Animal, Abolition, Property: Animal Oppression and Racial Capitalism

Abstract

This project brings together concerns over the property-status of animals found in animal studies and animal liberation politics with the movement to abolish prisons and the police that animates Black radical politics. These two strains of thought approach the question of the human in different ways but converge on the necessity of challenging our dominant conceptions of the human as a property-owning subject. Drawing on these two trenchant critiques of property, Animal, Abolition, Property develops an abolitionist politics committed to anti-anthropocentric critique by developing a theory of animal exploitation that sees such exploitation as central to the histories and presents of racial capitalism. The project thinks together a Marxist emphasis on capitalism with a focus on the policing of life found in biopolitical critique. It further enables a way to think beyond Blackness and animality as measures for the other’s abjection and instead stages a dialogue through a critique of the property-form. The project reads the intertwined histories of animal exploitation and racial capitalism from the formation of capitalism as periodized by Marxist historiography within a history of capital’s drive to accumulate animal life ranging from the colonial fur trade to contemporary modes of extracting value from animal life. I draw on the resources of both animal studies and Black Marxist thought to stage this account of capitalism and explore the limits of Marxist theory. The project further thinks about policing as an expansive concept that runs through capitalism’s history and ensures the ability of a given social formation to reproduce itself. The project reads the liberal politics of recognition and suffering and then of pandemic management as political thematics that stitch together questions over racialization, the human, animality, capital accumulation, and violence. It ultimately concludes with thinking about alternatives to the present that engage the promise of multispecies democracy.