After Accountability: A Critical Genealogy of a Concept

Available from Haymarket Books

An oral history and critical genealogy of “accountability,” the complex abolitionist concept that pushes us to ask: 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.

Contributors: 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.

Reviews

“An oral history by organizers for organizers, this book belongs on every radical’s shelf. For those of us who want to build a community strong and resilient enough to change the world, After Accountability is a foundation.”
—Malcolm Harris, author of What’s Left: Three Paths Through the Planetary Crisis

"We desperately need this collection on the left. The interviews are rich with the love and the heartbreak of trying to build liberatory spaces in a hostile society, stories that will resonate with every seasoned organizer. Pinko frames the interviews with a careful and principled analysis that answers the crucial question of how to move through collective grief, conflict and trauma in our movements.”
—Eman Abdelhadi, co-author of Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune, 2052–2072 

"With sharp and often moving conversations with key practitioners who continue to be active in various radical movements for liberation, After Accountability dives into more than the contested practice of accountability. With raw accounts which illuminate the tensions and pleasures in the daily labor to challenge oppressive structures and do more than survive, this book serves as a vital resource for all who labor, together, to build a different world."
—Erica R. Meiners, co-author, Abolition. Feminism. Now.

“Grasping a nettle that seems to have stung almost all of us, one way or another, on the anticapitalist left, the Pinko collective has accomplished something extraordinary with After Accountability, illuminating a way to move forward together in integrity, trust, and militant carefulness.”
—Sophie Lewis, author of Enemy Feminisms: TERFs, Policewomen, and Girlbosses Against Liberation

“In bringing together so many movement practitioners, After Accountability shows the diverse origins and manifold practices of this vital abolitionist praxis. In prisons, punk scenes, and radical political organizations throughout the country, accountability has been not just a goal to aspire to but a rubric for transforming our social relationships in real time. These interviews, framed by trenchant analysis from Pinko, provide a series of reflections on accountability as a revolutionary experiment that draw on a wide range of movements. After Accountability is a thoughtful pursuit of a critical concept, lovingly assembled by one of the most auspicious left publications in North America.”
—Dan Berger, author of Stayed on Freedom: The Long History of Black Power Through One Family’s Journey