Justin C. Mueller

Category: Uncategorized

  • Categorical and Dialectical Abolitionism

    We need to have a difficult conversation about prison abolitionist responses to police violence. Many abolitionists have responded to the Chauvin conviction by opposing any calls to imprison or punish him. This response is something I find politically and ethically unconvincing.

    Yes, prisons are a nightmare and the bane of a just society. Yes, they eviscerate social relations and exacerbate structural violence, foreclose futures, and denigrate human dignity, and in the U.S do so in service of a larger system of white supremacy. Yes, retribution is a shallow conception of justice that fails to mend wrongs. And yet, what is to be done — right now — with your Derek Chauvins, your Darren Wilsons, your Daniel Pantaleos?

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  • Trolley Terrors

    Five people work diligently on a railroad track, oblivious to the train barreling towards them. Sometimes the five people are tied down to the track by a villain, rather than workers caught unaware. Sometimes the engineer of the train is incapacitated, and sometimes the brakes have failed. Regardless, you, the student in an introductory ethics class, find yourself next to a lever. If you pull the lever, the train will be redirected onto another track and avoid horribly killing the five innocents. There’s a catch, however, because the second track still has one person on it, another innocent in the wrong place at the wrong time who will certainly be killed. Do you pull the lever?

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  • Juneteenth and Abolitionist Dreams

    Once, people dreamed of the end of slavery. Such dreams were needed, because utopias don’t birth themselves, and a world without chains was utopian before it was imagined to be inevitable. In the US, which holds 25% of the world’s prisoners, it still is.

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  • Interview at E-International Relations

    Here is a copy of a recent interview I gave for E-International Relations:

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  • Haiti and the violence of quasi-natural disasters

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    Hurricanes are destructive. Haitian misery, however, is not a natural disaster. It is the logical consequence of the quite man-made deprivations and vulnerabilities it has been subject to for the entirety of its existence… the slavery of multiple empires… over a century of extorted tribute payments to France after independence for the crime of abolishing slavery… multiple military interventions, coups, or occupations by the United States government designed to prop up brutal and corrupt dictators who proceeded to bleed the country dry… the destruction of its domestic agriculture and food security through neoliberal trade policies imposed through weaponized debt via the WTO and Washington policymakers… even hurricanes themselves are no longer free of the fingerprints of malignantly negligent human agency.

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  • Hate crime laws and police

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    Hate crime laws are usually intended to escalate punishments levied against people who commit crimes against protected classes of persons because of the target’s membership in a particular group or category of people. The establishment of protected classes usually aims to prevent discrimination against sociopolitically marginalized groups along lines of race, sex, religion, sexual orientation, or other more “intrinsic” traits (let’s leave aside problems with that idea of “intrinsic” for now). Louisiana just enacted a law that includes police (firefighters and paramedics were tacked on, but clearly not the primary targets) as part of a protected class of persons in hate crime law; a piece of “Blue Lives Matter” legislation. This law will be mirrored in other states. The bill supporters argue that this will help counter-balance a supposed “anti-police prejudice” that is making the lives of police especially dangerous. This kind of rationalization is little more than a form of authoritarian gas-lighting that obfuscates substantive and serious grievances people (especially more vulnerable people) have against the violence and political obstacles systematically produced and defended by police as an institution.

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  • Concepts of Note: What is Herrenvolk democracy?

    Concepts of Note: What is Herrenvolk democracy?

    white league (2)

    [[ The purpose of Concepts of Note entries is to provide summaries and reflections on important concepts in political theory, social science, and the humanities ]]

    “Herrenvolk democracy” is a crucial concept for understanding the potential racial dimension of democratic belonging and exclusion within a political body, as well as the inequalities of power, rights, and resources that follow. Coined by Pierre van den Berghe, a Herrenvolk democracy is a political order that is “democratic for the master race but tyrannical for subordinate groups” (p.18). There is equality, but only within the dominant racial group. Most importantly, the sociopolitical equality enjoyed within the dominant racial group is premised upon rather than in contradiction with the inequality that sustains the order as a whole. The idea that this should be considered a “real” form of democracy at all may sound strange or appear hypocritical on its face, especially to contemporary citizens of liberal democracies. The fierce international criticisms and boycotts of the apartheid regime in South Africa (where whites ruled, and people of color were disenfranchised, segregated, and stripped of citizenship) during the second half of the 20th century exemplifies this sense of its illegitimacy. Yet, the apparent contradiction of Herrenvolk democracy is something that was fought for and achieved, rather than being transhistorically obvious to all.

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