Having acknowledged the intimate bonds and episodic convergence of abolition and communism, it behoves us to inquire into what might be learned from their points of dissension. Are there ways in which abolitionism and communism might still operate, to cite Du Bois, as ‘separating ideologies’? I think the most fruitful approach, in view of an eventual ‘drawing together’, is to contend in tandem with abolitionist critiques of communism and communist critiques of abolition. My wager, to paraphrase an old philosopher from the Baltics, is that communism without abolition is empty, abolition without communism blind.