The Death Penalty, Self-Emancipation and Progressive Politics: Political Relationships in Conversation

Legally sanctioned punishment by death is widely seen as a legitimate form of state governance internationally. The inherently racialized and gendered nature of the death penalty, and what this reveals about state power and politics, have found articulation as abolition feminism. This paper puts this contemporary discourse in conversation with debates from the early years of the Russian Revolution. One of its first acts in 1917 was to abolish the death penalty. But by 1918 legal – as well as extra-legal – executions, became commonplace. In 1918, this policy regression was forcefully challenged by Iulii Martov, a leading scholar-activist from a Jewish background, whose writings however have been epistemically erased from the historical record. The paper suggests that death penalty policies provide an important insight into the shape of political relationships in general, and an effective critique of them can serve as a window to imagine alternative, emancipatory relationships in the future.

The paper uses a mixed methodology: (i) close readings of contemporary critiques of death penalty policies and theories of self-emancipation; (ii) original translations of writings by Martov and contemporaries; and (iii) autoethnography based on the co-authors’ personal archives from 40 years of shared practice.