Pinko Magazine

Transcript of Interview with Max Fox, M.E. O’Brien, and Tiana Reid, conducted by Nico Millman

Nico Millman: Hello, listeners at Full Stop. My name is Nico Millman, and today I will be interviewing three members of the Pinko Collective and discussing their revised and updated edition of their book, After Accountability: A Critical Genealogy of a Concept, which is published through Haymarket Books. After Accountability gathers and situates interviews conducted by members of Pinko with nine organizers, including members of Critical Resistance, Survive and Punish, Bash Back, and movement professionals. The outcome, as we will see, is a fine-grained and thoughtful and compelling inquiry into the circulation of left-wing concepts like “accountability” that also tracks how participants in political movements try to live differently in a world marked by the compulsion to be punitive.

We’ll be speaking with three members from Pinko. Max Fox is a writer, translator, and founding editor of Pinko Magazine. 

M.E. O’Brien writes on gender freedom and communism. As well as her work with Pinko, she has two books, Family Abolition: Capitalism and the Communization of Care, published in 2023 through Pluto, and the co-authored speculative novel, Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune, 2052 to 2072. Published in 2022 through Common Notions Press. 

And Tiana Reid, who is an assistant professor in the Department of English at York University, where she teaches Black literature. Her writing has appeared in Bookforum, Dissent, The Nation, The New York Review of Books, Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory, and elsewhere. She’s also an editor of Pinko and a former editor of The New Inquiry.

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To set the stage, can you tell me about how Pinko, as a collective, began? How did you get involved and what does the composition of your collective look like? And can you share what kinds of initiatives and projects you take on?

Max Fox: I suppose I’ll start. In some ways, I tried gathering some of the collective members in 2018, let’s say, initially. Gosh, it’s kind of hard to remember exactly what the context was. I mean, I’d also been working at The New Inquiry before, in a sort of separate editorial tenure than Tiana. And I had stepped away and I was starting to do some editorial work on a book that was later published, called Sexual Hegemony, and I was engaging with these . . . elaborate concepts and thoughts and felt like there were other people out there who I could hopefully have conversations with. And I sought them out to try and create some kind of a venue for continuing these conversations.

I . . . with Michelle and our other collective members, Lou Cornum, we began sort of thinking of other people who could play an interesting role in this project and . . . I guess what we did first, we wrote a manifesto somehow, we made a Kickstarter that was able to raise us some money to pay for the first printing of a magazine issue and then we put out this magazine issue which, ultimately, I think was released in 2019. That’s my memory of the origin.

Tiana Reid: Yeah, and I got involved after the first initial idea, after the manifesto was written but not published, I think. So I worked on the first issue, and it was Lou Cornum, who I worked with on The New Inquiry, who reached out to me. 

M.E. O’Brien: Thank you, Max and Tiana. Those are good histories. I remember Max approaching me at a sort of communist theory protest camp of sorts. And we were in overlapping circles around communist politics in the US and sort of interested in the position of queerness in that. And I think also shared a kind of interest that has been one of the kind of research projects of the collective is in trying to think about how to reconstruct and critique and rethink and use the legacy of gay liberationism and the kind of sexual insurgencies of the 1960s and 70s, and Tiana’s writing and Pinko engages this around Black lesbian eroticism in the 1970s and 80s quite richly.

You asked about the composition of the collective. I was thinking—I won’t speak to demographics or whatnot—but I was thinking that it would be nice to just include the names of the other collective members here. So, they include: Lena Perez Afridi, Sol Brager, Lou Cornum (whom we’ve spoken about), Emilio Martínez, and Addison Vawters.

NM: Great. Thank you for that. So, Pinko is described as “a collective for thinking gay communism together.” Here, I’m quoting from the website that you all have. Can you tell me more about this lineage of gay communism and how the pursuit of this revolutionary horizon motivates your projects?

TR: I think, recently, for some collective writing that we have been doing, I revisited the manifesto and . . . I think, for me, one of the key parts about gay communism is developing language and ideas to think about capitalist sexual and gender relations. And that’s the thing that brought me to Pinko because it was something—and I think you know we can talk about in a second how that relates to accountability—but, yeah, it’s everywhere.

MO: Yeah, I think in both your question and Tiana’s comment that both sides of it are there, right? So, we need a rigorous means of theorizing the nature of sexual relationships under capitalism and the quite limited possibilities with sexual freedom and what constitutes sexual life. And that includes sort of thinking about a kind of queer Marxism, thinking about the sort of many currents of political critique that have sort of tried to think capitalism and sexuality alongside each other, the critique of the family. That sort of legacy of white supremacy and slavery in shaping sexual relationships—all these things are just immensely important. But also, the other side of that is their overcoming that is implied as a utopic horizon and a vision in liberationist politics. An overcoming, of trying to theorize something of communism, of the sexual life of communism. I’ve done this in my own work in a quite, you know, specific, linear, in a particular kind of theoretical tradition. But within Pinko, I would say we’re quite varied in the kind of approaches that we take, in how we understand communism, in how we understand the legacy of Marxism, in how we position ourselves in the legacy of gay liberation, for example. These variations, I think, emphasize that, rather than a kind of political program, we’re much more a collective of inquiry, right? A space to raise a set of questions and to explore quite varied answers and to welcome other people to explore those questions with us.

So, what you read that we talk about ourselves, you read it, a collective for “thinking” gay communism together, which, is a very, you know, the grammar is subtle, but it’s quite different than just naming ourselves as a gay communist collective, for example.

MF: Yeah, there’s a dimension also, I think, to go back to the first question, the genesis of this project that I was responding to a particular moment and in, you know, 2018–2019, where, again, it feels extremely remote to even name . . . but there was this meme that was circulating about “fully automated luxury gay space communism,” and there was a number of books that were coming out that were being sort of re-translated and resurrected in some way from the sexual liberation era that were engaged in this particular question. Mario Mieli’s book, Towards a Gay Communism, as one, obviously.

There was a whole Verso sub-series that they did around that same time, and there was a sort of popular uptake in some way. It really it seemed like there was almost a critical mass of young people who were, you know, gay or queer or communist or socialist or whatever. We were all, ideally, partisans of this project, we were all a little bit baffled about what they could possibly have in mind, these people who are using these concepts and these terms and what the traditions that they were invoking actually had to say about our present situation.

There’s a bit of a kind of intellectual history, maybe activity that’s also going on in the project to try and bring these, you know, extremely alluring and vibrant and far-reaching critiques sometimes from an earlier moment of revolutionary activity into the light of the present and see what still makes sense about what they were saying and how it’s possible to use or not.

NM: Yeah, that’s all great. And I’m seeing a resonance between these variations and varieties of “gay communism,” as well as what we will talk about soon, the variations and varieties of “accountability” as it comes up in this project. So, it seems that grappling with these moving targets of keywords, seems to be a procedure that follows a lot of this work that you all do.

And so, let’s now begin to talk about After Accountability, which is a great book that I’m going to recommend that everybody check out and read. And it’s an oral history. I want you to tell me a little bit about the methods that inform this practice of oral history. Are you all trained oral historians or is this experimental for you all? And did you have any pre-existing relationships with the interviewees and did that shape your approach? Or if you didn’t, did that also shape the dimension of the conversations itself and the textures of how information became produced and their articulations and utterances of their experiences. So, yeah, tell me a little bit about that.

MO: So, I’ll start off. I am a trained oral historian and we did a little workshop together, you know, talking about oral history practices. I coordinated the New York City Trans Oral History Project for three and a half years and [I] taught oral history in a queer labor course at NYU for four years and have spent a lot of time training the volunteer interviewers of the New York City Trans Oral History Project.

My approach to oral history is informed by psychoanalysis, the work that I currently do, in that it’s really about sort of removing a kind of examining and being conscious of internal obstacles to how we listen and to really noticing the ways that we check out or become overwhelmed or want to actively intervene in what someone is saying. And that allows us to sort of hear something new in somebody’s account and notice the moments that there might be more to say, on some level. And so, it has a kind of a very open-ended and rich chance for someone, hopefully, to say something new beyond kind of routinized narratives that they told a lot.

And so, we talked a little bit about oral history practices and threw in a little bit about my academic research and sociology, qualitative interviewing. And then other people had other kinds of experiences with research interviews that informed our process. In terms of the people, we all drew on our personal networks. Three of the interviewers or narrators I knew from my time in the New Communist Movement organization. A couple of them I knew from my time in prison abolitionist organizing in New York City, and its sort of overlapping with transformative justice work of the 2000s. And so, you know, I had these existing political relationships over a long period of time that I drew on. And I think everyone in the collective similarly did so and incorporated personal relationships they had, longstanding political relationships they had, in thinking about who to interview and how to approach interviews.

And then we had a whole internal method of doing the interviews, transcribing them, looking over the transcriptions and beginning to sort of inductively try to see what we could think through them and with them.

MF: Yeah. Yeah, I also did some of the interviews, but I had no prior oral history formation or training whatsoever. I mean, we did the little internal workshop, which I found really interesting. And then, I look at the interviews that I actually conducted and I’m like, wow, I could not keep quiet for like more than a minute. I was like, there’s a lot little interjections that I’m doing . . . and I’m like, wow, maybe they could have said something a little bit more. I mean, I feel like the people that I was speaking with were all, you know, brilliant. And hopefully I didn’t step on their toes too much, but it was an interesting experience for me for my first sort of attempt at this process to discover how much I was actually really like trying to participate in their responses.

NM: Yeah. And I’m feeling that right now, actually, that same tendency. I want to interject and say so much. But I want to let all of your brilliance show right now.

So, when one reads this book, there’s a rich genealogy of this contradictory concept of and practice of accountability. One finds it has multiple meanings, and you really get that sense as you read the book, this evolving understanding of what accountability is. And it seems like you began with an understanding—I’m especially thinking of the introduction—you narrate this process, too. This understanding of the term as a process by which social movements address harm amongst participants in the movement, especially around how sexual violence gets addressed. What’s explicitly mentioned is that many movements do not always have the capacity to address it, and many such organizations have fallen apart. Though, you get the sense as you read the interviews, too, that other meanings of accountability began to emerge: Some interpreted it to mean accountability to one’s organization, to one’s spiritual values, to comrades in the struggle, among others. Some accountability to lots of different, discrete entities.

Can you walk us through these multiple meanings of accountability as you encountered them? Was there anything surprising or startling that you encountered in the interviews?

And, if you’d like, just one other thread that I saw throughout the interviews, was this Maoist practice of criticism and self-criticism, which informed the New Communist Movement, which was mentioned before, to practices of transformative justice and abolitionist movements. So, if you also want to remark on that too, that would be great.

TR: I’ll just start off by adding one of the contradictory or difficult meanings of accountability, which is at the beginning of the introduction. Accountability really comes as a description of a moment as well, a description of a historical conjuncture. The first sentence of the book is about the George Floyd uprising and its magnitude. On that first page, we get into how the state also harnesses the uprising to its own end. That image [is] so imprinted in my mind, of Nancy Pelosi in the Kente cloth. I don’t think that is the kind of accountability that is discussed primarily by the organizers. But I think we have to hold that alongside the other, right? Can law enforcement be held accountable? Well, like, no, you know, it’s an impossibility. But that’s some of the difficult language that we have to contend with as well.

MO: I’ll leave it to Max to talk a little bit about the introduction, but I think, Nico, you went over several of the meanings of accountability as they played out. We went into it sort of primarily thinking about how sexual harm tears apart and how people want to address it and try to address it. That’s sort of mainly what we were thinking going into it. Strangely, very few of the interviews mention that intra-movement harm is often of a sexual character, sexual assault and rape as playing a primary role. And as we interviewed people, all of this was in the context of the George Floyd uprising and its aftermath where accountability had all these other rich meanings as they were playing out on the streets, right? Because part of it is the ideas of transformative justice replacing the prison system is a quite resonant meaning for many people, and then as Tiana alluded to the whole question about can we hold the state accountable. Is that possible? No. I mean, it would require a revolutionary change. But as we interviewed people, all these other meanings of accountability came out and they all had something to do with each other. They were not unrelated, right? They all have something to do with the relationship between the self and the other, between the internal commitments that you have and the external demands of someone else, and the sort of place of the law or the community or the kind of third term within that. They all have an interconnection and a resonance with each other. And one of the meanings that came up a lot is people talking about being accountable to a line, people being accountable to an organization, to a movement, who have struggled over time, even when the kind of structural demands of reproducing yourself in the world and getting a job undermine your movement participation.

In terms of the Maoist bit, I’ll say a little bit about that. So, I had a theory going into it that how people talked about transformative justice was very deeply informed by the history of criticism/self-criticism, because many, many Maoists got involved in the prison abolitionist movement in the 1980s and 90s and got involved in building nonprofits in the 1990s and 2000s. I knew many people who had gone through that trajectory. And so, we went into it a little bit informed by this thesis. So, we interviewed perhaps more people from the New Communist Movement than we might have and did not really discover it to be the case in an interesting way, that mostly in their accounts, you know, when Peter Hardie does this really explicitly, he actually actively contrasts the kind of cruelty that he remembers in criticism/self-criticism to the new, more loving, more respectful forms of transformative justice. And he had participated in both and knew people, many people, who had participated in both, but had very little to say about how one had contributed to or informed his approach to the other, which I’ve found to be quite interesting.

So that particular kind of thesis fell by the wayside. But the Maoist movement in the US certainly asked many very interesting questions about how we organize together, how we treat each other in comradely ways, sort of an ethical and principled practice of interpersonal relations within movements, even if sometimes how that was defined was quite cruel and perverse.

But the emphasis on comradely relations was a much more central part of the New Communist Movement than it was many other political tendencies.

NM: Thank you all for that. Yeah, and I think that emphasis on comradely relations is what I saw surfacing throughout all of these interviews as well—how accountability is being thought through by all these interviewers. And something that came up—and here I’m thinking about the interview with Esteban Kelly . . . There, they make the distinction between informal and formal practices of accountability.

And there, he’s talking about involvement in the punk scene. And then, Philly Stands Up, which is its own organization and kind of talking about how community relations ended up influencing or shaping or even sometimes departing from the formal organizational structures in how accountability is thought of and practiced.

And so, just what I saw through there, is there’s this kind of like improvisation going on. I think he uses a “learning as doing” process and figuring out how to extend care—and that’s a word I’d like to return to at another point—among comrades rather than a programmatic way of managing conflict. So, I just wanted to ask you all: What do you think about this interplay between formal and informal, and this constant sort of improvisational revision of practices of accountability? Yeah, I just want to invite you to reflect on that, as specific or as broadly as you’d like.

MF: Yeah, so I did that interview with Esteban, and I looked back at the transcript and it’s interesting . . . I mean, obviously, I think in the history of his own sort of development that he gives, you know, there’s a sort of journey at . . . somewhat self-guided or whatever and not about following a pre-existing program because this whole thing is that like they were building out these necessary elements, organs in their community or whatever, and then they discovered that the whole time there had been this kind of like, you know, formalized practice in graduate school elsewhere or whatever that other people had been professionalizing and that they were then kind of brought into. And, I can see in my questioning of him, I’m like, but truly that wasn’t really what was going on. Truly behind the, you know, spontaneous like self-governing practices that your accounting, your journey . . . there was some kind of secret thing. And I don’t know, I mean, I’m not sure how strongly I want to hold onto that suspicion, because it’s like, it’s clear that people do have, you know, this is the story that the practitioners tell of their program. On the one hand, you do need a kind of special training to learn how not to carry out these like punitive . . . whether or not you’re involving the state or just a kind of social sanction, these punitive responses to harm, you need to like retrain yourself. And at the same time, these are capacities that human communities have availed themselves of since forever. And this is, in fact, a return, maybe, to what was more organic or more natural for people to be treating themselves as, you know, co-community members or whatever, rather than like evildoers and righteous, you know, adjusters or whatever.

So I think . . . maybe not to exactly answer your question, but I think the interesting thing about this project is that we began with this lightly held thesis that Michelle talks about as a way of trying to be, like, is this story about yourself, like, completely true? Is there maybe something else that was present? Were there other influences? Not that it’s like a self-serving story, but were there other things happening that you maybe may not have incorporated in the history that you’ve retained about this?

And I think, perhaps it’s a bit over emphasized in the way that we put it in the in the introduction, but I think that by approaching this question with this kind of, you know, critical lens, we did end up putting together a fairly, almost, coherent story of a relay between different attempts at revolutionary organization over the past half century. That, you know, in the moment, at each of these junctures or whatever, was not like we are executing a plan to become the next stage of the struggle, though some of them had those aspirations, but they had to be, you know, at some level blind to the conditions that they were operating in. But that this concept that we were able to find a kind of like trace of throughout past fifty years, does end up giving a somewhat legible story of the left and our attempts at carrying out any kind of revolutionary activity, which means maintaining any kind of organizational coherence. And so it makes sense that conflict and harm and intra-left discord or whatever would be the object that gives you that story, because that’s the task, the task that everybody fails at, obviously, constantly fails at. So there’s a very rich . . . the compensation for that total history of failure, is that there’s a very rich archive of attempts that we can try to put together.

MO: I want to highlight an implicit thread in what Max said and the way it sort of strangely responds to an element of your question. So, there are these formal practices of transformative justice that are manualized, that you can hire a consultant, people who do this as volunteers. And there are these informal practices of how communities try to grapple with conflicts that come up. And there’s a way that these are stitched together in the narratives of our practitioners, as Max laid out, in a pretty common narrative. And our book is sort of about neither. It’s about both and neither. It’s not about the formal in that we don’t explain the manuals. We don’t tell anyone how to do it. We don’t have any of the many experts we talk to lay out how it’s done.

But it’s also not exactly about the informal. Because we’re interested in critically taking a step back from the narratives people give about the informal process and trying to actually think about the role of political lineage, ideology, organizational commitments, you know, in the conclusion, capitalism, in thinking about what might structure or form or shape, what might give more formality to the informal than is claimed. And so, you know, the interviews touch on both over and over and over again. But our inquiry has a kind of dialectical relationship between them; it’s a slightly different dialectic than I think commonly characterizes the narratives that we’re following. 

And we went into it knowing that we didn’t want to just hear the canned story of it. We wanted to ask a set of questions where neither we nor the narrators entirely knew the answers beforehand.

NM: Yeah, I think I saw that playing out and you had mentioned before Peter Hardie’s interview, where I think that kind of interplay between the formal and the informal, and especially in talking about accountability. . . I think at one point, uses the phrase “criticism as personal” versus “criticism as organizational.” 

But then he goes on to talk about how he wants to be accountable to his queer and trans comrades. It felt more, I think he used lovey-dovey at one point? It felt like that ended up inflecting how he thought about accountability, which, when you see in your interview with him, it kind of surprises you when you look at that.

So, I think I also just wanted to ask . . . I am thinking about the personal and the political, which as we know, is this feminist adage that’s been around for some time. And sometimes a lot of the questions would begin by asking, “Tell us about your personal engagement with this notion of accountability?” So, I just wanted to ask: What did you learn about that, the personal is political? Did you rethink that as you were conducting these interviews or reading them? Just more broadly, this legacy of feminism?

That’s a lot to put out there. So, feel free to take this any direction that you’d like. But that was just something that came through: Is this occasion for a rethinking of that kind of adage?

TR: I mean, I’m going to answer, you know, in a personal way, because I think that’s what the question invites. But, reading . . . I wasn’t part of making the book, so I come to the book as a reader. When we were preparing it for Haymarket, I was a little bit more involved. But, as a reader, part of what this book made me realize—you know, along with years of therapy and analysis—was like, I’m not giving enough of myself to movements. And I don’t mean that on like a capacity or a work or energy level. But I mean that on an interpersonal . . . a level of vulnerability, a level of sharing ideas, thinking together to bring back the thinking gay communism together. Because organizations, collectives, are made up of people. And I think that’s one of the things that really comes across in reading the book. So yeah, it was kind of reflective for me on how I come to spaces and how I maybe leave parts of myself behind. And this was an invitation to be more integrated and to be . . . and that actually is part of liberation work as well.

MO: Going off of Tiana’s comment, I think, you know, the personal and political are so dialectically interdependent in so many fraught and complex and rich ways, and every political narrative sort of positions them differently. And I think the erotic, taking the erotic seriously, as only a few of our narrators did, and we tried to do in our work, like, really complicates it a lot, right? That people organize collectively around a set of political demands that might include sexual freedom somewhere in the list or opposition to anti-trans fascism, or whatever it is. And then while they’re organizing in that movement or a movement that has nothing to do with queers, they might flirt, right? They might hook up, they might date, they might find a spouse, they might do all sorts of things, they might constitute a family while they’re involved in the movement. And that sort of dynamics of erotics is partially what constitutes the social bond of solidarity and comradeship and care that exists within movements. But the erotic, because it’s so vulnerable and so dangerous, both forms very strong ties and has a very strong capacity for harm. And so there’s an impulse both to sort of separate out, right? If people are hooking up at meetings, that’s not other people’s business. That is their own personal business. And it might be. That might be the right way to go about it. But I had this sort of semi-arbitrary conceptual distinction that tries to contain the harm that happens and tries to contain the pleasure and possibility that happens. And the dynamics of that, I think, are very complex, right? There has been a lot of writing about [this] in ACT UP and a few other kinds of spaces. But actually thinking about how it unfolds—including in movements totally dominated by heterosexuals with retrograde sexual politics, for example—thinking about how that unfolds is really complex.

And I think what ends up happening is you get, and our book’s partially about this, a small faction that’s like these sexual practices harmful, and then a large section that’s like, we don’t know what you’re talking about. And then the battle between them tears the movement apart. 

And, you know, figuring out how to deal with that differently while not completely shutting out the erotic altogether is a very, very complex question. And it’s kind of the question of gay communism. Like in what kind of society could an erotic social bond be a source of solidarity and transformation between people?

NM: Absolutely. And these reflections on the erotic supplement nicely in the collectively written essay that you have at the end of the volume. There’s a brief section on the erotic there that—you’re anticipating another question I wanted to ask. (For the listeners: The volume is bookended by two collectively written essays. There is an introduction, and then the nine interviews as they are conducted, and then another concluding essay that offers other additional syntheses and reflections, especially on capitalism, but then it’s shot through with this question of the erotic at a certain point.) And to quote from that final essay, it says, “The erotic is woven into the political,” “the erotic weaves through political action,” and then, specifically, “queer struggle has been fueled and sustained by the passionate attachment between comrades at times.”

And I also think there is a resonance with ACT UP. I recently read Let the Record Show by Sarah Schulman, which is an oral history of ACT UP in New York in the 80s. And there’s so many accounts there of, you know, how sometimes people get brought into political movements through crushes or eyeing somebody cute or lovers becoming comrades.

But also, how that’s always fraught, too. There’s always a tension there. And so, Tiana, in your other writings in Pinko, you’ve written about the erotic and the political, specifically. There’s an essay titled “Beached Whales of the Sexual Universe: Reading Black Lesbian Sex,” where you offer other reflections on Black lesbian feminist thinking about the erotic and the political, holding its possibilities and dangers in simultaneity. And there, you write, “Sex is a connective tissue in all politics. We must continue to learn and read it. The stakes are life and death as we know it.”

So, I guess I just want to ask more broadly: In what other ways has this project, After Accountability, taught you to continue that rereading, that reading and rereading of sex and politics and the erotic? I know we started talking about it, but I also think another horizon of liberation or theoretical mooring is the Black Radical Tradition, too? So, I wanted to ask more about how all these interplay. Large question, feel free to take it in any way that you go.

TR: Yeah, I mean, I hadn’t made that connection, but obviously it’s there. It really goes back to what Michelle was saying, how sex, sexuality, the erotic, the libidinal, it’s really part of everything, but we kind of deny its embeddedness in our lives. And it’s not even so much that it gets obscured or concealed or covered up, but I think that’s part of it. But it’s like we don’t have the language or the tools to talk about it. And I think accountability, then, is like, does that give us the tools? I think it is part of the question that we are asking. And then in that essay, I was reading and rereading Black lesbian writing about sex in the late twentieth century to see methods to renew our relationship between sexuality and politics and power and powerlessness, which I think is also talked about in the erotic, in the ending on the erotic section, which is only a page and a half. I wanted it to be so much more. There’s so much more work to be done. And I think we’ve said it already, but it was really fascinating that the interviewees really didn’t acknowledge dating.

MO: One other thing, I spoke about the erotic already, but one other thing I’ll add is that there’s this Freudian theory that all psychopathologies all originate from sexuality. And it’s sort of absurd, right, on the face of it. And I think part of the rationale of it is quite magnificent, which is sexuality is the domain of excess. It’s like, it is everything that we experienced early in our life that wasn’t adaptable, wasn’t fully assimilable. It wasn’t like food, you know, sort of basic social relations, like survival, like these things give the impression that they can all fit together just right. But they always have an excessive element to them. They always have an element of pleasure that exceeds the necessary that then can’t be incorporated back into what’s perfectly adaptable or functional or harmonious. And we are sexual beings in that, we, our lives are lived in part in pursuit of this surplus, this excess, even asexual lives, right? That there’s something in the pleasure of our existence that always sort of puts in jeopardy the social bond while also creating the very possibility of its constitution.

And a social bond that is characterized by a kind of excess that sets everything in motion, of course, is exactly what social movements are, on some level. Like, social movements are necessarily libidinal, whether or not they theorize that at all.

NM: Another potential horizon, a revolutionary horizon that we see and another kind of practice that could enrich understandings of accountability that’s marked in this book, is thinking of Indigenous practices of relationality. So, this again comes in through at the introduction, at different points in different interviews, too, as well as in the concluding section.

But also, the necessity to not mythicize or romanticize these kinds of practices of relationality. But they also, again thinking about this dialectically, they also offer possible sites for thinking accountability anew. So, I wanted to ask you all to discuss this more.

And just a sub question to this question is that, M.E., I was thinking about how you opened your book, Family Abolition, with a discussion of the 2006 Indigenous Oaxacan uprising, especially the involvement of Indigenous Oaxacan women in the creation of communes in the process of that insurgency. And so, I also want to invite another kind of speculation on the possibilities of thinking these communes that are produced in insurgency alongside accountability as it is thought through in this book. Feel free to take that in any other direction you want. But that was what I was thinking of.

MO: Yeah, this was an analysis that Lou Cornum developed in reading over the interviews—looking, noticing repeatedly how sort of Indigenous transformative justice practices are mythologized and narrated and accounted by the narrators and how common that is in the movement. And, you know, when the actual alternative criminal justice practices of Indigenous nations in Canada and the United States are certainly immensely historically varied, but also quite varied now and include all sorts of carceral practices that have an element of an Indigenous cultural element incorporated into them but are quite far from what people imagine as transformative justice on some level. And so, what is going on in how this history is evoked? And it has something to do with really wanting to constitute a narrative of origins.

But then there’s another whole dimension to it, which is actually learning from radical Indigenous social movements, which are not covered in the book, but are certainly kind of important to my thinking. And that those have elements of Indigenous culture to them, Indigenous land, collective land ownership practices and other things, quite varied practices, but were not always so these sort of unchanging mythologized histories. 

And, for me, After Accountability and my book, Family Abolition, were in dialogue in lots of ways. Each of their conclusions, I think, are really sister essays and are kind of adjacent to each other in many ways, around the problem of community—Gemeinwesen in Marx’s work, “beloved community” in Martin Luther King Jr.’s work, and then the kind of difficulties of community in After Accountability.

But I opened it talking about this moment in 2006 when there was a mass uprising in Oaxaca. And the life on the barricades and how the Indigenous movement there, particularly women, really drove new forms of social reproduction as strategies of survival in the midst of this uprising, right? So, what was work that would take place within the home became the practices of reproducing the revolutionary movement. And this idea of insurgent social reproduction is really a focal point or pivot in my whole argument about what constitutes family abolition.

MF: I’m going to share an anecdote. Hopefully it’s quickly relevant. I happened to have been in Oaxaca the year after this uprising. I’d just graduated from college and I was like, I need to learn Spanish and I will go to this . . . random city where I can take a class or whatever. And I didn’t I think I’d been aware, but I certainly didn’t have like the full story at age eighteen or whatever. I happened to be there over Independence Day. And if I remember correctly, the uprising was about the appointment among other things, was about the appointment of the governor of Oaxaca by the either the old PRI or the at that time ruling party PAN, I think. Anyway, they had this incredible social movement, but by the next year or the time I was there, it was somewhat repressed. And I was there during Independence Day when the governor who was the sort of antagonist of the whole city, of the whole state, basically, is traditionally supposed to give the independence call or whatever. And I was in the central square, and I was young, but to this day, probably I have never been in a tenser situation. 

The whole population of Oaxaca City was there under machine gun sites and helicopters in the sky [as he] came out onto the balcony to deliver the symbolic reenactment of the national independence movement or whatever. As a gesture of command basically, that he had like crushed this movement, and you could like cut the tension in the square with a knife. It was really insane. 

And I guess I bring that up to go back a little bit to the Indigenous question and also to the final essay, where we post the big barrier, the big problem to the sort of enactment of these obviously like animating desires of a beloved community or new forms of relating or whatever as the capitalist state. And it feels somewhat obvious to have to say sometimes, but it’s like it would require a revolution to institute this transformation of social relations. 

And in the example of in the example the Indigenous traditions that people often cite, I think, Lou’s intervention has been really clarifying for me. You can say we’re doing these practices that Indigenous people (perhaps you can even be a little bit more specific of X nation or whatever) used to carry out, but in order to do what that means, you would need to return sovereignty over the land to these people—that’s what the ceremony requires. It’s not just a sort of gesture that you’re doing. It’s a total social metabolism with the earth and the kind of control over it in a certain way. And the barrier to that, obviously, is the capitalist state. 

And so, in some ways, that helps explain why the kind of like trailing theme of these questions that we’re asking these practitioners is failure. Why have these very brilliant, compelling, elaborate, you know, beautiful and inspiring efforts run into such intractable problems? And it kind of clarifies the stakes also of carrying out this effort. That’s what the aim is, a total overturning of present society, and that’s what it’ll take, whatever constitutes a real revolution that overthrows the state, which, you know, is not present to hand right now. Certainly not in hand in this history that we traced. Even though, what we also found was people committed to it as a horizon, despite really crushing defeat and keeping themselves together in some form. There are, you know, there are real enemies with power that need to be overcome before we can make effective reality.

NM: Another keyword—I like to think through keywords, it’s my way of ingesting knowledge—that keeps coming up (and of course your book marks this, too) is that word community. Even just on the back, it says, “An oral history and critical genealogy of accountability, the complex abolitionist concept that pushes us to ask: just what do we mean by community?” And, I think your concluding essay [thinks about this] too. It seems like an engagement with accountability entails an engagement with just what community means. As all of you dialectically work through, there are political communities but also communities of capitalism that you talk about, too, that shape us. 

And I think I just want to talk more about the kinds of communities that you saw coming through in the interviews. When I was reading, I saw them navigating so many different kinds: punk music scenes, church and religious communities, people involved in twelve-step programs responding to addiction and how that community became important for thinking through accountability, and revolutionary parties, among others. 

There’s Stevie Wilson, who was interviewed, talks about this as well, who is an incarcerated abolitionist. And they write, in relation to doing prisoner organizing as an incarcerated person, that, “growing up, they,” referring to other incarcerated people: “[Growing up, they] don’t feel a part of their community. They don’t feel a part of their neighborhood. You see that a lot of them don’t feel part of their family. And then you come to prison stuff, let’s talk about community. They’re looking at you like, ‘What? What community?’”

This is part of Stevie’s reflection on how they encountered accountability this context. And so, I guess I am noticing that “community” doesn’t always name something that already is self-evident that exists, but it also indexes a desire to bring forth a community that doesn’t yet exist within capitalism. And so that seems to [have a lot to do with] what we’ve talked about with queer communism, what we’ve talked about with accountability. We’re lining out horizons, and how does what we do now generate movement towards that horizon. That seems to be a lot of what’s coming out of the conversation so far.

So yeah, just any reflections on community, whether in the essay that you wrote at the end or in the interviews or your own personal engagements with that, too.

TR: I’ll start us off, generally thinking about the conclusion—because it really is the aspirational aspect of community or community as aspiration, that is our last section, that gets the last word. And I’m just going to read a few sentences, and then I’ll let other folks share. We write:

Often when we speak of community, we are also speaking of our own hopes for what the world can be. Though we may be mistaken about the resiliency or depth of our current social relationships, we are speaking a fantasy that expresses our political desire. Community, at its best, is our aspiration for genuine interdependence, mutual effective care, and a shared collectivity of human flourishing. We speak of community as if it has already arrived, as if it is at hand.

MO: I’ll say a bit more. I think Max’s comments about Indigenous spiritual practices requiring a social revolution in their full expression, and what Tiana read, sort of speak to all this quite powerfully. So, you know, something we discovered in the interviews and thinking about it, talking to people, was that, often, accountability processes fail, a really important fact that I think people don’t always emphasize. They often fail. And when they succeed, people often cite that . . . everyone involved shared some common commitment to a kind of third term of the party or the program or the revolution or that they might be each subject to the state right and to the law, to the court system, or they might each, you know, share some sense of community around church or a twelve-step or whatnot. And community was often really central to this, right? The idea of community was what made accountability possible. 

And accountability comes up all the time, right, as how the mechanisms, of how accountability processes are leveraged . . . their goal, what they helped accomplish in the process of unfolding. And when they don’t work, it’s often a kind of crisis of community and falling apart of community. And so, we developed this Marxist argument, drawing on the Marxist idea of separation, that we actually are immensely interdependent with huge numbers of people around the world. But that interdependence is mediated by the impersonal exchange of the market. We are connected, one might say accountable to huge numbers of people who we’ve never met, who we don’t have any social relationship with. And who, instead, whose work is somehow involved in the reproduction of our lives and our work is somehow in the reproduction of their lives. This is the community of global capital that constitutes our lives, that’s mediated by the market. And within that, there are a few relationships of direct personal domination within the market that are highly accountable. And those are your employer and your landlord, right? Those are like really accountable relationships, where you better stay accountable or it’s going to be really consequential.

And when people don’t have, you know, when this stuff breaks down, when people don’t have jobs, they draw on their friends, they draw on their comrades, they do their best. But over time, the proletariat condition is one where a different class owns the property that we need to reproduce ourselves and the practices of mutual aid . . . they have some real limits to how much we can survive. And when people can go out and get a job, they do, by and large, right? When they can afford rent, they do. And so, within this, we have all these aspirations and desires to think of us as living in a community of people that we share political commitments with, we share erotic life with, we share social networks with, people that we might care about a lot and might reflect something of the world that we want to live in.

And these relationships can be immensely important, and they can be surprisingly fleeting. The people put tons of work into forming them at some phase of their life. And then maybe as they age, they’re working more, they have had a lot of fights with their communities, they might be isolated into a couple or raising children. They might need to move for a job, right? And who moves with you? Probably your family, not a lot of your friends, right? And so that over time these communities can come under a lot of pressure. And then there’s the pressure of the racist state that communities are fragmented by borders, by immigration policy, by mass incarceration, by police violence, by gentrification, by the displacement and enclosure of peasant land, right? These huge genocidal processes that tear apart communities quite violently, as well as the more constant mundane ways of the market. And so, within all this, you know, the community is actually pretty fleeting, most of the time.

In the passage you read, Nico, there’s something . . . when we speak of community, we’re speaking of the world that we want to live in. And that world would actually require either the means of production, the means of reproduction, the means of survival, being directly, democratically owned by a community, or being universally available to people, and social relations not structuring people’s access to these things. And those are two different versions of what we could call communism, right? Of what we could call the overcoming of class society and racial capitalism. And so, the sort of problem of accountability goes very deeply into how we have these romanticized, mythologized, inverted understandings of our social world as it exists under capitalism.

You know, but in articulating that sort of inverted account, this idea of community that it’s barely there, we’re articulating something very true about our desire, and it’s a desire for communism.

MF: I would say also . . . and about the sort of maybe implicit or unrealized but nevertheless the kind of actual implicit basis of communism that organizes this global capitalist interdependence. It’s not under our control. It’s in the control of the capitalist class, but for global capitalist relations of production and interdependence on total strangers across the globe that you’ll never meet, perhaps ever in your life, requires a kind of like an actual technical social arrangement that puts people in this mode of interdependence that we just happen not to have control over. That, in fact, reproduces our abjection and our lack of control every day that we try and reproduce our own lives.

And we don’t really talk about in these terms in the book, but it’s sort of . . . you could align that with Marx’s concept of the “class in itself” versus a “class for itself.” And the revolutionary problem that accountability is, in some ways, a search for a solution . . . is that, the Marxist thesis at least, is that the only social actor that’s capable of overturning this is the proletariat. But it doesn’t know itself to be . . . it doesn’t have the community, right? It doesn’t exist “for itself,” even though it’s the only thing that is capable of carrying out this transformation. 

In some ways, the accountability story is one of a kind, a reparative or rear-guard action to kind of put the elements of that evanescent and embattled but crucial community back together after these attempts at making any sort of advance. Michelle [M.E.] talks about how, as any sort of social movement is in excess, it’s in excess of its organizational capacity. It’s in excess of what it’s capable of doing. But it does it. And that’s the only way that it’ll ever succeed. But it’s only retrospectively that we’ll realize that what was present was sufficient. And so . . . to return to this, maybe it sounds more negative than it is, this theme of failure and accountability. It’s this organizing principle in our study because that’s what you have to work with, basically, until we win.

NM: Well, we’re nearing time, and I want to be accountable to you all and your time as well. But anybody listening will see just how far reaching the consequences of thinking through accountability in this way [are], and where it could bring us all. Thank you all for sharing all these reflections. And just by conclusion, I want to ask: What’s next? Either for you all and your own projects, or more broadly, for Pinko as a collective. What might we have to look forward to reading from you all next?

TR: We’re working on issue four. Does anyone want to say anything more about that or any of our other projects? That’s kind of present on my mind.

MF: Yeah, it’s slated. If everything goes well, that’s coming out in the summer, late summer, maybe.

NM: Cool. Great. So, everyone keep an eye out for issue four, but also look through issues one through three, some of the essays we’ve talked about in our conversation. And thank you all for making the time to meet with me and to talk with Full Stop. This was a treat. Thank you.

MF: Thank you.

MO: It was a great pleasure. Thank you very much.

Nico Millman is a writer and researcher currently based in Chicago, IL. He received his PhD in English from the University of Pennsylvania, where he specialized in postcolonial studies, modern South Asian and Latin American literature, and comparative studies of race and caste. He was awarded an Editorial Fellowship and guest edited a special issue of Full Stop Quarterly titled “The Cultural Politics of Land” in 2023.