If we simply look at democracy as a form of political rule, we exclude a whole range of issues that ought to be attended to in discussions about democracy. Why is it that this myth of the United States as the first democracy continues to command so much attention? As you said, it was actually a democracy of the minority, which ought to be oxymoronic.

It would be interesting to talk about the economic applications of democracy. What would an economic democracy entail? What about the social dimensions of democracy? And how is democracy changed in relation to the particular economic system which constitutes the foundation for that democracy?

What would it be like to imagine a democracy in which everyone got to participate on the basis of economic, cultural, social, and political equality? If we argue that everyone, by virtue of living in a particular region, should be considered a citizen and should be able to participate in governing and the economy, what would that mean?

I question whether the outcome of the last election might have been different if more attention had been paid to those who are experiencing the impact of global capitalism —  the poor white families who now recognize that their children are not going to be better-off than they were. The outcome might have been different if we had developed strategies permitting us to recognize that so many of the existing problems in this country are directly related to the rise and spread of global capitalism.

As a matter of fact, we used to have more economic democracy than we do today. Once, people could expect to be treated at any hospital if they were ill. Hospitals and the whole health care system had not been privatized, as they are now, which is one of the reasons why the COVID-19 pandemic has created such a state of emergency — particularly with respect to hospital beds, because empty hospital beds are not profitable.

If one looks at the impact of global capitalism, it is very much an explanation for the rise of the prison industrial complex, as well as the disestablishment of so many institutions that used to serve as an economic safety net for people. The failure to develop more institutions devoted to the public good has created a terrain in which poverty has expanded, not only among communities of color, but also among white people.

The current occupant of the White House called upon those who were suffering, providing false solutions, such as a return to an era in which the industrialized economy in this country responded to people’s needs. And that’s not going to happen. The jobs that have gone all over the world, particularly to the Global South, are not going to return to the United States. It is important to consider the ways in which economic transformations have a direct impact on democracy.

For decades, people involved in socialist and communist struggles referred to the “other America.” There was the America represented by those in power, and then there were the unions and struggles against racism and sexism. What we’ve lost in our historical accounts is the role that communists and socialists played in expanding the possibilities of democracy in this country. We have unemployment insurance as a consequence of struggles in the 1930s. Black communists in the South [helped] create the terrain for the Civil Rights Movement.

[Today], as we are engaging in what people are calling a “racial reckoning,” our terminology should be broader. It’s not simply a racial reckoning. It’s a reckoning with the history of this country — not only the history of racism and the history of class exploitation, but also a history of the resistance. If we aren’t aware of those whose struggles created democracy as an aspirational notion, not as a given set of affairs —  not as simply a way in which government is organized, but as a struggle for a more just, more equal society —  then we have nowhere to start. We don’t acknowledge the continuum on which our struggles unfold.

In his book on slavery and social death, Orlando Patterson speculates that Western democracy must have evolved from the yearnings of the enslaved to be free. The very concept of freedom that we work with requires a sense of unfreedom in order to explain its emergence. Slavery was the palpable evidence to those who were not enslaved that they were free. But with the emergence of prisons as punishment, in conjunction with the rise of revolutionary ideals and the emergence of democratic imprisonment, punishment became the underbelly of democracy.

You need capitalist democracy in order to imagine imprisonment as a punishment, because imprisonment entails the divestment of rights. It would make no sense in a society that did not recognize individual rights. It would make no sense outside of the context of a democratic society. I think it’s really important to keep in mind that that constitutive negation of democracy actually constructs a democracy, and therefore it has to be denied those who are in prison.

We generally assume that when the subject turns to feminism that we’re going to address issues of gender. And, of course, we have to address issues of gender. But feminist approaches are so much broader than simply engaging with gender. Abolition feminism urges us to think about what might be required to begin to move in a democratic direction — that is to say, what we might need to cast into the dustbin of history.

Let me use an example of gender violence. If we did not have to assume that the institutions of policing and imprisonment were there to solve this problem, we would have to take a much more complex approach. This is what I appreciate about feminism: it troubles our neat analysis. It makes us recognize that the social realities don’t always reflect the neatness of our analytical categories, and that we have to be willing to try to begin to approximate the messiness of social reality. When we say that police and prisons are two institutions that need to be cast into the dustbin of history, how do we address the problems that these institutions pretended to address but could not?

The political constructs the personal, and constructs what we often assume to be ideas that have been generated by our own individualities. A feminist would argue that we cannot achieve abolition without also recognizing that we have to adapt a critical stance to our own emotions and to the ideas that we assume are our own. These are often the ideas of the state that work through us.

I think these feminist insights are absolutely essential when it comes to reimagining a democracy that would be more egalitarian and provide more justice for all.

I completely agree with you. The prioritizing of humans also leads to restrictive definitions of who counts as human, and the brutalization of animals is related to the brutalization of human animals. This will be a very important arena of struggle during the coming period.

If we are to engage in ongoing struggles for freedom and democracy, we have to recognize that the issues will become ever more expansive, because initially, the question of democracy only addressed a small subset of white, affluent men. I’m not suggesting that the trajectory of history is automatic. But we have witnessed an ever-expansive notion of the nature of democracy. And I do not see how we can exclude our nonhuman companions with whom we share this planet.

Earlier on during the pandemic, I did a webinar with people in the Brazilian Amazon. They have to address not only issues of racism, but also the burning of the Amazon. This makes me want to suggest that we have to avoid narrow approaches. We have to work against the blinder syndrome, which means we can’t only think about people in this country.

As far as the vote is concerned, immigrants who live in this country ought to be able to vote because they are part of the community. We will also have to address the obsolescence of the nation-state. I’m thinking about issues that will more than likely come up in the future. I don’t know whether I will be around when they become mainstream. I did not think I would be able to witness the mainstreaming of abolition. But here we are.

And candidates had to go visit the prison.

We must challenge hierarchies, including hierarchies that seem to be set in stone — such as those that guarantee the elderly more power and influence by virtue of age, and those that command the younger generation to follow in the footsteps of the elderly. I think that we should be more egalitarian.

This is one of the ways in which we can enact democratic relationships in the course of struggling for change, not only in relationality of generations, but also in relation to those who are in prison and those who are outside. Oftentimes, those who inhabit the so-called free world assume that they have greater capacity to give leadership than those who are imprisoned. And I am thankful to Critical Resistance, because from the very outset, the organization insisted on bringing those who were actually in prison into the leadership.

I don’t think that we have enough occasions to create democracy as we struggle for democracy.  But I think that it is also a feminist approach. That helps us to not only imagine a new world, but to become worthy of participating in that world in the course of struggling for it.

That movement is so exciting. The Ferguson protests and the emergence of Black Lives Matter have had an impact not only all over the country, but all over the world — the grasping of the meaning of “black lives matter,” which had been so often misinterpreted as meaning “all lives matter.” The tyranny of the universal, as I like to call it, was a way of discounting the impact and the particular experiences of black people in this country.

I’ve learned so much from the three women who founded the Black Lives Matter network and the Movement for Black Lives. My mentors during this period have been the young people who have taken up the struggles of the past and given them much more substance. It inspires me because I see a generation that doesn’t take for granted how long and hard we struggled. They not only know how to articulate this, but they know how to expand it, and to develop ways of transforming the world that are truly inspirational.

Oftentimes, we learn so much more from our mistakes than from what we did correctly, and the younger generation has to be prepared to experiment in the course of trying to figure out how one builds movements. What is the language that appeals to people? Even though we are living in a world made by racial capitalism, how do we nevertheless create a critical response? How do we encourage people and movements and organizations to recognize that ultimately we are going to have to dismantle this system and move in a socialist direction?

I can talk about a range of things, but I’ll focus for the moment on internationalism. Sometimes I wonder why we have not been able to create a sense of emotional connection with people in other parts of the world. Why is it that black women in this country are not more connected to the Brazilian black women’s movement? There is so much that we can learn from the struggles of black women in Brazil.

I’m yearning for the kind of internationalism that makes us feel strong — that makes us recognize how our desires are desires that animate people all over the world. I’m not suggesting that there is no internationalism today, because Palestine has certainly played a part in pointing the way to our abolitionist struggles in this country. Abolition isn’t about getting rid of prisons; it’s about the whole carceral regime, and we see it in occupied Palestine. So I want internationalism now.