exists to serve capitalism-imperialism. Prisons didn’t always exist. With a few ancient precursors, our modern notions of prisons arose around the 18th and 19th centuries, the time that capitalism was consolidating its hold on society and becoming the generalized means of production and exchange. These replaced earlier forms of social control like dungeons, flogging and maiming, forced labor, servitude and slavery. Much of this history is described in Davis’ book. But we’ve also seen the close relationship between prisons and capitalism develop to a new level within living memory as well. One easy way to illustrate this is by looking at the rise of mass incarceration and how closely it tracks the decline of urban manufacturing jobs in the US and the end of legal segregation. As factories and shipyards and auto plants, etc. were being shutdown in cities across the US and shipped off to places where capitalists could exploit people for a fraction of the labor costs, the number of farmers and sharecroppers dwindled. Black people were hit hardest and most long-term by both of these factors as white supremacy evolved through these changes — many shunted into generational unemployment, the gig economy, and the illicit economy with ghettos and segregated shantytowns acting as tinderboxes of unrest. The ruling class saw a situation where it had millions of people that it could not profitably exploit, at least not as legitimate wage laborers. This was a key ingredient in the mix of what became the political turmoil and rebellions of the 1960’s. And one key plank of the US imperialists’ strategy to deal with all of this was to incarcerate what it saw as a superfluous population. Warehousing these folks served numerous purposes — it broke the spirits of those it entombed and prevented them from organizing for any kind of better life for themselves or for all humanity, it disrupted the entire communities from whence it stole these vital human resources, and due to the exceptional language of the 13th amendment, it even made these inmates profitably exploitable again — competitive with the level of super-exploitation in the third world. In Davis’ analysis, capitalism exists passively as a backdrop with entities like the prison-industrial complex and the military-industrial complex playing the active role. In her smorgasbord approach to what’s driving all this, she even offers the expansion of prisons in California as “a geographical solution to socia-economic problems.” Once more she sees many of the ingredients of what’s really going on but posits such a corrupted notion of capitalism, that it becomes impossible to address. Towards the end of her section on the prison-industrial complex this becomes crystallized in talking about South Africa: “I am highlighting South Africa’s embrace of the supermax because of the apparent ease with which this most repressive version of the U.S. prison has established itself in a country that has just recently initiated the project of building a democratic, non-racist, and non-sexist society. South Africa was the first country in the world to create constitutional assurances for gay rights, and it immediately abolished the death penalty after the dismantling of apartheid. Nevertheless, following the example of the United States, the South African prison system is expanding and becoming more oppressive. The U.S. private prison company Wackenhut has secured several contracts with the South African government and by constructing private prisons further legitimizes the trend toward privatization (which affects the availability of basic services from utilities to education) in the economy as a whole.” To speak of a “democratic, non-racist, and non-sexist society” without addressing the class character of that society is meaningless and worse. On one level it’s just a bald-faced shameful lie evidenced by the rampant white supremacy still at the heart of South African society, but by claiming that it has “recently initiated the project of building” such a society, she implies that all that’s needed is a course correction in that “project.” But South Africa’s racism, sexism, and prison problem is precisely because it is a capitalist nation firmly within the grip of global imperialism. This statement also belies the real misconception of capitalism and imperialism at the heart of her analysis. She sees the relationship between prisons and capitalism as a way to line the pockets of the owners and operators of private prisons like Wackenhut and the complex web of corporations that profit off of them. But while they have influence, it isn’t the corporations who write the laws or legitimize the police force, nor the corporations who exercise the monopoly on the use of legitimate force. The prisons serve the capitalist state. The state is who bestows on the prisons (private or otherwise) the right to commit any range of violence against their charges which would be a crime under any other circumstance. This is, once more, the difference between Davis’ conception of capitalism as a form of institutionalized greed, and the scientific understanding of capitalism as the generalized economic relations enforced by the dictatorship of the capitalist class. And with this difference in diagnosis, the need for a different treatment becomes clear.

We see this crass reformism come to light in the second chapter as well where Davis evokes slavery, lynching, and segregation as horrors that were successfully abolished in a way parallel to the way she sees the potential abolition of prisons. She also identifies all four as racist institutions. She recognizes the fact, but never wonders the reason why it is, that the abolition of these institutions was superseded by continued racist brutality.

Davis states “To be sure, I am not suggesting that the abolition of slavery and the lease system has produced an era of equality and justice. On the contrary, racism surreptitiously defines social and economic structures in ways that are difficult to identify and thus are much more damaging.” But this statement acts as cover for the conception of history she lays out. In her hands, the development of this country, of racism, and of history is that amidst great suffering things are getting better — she believes that these previous movements have created a global consensus that racism is undesirable, even if definitions of racism are still up for debate and even if institutional racism persists. To Davis, these three previous abolition movements each made things better overall in the long march to justice. This section is a rehashing of the old religious delusion that “the arc of history is long, but it bends towards justice.” As opposed to recognizing the evolution of the oppression of black people, and the fact that we may very well face unprecedented horrors in the future, Davis poses the abolition of prisons as the next rung on the ladder to a better world. If that were the case, Who knows, maybe it would be the final rung.

That Which She Will Not Name

Angela Davis is no intellectual pawn, but she is not alone in this thinking either. And these aren’t just bad ideas, they are specifically distortions of communism and marxism. At this point I would be remiss not to mention Davis’ perpetual association with the old decrepit Communist Party, USA (CPUSA) (a few times running as their Candidate for Vice President of the American empire) and it’s splinter group the Committees for Correspondence. “Revisionism” is a term coined to describe those who revise the revolutionary heart out of Marxism. This barely captures the reality of these folks who have been so actively heartless for so long. They could be better described as a band of pseudo-scientists attempting to pragmatically Frankenstein together some semblance of “socialism” from whatever they feel might be palatable to “America” as some sort of painless progression from here to utopia (or at least to ‘the best that we can do’). The only way to develop such a theory or to implement it in practice has been to distort the meaning of socialism beyond recognition and as in this book, not even mention it.

So by proclaiming to BE a communist without explicitly advocating for or even mentioning communism we are left to wonder. Is the hazy “abolitionist” vision that Davis puts forward for the future her notion of communism? Is it the reforms that she thinks we can muster short of communism? Or is communism just another wouldn’t-it-be-nice-if idea to talk about at some other panel discussion.

These ideas are not only vague, they are deeply wrong. And Davis serves as a meeting point (or intersection, if you will) through which these ideas connect with many other popular dead-ends. As part of the old CPUSA she allied herself with the most notorious traitor to the socialist cause, Kruschev and his notions of “peaceful co-existence with capitalism” and the CPUSA’s correlated official policy of “peaceful transition to socialism.” She has allied herself with Kimberle Crenshaw, who coined the term intersectionality which is much more in line with Davis’ conception of capitalism as just another -ism. Intersectionality is a sacred term within much of the so-called abolition movement. Davis also unofficially endorsed Bernie Sanders for president in 2016, signing onto his redistribution of America’s imperialist plunder of the rest of the world, his distortion of the word socialism, and his vision of painless progress. And we can really gain some insight from Davis’ role in the Committee for Correspondence. While the old CPUSA had long ago replaced any recognizable notion of communism with American patriotism (even claiming that communism was “Twentieth Century Americanism”) the Committee for Correspondence was a splinter group formed in the early to mid 1990’s with Angela Davis in a major role that doubled down on this notion — naming itself after renegade bands of early American slaveowners and leaving the CPUSA in order to “reject Leninism” and promote a “multi-tendency” approach popular among groups like the DSA and many of the local “socialist” groups popping up throughout the country. “Americanism,” intersectionality, the peaceful transition to socialism, the painless progress of “communist” and “democratic socialist” electoral politics, a “multi-tendency” rejection of leninism, and an organization named after some slaveowners who demanded freedom for “all men” but really just meant themselves. This is quite a package and they all deserve each other. But humanity can do so much better, as we will see below.

(For more on the themes discussed in this section, see “Communism and Jeffersonian Democracy” by Bob Avakian)

What About Crime?

We have taken the position that prisons today exist fundamentally to serve capitalism-imperialism. Where does Davis start? She embarks on this journey writing: “In most parts of the world, it is taken for granted that whoever is convicted of a serious crime will be sent to prison.” So lets address this. Crime exists. It predates capitalism and some forms of crime even predate class society. Crimes will definitely still exist in the aftermath of the revolution, all through the socialist transition to communism, and some will no doubt even exist after communism has been established. Similarly to the rights and responsibilities of individuals, crimes are closely related to the level of development of a society. If you’re living in a hunter-gatherer society in the 1500s (or amongst those today that haven’t been enveloped by globalized society), then there’s no such thing as stealing a car. On the other hand, If you were forced into chattel slavery today in the United States (outside of the prison system), that self-appointed slavemaster would be committing a crime and could be locked up.

This relationship between the rights of individuals and the development of society is also why we look at phenomena like the documentary Lorena and the statistics around the prosecution of sexual assault and we see the contentious issues surrounding crimes against women. — because while this system formally recognizes the rights of individuals, this system also thrives on the degradation, dehumanizaton, and control of women. Misogyny and patriarchy are stitched into the very core of capitalism-imperialism. It’s not simply that men are pigs or even that men vouch for each other or that people don’t believe women — all that is part of what’s happening. But all of this is tied into the legal structure and the whole system of Capitalism-imperialism itself and these oppressive social relations are reproduced and regenerated every minute of every day. We have also explored in the previous sections some of. how this relates to white supremacy. To some degree Davis acknowledges some of this, but she does not follow this thread through to its full conclusion, especially to understand what positive role prison might play in a revolutionary society. In reality, people end up in prison because they have done something (or just are) out of line with the system. What would that mean within a new system, a fundamentally liberating system emerging from this heartless and brutal one we live under today?

Because she refuses to recognize the dictatorship we live under and refuses to follow this conception of crime and punishment’s relation to the character of society through to its conclusions, her solutions then become alternatives for prison while leaving this capitalist-imperialist system intact. It is intensely ironic that she thinks that people could challenge a key pillar of the repressive apparatus of this system so deeply without even considering the possibility of having such a movement itself repressed out of existence. It becomes doubly ironic considering her experience with an organization (the Black Panther Party) and as an individual who faced such repression for much better work than she is proposing here. “The creation of new institutions that lay claim to the space now occupied by the prison can eventually start to crowd out the prison so that it would inhabit increasingly smaller areas of our social and psychic landscape.” Here is her Al Gore moment. These “new institutions” are Davis’ equivalent to energy-efficient lightbulbs somehow crowding out the largest institutional emitters of greenhouse gasses and destroyers of the planet.

So when we talk about crime and prisons, we are talking about constructs deeply tied into the class divisions, production relations on which those class distinctions rest, social relations that correspond to those production relations and ideas corresponding to those social relation of a given society. And when Bob Avakian talks about a revolution to bring into being a new economic system that enables us to transform these social relations this is something that will have expression in a new justice system as well.

A Radical Transformation

It is very telling that not only does Professor Davis neglect to talk about socialism or communism in terms of the future that she wants, but she also neglects the massive experience, good and bad, that real socialism has had with prisons. Why? Why would a self-avowed communist especially, but really any legitimate scholar overlook such an enormous and rich experience. One reason might be that after the counter-revolution took hold in the Soviet Union that government and its allies, neo-colonies and satellite states (all of whom she and the CPUSA upheld) used prisons for the exact same purposes that the capitalist states use prisons. One other reason might be an unwillingness to look scientifically at the difficulties, shortcomings, mistakes, and suffering during the real revolutions of the last century. The last and most profound reason might be because the experience of those revolutions, especially the revolution led by Mao Zedong in China, made initial great leaps in providing profoundly better answers to the questions raised in her book. First hand accounts by prisoners such as “Prisoners of Liberation” and “From Emperor to Citizen: The Autobiography of Aisin-Gioro Pu Yi” can tell us some of what went on. Their books are both very informative and objective about their own treatment and that of those around them, although there were clear reasons for these individuals to be treated in a model way. The former is a prison memoir of a well-off American couple who could be expected to report back on their experience. That said, the experience of Adele Rickett and her fellow female inmates in particular paints a picture of women’s imprisonment in such stark contrast to what Davis details in her chapter on “How Gender Structures the Prison System” that you would almost think a different term should be applied. The latter is the life story of the former emperor, whose life was a source of great interest and whose memoir was encouraged and edited by the party itself.

On the other hand, Clarence Adams was another prisoner who told his story. He was a Black American prisoner of war captured during the US invasion of Korea. When the Chinese army took over administration of his POW camp, even in the extraordinarily desperate conditions of that war, he decided that he was treated better by the communists as an enemy soldier than he had been growing up as a Black person in the US south. He decided to stay on in China.

These prisons were very sparse institutions of discipline, cooperation, teaching, ideological remolding, but above all of extraordinary patience. As China was facing enormous obstacles in overcoming millenia of poverty, oppression and exploitation, they were led by a party that recognized that the only people who could overcome these obstacles in the interests of the world revolution were the masses of people of China — all of them increasingly consciously and to the greatest degree possible at any given time voluntarily. As communist China faced threats and invasions from outside, sabotage and violent plots of revenge and usurpation by the old overthrown ruling classes and new capitalist-roaders, and all kinds of backward social relations (including petty crime, domestic abuse, etc) inherited from the old society, these prisons were a necessary component of the historic transformation that the Chinese revolution was setting out on. But again, these were only the first steps. In Bob Avakian’s Draft Constitution for the New Socialist Republic of North America, he has crystallized the guiding principles of the next wave of communist revolution with a specific focus on the legal rights of the people under the new socialist state. Against the delusional notions of prison abolition, peaceful transition to socialism, painless progress, and that we are all (the ruling class and the rest of us) in this together, this constitution specifically speaks to a period of reconstruction immediately following the revolutionary seizure of power and the initial stages of building a new kind of state power — a socialist state. And as such it would be faced with the necessity to dismantle — you might even say abolish — the old system and create a new one.

No person in the New Socialist Republic in North America shall be deprived of the rights set forth in this Constitution, except through due process of law. Through the course of and as a result of the revolutionary struggle which led to the defeat and dismantling of the former imperialist United States of America, and which has brought into being the New Socialist Republic in North America, members and functionaries of the former imperialist ruling class and its government and state apparatus — and in particular those who had been responsible for the most egregious crimes against the people and against humanity — will have been duly punished, in accordance with the necessities and requirements of that revolutionary struggle and the fundamental principles that guided and governed it. Also, with the advance of that revolutionary struggle, as territory was increasingly wrenched from the control of the imperialists, growing numbers of people who had been imprisoned under the rule of those imperialists came under the jurisdiction of the advancing revolutionary forces. In this situation, the policy of the revolutionary forces with regard to these prisoners was to immediately abolish the inhumane conditions to which they had been subjected, and to begin a process through which they could learn more fully about the world and the struggle to transform it, and could have the best basis to transform their own world outlook and become conscious partisans of the revolutionary cause. To the degree possible, depending on the strength of the revolutionary forces and the overall situation, those who had been incarcerated in the dungeons of the imperialists, and who had in fact become partisan to the revolution, were provided with means to become actively involved in this revolution, in accordance with its basic principles. Since the establishment of the New Socialist Republic in North America, the orientation and policy of the government of this Republic has been to enable as many as possible of those imprisoned under the old imperialist system to not only be freed from prison and integrated into the new society but to contribute in many ways to the continuing revolution, and to further transform themselves in the process. To this end, special bodies were set up to review, as quickly as possible, the cases and the situations of all those who had been incarcerated under the old imperialist system and who remained imprisoned at the time of the founding of the New Socialist Republic in North America. This resulted in release from prison, within a relatively short period, for the great majority — with the exception of those who had committed truly egregious offenses in the past and who showed no genuine signs that they were able, willing and determined to avail themselves of the chance, with the triumph of the revolution and the founding of the new revolutionary society, to radically transform themselves, and contribute to transforming the larger world, with the goal of uprooting relations of domination, oppression, and exploitation and the ways of thinking that go along with all that. Among the great majority who were released, this generally involved a transition period in which supervision by the relevant authority was combined with active support and assistance, including education, both practical and political — with the length and specific character of this transition process determined in accordance with the particular history and needs of the different individuals. Political education and ideological struggle has also been carried out in the society overall, to contribute to an atmosphere in which people broadly would understand the actual reasons and causes for crime in the old society and the importance of creating the conditions and atmosphere in which those who had been incarcerated as a result of criminal activity in that old society could be welcomed and supported in devoting their energies, creativity, initiative, and determination to building the new revolutionary society and carrying forward the revolutionary process in these radically new conditions. The result has been that, in addition to a significant number of people who were discovered to have been wrongfully prosecuted and imprisoned under the old system, and were therefore immediately released and provided with the means to become actively involved in the new society and its revolutionary transformation, literally millions of men and women — who had been denied a decent life in the old society; who had become involved in criminal activity, owing to their often desperate conditions and in many cases to the influence of the prevailing outlook and values in that old society, which constantly encouraged and in many ways rewarded advancing one’s interests at the expense of and through the domination of others; and who had been written off as subhuman, and confined in subhuman conditions, by the guardians and enforcers of the old order — have regained and reasserted their humanity through active involvement in the new, revolutionary society, with many of them having joined the front ranks of revolution to remake the whole world in the interests of humanity. This New Socialist Republic in North America having been established, its Constitution adopted and in effect, and its government at various levels operating in accordance with this Constitution: from that time forward, only as a matter of law, and through due process of law, may people be imprisoned or otherwise deprived of rights and liberties. This shall apply to those — including former members and functionaries of the ruling class of the imperialist USA and its state and government apparatus who are within the jurisdiction of this Republic and who may be accused of having in the past committed, or may in the future be accused of committing, war crimes and crimes against humanity: whether tried in special Tribunals established to preside in cases of war crimes and other crimes against humanity (as set forth in Article I, Section 3) or in other judicial proceedings, all those accused of crimes shall be treated in accordance with the laws, and due process of law.”

The Constitution goes on to detail a list of protections of people’s rights. It’s striking that many of these rights such as due process, the prohibition of torture, Habeas Corpus, trial by jury, etc. are legally guaranteed under the current capitalist system but are clearly violated as standard operating procedure. This is not an accident or an anomaly. This is precisely because we are living under the dictatorship of capital and the penal system exists to serve that system, not to address crime in it’s own right nor just to line its own pockets. Capital’s guiding principle and daily, hourly compulsion is profit. And we have shown that a key function of the prison is to warehouse, disrupt the lives and communities of, and even make profitable people who would otherwise be not only “useless” to this system but could potentially present major disruptions to their system or even its overthrow. The guiding principle of the dictatorship of the proletariat is the emancipation of all humanity and the end of all oppression and exploitation. This is not only an aspiration, but increasingly built into the very foundation of the new society. As the revolution advances, the underlying material basis for relations of exploitation and oppression is consciously eroded to the point where in contrast to capitalism, respecting these fundamental rights becomes more and more compulsory.

In conclusion, Angela Davis poses her desire for essentially capitalist alternatives to capitalist prisons to ameliorate the worst parts of capitalist society. It is at best a pipe-dream, but as practiced it turns people’s deep heartache and suffering into fuel driving them to a demoralizing dead-end. On the other hand, Bob Avakian’s new synthesis of communism poses a reality-based vision of revolution that could very swiftly liberate millions and where the few new socialist prisons will themselves be engines for overcoming all oppression and exploitation. In the words of Bob Avakian, from his summer 2018 talk, Why We Need an Actual Revolution and How We Can Really Make Revolution: “We have two choices, either we live with all this — and condemn future generations to the same, or worse, if they have a future at all — or we make revolution!”