The past and present of abolition: reassessing Adam Smith’s “liberal reward of labor”

Abstract

Abolish prisons; abolish police; abolish immigration enforcement: current “abolition” movements have yet to receive the attention that international political economy has given to its social justice forerunners, e.g. World Social Forum and Occupy. I argue that to make the current abolition movement legible to the field first requires a retrieval of abolition’s import for classical political economy. Towards this aim, I reassess the ways in which Adam Smith’s ethical prospecting of the “liberal reward of labor” referenced abolition. I then contextualize Smith’s agonistic argument for commercial society within late seventeenth to early nineteenth century struggles over imperial commerce, especially Atlantic slavery. For this purpose, I take a prompt from the institutional framework of “abolition democracy” provided by Angela Davis and WEB Du Bois. Specifically, I examine the ways in which the prospect of abolition challenged a) existing institutions that rendered enslaved labor in plantation economies as property; as well as b) the patriarchal institutions in England that rendered labor through a “master/servant” relation. I conclude by arguing that current abolition movements prompt us to address the obfuscation in classical political economy of particular agents and sites through which struggles over freedom have been waged across capital’s imperium.