Abolition Economics

Abstract

Over the past several decades, Law & Economics has established itself as one of the most well-known branches of interdisciplinary legal scholarship. The tools of L&E have been applied to a wide range of legal issues and have even been brought to bear on Critical Race Theory in an attempt to address some of CRT’s perceived shortcomings. This Article seeks to reverse this dynamic of influence by applying CRT and related critical perspectives to the field of economics. We call our approach Abolition Economics. By embracing the abolitionist ethos of “dismantle, change, and build,” we seek to break strict disciplinary habits of modelling and identification, destabilize value systems implicit in mainstream economics, model society more fully as made up of interconnected humans, and develop a richer and more realistic understanding of racialized economic inequality, hierarchy, and oppression. We argue that, contrary to accepted disciplinary conventions, such an endeavor does not introduce new (inappropriate) ideological content into (objective) economics; rather, this endeavor is necessary to fully reveal the ideological content already embedded in mainstream economics as it is currently practiced, and the consequences of that embedding in supporting the functioning of systems of racial capitalism and racial injustice. We believe that imagining the possibility of a different economics—an Abolition Economics—can be an act not only of resistance but, crucially, of freedom-making.