| Abstract: | "A new era of cooperation is on the horizon. Born of decades-long struggles against ever-shifting forms of domination, cooperation heralds a dramatic transformation of our economy and society. It presages a radical change, as significant in scope as the last revolution from feudalism to capitalism. It augurs a cooperative society in which hierarchies of race, ethnicity, gender, class, and sexuality will be leveled. Cooperation is Bernard E. Harcourt's call to arms on behalf of the critical project of abolitionism. The new abolitionism forces us to address the central challenge to legal liberalism, namely: whether the institutions, practices, and agents associated with the enforcement of the law function (or should function) to redress social harms associated with law-violative behavior or, instead, serve primarily to impose a social and racial hierarchy. This question goes to the heart of whether contemporary punishment practices-such as policing, incarceration, juvenile detention, deportation,in other words,the practices of the punitive state-are a response to crime and to deviations of law, or instead constitute chiefly a mode of governing that produces racial, ethnic, gender, and other hierarchies. He argues for a society based on cooperation, mutual aid, solidarity, an ethic of care - the rallying call of a new generation of critical thinkers and organizers. This new generation builds on a long history of revolt and rebellion that has sharpened and perfected the critique and praxis challenging the ever-shifting forms of domination-from slavery to racial chattel slavery, from colonialism to settler-colonialism and genocide, from de jure to structural racism, from patriarchy to the oppression of sexual minorities, from class exploitation to racial capitalism." |
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