ABOLITION THEN AND NOW / Vol. 92, No. 4 (Winter 2025)
- Jan 26
- 5 min read
Oz Frankel, Journal Editor
Nineteenth-century American abolitionists led by William Lloyd Garrison urged their followers to rally around the unpopular motto “No Union with Slaveholders.” Beginning two decades before the Civil War, they argued that the only way to end slavery was to dissolve the Union. These “disunionists” were criticized by other reformers at the time for doing nothing to advance the cause, especially in comparison to antislavery politicians who believed slavery could be “denationalized” through electoral politics. Like today’s abolitionists, disunionists were often dismissed as impractical idealists. Yet they did have a plan that proved prescient in the end.
This article centers slave resistance in the history of abolition and argues that abolition was a radical transnational social movement that transformed the United States. It illustrates how abolition gave birth to and linked the slaves’ cause with overlapping international movements such as feminism, utopian socialism, pacifism, and critiques of early capitalism and European imperialism. The abolition movement also moved the pendulum of national antislavery politics and helped create a new political coalition in the Northern states that would eventually overthrow slavery. It ultimately linked abolition to the struggle to redefine American democracy and human rights across the globe.
Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century liberal abolitionists thought of emancipation as a process of maintaining planters’ landownership and transforming slaves into wage laborers to sustain capitalist plantation production after slavery ended. In contrast, revolutionary abolitionists claimed that abolishing slavery required providing ex-slaves with access to the means of production through commonly held land and collective labor. Attending to the multiple and variegated ways in which abolitionism indexed, reflected, and rejected capitalist social relations, this article analyzes what I call the tensions of abolitionism and racial capitalism. Exploring these tensions, I theorize the entanglements of capitalist extra-economic coercion, racial hierarchization, and abolitionist ideologies and processes.
Abolition names more than a specific political demand or social movement discourse; it also names a distinctive orientation to politics. Abolition aims at an immediate and absolute end to domination; at the same time, it conjures new forms of life that are free from domination. In these ways, abolition often has theological resonances. This essay first explicates the discourse of contemporary abolitionists, locating it in a particular historical moment, the long 2010s. It theorizes abolition as committed to destruction, and it distinguishes destruction from its alternatives, such as transformation. The essay stages a dialogue between movements for abolition and movements for decolonization.
This essay reads pedophilia and abolitionism together as a popular terrain of struggle in the late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century US. Child sexual abuse (CSA) and incest became sites of struggle, opening up popular negotiations of care work, social reproduction, and collective power before they were first policed as crisis, then dismissed as panic. The pedophile emerged as a dominant resolution to these struggles, a virtually White male figure used to counter abolitionist approaches while absorbing the affective charge associated with earlier CSA and incest mobilizations. These legacies appear in QAnon conspiracies and current abolitionist struggles.
Recently, some anti–domestic violence organizations have signaled a turn toward abolition, recognizing the harm created by and racism embedded in the criminal legal system. But their support for the US government’s prosecution of Zackey Rahimi illustrates how difficult it has been for the anti-violence movement to put these principles into practice. This article provides a brief history of the anti-violence movement’s relationship with the criminal legal system, explores an abolition feminist frame for thinking about how to intervene in the problem of intimate partner firearm violence, and explains why the anti-violence movement, despite its rhetoric, has not embraced abolition.
The idea of family abolition has reappeared among parts of the radical left, following a hiatus of almost 50 years. But—as some have objected—is not capitalism itself “abolishing” familial life (in the colloquial sense of destroying it) in various ways? Indeed, the private nuclear household appears embattled and undermined. In this context, the resurgent debate clarifies why the form of destruction family abolitionists seek is one that realizes familism’s false promise. Abolition, here, is the actualization of humanity’s universal care-neediness through the communization of lifemaking. Defending this sense of the word “abolish” (i.e., positive supersession) remains worthwhile.
This essay takes the immigrant detention facility “Alligator Alcatraz” in the Florida Everglades as a starting point to examine the place of nature and nonhuman animals in prison abolition. The case reveals that political struggles over human confinement are simultaneously struggles over conceptions of nature and claims to land. I theorize an emergent abolitionist environmental politics that could help us take on the interrelated crises of climate change and carceral state building and advance multispecies flourishing. This emergent politics, I argue, should be understood as a form of coalition politics, and cultivating human enjoyment of nature could help sustain abolitionists in this difficult but necessary work.
As is true for many other scholars, the authors of this article have spent the last decade exploring abolition in practice. At the University of Rochester in western New York, where both authors teach, they have collaboratively engaged in abolitionist teaching, research, institution building, and organizing, both on and off campus. At this moment of transformation and profound uncertainty, this essay reflects on a decade of wins and losses in search of possible lessons going forward.
Teaching, learning, curriculum, and abolition are deeply entangled. Much of our understanding of abolition emerges from teaching spaces where curriculum becomes a method for liberation. These are sites where literacy is a means of acquiring knowledge for political power and freedom, where curriculum fosters self-determination and world-making, and where speculative fiction opens portals to abolitionist futures. This article explores the abolitionist teaching practices of a high school teacher in New Jersey who cofounded and teaches at a fugitive curricular space that challenges injustice, disrupts traditional schooling, and interrupts the “world-ending” public school system to engage in abolitionist world-making.
Critical race theorists, along with some feminists, have rightly pointed out that rights-based politics has not proven to be an effective remedy for the social ills of racial and gender inequality, discrimination, and oppression. They have called for the abolition of some political institutions but not of rights themselves. This essay explores whether their arguments should be taken further in that direction, by addressing the following questions: (1) How many ways are there to clarify what makes a right a right? (2) What is it about the idea of a right that leads most political activists to retain the idea rather than dispense with it—despite having theoretical reservations about it? (3) What are the costs of this rights orientation? (4) What benefits might come into view if political activism did not proceed under the banner of claiming and securing rights?
Prison abolitionism has gained significant prominence in criminal law scholarship, while artificial intelligence (AI) has emerged as a transformative force across society. Two schools of thought have arisen regarding their intersection. Some scholars contend abolitionists should welcome AI technologies to reduce the carceral state’s reach. Critics view these tools skeptically, arguing that they lead to biased surveillance and incarceration practices. Using this debate as an example, this article seeks to illuminate the distinction between reformist and non-reformist reforms. The article argues that abolitionists’ criticism of reformists as agents of oppression risks alienating potential allies and discouraging progressive interventions in pivotal, formative policy decisions, including those governing the role of AI in the criminal justice system.