We are, once again and inexplicably, seeing a conversation unfold about reforming the military force in our streets, with body cameras and training standing in for a moral reckoning about the kind of world we want to live in, the kind of world that is livable for more than the wealthy few. We know what such “reforms” accomplish, because we’ve seen this many times before: an armed, unaccountable force with body cameras is no less deadly or immoral than an armed, unaccountable force without. A trained secret police is still the secret police.

A short walk from where I write this is the old Walnut Street Jail, the first penitentiary built in the US, a precursor to the more infamous Eastern State Penitentiary, which was designed and operated by the Quakers. The Quakers advocated for reforms to the old prison systems, in which deprivation and corporal punishment were the norm, arguing that solitude, cleanliness, and discipline were better methods for rehabilitation. More than 200 years after those “reforms,” our prisons remain locations of intense deprivation, physical violence, coerced labor, and, frequently, inhumane solitary confinement—the “penitence” the Quakers were after still in short supply. Reports from the detention centers built today to house people pulled from the streets without due process shows that even those minimal standards are anything but: inedible food, overcrowding, lights on twenty-four hours a day, refusal of medical care, rape, and murder are all regular occurrences in these new prisons.

This is the process that reform takes: the system is modified around the edges, often in ways that seem to cushion or obscure its real purpose, but the underlying conditions that maintain it remain unchanged. The old ways resurface, eventually.

But if not reform, then what? What else can we do? André Gorz proposes a concept of “non-reformist reforms,” reforms which

bring the future into the present…[that] make power tangible now by means of actions which demonstrate to the workers their positive strength.

Gorz, A Strategy for Labor, page 11

For Gorz, a reform is non-reformist if it both exercises the power and agency of workers acting together and foreshadows the future world in the present. That is, a non-reformist reform requires both concrete, bottoms-up action and the reflection of a different world within that action, the way a small fractal prefigures the large. Body cameras promise increased surveillance with no attendant increase in accountability, while training maintains the distribution of money and resources away from care and towards cops and prisons; both reforms represent business as usual, not a remade world. Only abolitionist demands—to defund militarized police forces in all their many forms, to invest instead in schools, libraries, homes, healthcare, childcare, and more—can both exercise that power and foreshadow a world where care overcomes criminalization.

To put this another way: a reform maintains the old world, often under cover. While a non-reformist reform demands that we build a new world, one in which all humans and the more-than-human world can thrive.

We must take small steps towards the future we want; there is no other way. But each step must point the way toward that future, a drop of water that heralds the wave.