UC Davis Humanities Institute
April 26th, 2021
This event brings together our favorite thinkers of both abolition and communism not as official upper-case ideologies but as lower-case ideas about how to organize social existence. While some would say that each implies the other, tensions between the two traditions have also proliferated. Some interpreters have opposed anti-racism and class analysis, decolonial thought and Marxism, the Global South and Eurocentrism, among other oppositions. Such considerations have taken on ever greater significance amid the ongoing horrors of police violence within the explosion of the carceral state, and the intensifications of capitalist collapse. This discussion provides an opportunity for these scholar-organizers to consider the overlaps and consonances, the necessary and prospective relations between abolition and communism — as well as the potential lacks thereof. We’ll feature statements by each participant, shared discussion, and some time for questions.