Tuckerβthat thick red volume that every undergraduate in social studies carries with them. The articles do not figure in the typical bibliography of political, philosophical, and economic writings. They upended criminology, creating a whole new flank of critical criminologist, and nourished a body of Marxist historiography.
And for good cause. They revealed how the criminal law and punishment could be instrumentalized by the wealthy to dispossess the downtrodden. They showed the violence of capital accumulation. In the s, Marxist historians and critical sociologists and lawyers would do precisely that work: layer the political economy, critical legal theory, and critical criminology onto the work that Marx had begun, in , with his blistering critique of how the Rhine provincial legislators had turned a customary privilege of the poor gleaning dead wood in the forest, including on private and communal property into a crime and used it to impose forced labor on the poor to work under peonage conditions on the roads and property of the landed gentry.
The British social historians, E. Une lecture des Β« vols de bois Β». He crashed the meeting and gave not a labour-theory-of-value speech, but a Marxist-theft-of-wood-anticipates-everything-that-the-modern-leftist-can-think-of-and-it-is-really-the-working-class-that-counts speech. Other brilliant contemporary thinkers would pick up these threads and push them further.
The critical theorist and anthropologist James C. In fact, one can draw a straight line from these thinkers to the present, to the powerful abolitionist movement today and the writings of abolitionists, especially feminist abolitionists, including Angela Davis, Mariame Kaba, Dorothy Roberts, Sarah Haley, Derecka Purnell, and others.
This is the top-down dimension: the way in which the criminal law is instrumentalized and deployed; the way that punisment, for instance, serves to enforce a racial hierarchy by perpetuating racialized mass incarceration today, or a sexual hierarchy by targeting transgender persons.
