The Core Curriculum: Module 4

Abolition Democracy

Bernard E. Harcourt
This course, situated at the intersection of critical theory and praxis, will explore each week a theoretical dimension of abolition democracy and ways in which abolition is put in practice.

Description

This course, situated at the intersection of critical theory and praxis, will explore each week a theoretical dimension of abolition democracy and ways in which abolition is put into practice. It will explore abolition in the most capacious sense of the term—not just the abolition of capital punishment or even the prison or police—but rather the entire dominant punitive punishment paradigm in the United States. In the vein of Fred Moten and Stefano Harney, and in the tradition of the abolition democracy of W.E.B. Du Bois and Angela Davis, the course asks:

“What is, so to speak, the object of abolition? Not so much the abolition of prisons but the abolition of a society that could have prisons, that could have slavery, that could have the wage, and therefore not abolition as the elimination of anything but abolition as the founding of a new society.”

The United States incarcerates more of its own than any other country in the world and more than any other civilization in history. With over 2,600 persons on death row, 2.2 million people behind bars, another 5 million people on probation or parole, and over 70 million people in the FBI’s criminal record database, this country now operates a criminal justice system of unparalleled punitiveness. The burden of this system has fallen predominantly on poor communities of color. In fact, in some striking ways, this country’s criminal justice system and reliance on mass incarceration have replaced chattel slavery. As Bryan Stevenson explains, “Slavery didn’t end in 1865. It just evolved.” 

From a practical dimension, this course will explore how the country can move from a punitive paradigm to a new paradigm that favors instead education and well-being, one that has abolished prisons, police, and the death penalty, as well as borders, the wage, capital, and other systems and structures that stand in the way of equal human flourishing and liberation.

From a theoretical dimension, this course will explore the theory behind the abolition of the prison, the police, and the death penalty, but also the abolition of property and capital, fossil fuels, and borders, and it will consider the history of the abolition of slavery.

This course is tied and situated within ongoing abolitionist struggles. Whenever possible, the instructor is encouraged to invite practitioners, organizers, activists, and other guest speakers to provide students in the class with a more comprehensive understanding of on the ground abolitionist movement work.

Topics / Learning Objectives

Learning objectives for this module include:

  • Exploring the theory behind the abolition of the prison, the police, and the death penalty
  • Reflecting on the history of the abolition of slavery
  • Exploring how on the ground abolitionist movement works
  • Discussing various theoretical dimensions of abolition democracy 
  • Re-imagining how the U.S can move from a punitive paradigm to a new paradigm that favors education and well-being instead

Required Material

All reading material due each session can be found in the reading and assignment schedule section of this syllabus.  Books can be purchased or borrowed from the library, and links to articles have been provided.

Black Reconstruction in America, 1860-1880 by W.E.B. Du Bois (New York: The Free Press, 1998) 

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Abolition Democracy: Beyond Prison, Torture, and Empire by Angela Y. Davis (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2005)

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Discipline and Punish by Michel Foucault (Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Vintage, 1977)

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Cooperation by Bernard E. Harcourt (New York: Columbia University Press, 2023)

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Abolition. Feminism. Now. by Angela Davis, Gina Dent, Erica R. Meiners, and Beth E. Richie (Chicago: Haymarket, 2022)

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We Do This ‘Til We Free Us, by Mariame Kaba (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2021)

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Readings and Assignments Schedule

In our first seminar, we will introduce the topic of abolition democracy and abolition today.

Readings:

W.E.B. DuBois, Black Reconstruction in America (New York: Free Press, 1991 [1935]), 121-126.

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Akbar, Amna. “Towards a Radical Imagination of Law.” 93 NYU L. Rev. 405 (2018), available here

Roberts, Dorothy. “Abolition Constitutionalism.” Harvard Law Review 133, no. 1 (2019): 1-122, available here

McLeod, Allegra. “Prison Abolition and Grounded Justice.” 62 UCLA L. Rev. 1156 (2015), available here.   

McLeod, Allegra. “Envisioning Abolition Democracy.” Harvard Law Review 132, no. 6 (2019): 1613-1649, available here.

Moten, Fred, and Stefano Harney. The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study. Wivenhoe: Minor Compositions, 2013. 40-43.

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A central thrust of Du Bois’s writings serve to demonstrate that abolition was achieved through the actions of Black men and women: through escape to fight in the ranks of the Union army, through the general strike and the threat of a general strike, through forms of resistance, through their presence as the primary force that fueled the Southern economy. 

The war transformed abolition into a democratic movement, against the will of the majority of the North and the South. The North had no choice but to bring enslaved persons into the democratic fold as a way to win the war. The South would have had to do the same in order to win the war, but it was, of course, unwilling. 

In this seminar, we turn to interrogate the lessons that the abolition of slavery might teach us today in our struggles for abolition democracy. The passage from a de jure to de facto system of racial oppression in this country raises many important questions. Some involve the continuities and the differences: What can we learn from thinking of these different periods as similar or different? Some involve the lessons to be learned for abolitionist movements in other domains: In what ways do the struggles enrich each other? Some involve the hidden and not-so-hidden pitfalls of abolitionism: What are the shoals to be avoided in future abolitionist campaigns? These will be some of the themes we explore in this seminar on the abolition of slavery.  

Readings: 

Du Bois, W.E.B. Chapter 4: The General Strike. In Black Reconstruction in America, 1860-1880. New York: The Free Press, 1998. 

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Davis, Angela. Abolition Democracy: Beyond Prison, Torture, and Empire. New York: Seven Stories Press, 2005.

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Jones-Rogers, Stephanie. They Were Her Property. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019, Chapter 8 and Epilogue. Available here

Hartman, Saidiya. “Venus in Two Acts,” Small Axe, No. 26, Vol. 12(2), June 2008, pp. 1-14. Available here

Prince, Mary. The History of Mary Prince. New York: Penguin Books, 2000.

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Reidy, Joseph P. Illusions of Emancipation: The Pursuit of Freedom and Equality in the Twilight of Slavery. University of North Carolina Press, 2020 (selections)

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Foner, Eric. Second Founding: How the Civil War and Reconstruction Remade the Constitution. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2019 (selections)

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Multimedia:
Center for Contemporary Critical Thought. Abolition Democracy 2/13 | Abolition Democracy with Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Robert Gooding-Williams, Kendall Thomas, Flores Forbes, and Bernard E. Harcourt. October 15, 2020, available here.

Foucault, Michel. The Punitive Society. Trans. Graham Burchell. Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2015 (excerpts)

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Foucault, Michel. Chapter 1: The body of the Condemned. In Discipline and Punish. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Vintage, 1977, 3-31.

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Harcourt, Bernard E. Chapter 6. In Cooperation. New York: Columbia University Press, 2023.

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Multimedia:

Columbia Center for Contemporary Critical Thought. Abolition Democracy 7/13 | Beyond the Punitive Society with Miguel Beistegui, Henrique Carvalho, Stuart Elden, Adnan Khan, Daniele Lorenzini, Goldie Osuri, Irene Del Poz. Federico Testa, Cori Thomas, and Bernard E. Harcourt, available here. 

This session will explore how criminalization of Blackness has served, especially in the years following the Civil War, as a mechanism through which Black individuals and communities in the United States have been oppressed. We will discuss the construction of criminality and its evolution throughout American history, and how the criminalization of Blackness led to the incarceration crisis today.

Readings:

Muhammad, Khalil Gibran. Introduction to The Condemnation Of Blackness: Race, Crime, And The Making Of Modern Urban America (Harv. Univ. Press 2010): 1-14

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Stevenson, Bryan. A Presumption of Guilt, in Policing the Black Man (Angela J. Davis ed., Penguin 2017), pg. 3-30

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Butler, Paul. In “Constructing the Thug.” Chokehold: Policing Black Men. (New Press 2017): 17-46 

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Abolish the police. #DefundNYPD. #AbolishICE.

After the George Floyd uprisings in 2020, never before has the country been engaged in such a genuine conversation about abolishing police departments. Of course, there were earlier flashpoints that raised serious challenges to the police—in the wake of the Rodney King beating, for instance, especially after the acquittal there, or in the wake of the Selma March, or the DNC convention in Chicago in 1968, or further back still. There has been protest against the police; but not until now has there been a national debate over abolishing the police. As Amna Akbar correctly observes, “The nationwide protests catapulted abolition into the mainstream and, in the process, unsettled the intellectual foundations of police reform discourse.”

There is no point in debating the law-and-order apologists, and there is little point continuing with the kinds of incremental reforms we have been doing. So the only two viable positions are limiting the police or abolishing it. That is what we will discuss in this seminar.

Readings:

Akbar, Amna. “An Abolitionist Horizon for Police (Reform)” (August 10, 2020). California Law Review, Vol. 108, No. 6, 2020, available here  

Akbar, Amna. An Abolitionist Horizon for Police (Reform), 108 Calif. L. Rev. 1781 (2020), available here.

Felber, Garrett. The Struggle to Defund the Police Is Not New, Boston Review, June 9, 2020, available here.

Hasbrouck, Brandon. Abolishing Racist Policing with the Thirteenth Amendment, 67 UCLA L. Rev. 1108 (2020), available here.

Kaba, Mariame. Opinion: Yes, We Mean Literally Abolish the Police, N.Y. Times, June 12, 2020, available here.  

Purnell, Derecka. “How I Became a Police Abolitionist.” The Atlantic, July 6, 2020, available here. 

Purnell, Derecka. Becoming Abolitionists. New York: Astra, 2021. 

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Simonson, Jocelyn. Police Reform Through a Power Lens, 130 Yale L. J. __ (forthcoming 2021), available here.

Vitale, Alex S. The End of Policing. New York: Verso, 2017.

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Sub-topic: Abolish Qualified Immunity

Jamison v. McClendon, No. 3:16-595 (S.D. Miss. Aug. 4, 2020), available here.

Baxter v. Bracey, 590 U.S. ___ (2020) (Thomas, J., dissent), available here.

Joanna Schwartz, Police Indemnification, 89 N.Y.U. L. Rev. 885 (2014), excerpts, available here. 

Multimedia: 

Columbia Center for Contemporary Critical Thought. Abolition Democracy 3/13 | Abolish the Police with Amna Akbar, Derecka Purnell, Josmar Trujillo, Alex Vitale, and Bernard E. Harcourt. October 29, 2020, available here. 

What does it mean for an institution like the prison, founded on the very notion of reforming the delinquent, to constantly be defective, deficient, or deviant itself, and constantly in need of reform? How should we think about an institution like the prison that exists in a constant state of needing to be reformed?

In the media and public debate, we are constantly confronted with these arguments and the choice between reform or abolition.

W.E.B. Du Bois’s idea of “abolition democracy” suggests that this is a false dilemma. It is a trap. Neither piecemeal reforms, nor abolition alone would truly advance the cause of racial justice. Neither one, standing alone, properly addresses the legacy of systemic racism in this country. Instead, we need to pursue, simultaneously, the abolition of these punitive institutions and the invention of new institutions guided by a different paradigm than punishment.

That is the lesson of Angela Davis’s writings and the work of so many prison abolitionists.

In this session, we reflect and discuss these ideas and the broader debate over the reform versus abolition of the prison.

Readings and Podcast:

Ruth Wilson Gilmore Makes the Case for Abolition, The Intercept, Vol 1. (54 min) and Vol. 2 (31 min), available here. 

Davis, Angela. Are Prisons Obsolete? New York: Seven Stories Press, 2011.

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Gilmore, Ruth Wilson. Change Everything: Racial Capitalism and the Case for Abolition. Chicago: Haymarket, 2023.

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Kaba, Mariame, and Kelly Hayes. “A Jailbreak of the Imagination: Seeing Prisons for What They Are and Demanding Transformation.” Truthout, May 3, 2018, available here. 

McLeod, Allegra. “Prison Abolition and Grounded Justice,” 62 UCLA L. Rev. 1156 (2015): 1156-1239, available here. 

Multimedia:

Van Buren, Deena. “Imagine a World Without Prison,” TED Talk, available here. 

Columbia Center for Contemporary Critical Thought. Abolition 9/13 | Prison Abolition with Reginald Dwayne Betts, Allegra McLeod, and Bernard E. Harcourt. February 4, 2021, available here.

In recent years, following the peak in the 1990s, execution rates and death-sentencing rates around the county have gone down drastically. Prior to the election of Donald Trump in 2016, abolition of the death penalty in the United States seemed imminent. Now, the future of the death penalty appears less clear. There is an ultra-right-wing Supreme Court as the nation’s executioners, yet there is nevertheless a continuous stream of states abolishing the death penalty at the state level. Fewer and fewer people are being sentenced to death even as execution protocols become increasingly ghastly. This session will ask the question of what is coming next in death penalty abolition and how it will come about.

Readings:

Buck v. Davis, 137 S.Ct. 759 (2017), excerpts available here. 

McCleskey v. Kemp, 481 US 279 (1987) available here.

Glossip v. Gross, 135 S.Ct. 2726, 2755-2797 (2014) (J. Breyer, dissent) available here. 

Washington v. Gregory, No. 88086-7 (Oct. 11, 2018) Hoag, Alexis. “Valuing Black Lives: A Case for Ending the Death Penalty.” Columbia Human Rights Law Review 51, no. 3 (2020): 985, available here.

Enduring Injustice: The Persistence of Racial Discrimination in the U.S. Death Penalty, Death Penalty Information Center Report (2020), available here.

Eberhardt, Jennifer, et. al., Looking Deathworthy: Perceived Stereotypicality of Black Defendants Predicts Capital-Sentencing Outcomes, 17 Psychol. Sci. 383 (2006), available here. 

Pilkington, Ed. “‘The nation’s executioners’: the US supreme court’s shift towards capital punishment.” Guardian, January 12, 2023, available here. 

Multimedia:Columbia Center for Contemporary Critical Thought. Abolition Democracy 8/13 | Abolish the Federal Death Penalty with Kelley Henry, Alexis Hoag, Lee Greenwood, Liliana Segura, Susannah Sheffer, and Bernard E. Harcourt. January 21, 2023, available here.

What is the role of law in progressive politics? To what extent can the legal system serve as a tool for liberation? From the Civil Rights Movement to the emergence of movement lawyering today, the question of the role of lawyers in progressive politics, as Cornel West asked, has been answered in many different ways. This session will attempt to answer this question for this moment. 

Readings:

Greenberg, Jack. Chapter 32, NORI and Criminal Justice, Crusaders in the Courts: How a dedicated band of lawyers fought for the Civil Rights Revolution (Basic Books, 1994), 440-460 

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West, Cornel. “The Role of Law in Progressive Politics.” Vanderbilt Law Review 43, no. 6 (1990): 1797-1806, available here.

Akbar, Amna A., Sameer M. Ashar, and Jocelyn Simonson, Movement Law, 73 Stan. L. Rev. (2021), available here.

Hoag, Alexis. “Black on Black Representation.” NYU Law Review 96, no. 5 (November 2021): 1491-1548, available here. 

Webb, Lindsey. “Slave Narratives and the Sentencing Court,” 42 N.Y.U. Rev. L. & Soc. Change 125 (2018), pages 141-71, available here.

“They separate children at the border of Harlem too,” reads a poster by Abolish NYC ACS (Administration of Children’s Services). This session will focus on how the family policing system, operating under the guise of “child welfare,” functions as an arm of the punitive state. 

Readings:

Roberts, Dorothy. Torn Apart: How the Child Welfare System Destroys Black Families—and How Abolition Can Build a Safer World. New York: Basic Books, 2022 (excerpts). 

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Roberts, Dorothy. Killing the Black Body. New York: Pantheon, 1997 (excerpts).

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Roberts, Dorothy. “Abolishing Policing Also Means Abolishing Family Regulation.” The Imprint. June 16, 2020, available here.

Multimedia:

Center for Contemporary Critical Thought. Abolition Democracy 10/13 | Abolishing Family Policing. February 15, 2021, available here .

This seminar will explore the long history of feminist abolitionist activism and theory that extends back not only two decades to the turn of the twenty-first century with the collaborative political organizing of INCITE! and Critical Resistance, but much further back, centuries back, to the feminist abolitionist struggle against slavery and the uniquely violent forms which it took against Black women, as well as the forms of resistance going back to the Combahee River battle for instance.

Readings:

Davis, Angela, Gina Dent, Erica R. Meiners, Beth E. Richie. Abolition. Feminism. Now. Chicago: Haymarket, 2022.

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Haley, Sarah. No Mercy Here: Gender, Punishment, and the Making of Jim Crow Modernity. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016.

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Bierria, Alisa, Hyejin Shim, Mariame Kaba, and Stacy Suh, ed. Survived and Punished: Survivor Defense as Abolitionist Praxis, (2017), available here. 

Goodmark, Leigh. Imperfect Victims: Criminalized Survivors and the Promise of Abolition Feminism. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2023.

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Aviva Stahl, We Have Already Stopped Calling the Cops, Bustle, July 21, 2020, available here. 

Multimedia:Center for Contemporary Critical Thought. Revolution 12/13 | Abolition Feminism with Sarah Haley. June 1, 2022, available here. 

The relationship, interconnections, overlap, differences, and conflicts between the movements to abolish slavery and to abolish property are complex, to say the least. The historical record is fraught. But the resonances are clear.

Chattel slavery was, of course, a form of property, and its abolition entailed technically the abolition of property. From the other end, the abolition of capitalist property-ownership was often presented as a liberation from relations of dominance no different than slavery. The resonances are clear, but the history is fraught—especially the relationship between anti-racism and the labor movement.

In the modern era, the regime of capital that displaced feudal property relations. Today, it is beyond time to imagine its overcoming. We will discuss the abolition of feudal property relations and paradigm shifts in political economy. We will also discuss arguments for cooperation as an alternative to capital.

And so we turn now, in this seminar, to the puzzle: How should we rethink the movements to abolish property and capital through the lens of abolition democracy? How do we rethink Proudhon, Marx, and utopian socialist thinkers—as well as the entire political traditions of the labor theories of property and of value from Locke onwards—through the prism of abolition democracy? What role might the idea of cooperation, or coöperism, play in the abolition of property and capital?

Readings: 

Marx, Karl and Frederick Engels. Manifesto of the Communist Party. Ed. Frederick Engels. New York: International Publishers, 1948.

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Marx, Karl. “Critique of the Gotha Programme.” In Marx/Engels Selected Works, Volume 3, 13-30. Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1970, available here.

Proudhon, Pierre Joseph. What Is Property? (1840). Ed. and trans. Donald R. Kelley and Bonnie G. Smith. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994.

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Du Bois, W.E.B. Chapter 7: Looking Forward. Black Reconstruction in America, 1860-1880. New York: The Free Press, 1998. 

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Harcourt, Bernard E. Cooperation. New York: Columbia University Press, 2023 (excerpts).

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Multimedia:

Center for Contemporary Critical Thought. Abolition Democracy 5/13 | Property is Theft! with Amy Allen, Étienne Balibar, Karuna Mantena, Dan-El Padilla Peralta, and Bernard E. Harcourt. December 3, 2020, available here. 

Center for Contemporary Critical Thought. Abolition Democracy 6/13 | Abolish Capital with Martin Saar and Bernard E. Harcourt. December 17, 2020, available here. 

“Oil abolition implies social transformation—a systemic change toward collective freedom,” Reinhold Martin writes. In this seminar, we will explore the relation between fossil fuels and social inequality, and focus on efforts, like the Green New Deal, to abolish oil dependency. 

Please read: 

The Red Nation. The Red Deal: Indigenous Action to Save Our Earth. Parts 1, 2, and 3 are available here.

Estes, Nick. The History Is Our Future: Standing Rock Versus the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance. New York: Verso, 2019.

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Aronowsky, Leah. “Gas Guzzling Gaia, or: A Prehistory of Climate Change Denialism.” Critical Inquiry 47, no. 2 (Winter 2021): 306-327, available here.

Latour, Bruno. Down to Earth: Politics in the New Climatic Regime. Trans. Catherine Porter. Medford, MA: Polity, 2018.

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Martin, Reinhold. “Abolish Oil.” Places Journal (June 2020) available here.

Multimedia:

Center for Contemporary Critical Thought. Abolition Democracy 11/13 | Abolish Oil with Alyssa Battistoni, Daniela Gandorfer, Reinhold Martin, and Bernard E. Harcourt. March 11, 2021, available here. 

As borders increasingly become sites of struggle and serve an exclusionary purpose for racist and xenophobic ends, there arises the question of whether borders are necessary at all. This session will explore how the history of borders mirror the needs of colonialism, imperialism, and capitalism, and the violence of their maintenance today.  

Readings: 

Walia, Harsha. Border & Rule. Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2021.

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Walia, Harsha. “There is No Migrant Crisis.” Boston Review, November 16, 2022 available here. 

Multimedia:

Center for Contemporary Critical Thought. Abolition Democracy 12/13 | Open Borders with Seyla Benhabib, Joseph Carens, Paulina Ochoa Espejo, and Bernard E. Harcourt. April 15, 2021, available here. 

Readings:

Franke, Katherine. Repair: Redeeming the Promise of Abolition. Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2019.

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Gilmore, Ruth Wilson. Change Everything: Racial Capitalism and the Case for Abolition. Chicago: Haymarket, 2023.

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Kaba, Mariame. We Do This ‘Til We Free Us. Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2021 (excerpts)

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Interrupting Criminalization and Project Nia. One Million Experiments, available here. 

Ambedkar, B.R. Annihilation of Caste. New Delhi: Rupa Publications India Pvt. Ltd, 2018.

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Hannah-Jones, Nikole. “What is Owed,” The New York Times Magazine, June 30, 2020, available here.

Expectations and Assignments

  • Students will be required to read the assigned materials, attend the weekly seminar, and participate in seminar discussion. 
  • Over the course of the semester, students will be asked to write two reflection papers, each about 2-4 pages, on the session’s readings. 
  • Students will be encouraged to submit one reflection paper prior to a seminar of their choice, based solely on their interpretation of the readings, and the other reflection paper following the discussion during a session, including ideals and materials shared during the session’s discussion. 
  • Students will be required to submit a final paper.

Suggested Structure

Seminar-style to facilitate small group conversations

Suggested Assessment Tools

  • Discussions
  • Reflection paper
  • Final paper.

Helpful Resources

For session 2

For session 5

For session 6

For session 7

For session 8

For session 10

For session 11

For session 13:

See Resources
Syllabus
Description
Topics/ Learning Objectives
Required Material
Readings and Assignments Schedule
Expectations and Assignments
Materials for Instructors and Facilitators
Suggested Structure
Suggested Assessment Tools
Lesson Plan / Lecture Notes
Helpful Resources