By Dana O’Donnell

My final project for my international development class this past spring involved researching the history of liberal democracy as a development paradigm. That project raised these questions: What does it mean for a truth to be self-evident? Who is included in the category of all men? What does it mean to be created equal? What is an unalienable right? What did these terms mean when the Declaration of Independence was written? What do they mean today? At the same time, in my extracurricular life, a group of my classmates and I were working on starting a Prison Industrial Complex (PIC) abolitionist club on campus. One of the requirements of starting a student club was drafting a mission statement and organizational goals. Therefore, we had to consider a question: What does it mean for our club to be “abolitionist”? So while I was asking questions about the founding ideals of liberalism in my research, I was asking similar questions of PIC abolition, as my classmates and I drafted the “founding documents” and the “founding ideals” of our fledgling club. As my research and extracurricular endeavors coincided, it naturally invited a comparison of the ideals of liberalism with those of PIC abolition. In this essay, I hope to share some of the insights I gained in the process.

From their etymological roots, both words suggest an ideal of emancipation: liberalism, from Latin liber, “free,” as in the freedom from repressive forms of government; abolition, from Latin abolere, “destroy,” as in the destruction of repressive social institutions. Liberalism, like abolition, is hard to define without identifying the specific forms of repression it stands against, and in turn, the particular forms of expression it stands to make free. Yet, in the case of liberalism, this lack of specificity appears to unite conflicting interests under the same transcendental ideal. The dissociation of this ideal from its material implications – liberation from what exactly, liberation to do what exactly – makes liberalism idealistic in the first place. If John Locke, Margaret Thatcher, and Barack Obama are all liberals, it is not that the core ideal of liberalism has changed from classical liberalism to neoliberalism to Third Way liberalism. Instead, as an ideal, rather than being rationalized by subjective interest, it rationalizes subjective interest to obscure its subjectivity. For example, depending on the subjective interest it centers, the slogan “all men are created equal” could rationalize either emancipation or slavery. The question is not about how Thomas Jefferson defined equality but about equality as an ideal, or rather, the effect of treating such ideals as axioms, transcendent of the subjective interests they serve.

This is a question I asked critically in my research on liberal ideology: Why is it important to the political project of liberalism for its ideals to appear self-evidently and universally true rather than admit to serving a subjective interest? Historically, the purpose for which these ideals are invoked, rather than their innate truth, has determined the normative conclusions drawn from them. To give a modern example, it is not that the slogan “all lives matter” appeals to the ideal of equality but that it was branded in opposition to the Movement for Black Lives, which defines the political position it represents. As with the slogans in the Declaration of Independence, the self-evident truth of descriptive equality rationalizes a less than self-evident conclusion of prescriptive equality: If all lives have equal significance, then there is no reason to assert the significance of Black lives in particular. In both cases, it is the denial of subjectivity by means of appealing to a transcendental, universal ideal (“all lives,” “all men”) that, in effect, defaults to the subjectivity of the dominant class – a subjectivity staked in and privileged by racial capitalism.

It, therefore, becomes the task of progressive liberalism to reconcile this subjectivity with its unrealized claim to universality; to make it more universally accessible and, thus, more universally enforceable. To recognize it as subjective, that is, to question its validity as a universal standard of progress, presents a problem similar to questioning the slogans “all men are created equal” and “all lives matter.” Who would question the ideals of equality, rights, liberty, and democracy as universal standards of progress when it is the struggle for their universal realization that has characterized, and remains embedded in the emancipatory lexicon of, social progress for the past hundred years?

Here I locate a critical distinction between liberalism and PIC abolition. It is not that grand ideals like freedom are out of place in abolition. On the contrary, the sense of freedom as a shared value connects contemporary abolition to a historical struggle against the unfreedom of racial capitalism, beginning with slavery. The affirmation of freedom as a subjective interest following unfree social and material conditions – rather than as an objective truth to which different conditions and interests conform – distinguishes the way that ideals such as freedom relate to PIC abolition differently than they do to liberalism. It is why abolitionist freedom manifests as a set of demands surging from the bottom up, while liberal freedom manifests as a set of laws enforced from the top down. PIC abolition demands a more specific freedom than what can be captured by a universal ideal. Not everyone is unfree in the same way, nor does everyone seek to be free in the same way. Recognizing freedom as a set of subjective interests does not lessen the importance of the struggle for freedom. Quite the opposite – its importance is clarified by the subjective interests it centers.

If my classmates and I want to call our student club “abolitionist,” then it matters what interests we represent. It matters how these interests align, conflict, and intersect to form our shared ideals and to what extent those ideals can ever be removed from the subjective interests they serve. Drawing on the work of Critical Resistance, at our club’s founding, we described our shared abolitionist ideal as that of “eliminating the need for imprisonment, policing, and surveillance.” We recognize that in a society stratified by privilege and exclusion, with a mode of production sustained by exploitation and privatization, these forms of violence and coercion don’t ensure public safety (as they claim), rather they increase harm and maintain the status quo. However, we also recognize that necessary in maintaining this status quo is an ideology that insists our interests are the same; that everyone is equal under the law; that the police protect and serve us all; that you should have nothing to fear if you haven’t done anything wrong. The liberal ideal of equality actually obscures the reality and conditions of our inequity – the conditions to which PIC abolition responds.

So while liberal idealism tends to erase or problematize differences of subjective interest in a way that grants the interests of the dominant class an appearance of objectivity, to embrace subjectivity (as PIC abolition does) is not to invite inconsistency, but to face the complexity and contradiction that comes with reconciling individual and collective interest. Invoking the ideals of freedom and equality always serves a purpose. This purpose can easily be obfuscated by appealing to these ideals as transcendent and universal rather than grounded in the specific social and material context to which they correspond. The purpose served by the words “all men are created equal” is obscured by what is not said about what it means to be “equal” and who is included in the category “all men.” Conversely, the purpose of PIC abolition is made clear by what is said about the specific forms of unfreedom and inequality we seek to abolish and the specific interests we, as abolitionists, serve. The abolitionist vision is for a world without prisons, where we all have everything we need to thrive.

Dana O’Donnell is an undergraduate student at California State University, Monterey Bay, majoring in Social and Behavioral Sciences. She is a co-founder of the Abolitionist and Decolonial Learning Collective (ADLC), a student club inspired by the faculty and staff-led Abolitionist and Decolonial Education Collective (ADEC). CSUMB students interested in joining ADLC can find more information on the club’s MyRaft page.