In the 1970s, what Marx and Engels satirised as the most ‘infamous proposal of the communists’, the abolition of the family, becomes the most scandalous demand of feminists. Ever since then, numerous US feminists have tried to walk it back. This article revisits 1970s feminist family abolitionism and develops an argument for its contemporary relevance.

In The Idea of Prison Abolition, philosopher Tommie Shelby critically analyzes the case for prison abolition advanced by scholar-activists such as Angela Davis. Abolition is understood as the dismantling and permanent abandonment of incarceration as a method of responding to a social problem like crime. In Shelby's view, abolitionists do not successfully show that prisons must be abolished. Prisons for him retain a necessary and morally defensible function: preventing serious crime. In my commentary, I first suggest that (...) Shelby implicitly evaluates some of Davis's arguments on the terms of success of a scholar, not those of a scholar-activist, and does not consider an objection to his conclusions that scholar-activists are likely to raise. Second, I problematize the basis for Shelby's claim that punishment remains necessary to prevent the most serious crimes. (shrink)

This article responds to contributions to an Author Meets Critics book symposium addressing the author's book Restorative Justice and Lived Religion: Transforming Mass Incarceration in Chicago (New York University Press, 2024). It further develops the account I develop in my book regarding how restorative justice has emerged as a transformational social movement, and what such a movement can do to address harms that are not merely perpetuated by one individual against another but reproduced by an entire “justice” system. To accomplish (...) this, I explore the ways that several lived restorative justice initiatives on the South and West sides of Chicago both resist, but also transformatively engage, the U.S. criminal legal system. In light of this focus, in the first part of this response, I return to the controversy among contemporary restorative justice practitioners over the ability—or alleged inability—of restorative justice to transform systemic injustices. I reiterate that restorative justice must be understood holistically, taking into account what I argue are its distinctive moral and spiritual dynamics. Doing so, I contend, allows us to overcome a prison reform vs. prison abolition dichotomy that has emerged in scholarship and activism. In the second part of this response, I reflect on the colonial and racial dynamics that undergird work in the scholarly community’s restorative justice and lived religion spaces. (shrink)

There is something prophetic about abolition; some element of the elsewhere that marks its practice, and its discourse. In the work of undoing, there is a crack. In the refusal, a moment of imagination. Abolition is driven by definitive demands as much as by what is yet to come and what is still unfinished.

This paper analyses the demands for abolishing passports after WWI. The international regime of obligatory passports, as it exists today, is a legacy of the Great War. After the Armistice, two Passport Conferences organized by the League of Nations considered its abolition. Before the second conference, a resolution of the Sixth Assembly of the League of Nations stated that "public opinion is certainly waiting for at least one step towards the most generalized abolition of the passport system ". (...) Was this just a diplomatic figure of speech, or is there really such an "expectation" to be found, for instance, in the press? If there was such an expectation in the press, what was the political orientation of the newspapers in favor of abolishing passports: was it left-wing? This article analyzes a corpus of over 600 articles published in the French press between the World Wars to show, firstly, that interest in the "abolition of passports" was not circumstantial. It's not because the League of Nations is discussing it that the press is discussing it - the opposite is true. The issue of the "abolition of passports" gave rise to a greater number of articles than the League’s "passport conferences". secondly, and more surprisingly, the newspapers that published the most articles on the abolition of passports were center-right and mostly regional. (shrink)

What is abolition? What is the logic of its movement, the character of its kinesthetic signature? By exploring abolition’s debts to Foucauldian genealogy, the messianism in Derridean deconstruction, and the affective resistance among queer/trans communities, this essay argues that abolition is a kite-idea. It moves by flying overhead, shimmering in the sun, and tugging at the hand. Abolition is a practice of history, a dream of the future, and an affective struggle lived today. This is its (...) fragile promise. (shrink)

Building Abolition: Decarceration and Social Justice explores the intersections of the carceral in projects of oppression, while at the same time providing intellectual, pragmatic, and undetermined paths toward abolition. Prison abolition is at once about the institution of the prison, and a broad, intersectional political project calling for the end of the social structured by settler colonialism, anti-black racism, and related oppressions. Beyond this, prison abolition is a constructive project that imagines and strives for a transformed (...) world in which justice is not equated with punishment, and accountability is not equated with caging. Composed of sixteen chapters by an international team of scholars and activists, with a Foreword by Perry Zurn and an Afterword by Justin Piché, the book is divided into four themes: - Prisons and Racism - Prisons and Settler Colonialism - Anti-Carceral Feminisms - Multispecies Carceralities. This book will be of interest to undergraduate and postgraduate students, activists, and scholars working in the areas of Critical Prison Studies, Critical Criminology, Native Studies, Postcolonial Studies, Black Studies, Critical Race Studies, Gender and Sexuality Studies, and Critical Animal Studies, with particular chapters being of interest to scholars and students in other fields, such as, Feminist Legal Studies, Animal Law, Critical Disability Studies, Queer Theory, and Transnational Feminisms. (shrink)

The United States system of policing is in drastic need of change. Some recent critics have encouraged that we avoid trying to repair the system—and abolish it altogether. In advancing this position, they often invoke ideas of “dreams,” “speculative imagination,” and “horizons” to guide efforts at fixing the problems of policing. In this essay, I caution against the overuse of this sort of idealized discourse in debates about policing. Specifically, I show how idealizations risk being counterproductive with respect to abolitionists’ (...) activist goals, in that they suggest that if abolition is desirable, approximating abolition is also desirable; fail to clarify what the conditions of application of their view are; and operate without the feasibility-sensitivity that one should expect from a non-evaluative position. My goal is not to suggest that our system of policing is fine as is. Nor is it to diminish the importance of having a long-term revolutionary vision. By pointing out the ways in which the idealizations invoked are inconsistent with abolitionists’ activist agenda, I hope to help clarify the merits of police abolition as a guiding strategy for change and caution against the use of certain forms of idealized thinking in our efforts at police reform. (shrink)

Canada’s binary prison system is a product of prison reforms that aimed to be attentive to what has been presumed to be innate differences between men and women. More recently, however, the binary structure of prisons has been troubled by a new era of trans rights recognitions. While penal actors are now grappling with how to include and accommodate Two-Spirit and trans people within this context, a review of the history of women’s incarceration in Canada brings to light how the (...) division of men’s and women’s prisons has always been a tool of social control. While binary prisons are institutionalised sites of trans oppression, binary prisons should likewise be understood as an affront to Indigenous sovereignty as they impose a colonial understanding of gender within an institution where Indigenous peoples are mass incarcerated. This paper explores how the introduction of trans rights into Canadian prisons is situated with respect to Canada’s ongoing history of gendered colonialism. Tracing the shift in prisons reforms, from those that established a rigid dichotomomous understanding of men/women to the more recent mandate to recognise and accomodate gender diversity, brings to light how this system of punishment is intimately connected to experiences of oppression and dispoesssion under the Western gender system. By bringing together feminist, trans, and Indigenous critiques of prisons, this paper illuminates shared struggles and shared investments in moving towards prison abolition in the pursuit of collective freedom. (shrink)

Punishment involves the intentional infliction of harm and suffering. Both of the most prominent families of justifications of punishment – retributivism and consequentialism – face several moral concerns that are hard to overcome. Moreover, the effectiveness of current criminal punishment methods in ensuring society’s safety is seriously undermined by empirical research. Thus, it appears to be a moral imperative for a modern and humane society to seek alternative means of administering justice. The special issue of Diametros “The Abolition of (...) Punishment: Is a Non-Punitive Criminal Justice System Ethically Justified?” was brought into life precisely to give the authors a platform for such progressive inquiries. And it is now safe to say that this platform has been put to excellent use, since Valerij Zisman, Alexander Stachurski, Giorgia Brucato, Perica Jovchevski, Sofia M. I. Jeppsson, Stephen G. Morris, Benjamin Vilhauer, John Lemos, Saul Smilansky, Elizabeth Shaw, Mirko Farina, Andrea Lavazza and Sergei Levin have presented such thought-provoking texts that they are bound to set the stage for debate in the years to come. This article is an introduction to this special issue and to the authors’ papers. (shrink)

Medical schools, like all institutions, are conservative since they seek to maintain and expand on their accomplishments. Stakes are high in carceral medicine given the risks of replicating the inhumane social conditions that exist within prisons and allow prisons to exist. Given the increasing number of partnerships between state and municipal carceral systems with academic medical centers, medical schools must consider which guiding theory they will use to teach carceral medicine. The interdisciplinary theory of prison abolition is best fit (...) for the task of training medical students to think about the long term goals of societal change and public health. (shrink)

The Abolition of Man, C. S. Lewis's masterpiece in ethics and the philosophy of science,warns of the danger of combining modern moral skepticism with the technological pursuit of human desires. The end result is the final destruction of human nature. From Brave New World to Star Trek, from Steampunk to starships, science fiction film has considered from nearly every conceivable angle the same nexus of morality, technology, and humanity of which C. S. Lewis wrote. As a result,science fiction film (...) has unintentionally given us stunning depictions of Lewis's terrifying vision of the future. In Science Fiction and the Abolition of Man: Finding C. S. Lewis in Sci-Fi Film and Television, scholars of religion, philosophy, literature, and film explore the connections between sci-fi film and the three parts of Lewis's book:how sci-fi portrays "Men Without Chests" incapable of responding properly to moral good, how it teaches the Tao or "The Way," and how it portrays "The Abolition of Man.". (shrink)

An argument for the elective abolition of Intellectual Property Rights (IPR). The premise is that IPR law is a form of slavery to Capital, for authors and for artists. The ontological reduction of IPR is part and parcel of the "Proof of Concept" phase for a PhD dissertation project, dating to September 2021, entitled Works for Works: "No Rights".

An incisive and sympathetic examination of the case for ending the practice of imprisonment Despite its omnipresence and long history, imprisonment is a deeply troubling practice. In the United States and elsewhere, prison conditions are inhumane, prisoners are treated without dignity, and sentences are extremely harsh. Mass incarceration and its devastating impact on black communities have been widely condemned as neoslavery or “the new Jim Crow.” Can the practice of imprisonment be reformed, or does justice require it to be ended (...) altogether? In The Idea of Prison Abolition, Tommie Shelby examines the abolitionist case against prisons and its formidable challenge to would-be prison reformers. Philosophers have long theorized punishment and its justifications, but they haven’t paid enough attention to incarceration or its related problems in societies structured by racial and economic injustice. Taking up this urgent topic, Shelby argues that prisons, once reformed and under the right circumstances, can be legitimate and effective tools of crime control. Yet he draws on insights from black radicals and leading prison abolitionists, especially Angela Davis, to argue that we should dramatically decrease imprisonment and think beyond bars when responding to the problem of crime. While a world without prisons might be utopian, The Idea of Prison Abolition makes the case that we can make meaningful progress toward this ideal by abolishing the structural injustices that too often lead to crime and its harmful consequences. (shrink)

Francis Dunlop; The Abolition of Morality?, Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 33, Issue 3, 16 December 2002, Pages 473–484, https://doi.org/10.1111/146.

In the history of interpretations of Hegel, how one reads the chapter on “Absolute Knowing” in the Phenomenology of Spirit determines one’s whole perspective. In fact, Marx’s only comments on the Phenomenology concern this final chapter, taking it as the very “secret” of Hegel’s philosophy. But what is the secret hidden within the thicket of this impenetrable prose? My suggestion is that it turns on a very specific meaning of the “abolition of time” that Hegel describes in the very (...) last paragraphs. But the meaning of this idea is not what Marx criticized in his last Manuscript of 1844, that is, it is not simply a form of idealism which abolishes the finitude of man. Rather this relationship to time accepts such finitude, making it the central axis upon which the possibility of freedom turns. In this paper, I will present a reading of “Absolute Knowing” that focuses on the meaning of overcoming time, and connect it to some thoughts on “disposable time” that Marx discusses in the Grundrisse. (shrink)

C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man HarperCollins Publishers, New York, 2001.

This paper argues that Rwanda’s decision to abolish the death penalty should be viewed in a wider context rather than as a mere result of top–down pressure from the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR). Part I traces the creation of the ICTR and the breakdown of negotiations as a result of the exclusion of the death penalty from the ICTR’s jurisdiction. It then outlines Rwanda’s efforts to prosecute the hundreds of thousands of individuals accused of committing genocide-related crimes and (...) notes the limited and steadily decreasing role the death penalty actually played within Rwanda. Part II discusses Rwanda’s legislation abolishing the death penalty and argues that both international pressure and local historical and political forces influenced the decision. Part III situates Rwanda’s story within a growing paradox of excluding the death penalty from international criminal tribunals for the most serious crimes while national jurisdictions maintain it. It concludes that as in Rwanda, any perceived or potential impact of international criminal law in national jurisdictions must be measured in light of local circumstances. (shrink)

This chapter attempts to trace in some detail the decision-making process pertaining to the abolition of the British slave trade as debated in the British Parliament in the years 1788 to 1807. It applies to the logic of rules to identify the rules at issue and the quandaries generated by them; then it applies it again to the deliberations of the people — British MPs in this period — who consciously dealt with the quandaries. Thus, this is the fullest (...) use of the logic illustrated in the book, a use that stands on the frontier of much more elaborate applications, though this is a frontier that calls now for joint activity by philosophers and historians, rather than further illustrative activity on our part. Another way of expressing the distinctive nature of the chapter is to say that in it we are concerned not just with quandaries and changes in rules, but with issue-processing. (shrink)

The movements for prison and police abolition today are not only analogous to but extensions of antebellum and postbellum movements for the abolition of slavery and segregation. Dreams of transformative justice, resistance to government, and the creation of alternative practices have been vital to abolitionist efforts to dismantle various US anarchies. This essay examines the political and theological debates of antebellum abolitionists about the US government, the Constitution and law more broadly, civil disobedience, anarchy, and revolution, arguing that (...) these remain vital debates for abolitionists today. (shrink)

Given the many misunderstandings concerningDelayin dying/withering away of the state the ‘dying awayStatedying away’ of the state, this is the longest chapter. I begin by analysing debates among German socialists in the 1840s, finding that they did not urge the state’s abolition (AbschaffungAbschaffung (abolition)), annihilation (VernichtungVernichtung (annihilation)) and dialectical transformation (Aufhebung). With one exception: Max Stirner in The Ego and Its Own (1845) urged that the state should be abolished as an immediate and willed act. This would come (...) to be the position of Bakunin particularly in 1870s, since he saw the state as the prime cause of exploitation. For Engels (and Marx), this made no sense: in light of their method, the state was a secondary phenomenon, arising from economic conditions andStatearising from class struggleclass struggleClass strugglestate and. Thus, a communist revolutionRevolutioncommunist revolution would need to enact wide-sweeping changes to the forces and relations ofProductionrelations of production before aspects of the superstructureSuperstructurestate and, such as the state, could be addressed. As the struggle with the Anarchists developed, we find an increasing emphasis that one of the final results of constructing socialism would be not the ‘abolition’ of the state, but its falling awayStatefalling away, disappearance, going to sleep, or—as the third edition ofFriedrichAnti-DühringAnti-DühringAnti-Dühring (Engels) of 1894 famously put it—its dying away. (shrink)

Illusionism claims that we are not conscious, that there is nothing it is like, in the usual sense of the word, to feel sad, or to smell lavender. According to Illusionists, we are, in a technical sense, zombies. Instead of arguing for the falsity of Illusionism directly, I will explain why the main philosophical motivations for it are mistaken – and I trust the rest will be taken care of by the extreme implausibility of the view. I want to spread (...) the good news to Illusionists that they don’t need to resort to this highly counterintuitive, strange, and as I will argue later, morally corrosive idea. One can be a physicalist and phenomenal realist since neither of the two types of arguments Illusionists rely on – the conceivability arguments, and the debunking arguments against physicalist phenomenal realism – work. In the last part of the paper, I will say something about the corrosive effect this metaphysics has on our moral and evaluative outlook. (shrink)

What made colonial slavery wrongful? This article reconstructs the answer given by a radical Black antislavery theorist writing in late eighteenth-century Britain: Quobna Ottobah Cugoano (c.1757–c.1791). His answer drew on lived experience. Born in present-day Ghana, Cugoano was enslaved aged 13 and trafficked to Grenada, before being taken onwards to England where he reclaimed his freedom. His Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil of Slavery [1787/1791] highlights two central injustices blighting colonial slavery – robbery (‘theft of rights’) and dehumanization. On (...) my interpretation, enslaved Black people are dehumanized in three ways: through instrumentalization; commodification; and racial inferiorization. A specific type of violence accompanies each. Significantly, unfreedom and exploitation per se are not among the injustices of slavery. Both feature in a condition Cugoano calls “lawful servitude” – part of his overlooked vision for post-abolition transitional justice. After abolition, enslaved persons should continue to work for their ex-owners, “without torture or oppression” – until they completed seven years in total, nominally to compensate “for the expences attending their education” (98-99). Biblical laws of bondage provide the blueprint for post-abolition lawful servitude. Parsing its meaning and legitimating conditions allows me to clarify what in Cugoano’s view the injustice of colonial slavery exactly consists in. (shrink)

Paru une première fois en février 1968 à l'enseigne de la galerie Claude Givaudan, L'Abolition de l'art est l'un des textes les plus emblématiques parmi ceux préfigurant Mai 68, mais aussi dans la réflexion d'Alain Jouffroy sur l'art. Accompagné ici, et pour la première fois, du film éponyme réalisé dans la foulée, et de deux textes qui en redistribuent les enjeux (« Que faire de l'art? », écrit en août 1968, et « Le futur abolira-t-il l'art? », écrit en (...) 1970); les propositions de L'Abolition de l'art se présentent désormais comme un ensemble autonome dont Alain Jouffroy donnait la portée inaugurale en ces termes : « C'est au moment où, devant une oeuvre nous oublions qu'elle relève de l'art, au moment où la méthode d'exécution suscite dans le spectateur, une méthode de méditation - une série d'actes organisés par la pensée – que nous sommes confrontés vraiment avec nous-même, avec le feu. C'est ce basculement que j'appelle l'Abolition de l'art (...). » Cette édition, accompagnée des plans des « Urgences » de Daniel Pommereulle et du DVD du film, est préfacée par Pablo Durán. Alain Jouffroy est né en 1928. (shrink)

The series of conversations between Angela Y. Davis and Eduardo Mendieta entitled Abolition Democracy is a powerful investigation of the failed moral imagination of imperial democracies. After examining their discussion of how truncated political discourses enable abuses in both war and imprisonment, I look to the “exceptional” status of war prisons such as at Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib. I argue that domestic prisons, like international war prisons, are means for the paradigmatic functioning of the exception in modern democracy, as (...) described by Giorgio Agamben, and thus constitute no less of an “ultimate carceral threat.” Within the domestic prison, the legal status of inmates is virtually suspended and they are reduced to bare life. I conclude that we may yet share the hopes of Davis and Mendieta for an abolition democracy, and that such a democracy would bear the echoes of the unconditional sovereignty “to come” theorized by Jacques Derrida. (shrink)

In advocating an extreme form of specification requiring the abolition of separate senses, Stoffregen & Bardy run the risk of diverting attention from the multisensory integration of perception and action they wish to champion.

This article explores how peace studies deal with two interrelated issues: nuclearismand militarism. Nuclearism assumes the practice of spreading nuclear threatsalong with the security thinking and power structures that surround the doomsdayweapons. Militarism is about the deeply embedded belief that military power (includingthe nuclear one) is the only way to preserve one’s national security. In short, today’sworld deals not only with stockpiles of existing weapons but also with the way of thinkingabout their use, reduction or abolition. The general hypothesis (...) is that the academicand intellectual efforts invested in these issues are (self) limited and developed in aclimate of self-censorship and organized hypocrisy. This makes them not only ineffectivebut also prone to the preservation of the global status quo as the best solution for peace inthe world. Scientists are involved in the technical aspects of the weapons management.But scholars from the social sciences and humanities (i.e. where the peace researchersmostly come from) are expected to deal with the deconstruction of the dominant way ofthinking (both in academia and out of it) and promotion of the idea that a different worldis possible. Or the alternative is nuclear holocaust. (shrink)

Analytic metaphysics of gender has taken an ameliorative turn towards ethical and political questions regarding what our concept of gender ought to be, and how gendered society should be structured. Abolitionism about gender, which claims that we ought to mandate gender out of existence, has therefore seen renewed interest. I consider three arguments for abolitionism from radically different perspectives: Haslanger’s simple argument, Escalante’s Gender Nihilism, and Okin’s argument from ideal theory. I argue that none of the above manage to establish (...) the desirability of abolitionism and that we should be wary of the abolitionist position, as it imperils trans lives. (shrink)

Racial discrimination embodies inequality, exclusion, and injustice and as such has no place in a democratic society. And yet racial matters pervade nearly every aspect of American life, influencing where we live, what schools we attend, the friends we make, the votes we cast, the opportunities we enjoy, and even the television shows we watch. Joel Olson contends that, given the history of slavery and segregation in the United States, American citizenship is a form of racial privilege in which whites (...) are equal to each other but superior to everyone else. In Olson's analysis we see how the tension in this equation produces a passive form of democracy that discourages extensive participation in politics because it treats citizenship as an identity to possess rather than as a source of empowerment. Olson traces this tension and its disenfranchising effects from the colonial era to our own, demonstrating how, after the civil rights movement, whiteness has become less a form of standing and more a norm that cements while advantages in the ordinary operations of modern society. To break this pattern, Olson suggests an "abolitionist-democratic" political theory that makes the fight against racial discrimination a prerequisite for expanding democratic participation. (shrink)

What effects are produced in an encounter between what Gilles Deleuze calls Spinoza’s ‘practical philosophy’ and abolition? Closely following Deleuze’s account of Spinoza, this essay moves from the reifying and weakening punitive moralism of carceral state thought towards a joyful materialist abolitionist ethic. It starts with the three theses for which, Deleuze argues, Spinoza was denounced in his own lifetime: materialism (devaluation of consciousness), immoralism (devaluation of all values) and atheism (devaluation of the sad passions). From these three, it (...) derives three parallel abolitionist theses: (1) Spinozan materialism undermines the reifications of carceral state thought; (2) Spinozan ethics undermines the punitivism of the carceral state; and (3) Spinozan joy is inversely proportional to the power of the carceral state. While Spinoza’s corpus may not give us an adequate account of the complex dynamics of the carceral state and racial capitalism today, this essay argues that in the infinite streams of the Ethics we nonetheless find some vital strategies through which we might compose an anomalous alliance between this condemned philosopher and abolition. (shrink)

Kant is a war abolitionist. He suggests that war is unreasonable, while critiquing the economic, social, and political systems that give rise to war. For Kant, the pursuit of world peace requires the abolition of the systems of war. In describing Kant as a war abolitionist, this paper aims to breathe new life into the scholarly question of whether Kant was a pacifist or a just war theorist. The paper also builds upon recent discussions in the literature on pacifism (...) and nonviolence to suggest that war abolition is a kind of pacifism. The paper also argues that Kant’s call for war abolition should be understood as a regulative ideal. Kant was not naïve. He did not think that war would end immediately. Nonetheless, given the fundamental irrationality of war, he called upon us to work to approach the ideal of war abolition. (shrink)

C. S. Lewis sets out to persuade his audience of the importance and relevance of universal values such as courage and honor in contemporary society.

This essay argues that a black radical Kantianism proposes a Kantian theory of justice in the circumstances of injustice. First, I describe BRK’s method of political critique and explain how it builds on Kant’s republicanism. Second, I argue that Kant’s original account of public right is incomplete because it neglects that a situated citizenry’s adoption of an ideal contributes to its refinement. Lastly, with the aid of W.E.B. Du Bois’s analysis of American Reconstruction and his proposal of an “abolition (...) democracy,” I offer my refined universalizable standard for political critique. Du Bois reconceptualizes the requirements of justice to protect the political liberties and productive powers of black freedmen and the working poor. While originating with the political demands of black freedmen during the Reconstruction era, the universal protection of political liberties and productive powers offers a novel public standard for political judgment that should still anchor deliberation today. (shrink)

This article uses the concept of a progressive jail assemblage to think about the focus on jails as both a target of social justice organizing and a tool for advancing social justice goals. Drawing on ethnographic research conducted among formerly incarcerated organizers and their allies in Western Massachusetts (New England), I explore how the sheriffs who operate jails in this region, along with their collaborators, have increasingly sought to redefine the figure of the criminal as not just a danger to (...) others but also a danger to themselves, someone in need of rehabilitative treatment and even care. In doing so, these sheriffs have attempted to reinvent their role, from the quintessentially American crime fighting figure, to one who is also a provider of care. Social justice activism has helped to expand the “caring” role of the jail, through increased addiction treatment, re-entry support, and community outreach – even to the extent of incarcerating individuals dealing with addiction who have not been charged with a crime. As progressive jails have been reconfigured as providers of care, abolitionists are confronted with the ongoing dilemma of how to remain a figure opposed to the use of prisons and jails without being seen as against care. (shrink)

Mass incarceration is an ethical crisis. Yet it is not only the magnitude of the system that is troubling. Mass incarceration has been created and sustained by racism, classism, and ableism, and the problems of the criminal legal system will not be solved without meaningfully intervening upon these forms of oppression. Beyond that, incarceration itself—whether of one person or 2 million—represents a moral failing. To punish and control, rather than invest in community and healing, is antithetical to the values of (...) the field of bioethics. This commentary, which responds to the article “Fifty Years of U.S. Mass Incarceration and What It Means for Bioethics,” by Sean Valles, considers abolition as a crucial form of justice that must be centered in the work of bioethics. Abolition is both an antiracist intervention and a means of considering the ways health care broadly and bioethics specifically have allowed for the perpetuation of carcerality in the United States. (shrink)

This article discusses critical comparisons between the human and nonhuman abolitionist movements in the United States. The modern nonhuman abolitionist movement is, in some ways, an extension of the anti-slavery movement of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and the ongoing human Civil Rights movement. As such, there is considerable overlap between the two movements, specifically in the need to simultaneously address property status and oppressive ideology. Despite intentional appropriation of terminology and numerous similarities in mobilization efforts, there has been disappointingly (...) little academic discussion on this relationship. There are significant contentions regarding mobilization and goal attainment in the human abolitionist movement that speak to modern collective action on behalf of other animals. This article will explore the human abolitionist movement and discuss possible applications of movement organization, tactical repertoires, and goal attainment to the current nonhuman animal rights movement. Specifically, the utility of violence and legislative activism in the antislavery movement are discussed as potentially problematic approaches to abolishing nonhuman animal exploitation. Alternatively, the nonhuman animal rights focus on consumer resistance and nonviolence represent an important divergence in abolitionist mobilization. (shrink)

Critical posthumanism as a philosophical, antifascist nonhierarchical imagination for nursing offers a liberatory passageway forward amidst environmental collapse, an epic pandemic, global authoritarianism, extreme health and wealth disparities, over‐reliance on technology and empirics, and unjust societal systems based in whiteness. Drawing upon philosophical and theoretical works from Black and Indigenous scholars, Haraway's idea of the Chthulucene, Deleuze and Guattari's rhizomatic thought, and Kaba's abolitionist organizing among others, we as activist nurse scholars continue the speculative discussion outlined in prior papers. Here (...) we further imagine how we can engage a radical philosophical mission of care for all beings human and non, walking and working alongside the people and communities nurses accompany, connected as we are on this dystopian celestial orb. Discussion is centred on critical analyses of traditional justice framing in nursing, and on the praxis possibilities found within rhizomatic thought, making kin, and just episteme while knitting filaments of nursing theory and history, humming song lyrics from collective memory, and critically dismantling received wisdoms to stumble toward a more emancipatory present future. (shrink)

Cet article propose de situer l’originalité de la justice transformatrice dans le paysage plus général des théories de la justice. Il suggère que la justice transformatrice est à découvrir dans sa spécificité, venue des mouvements anti-racistes africains-américains, mais qu’elle s’inscrit aussi dans toute une série de questions très anciennes, qui s’en trouvent relancées sur de nouvelles pistes. C’est désormais à l’échelle planétaire qu’il faut élever le slogan Pas de paix sans justice, et devant les impasses des politiques répressives, la justice (...) transformatrice fraie des voies qu’il est urgent d’expérimenter activement. (shrink)

This chapter first clarifies what it would mean to abolish punishment. Abolishing state punishment in both law and practice would mean doing away with one category of social control, as opposed to merely reforming punishment or limiting its application. After surveying some of the major historical trends in criminal punishment and its justification, we discover that the two main theories of punishment—deterrence and retribution—could not warrant doing away with punishment. Incapacitation is an incomplete alternative. Only reform theories are, strictly speaking, (...) proposals for abolishing punishment. However, reform theories are inconsistent with historical practice and they cannot address all classes of crime. Therefore, abolishing punishment for all crimes cannot plausibly be justified. (shrink)

Active and targeted reforms at the local and state levels have had success reducing youth incarceration rates. While most agree the work is not done, reform of the youth incarceration system has had important successes. At the same time, activists and advocates have increasingly rejected the goal of reforming youth prisons in favor of abolishing them. I outline some objections to prominent abolitionist arguments. Specifically, I show why arguments that focus on the racist historical origins of the incarceration system, structural (...) injustices within that system, or the inefficiency or harms of the current system justify reform of youth imprisonment practices, not complete elimination of them. By advancing these critiques, I do not claim to show that the reformist perspective is superior to the abolitionist one. Instead, I aim to identify an argumentative burden that abolitionists must address if they are to give reformers good reason to become abolitionists. (shrink)

The abolition of the state is a central element in Marx’s vision of human emancipation. However, at a later stage of his intellectual development Marx seems to have retreated from this idea. Marx’s theory should be defined as the primacy of labor: labor, or instrumental productive activity, brings about, as its unintended, as-if-natural results, different social relations, including the state. At the core of communism, as first envisaged by Marx, is the abolition of labor and its unintended social (...) results . However, Marx did not hold to the idea of abolition of labor in his later writings. If labor cannot be abolished, the social relations that have developed as its unintended results, notably the state, cannot be abolished either. Any revival of the conception of abolition of the state should be connected to a revival of the conception of abolition of labor, as a regulative idea, based on modern, computer technology. (shrink)

An NYRB Classics Original Simone Weil—philosopher, activist, mystic—is one of the most uncompromising of modern spiritual masters. In “On the Abolition of All Political Parties” she challenges the foundation of the modern liberal political order, making an argument that has particular resonance today, when the apathy and anger of the people and the self-serving partisanship of the political class present a threat to democracies all over the world. Dissecting the dynamic of power and propaganda caused by party spirit, the (...) increasing disregard for truth in favor of opinion, and the consequent corruption of education, journalism, and art, Weil forcefully makes the case that a true politics can only begin where party spirit ends. This volume also includes an admiring portrait of Weil by the great poet Czeslaw Milosz and an essay about Weil’s friendship with Albert Camus by the translator Simon Leys. (shrink)