The Initiative for a Just Society

Preface

The crises we face today are larger simply than overincarceration or climate change. They form part of a broader problem: liberal-democratic forms of governance have given way in the West to unrestrained extractive economic logics, practices, and institutions that enable concerted forms of wealth accumulation and power concentrations to corrode society, to entrench White Supremacy, and the undo the human and ethical fabric of society.

The same kind of inequalities and injustices that the great democratic revolutions were intended to eliminate are now pervasive. Worse, they are now protected by the illusion of democratic governance and free markets. They are now facilitated by other means than autocracy or imposition.

In the United States, earlier practices of native genocide, chattel slavery, and racial segregation have metamorphosed into a contemporary police state marked by profound inequalities, racialized mass incarceration, and two-tier citizenship. Today, three white men have more wealth than the combined wealth of half of the total U.S. population. The 100 richest Americans hold as much wealth as all the country’s 42 million African Americans. With over 2.2 million people incarcerated, another 5 million under criminal supervision, and over 70 million people with criminal records in the FBI’s database—predominantly persons of color—the U.S. incarcerates more of its citizens than any civilization in history. Elected office has become a trophy for millionaires and billionaires. Only a little more than half of the eligible American voters feel sufficiently empowered to cast a ballot in the country’s most significant national elections. The political situation today in the U.S. is hardly better than in the autocratic, hereditary, monarchical regimes that preceded it.

Reformers are now struggling to cut mass incarceration, to limit cruel and unusual punishments, to curb police violence. But as long as these efforts are not understood as part of a larger effort to abolish our punitive society and the logics of capital accumulation and wealth concentration, the reform efforts will merely lead to other forms of oppression. Chattel slavery was replaced in this country by a heinous system of convict leasing precisely because the same ambition of wealth accumulation persisted. The task of redressing these social ills requires a far more ambitious and holistic project.

To get beyond the crises we face, we will need to abolish barbaric punishments like the death penalty and solitary confinement, but we will also need to do more.

We will need to abolish prisons, but beyond that, we will need to abolish the punitive paradigm that governs the criminal justice field.

We will need to abolish, more ambitiously, the punitive society that produces these recurring injustices, but beyond that, Western liberal-democratic advanced-capitalist society as we know it today.

Not in order to return to autocratic or totalitarian forms of governance like those it displaced in the eighteenth century or conquered in the twentieth century.

But to move forward to a new period in human history marked by an entirely different logic of governing: not wealth and power accumulation, but equal human fulfillment.

The aim of the Initiative for a Just Society is to push history and humanity forward.

History

The concentration of wealth and power that characterized monarchy during the ancien régime was maintained through centralized control of economic exchange and fiscal policy. Those concentrations were somewhat equalized among white men, initially, by the revolutionary processes that birthed democracies; and then, again among whites, by the exigencies of imperialist competition and the threat of communism—both of which gave rise to a welfare state at mid-twentieth century. Tragically, for indigenous peoples and other persons of color, the birth of democracy in this country was immediately accompanied by genocide and institutionalized slavery, the worst forms of inequality and injustice.

Gradually, over time, democratic governance enabled a form of advanced capitalism that has concentrated wealth and power among small elites who now control economy and society with at least the same firm grip as the aristocrats of the ancien régime. The oppressive forms of social control (genocide and slavery) were transformed, for indigenous peoples, into destitution on remote reservations, and, for persons of color, into a series of institutions (Jim Crow segregation, the ghetto) now culminating in racialized mass incarceration for African-Americans and Latinx individuals.

The logic of advanced capitalism has also fueled a competitive grab for the commons that has not only produced intolerable inequalities, but now threatens the Earth itself. The long-standing patterns of selfishness and wealth accumulation are making it increasingly possible for those with power to protect themselves and their property while doing nothing for humanity. The practices of wealth accretion undermine the possibility of addressing climate change.

Challenge

It is time, in the West, to get beyond liberal democratic forms of governance that are wedded and captive to advanced extractive logics of wealth accumulation, concentration, and monopolization. It is time to dismantle the logics and institutions of advanced capitalist accumulation that empower our punitive society. The challenge is to figure out how and what to imagine for the next period in human history.

Some dimensions are more evident than others, but even they raise challenges of implementation and practice. So, for instance, to destroy the logic of the punitive society, we must abolish the death penalty and mass incarceration in this country—not just mass incarceration, but all incarceration. We must replace the punitive paradigm with a different one.

But even the most identifiable and discrete tasks, such as abolishing capital punishment, raise the challenge of how best to achieve that end (in itself a complicated strategic question) and how to achieve it without replicating the punitiveness of society (for instance, how to achieve it without putting in place another monstrous “life row” of persons sentenced to life imprisonment for the rest of their natural lives without the possibility of parole).

At a broader level, the challenge of abolishing the punitive society raises complex questions of what paradigm to replace it with (education, rehabilitation, restoration, well-being, etc.). The challenge of dismantling Western liberal-democratic advanced-capitalist society raises equally complex questions about the character and nature of the next historical period.

There are no easy or obvious answers. Clearly, the ambition cannot be to return to earlier autocratic or totalitarian forms of governing, nor to new forms of fascism. Autocracies and centralized forms of governance continue to exist around the globe, and they threaten their citizens with unique dangers. China is a case in point, with its concentration camps for Muslim Chinese, its massive rate of executions, its new “social score” for each citizen that metes out privileges and punishments, and its total surveillance and oppression of its citizens. These forms of centralized totalitarian governance must also be abolished. Like ancien régime monarchies, they too must be eliminated (although this cannot be accomplished by those of us in the West).

Communist and socialist experiments have also failed us. The communist experience in the Soviet Union and in China demonstrated its tendency toward autocracy and the concentration of power and wealth in the hands of central party members. Electing a socialist party, as was done for instance in France with President François Hollande, is no recipe either, but often results instead in compromises with advanced logics of accumulation.

The solution does not lie in a particular regime type—whether it is socialist, communist, or capitalist. It must lie instead in close attention to the actual distributional justness of the governing logics and whether they promote the equal and general welfare of all human beings.

But this, naturally, raises the stakes for critical thought and practice.

Urgency

Courageous women and men put their lives at risk to abolish slavery. They put their lives at risk to abolish racial segregation. They put their lives at risk to abolish totalitarian autocracies.

It is time to show the same courage to abolish Western hyper-extractive liberal-democratic regimes that promote a racialized punitive society. Unless we do that, the injustices will just grow.

In order to achieve this, we cannot engage merely in criminal justice reform that does not take on the broader logics of the punitive society and wealth accumulation. We cannot focus on just one issue—abolishing capital punishment, for instance—without placing that project within the broader framework, because otherwise we only replace one punitive excess with another. We cannot embolden those who want to strengthen the model and logics of capital accumulation because that will merely coopt us and the project of abolition.

These struggles are all tied together. They cannot be severed from each other—otherwise they reproduce the punitiveness and corrosiveness. Piecemeal reform leads only to new forms of oppression—slavery to convict leasing, to Jim Crow, to mass incarceration. The logics of the punitive society will persist unless they themselves are abolished.

The Initiative for a Just Society seeks to dismantle the liberal-democratic extractive economic practices that place profits before people and sustain a society of accumulation rather than equality. The initiative aims to eliminate not only prisons and punishments, but also wealth accumulation and greed, because they reproduce exploitation. Concentration and exploitation drove slavery, Jim Crow, and the ghetto, and now drive racialized mass incarceration. They drive racism. They will drive the next method of subjugation, whatever comes next—unless we stop them in their tracks.

The objective is not to expedite a next system of oppression, but to combat the punitive society that allows it to happen. If we do not keep our eyes on the prize, we will merely replicate and reproduce our current crises. The prize is overcoming and getting beyond our current forms of extractive punitive society that privilege accumulation over the equal well-being of humans.

Strategy

The Initiative calls both for sustained critical analysis on how to get beyond Western liberal-democratic advanced-capitalist society and for ongoing critical practices that seek actually to dismantle it. There is both a critical philosophical dimension and a practice side to this—and a constant conversation between and confrontation of the two. It requires thinking and doing, reflection and action, constantly and endlessly in dialogue.

On the one hand, the project calls for sustained critical thinking about the ambition of abolition and the transformation of political economy. This entails a critical theory seminar along the lines of the CCCCT’s 13/13 seminar series focused on the project of abolition and transformation—what we might call an annual Abolition 13/13 seminar. This forum would explore and study previous campaigns for abolition (e.g., slavery, torture, Apartheid), as well as critical writings on abolition (e.g., Frederick Douglass’s abolition writings, W.E.B. DuBois’s abolition democracy, Angela Davis’s prison abolition), and various manifestos (Wollstonecraft, Marx, Lusaka, Malcolm X). It would also entail sustained critical thinking about transformations of political economy, especially in relation to new digital technologies. Critical thinkers have explored the changes of capitalism and modern society—Hannah Arendt describing the rise of the labor model of human reproduction, Althusser returning to theories of capital, Thomas Piketty rethinking capital for the twenty-first century. These conversations need to be pushed forward in light of the new digital economy and its implications for work and machine learning. Here too, the time is ripe for annual 13/13 seminar series on the transformation of political economy. These encounters would be a vehicle to critically imagine the next stage of history.

On the other hand, the project calls for ongoing action—legal and political interventions—aimed at bringing about the ambition of abolition. This entails a litigation strategy aimed at capital punishment and the punitive state in all its dimensions, including solitary confinement, life imprisonment without parole, and inhumane and intolerable conditions of confinement. It would involve crafting new strategies to eradicate the death penalty. It would also involve educational and clinical venues like the Abolition Practicum at Columbia Law School that take on intolerable practices through litigation and politics.

Action

In order to move the Initiative forward as expeditiously as possible and to actually make it happen—rather than just imagine it—we will draw on all the current resources of the Columbia Center for Contemporary Critical Thought. 

The critical thinking component will be organized on the foundation of the CCCCT’s 13/13 seminar series. The CCCCT has now put together a critical series called Abolition 13/13 to explore how to dismantle our current punitive society and imagine the next stage of history. It has also created a blog to publish essays called "The 13/13 | Essays". During the 2025-2026, it is running a public seminar titled "Inversions of Hegel 13/13."

The practice and litigation component will be organized on the foundation of the CCCCT’s Practical Engagements section. It will manage the several interrelated litigation and policy interventions of the Practical Engagements.

Conclusion

Abolition of the death penalty or of racialized mass incarceration—like abolition of slavery or Jim Crow—will lead to other forms of intolerable injustice unless the broader liberal-democratic paradigm of wealth accumulation, concentration, and monopolization is also abolished.

The goal of this project is to coordinate the abolition of unjust practices with the dismantling of the punitive society more broadly. That is the ambition of the Initiative for a Just Society. We hope you will join in this effort.

Bernard E. Harcourt

Columbia University

June 1, 2020