Justice and anthropology Class notes

Week 6: The new abolitionists

Ryan Schram

March 30, 2026

Week 6: The new abolitionists

ANTH 3623: Reconciling justice with anthropology (Semester 1, 2026)
March 30, 2026

Main reading: Lloyd (2025); Terwiel (2025)

Other reading: Heynen (2021); Luke and Heynen (2020); Vega León (2025); Marx ([1843] 1978)

Notes

For Marx ([1843] 1978), the great failure of democratic revolutions is that they stop short at changing what really needs changing. They just change the laws. They may even change all of the laws, erasing legal and institutional categories between serf and lord, or Jew and Christian. Liberal democrats say that this is an “abolition” of past discrimination and privleges, but all it is a change of rules. Private property is what he thinks needs to be abolished, and don’t get him started on Christianity—abolished! So-called revolutions don’t touch these; they aren’t real social transformations.

There is a new idea that the 21st century world can only escape from its current crises if we abolish the structures and ideas that led to them: police, prisons, racial capitalism to start. Aboish ICE? How about abolishing borders? These abolitions are just as crucial and urgent as abolishing slavery and the systems of racial governance the undergird colonialism. What would you abolish? Can anthropology serve this new/old idea of genuine social transformation and what would abolitionist anthropology look like?

References

Heynen, Nik. 2021. ““A Plantation Can Be a Commons”: Re-Earthing Sapelo Island Through Abolition Ecology.” Antipode 53 (1): 95–114. https://doi.org/10.1111/anti.12631.

Lloyd, Vincent. 2025. “Abolition, Destruction, Decolonization.” Social Research: An International Quarterly 92 (4): 941–64. https://doi.org/10.1353/sor.2025.a981024.

Luke, Nikki, and Nik Heynen. 2020. “Community Solar as Energy Reparations: Abolishing Petro-Racial Capitalism in New Orleans.” American Quarterly 72 (3): 603–25. https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/1/article/765825.

Marx, Karl. (1843) 1978. “On the Jewish question.” In The Marx-Engels reader, edited by Robert C. Tucker, 26–52. New York: Norton. http://archive.org/details/marxengelsreader00tuck.

Terwiel, Anna. 2025. “Alligator Alcatraz and the Environmental Politics of Prison Abolition.” Social Research: An International Quarterly 92 (4): 1043–67. https://doi.org/10.1353/sor.2025.a981028.

Vega León, Ricardo. 2025. “The Tensions of Abolitionism and Racial Capitalism.” Social Research: An International Quarterly 92 (4): 915–40. https://doi.org/10.1353/sor.2025.a981023.