This course explores the historical encounter of Marxist revolutionary theory, with its roots in German idealism (Kant, Schiller, Fichte, Hegel), and abolitionist causes. How have abolitionist movements historically informed, expanded, and challenged Marxist theory and its tactical playbook? What made Marx a touchstone for so many black revolutionary thinkers, including W.E.B. du Bois, Franz Fanon, C.L.R. James, and Angela Davis? How have anticommunist, racist, security-statist ideologies been mobilized to undermine and defeat transformative social movements? We will begin with the Haitian Revolution and work our way through the abolition of slavery in the US and the anticolonial and civil rights struggles of the mid-20th century to the prison abolition movement today. In addition to the above mentioned authors, readings will include Toussaint L'Ouverture, Frederick Douglass, Ottilie Assing, V.I. Lenin, Rosa Luxemburg, Georg Lukács, Max Weber, Martin Luther King, Jr., Herbert Marcuse, and the Combahee River Collective. |