Abolition 5\/13, \u201cProperty is Theft!\u201d, co-hosted by Professors Bernard Harcourt and Dan-el Padilla Peralta, approached the topic of the abolition of property through texts by Karl Marx, Frederick Engels, and Pierre Joseph Proudhon, placing these texts in conversation with our previous discussions of W. E. B. Du Bois\u2019 Black Reconstruction in America<\/em>. Or, as Professor Harcourt put it in his introductory notes to the session, \u201cHow can we think the abolition of property through<\/em> the lens of abolition democracy?\u201d Through this lens, the discussion among panelists tied together concerns of the expropriative nature of property with questions of labor, of slavery, of modernity, of agency, and of analogy, among others, ultimately circling back again to the central framing of Abolition 13\/13 as a whole: the positive project of abolition as framed by Du Bois. The session opened with a powerful live performance from Theo Bleckmann, with music from Bertolt Brecht\u2019s The Threepenny Opera <\/em>before turning to presentations from several of the panelists.<\/p>\n First, Professor Amy Allen drew our attention to a discussion of Du Bois\u2019 Marxism in Black Reconstruction, <\/em>which she worked to frame not as having left Marxism behind, as presented in Cedric J. Robinson\u2019s Black Marxism<\/em>, but as instead offering a powerful rearticulation of Marxism in which Du Bois complicates many of Marx\u2019s central categories. Among these categories, Professor Allen noted the ways in which Du Bois forces us to reconceptualize traditional Marxist notions of history and progress\u2014when considering slavery\u2019s centrality to the development of capitalism in Europe, she expressed, \u201cit\u2019s very difficult to understand capitalism as a progressive historical force\u2014albiet destructive, ambivalent, and so on, but still . . . in Marx\u2019s early philosophy of history, essentially progressive.\u201d Du Bois\u2019 productive upending of this, and also his further rethinking of the conceptual role that slavery plays in Marx\u2019s work. Du Bois rewrites the slave as the black worker, and thus rewrites emancipation, though the black worker\u2019s own agency, as a kind of worker\u2019s revolution, but Professor Allen\u2019s primary question, both in her presentation and in her post before the seminar, and drawing on Frank Wilderson, was: to what extent does Du Bois\u2019 move to equate the slave with the black worker make sense, and what does it leave out? From her comments, Professor Allen also brought up again the important question of what role agency<\/em> plays, and whose<\/em> agency we discuss as important, and where we locate the potential of revolutionary agency. In a set of brief comments following Professor Allen\u2019s presentation, Professor Padilla raised a similar, but broader question, which is whether the contempt of revolution as mobilized in Marx might render some kinds of agency, and some sites for agency, as illegible.<\/p>\n Professor \u00c9tienne Balibar\u2019s presentation, following Professor Allen\u2019s, began with an examination of the work of analogy and, like Professor Allen, the ways in which Du Bois recontextualizes basic Marxist categories of property, slavery, theft, and debt. He touched, too, on Professor Allen\u2019s question of agency, and how agency is expressed in terms of self-emancipation. The quotation after which his post for the seminar was titled, \u201cThe expropriators are expropriated,\u201d he noted, leads us to ask: by whom? In this instance, the agency comes from the dominated and creates a reversal of domination, which then prompts us to add to our thinking of abolition the category of insurrection, and directs our attention to movement that comes from below. This distinction between insurrection and revolution was central to the comments that followed Professor Balibar\u2019s presentation, and came up later in the discussion as well.<\/p>\n Professor Karuna Mantena\u2019s comments focused, primarily, on the different resonances found between, on one hand, a Marxist understanding of the abolition of property, and on the other hand, an anarchist understanding of the abolition of property. Among other notes, she outlined the differences in the understanding of property as an institution. That is to say, from the Marxist perspective, property and the exploitative nature of property are seen as a symptom of a particular political organization or mode of production. However, from the anarchist perspective, the problem of property is also explicitly linked to other related institutions, from law and prisons and armies to the State itself. For anarchists, then, the problem with property is not simply exploitation, but coercion and violence, and thus the abolition of property is inextricably tied to a larger project of the abolition of the State. Professor Mantena connected this contrast to the contemporary debates within police and prison abolition as to whether or not abolition efforts can work within<\/em> the State, or turn away from the State and privilege community- and self-organizing in these efforts. She encouraged both real consideration of the anarchist anxiety over whether or not the State can serve as an agency of transformation, as well as a \u201cboth\/and\u201d approach over an \u201ceither\/or\u201d one, with a focus on both what you can do via the State and what must be done outside of it. She also discussed the individualistic belief that ties property to work through the idea of merit, and of different conceptions of \u201cfair\u201d distribution of labor and effort, noting the anarchist radical critique of the division of labor, and the idea that, because the true abolition of labor may be a fantasy, we not only must attempt to give dignity to all<\/em> labor, but also to engage in reforms at both the level of structural reform and<\/em> self reform, or the reformation of ourselves, our desires, and the way we live.<\/p>\n Finally, Professor Dan-el Padilla Peralta turned our attention towards understanding property specifically through its relationship to settler colonialism. He began by noting how the figure of the Native American\u2014shadowed in both Marx and Du Bois\u2014acts as a destabilizing force in the thinking of early critiques of property, which conceptualize a past in which there is<\/em> no private property. This \u201cspectral shadowing,\u201d he argued, occurs because both Marx and Du Bois are bound up in modes of theory which are circumscribed within settler colonialist logics. The figure of the Native American \u201cbecomes a method for the extraction of a past before<\/em> property\u201d for both Du Bois and Marx, and Professor Padilla noted the shared assumption between Du Bois and Marx that \u201cthe Native American exists outside<\/em> of the private property relation . . . [and] outside of the temporality that\u2019s constituted by the emergence and entrenchment of private property as the dominant structure of North Atlantic hegemony.\u201d Any account of the abolition of property, then, must look to the ties between private property and settler colonialism, and the way settler colonialism not only expropriated land from the Native Americans, but also how settler colonialist theorizations of property, like Locke\u2019s, also worked to fix Native Americans in this \u201cpre-property\u201d temporality.<\/p>\n As the panel opened up for wider discussion, the panelists were joined by Professors Amina Hasan-Birdwell and Robert Gooding-Williams for the discussion, and Professor Harcourt laid out several key issues from the panel presentations to guide the discussion: agency and the question of who is able to achieve meaningful transformation; insurrection, and whether or not we might, in the present moment, be at a stage at which it is unimaginable to think through the conventional revolutionary models of Marx; and the role of the State. Professor Gooding-Williams also brought into the discussion the question of the role of the category of democracy in Du Bois\u2019 work, how discourse on racial capitalism lets that category of democracy disappear from view, and how the category of democracy animates Du Bois\u2019 work on race and class. And finally, Professor Hasan-Birdwell added to that list the provocative question of the ways in which slavery originates as a function of war, and thus predates a Marxist state, which returned again and againt throughout the longer discussion to raise complex and generative questions between the panelists about the interplay between property, slavery, and international and civil war.<\/p>\n This lively and complex discussion illustrated just how complex the issue of the abolition of property is, and how deeply tied it is to a remarkably wide range of other concerns and other forms of abolition we have and will discuss in the other sessions of Abolition 13\/13. However, unlike so many of our other conversations this semester about abolition democracy, which have intentionally focused not only on what has <\/em>been and what is<\/em>, but on what can <\/em>be, the discussion in this seminar felt mostly rooted in the past. To the many generative and difficult questions grappled with in our concluding discussion, then, I would like to add: what kinds of transformation are possible, beyond the abolition of property? To use a particularly useful phrase we encountered in Abolition 3\/13, in the work of Amna Akbar, what is the abolitionist horizon<\/em> of property abolition?\u00a0 And in lieu of a conclusion, I would like instead to turn back to Karuna Mantena\u2019s flagging of a \u201cboth\/and\u201d approach to Marxist and anarchist notion of property abolition to ask what kinds of self-reform of ourselves, or desires, and our ways of living are possible as we reach towards this horizon?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" By Christine Prevas Abolition 5\/13, \u201cProperty is Theft!\u201d, co-hosted by Professors Bernard Harcourt and Dan-el Padilla Peralta, approached the topic of the abolition of property through texts by Karl Marx, Frederick Engels, and Pierre Joseph Proudhon, placing these texts in… Continue Reading