Abolition

Tenth annual conference of the Danish Society for Marxist Studies

Aarhus University, Denmark
10-11 October 2025

“We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things. The conditions of this movement result from the premises now in existence,” Marx and Engels once famously wrote. The word ‘communism’ to them did not signify some utopian endpoint, but rather a concrete engagement with a concretely existing state of affairs standing in the way of social liberation. Today, as the extreme right is attacking liberal institutions from within, critical scholarship has the urgent task to provide an alternative perspective on what it means to abolish in order to reconfigure.

Contemporary abolitionist discourse has been crucially shaped through black radicalism during the twentieth century. Drawing on the collective memory of slavery, this intellectual and political movement criticised the unfulfilled promises of anti-racist governing and interracial democracy. Appropriating Marxist categories, they analysed the conditions for life in a society built on colonialism, while black activists struggled against the police and other state institutions of racial and carceral capitalism.

In recent years, we have seen a surge in abolitionist discourse and practice, which became especially visible during the Georg Floyd protests. Abolition puts into question not only private property, but also the wide range of social forms it depends on such as racism, borders, prisons, and militarism. Feminist and queer abolitionists, working towards liberated forms of living, have adopted and renewed the abolitionist epistemology to criticise capitalist and colonial structures imposed on gender and social reproduction. Abolition is the decisive rejection of power differences and a radical strategy towards liberation; it is both the context and content of social struggle.

The concept of abolition assembles under its banner a broad range of critical theoretical traditions and analytical strategies; it marks a common direction, yet a plurality of approaches. In a call for a world beyond sexism, racism, police, and prisons, the Danish Society for Marxist Studies invites researchers from all fields and strains of critical research and radical scholarship to engage with abolition as a broadly conceived project of liberation.

We welcome papers that engage with topics such as (but not limited to) the following:

• Abolition and political organisation
• Abolitionist strategies against, beyond, and within the state
• Empirical engagements with rejections of reformism
• Critiques of and alternatives to abolitionism
• Queer and feminist liberation
• Settler colonialism
• Prison abolition
• Family abolition
• Abolition of (private) property
• The relationship between abolition and freedom
• Successes and pitfalls of prior abolitionist efforts

Please submit your abstract (max. 250 words) through this form by 1 May 2025. Abstracts and presentations may be in Danish or English.  

Please note

The conference is in-person only, and it will not be possible to present virtually. Attendance is free but requires registration beforehand. Participation in the conference dinner is only possible with pre-payment at registration, which will open in the summer.

The Danish Society for Marxist Studies (Danish: Selskab for Marxistiske Studier, SMS) is an independent academic society in Denmark. The purpose of the society is to promote interest and research in Marxism and other strands of critical thought and radical scholarship at Danish universities and institutes of higher learning, especially among early career scholars. We understand ‘Marxism’ in the broadest possible sense of the term as the critical tradition emanating from Marx’s thought in its entire historical and theoretical breadth and depth, and SMS is not committed to any one particular theoretical or political position.