Interview by Nell Whittaker

NW I’ll begin with a question about form that feels appropriate for the book’s subject. How did it work – in a nuts and bolts way – to write this book collectively? Where did it begin?

PC This book began with a few deferrals. When we came together as a collective around 2018 we drew up a handful of ideas or arguments that we thought a magazine of gay communism might be suited to address. We have also been interested since our genesis in historicising our own positions and understanding the shifts and waves that have made different configurations of the gay left possible or not.  One idea we thought to historicise was “accountability” – its character, function, status, etcetera, in the political and queer communities or scenes we were familiar with. We thought it would take more than an essay to properly handle the question so set it aside. Then following our first issue we were offered a short residency with this small publisher Wendy’s Subway, which would have let us use their space and library and a limited budget to produce a short book. The residency was supposed to begin in March 2020 and, needless to say, did not take place as scheduled. We reconvened in 2021 in a somewhat changed world, after the largest mass uprising in living memory which happened to have turned in some respects on the question of accountability for state violence. It was also a high point for a movement we’d been curious about finding a way to address, and we thought that the topic might give us a way to recompose ourselves after a fairly brutal year. We took a few approaches, including studying some foundational texts about criticism and self-criticism together. Once we decided on the form of collected interviews, the process itself was somewhat straightforward, though it took us a long time. We tried to think of people who had decently lengthy experience with accountability as a movement concept on the left and trained ourselves in oral history procedure to prepare for interviewing them. One of our collective members had been a part of the NYC Trans Oral History Project so she had a strong sense of how that aspect should go, which helped a lot. We divided up the interviewees and sat with them for a few hours, then transcribed and discussed what they had said among ourselves over the course of a few meetings and then worked on the introductory and concluding essays in pairs. It’s likely that we could have had a better-integrated process for going through the conversations and coming up with a more fully collective set of thoughts, but we only had so much time to work on this project and as the concluding essay argues, it’s hard to successfully carry out any sort of collective activity when it is not the basis for your self-reproduction, which working on Pinko isn’t for any of us. The most common outcome of this kind of effort is failure, and one of the insights we arrived at is that accountability is one way people on the left have historically attempted to overcome this common failure.

NW Who did you speak to?

PC We ended up interviewing nine people altogether. About half were more squarely from the socialist or labour movement and the other half represented people involved in the abolitionist and transformative justice movement, though even in such a small sample there is significant overlap. For this new edition of the book Haymarket is putting out we were able to include an interview with someone who had been part of Bash Back!, which was an early-2010s queer nihilist/anarchist crew or movement, depending on your perspective, that happened to reconvene after our first edition was released. Everyone had really striking, thoughtful things to say about this concept, and each of the interviewees took the question in a different direction. Michelle Foy, for example, maybe didn’t have the direct answer we had been looking for about where the concept of accountability as it is used on the contemporary left come from, but she gave us a very moving perspective on long-term political commitment through different seasons of struggle. Stevie Wilson, an incarcerated abolitionist organiser in Pennsylvania who we’d connected with during the first year of the pandemic, shared his thoughts through the privatised electronic prison messaging service. Emi Kane and Hyejin Shim had really brilliant insights and were willing to be self-critical. One of the provisional theses we considered in approaching this project was whether the infamous criticism/self-criticism of the New Communist Movement of the 1970s and 1980s played some role in shaping contemporary practices of accountability. We did not arrive at a conclusive answer but that wasn’t really the point – we got a very rich portrait of how lifelong, engaged militants thought and organised around harm and repair in movements over the past half-century.

NW You take “drama”, as you call it, seriously, as something that can rupture and destroy – not always unnecessarily. Feelings are significant. Pilar quotes Guevera, “The true revolutionary is guided by great feelings of love.” How do feelings feature in successful accountability processes?

PC Feelings seem to be hugely decisive. One of the people we interviewed, Esteban Kelly, spoke about the evolution of his thinking as he facilitated these accountability processes over a decade or so and arrived at the idea that the fundamental element of any working process is the self. That seemed to challenge the common notion that the community is the agent of change, but he explains there’s only so much even a group of committed and trained facilitators can do to compel a person at the centre of it to make a genuine transformation in their conduct or life. The person needs to be capable of moving through feelings of vulnerability to begin to trust what’s underway and even then, of course, there’s no guarantee. On the other hand, Kim Diehl talks about the imperative to put your feelings aside and keep the needs of the organisation or group in focus during any sort of conflict or process. These two positions describe two poles within the concept of accountability as it is practiced on the left. Some part of this divergence is maybe explained by the political biographies of the two interviewees, with one having come up through autonomous, punk, and anarchist organising cultures and the other having more of a Black Nationalist or Maoist formation. This kind of genealogical explanation doesn’t totally exhaust the story of accountability’s career but through this investigation we found it helped enlarge more obscure aspects of it, by illuminating the specific parts of the left in which it emerged. 

NW As you write, “What exactly constitutes an accountability process is rarely clear, far from standardised, and constantly subject to contestation and debate.” What are some of the different ways that people describe accountability?

PC One of the reasons we wanted to take up this investigation was because we found that people had quite different concepts of what they were saying when they invoked accountability, especially as the summer uprising of 2020 reached its peak. This was not always a problem of people’s poor study or incomprehension, as our interviews with career practitioners also sometimes yielded statements which seemed to contradict each other. People have divergent desires for what they want accountability to be. Is it a strictly survivor-led process, or does the community have a decisive role to play? Is it a set of formal procedures or a stage of political struggle? Is it necessary to resort to certain kinds of pressure to compel adherence or is that a betrayal of the commitment to non-carceral transformation? Etc. These are substantive disagreements, not misunderstandings. And there are disagreements at the most rigorous level, elaborated with great care as the body of thinking and practice known as transformative justice, as much as there are discrepancies between it and a more diffuse but aspirationally adherent set of practices that invoke the name accountability to denote a commitment to police and prison abolition.  At the same time, many of the experts we interviewed seemed to have moved through different stages of comprehension of what the practice demands, and viewed certain popular adoptions of their hard-won insights with concern or dismay. They often mention a difficult passage through conflicts or processes which tested their own assumptions and taught them to leave certain emotional reactions behind. Pilar mentions that for so long the movement’s aim was to popularise the concepts but now that she sees the way people with “punitive” or “vindictive” aims are using it she’s less sure.

NW The theme for our issue comes from noticing that the word community is used a lot, and in a wide spectrum of contexts, without it having a stable definition. What issues does the idea of community bring up in the context of accountability?

PC Our conclusion focuses on the question of community. It comes up over and over as how people describe what makes for a successful accountability process. We write that “Community is the imagined basis and the hoped-for outcome of accountability.” Clearly, there’s already a sort of dilemma: how can it be both? If it’s present as the basis for the process, why do we need to develop a deliberate politics to produce it? If it’s something that must be produced, how can it be relied on to carry out the process? But a dilemma never fully stops people in their tracks. Community can provide the sense of a collective authority without the sense of authoritarianism many in the United States left reject. This desire for moral authority also animates the construction of a lineage, that is to say the idea of precedence for something like the accountability process outside the history of the state. This was evident in the invocation of accountability as some kind of tradition passed down from the age-old practices of Black and Indigenous peoples, even if in actuality those traditions and practices were more complex and less widespread than was imagined, or would require much more (like the restoration of Indigenous sovereignty over land) than is being carried out. The centrality of community for accountability processes helped us understand why they so often fail. Our book includes many practitioners of transformative justice, conflict resolution, and healing from abuse. They have great advice for how to improve our practices, and are part of a vibrant and growing world of people facing harm within our movements without relying on courts and prisons. But mostly, we found in our own personal experiences and in the experience of many we talked with, accountability processes often end in disappointment and failure. Its rare harm is successfully addressed in ways that make sure it won’t continue and where survivors feel fully supported. Instead it is a lot more common for harms like sexual violence to either not be addressed adequately, or to tear apart whole scenes, political organisations and social networks. In radical queer life, we often imagine community as providing an alternative to the nuclear family, to provide mutual aid and material support when things are rough, or to be a means of addressing problems when the state is a force of so much violence and harm. But instead, community often falls short, and falls apart just when we need it most. We drew on our studies as communists to try to make sense of this. In our capitalist society, we are all dependent on vast networks of human interdependence. The labour of millions of people sustains every aspect of all of our lives. This is mediated by impersonal market exchange; we exchange money for what we need, and don’t even meet most of the people whose work makes that possible. But our most important immediate relationships with the global market are through those who pay our wages, our direct employers, and our landlords. Because these relationships are the ones we concretely depend on to live, they are our strongest relationships of actual accountability. Community is how we wish our interdependence was organized, but the capitalist market is far more powerful.

NW Something you write could well be a heading in this issue: “If our experience of community is overwhelmingly disappointing, fragile, or fleeting, why, then, do we talk about it so much?” What’s your answer?

PC There are no political parties in this country that represent the left, let alone the gay left, let alone gay communists, and there are very few institutions if any that do either. In the absence of that, people look to the nebulous idealist form of community. What our project, this issue, and other recent work like the book On Community by Casey Plett, indicate is that many who invoke or are invoked by community are frustrated by that very nebulous and highly contingent, too-flexible notion of community and keen to pursue its concrete coordinates. We need community but we have not yet found the form that meets our other collective needs. We might aspire for building real community with our comrades, with other queers, with all the people we care about, with those we struggle alongside. And we do, those networks can be very powerful and helpful. They help people, and have helped us. Sometimes even materially with a place to stay or money. But precisely because working-class people, proletarians, do not own the means of our reproduction, we end up eventually having to rely on getting a job or attaching ourselves to a person who has a job, and a different class controls access to work. Because our communities do not own the means of survival, they are ultimately quite precarious. We work hard to build them in periods of our lives, but for many they unravel, and we become more isolated at other phases of our lives. The market and its relationships of domination persist, but community often doesn’t.

NW What true community is possible?

PC This is the fundamental question of the conclusion to After Accountability, and perhaps to gay communism. There is a profound tension between the aspirational community that we want, we seek, that we try to build and hope it lasts; and the actual dependency on the world market. This analysis led us to the conclusion that real robust accountability, to really rely on community to do all the things we wish it to do, would depend on either what we need to survive being universally available to everyone, or to at least be under community control, to be collectively owned and managed. The word for this is communism. This is only possible through replacing the global market with a fundamentally revolutionary alternative, through a global struggle that successfully overcomes private property, capitalist social relations, and the state. This of course is something that feels very far away, very difficult to achieve. When we talk about community in idealising and romantic terms, we are not describing something that already exists, we are articulating a desire for the world we want to live in. Through our ideas of community, we are describing a way of relating to each other that is only possible in the revolutionary overcoming of capitalism and class society. Community is our yearning for communism. And the barrier to attaining it is the capitalist organisation of present society. Accountability, like community, is a way of articulating our desire for communism, for a form of communist social relations that ties us together. Rather than relying on a violent, racist state that has never protected us for our safety, we could rely on each other. There is so much we name as our desire when we talk about accountability—to be kind and helpful to each other, to have pleasurable and fulfilling sex lives that don’t traumatise and harm each other, to be able to be pushed to learn and grow as people. We clearly need to build movements now that take some steps in these directions now. But the full expression of a world that is able to do this for everyone would have to abolish and overcome the family, the market and the state as the main system for regulating our ties to each other and reproducing our lives. Accountability can help bridge between the world we live in now and the world beyond capitalism we yearn for. .