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?

Agenda for class

  1. Abolition and emancipation
  2. Plantation and plot (and commons)
  3. Abolition is “total” liberation. What does it mean to liberate totally?
  4. Imagination is necessary for abolition. What kind?
  5. The land question and abolition
  6. Essay assignment: Two options

“Abolition is a totality”

“[W]e must direct our energy and resources as workers toward the goal of freedom, which I’m going to call tonight, for the sake of brevity, radical abolition. The abolition I speak of has roots in all radical movements for liberation and particularly in the Black Radical tradition. The abolition I speak of somehow, perhaps magically (meaning we don’t yet know how, which is what magic is, what we don’t know how to explain yet)—the abolition I speak of somehow, perhaps magically, resists division from class struggle and also refuses all the other kinds of power difference combinations that when fatally coupled, spark new drives for abolition. Abolition is a totality and it is ontological. It is the context and content of struggle, the site where culture recouples with the political; but it is not struggle’s form. To have form, we have to organize.“ (Gilmore 2011, 258)

Reference

Gilmore, Ruth Wilson. 2011. “What Is to Be Done?” American Quarterly 63 (2): 245–65. https://doi.org/10.1353/aq.2011.0020.

Imagination is necessary for abolition. What kind?

Essay assignment

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.