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After Accountability: A Critical Genealogy of a Concept
An oral history and critical genealogy of “accountability,” the complex abolitionist concept that pushes us to just what do we mean by “community?"
A concept just short of a program, accountability has been taken up as a core principle within leftist organizing and activity over the past quarter century. While it invokes a particular vocabulary and set of procedures, it has also come to describe a more expansive, if often vague, approach to addressing harm within movement work. The term’s sudden, widespread adoption as abolitionist concepts began to circulate broadly in recent years cast light on certain shifts in its meaning, renewing the urgency of understanding its relation to militant leftist history and practice.
After Accountability gathers interviews conducted by members of the Pinko collective with nine transformative justice practitioners, socialist labor organizers, incarcerated abolitionists, and activists on the left, and also includes framing essays by the Pinko collective in which its members situate and reflect on those illuminating conversations. An investigation into the theoretical foundations and current practice of accountability, this volume explores the term’s potential and limits, discovering in it traces of the past half-century’s struggles over the absence of community and the form revolutionary activity should take.
Kim Diehl, Michelle Foy, Peter Hardie, Emi Kane and Hyejin Shim, Esteban Kelly, Pilar Maschi, and Stevie Wilson, and Pinko collective members Lou Cornum, Max Fox, M.E. O'Brien, and Addison Vawters.
A concept just short of a program, accountability has been taken up as a core principle within leftist organizing and activity over the past quarter century. While it invokes a particular vocabulary and set of procedures, it has also come to describe a more expansive, if often vague, approach to addressing harm within movement work. The term’s sudden, widespread adoption as abolitionist concepts began to circulate broadly in recent years cast light on certain shifts in its meaning, renewing the urgency of understanding its relation to militant leftist history and practice.
After Accountability gathers interviews conducted by members of the Pinko collective with nine transformative justice practitioners, socialist labor organizers, incarcerated abolitionists, and activists on the left, and also includes framing essays by the Pinko collective in which its members situate and reflect on those illuminating conversations. An investigation into the theoretical foundations and current practice of accountability, this volume explores the term’s potential and limits, discovering in it traces of the past half-century’s struggles over the absence of community and the form revolutionary activity should take.
Kim Diehl, Michelle Foy, Peter Hardie, Emi Kane and Hyejin Shim, Esteban Kelly, Pilar Maschi, and Stevie Wilson, and Pinko collective members Lou Cornum, Max Fox, M.E. O'Brien, and Addison Vawters.
- GenresPhilosophyNonfiction
224 pages, Paperback
Published January 28, 2025
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
April 11, 2025
For people more familiar with the writings and practices of community accountability and movement-oriented transformative justice in the last 15 years or so, this book is a real intervention. I would say it is a theoretical advancement built on the historic openings since 2020.
The oral histories contained within are an education in movement history, tracing the origins and trajectories of various touchstone organizations or formations (Critical Resistance and INCITE!, to name two highlights). The interviews overlap sometimes, express different and sometimes conflicting approaches to the core themes, and generally reflect widely varying standpoints and individual histories. There is a lot of honest critique of many commonplace (on the abolitionist left) community accountability practices, given by people who have the experience to speak on the subject. But there were also many insightful affirmations of the value of accountability efforts. In that vein, accountability is defined variously as:
- Being responsible for your impact on others
- Doing the work of developing and deepening relationships on a human level with the people one organizes with
- Akin to socialist or communist discipline of holding oneself in a shared space for the sake of the common good
- A dialogue with community and a commitment to your comrades
- A synonym or dimension of solidarity
The introduction and especially the conclusion written by Pinko editors are excellent. One paragraph articulated something so fundamental about the connection between abolitionist practices and anticapitalist analysis that it’s worth quoting in full:
The conclusion identifies directly the interrelation of abolitionist movements and revolution. Here efforts or urges for accountability are re-articulated for their underlying political content within capitalism: a deep-felt desire for communism.
The book approaches a fraught but necessary topic with delicacy and honesty, and I read it as an intimate identification of the strengths and limitations of movement relational work on the road toward a communist horizon.
The oral histories contained within are an education in movement history, tracing the origins and trajectories of various touchstone organizations or formations (Critical Resistance and INCITE!, to name two highlights). The interviews overlap sometimes, express different and sometimes conflicting approaches to the core themes, and generally reflect widely varying standpoints and individual histories. There is a lot of honest critique of many commonplace (on the abolitionist left) community accountability practices, given by people who have the experience to speak on the subject. But there were also many insightful affirmations of the value of accountability efforts. In that vein, accountability is defined variously as:
- Being responsible for your impact on others
- Doing the work of developing and deepening relationships on a human level with the people one organizes with
- Akin to socialist or communist discipline of holding oneself in a shared space for the sake of the common good
- A dialogue with community and a commitment to your comrades
- A synonym or dimension of solidarity
The introduction and especially the conclusion written by Pinko editors are excellent. One paragraph articulated something so fundamental about the connection between abolitionist practices and anticapitalist analysis that it’s worth quoting in full:
The structure of universal market dependency is mediated by direct personal relationships. Those who can’t find a job can partner and depend on someone else who has one. This usually takes the form of the nuclear family or other forms of private households. Dependency on the private household to survive leaves people vulnerable to interpersonal partner violence, abusive relationships, terrible childhoods, and other issues of concern to those pursuing accountability and transformative justice. Of course, market dependency creates this same vulnerability to abuse within the workplace as well.
The conclusion identifies directly the interrelation of abolitionist movements and revolution. Here efforts or urges for accountability are re-articulated for their underlying political content within capitalism: a deep-felt desire for communism.
The book approaches a fraught but necessary topic with delicacy and honesty, and I read it as an intimate identification of the strengths and limitations of movement relational work on the road toward a communist horizon.
December 2, 2025
i really really liked reading this book. the notion of trying to trace the lineage of our collective understanding of accountability through interviews with so many different people who have different relationships with the term was really special to read. It has a really democratizing effect, and allows the reader to see themes form through different peoples lived experiences.
I learnt so much about the history of resistance and struggle and the role(s) people have played in trying to resist against the forces that disempower us everyday. many a highlighted passage, many a highlighted name of someone i will go read more about. Big big fan
I learnt so much about the history of resistance and struggle and the role(s) people have played in trying to resist against the forces that disempower us everyday. many a highlighted passage, many a highlighted name of someone i will go read more about. Big big fan
August 4, 2025
for me, one of this book's primary contributions is its focus on contextualizing the lineage, evolution, & praxis of "accountability" within its historical, material political trajectory; within capitalism & alongside the emergence of neoliberalism. this is a necessary frame, and one that has not received nearly enough attention in the repertoire of documentation on accountability / TJ / etc.
i found Pinko's introductory & closing sections--the brackets to the interviews--to be largely very thoughtful & useful. the collective's brief articulations (in the book's introduction) of some of the oppositions embedded within & emerging from present accountability-abolition-repair struggles offer an interesting dialectical frame for exploring accountability. the closing section's address of "community," its foibles, and the obstacles to its realization & longevity is topical and insightful. for a few reasons, i did not love the short section called "The Erotic," but the rest felt salient and important.
as with any book involving many contributors, we will all have preferences for some and not others; there were interviews here that were, for myriad reasons, difficult for me to follow or engage with. that said, i'm sure i learned something from even the ones i didn't love. the interviews i found most compelling & resonant (perhaps because they felt most relevant to my own experiences) were the conversation between M.E. O'Brien, Emi Kane, & Hyejin Shim; and the dialogue between Max Fox & Esteban Kelly. Lou Cornum's interview with LV was similarly engaging.
on the critical side: i found the editors' ongoing flattening of tj / accountability as merely or primarily an attempt to supplant the state to be one-dimensionalizing in a way that misses a lot of complexity. perhaps that's relevant to another thing that irked me, which is the editors' / interviewers' ongoing haranguing, in the face of their interviewee's thoughtful attempts at comprehensive & nuanced approaches to questions, of those interviewees for more "concrete" examples of their experiences with accountability processes.
while both of the above complaints deal with tendencies that make sense given the project's goals (to trace a genealogy of "accountability"; to link "accountability" with abolition and communism), these tendencies' manifestations perhaps embody an instance of burying the trees within the forest. additionally, while of course individual proclivities & aversions to so-called abstraction are in part a result of differently-wired brains, i also read this dogged pursuit of utter clarity as a betrayal of a kind of naïveté--these experiences (of addressing "harm" in "community") are rarely, if ever, easy or even possible to speak to succinctly or concisely even within the "communities" in which they've taken place; asking for concrete examples, in brief & in sum, of incredibly complicated, imbricated dynamics, relationships, exchanges, that have occurred in vastly differing, always specific (and specifically structuring) contexts is asking people to evacuate something of most of its dimensionality. in this case, the ask is well-intentioned; still, aside from the fact that answering it as posed is practically impossible, i bristle at the idea that attempts to answer the ask would in fact serve the project of better understanding the complexities, challenges, "successes," & "failures" of accountability efforts.
all that said, this book is an important contribution and intervention (in)to the literature on accountability, RJ/TJ, and approaches to interpersonal harm, and i'd encourage anyone committed to liberatory movements, "communities," and relation(ship)s to read it.
i found Pinko's introductory & closing sections--the brackets to the interviews--to be largely very thoughtful & useful. the collective's brief articulations (in the book's introduction) of some of the oppositions embedded within & emerging from present accountability-abolition-repair struggles offer an interesting dialectical frame for exploring accountability. the closing section's address of "community," its foibles, and the obstacles to its realization & longevity is topical and insightful. for a few reasons, i did not love the short section called "The Erotic," but the rest felt salient and important.
as with any book involving many contributors, we will all have preferences for some and not others; there were interviews here that were, for myriad reasons, difficult for me to follow or engage with. that said, i'm sure i learned something from even the ones i didn't love. the interviews i found most compelling & resonant (perhaps because they felt most relevant to my own experiences) were the conversation between M.E. O'Brien, Emi Kane, & Hyejin Shim; and the dialogue between Max Fox & Esteban Kelly. Lou Cornum's interview with LV was similarly engaging.
on the critical side: i found the editors' ongoing flattening of tj / accountability as merely or primarily an attempt to supplant the state to be one-dimensionalizing in a way that misses a lot of complexity. perhaps that's relevant to another thing that irked me, which is the editors' / interviewers' ongoing haranguing, in the face of their interviewee's thoughtful attempts at comprehensive & nuanced approaches to questions, of those interviewees for more "concrete" examples of their experiences with accountability processes.
while both of the above complaints deal with tendencies that make sense given the project's goals (to trace a genealogy of "accountability"; to link "accountability" with abolition and communism), these tendencies' manifestations perhaps embody an instance of burying the trees within the forest. additionally, while of course individual proclivities & aversions to so-called abstraction are in part a result of differently-wired brains, i also read this dogged pursuit of utter clarity as a betrayal of a kind of naïveté--these experiences (of addressing "harm" in "community") are rarely, if ever, easy or even possible to speak to succinctly or concisely even within the "communities" in which they've taken place; asking for concrete examples, in brief & in sum, of incredibly complicated, imbricated dynamics, relationships, exchanges, that have occurred in vastly differing, always specific (and specifically structuring) contexts is asking people to evacuate something of most of its dimensionality. in this case, the ask is well-intentioned; still, aside from the fact that answering it as posed is practically impossible, i bristle at the idea that attempts to answer the ask would in fact serve the project of better understanding the complexities, challenges, "successes," & "failures" of accountability efforts.
all that said, this book is an important contribution and intervention (in)to the literature on accountability, RJ/TJ, and approaches to interpersonal harm, and i'd encourage anyone committed to liberatory movements, "communities," and relation(ship)s to read it.
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July 27, 2025Leaving no rating because I don’t think I have the proper background to adequately assess the work’s content. It’s a cool project, and the interviews themselves are very interesting, but I found the introductory material more confusing than helpful. The final essay was excellent.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews