For me, it’s pretty clear that police and prisons reinforce class society and are things that factor into proletarianization. Therefore there can be no socialism without abolition. A corollary states that socialist projects that reinstituted police and prisons (gulags and checka anyone?) couldn’t be socialist because by using police and prisons it reinforced proletarianization and class relations.
What do you think?
I’m not an abolitionist because “abolition” doesn’t go far enough. It’s no accident that abolitionists mostly talk about “abolishing” visibly repressive arms of the state but not so much the nation-state system in its entirety, or the European cultural base it rests on. Most of them shy away from even fighting to abolish the nation-state they live in because then they wouldn’t be able to demand policy changes from it.