A profound rebellion against racism has been sweeping the country for a month. Millions have taken to the streets in every part of the country, shaking public opinion. Elite institutions, individuals and corporate brands are scrambling to offer symbolic sacrifices at the altar of racial justice in the hopes they will be spared from the righteous wrath in the streets.
At the same time the police are wantonly attacking protestors and continuing to murder Black people, making a mockery of all the “official” declarations of “anti-racism.”
Hidden in just this fact is the most important lesson: The capitalist system grants concessions only in defense of its own stability. None of the grisly facts of racism was unknown or undocumented prior to the assasination of George Floyd. The only thing that has changed is people are willing to burn down buildings and confront the “shoot-to-maim” riot brigades.
Stability has not been restored. Massive crowds continue to come out into the streets; unions are taking strike action for Black Liberation; and a big cultural moment featured a Black Communist as the hero.
Various attempts to extinguish the flames of resistance–through force or flattery–have had the opposite effect. For the authorities this begs the question of what will get people out of the streets? Those in the streets meanwhile grapple with what it takes to make substantive changes and what would even constitute “real change.”
There are many rebellions, fewer revolutions. Rebellions are usually associated with fighting the good fight, revolutions with winning it. We remember many slave rebellions across the Americas, but only one slave revolution. We celebrate the heroism of Nat Turner and Dessalines equally but recognize that their achievements are of different orders.
Rebellions express the inability of the current system to resolve its own contradictions using the existing political framework. Revolutions resolve those contradictions: a new framework, a new system.
The uprising that erupted after the murder of George Floyd is beset on two sides. On the one hand the forces of “law and order;” on the other an assorted group of “reformers” seeking to placate resistance through cosmetic change. In other words, on both counts, the familiar strategies of counter-insurgency designed to quench any rebellion to the status quo: repression and co-optation.
And they are right to be concerned as this new upsurge in the Black Liberation Movement coincides not only with a pandemic but also a severe economic crisis and the unfolding disasters associated with climate change. The idea of socialism — the extension of social and economic rights — is rising and unsettling the capitalist status quo. The LGBTQ movement and the rise of #MeToo are taking aim at thousands of years of social and cultural conventions.
The oppression of Black America is so central to the country that the struggle for Black Liberation has often acted as a detonator, so to speak, setting off broader social struggles throughout the system. In today’s volatile mix, the charges now rigged to blow may be too difficult for capitalism to withstand.
Those in the streets are learning concretely about their own power. The scale of the response to the uprising — from nearly every corner of the capitalist class — has also revealed that they fear that the struggle of the Black community will grow and expose a distinct source of weakness.
Moving from rebellion to revolution is ultimately figuring out how to operate the “detonator factor” capitalist elites fear so much.
This is the political context with which we now approach the question of “reforming” or “defunding” or “abolishing” the police.
What is policing?
The first really “modern” police department in the United States were the Charleston City Guards formed in the 1730s. They were created out of fear that the more informal methods employed before were not sufficient to prevent slave revolts.
Policing has further roots in the growth of urban centers in the mid-19th century. The expanding capitalist economy was growing through large influxes of immigrants rendering former methods of social control less effective. Notably, the rise of policing in this context was not a response to rising crime; in fact, in some early police bastions, crime appeared to even fall in the decade preceding the formation of police departments. They were about control.
The issue was not the scale or intensity of the “crimes” but who was committing them. Those with the power to mould public opinion identified the new working classes as a particular threat. They saw and portrayed the workers as a mob, prone to licentiousness, who must be controlled for the good (read: stability) of society.
The Boston Council noted, for instance, the need for police based on the “great numbers” arriving in the city without the benefit of “New England training” who can be “held to restraint” only by “fear of the lawgiver.”
In both cases the police were not a reflex response to “crime.” Then–and now–they were the instrument for controlling classes of people deemed “criminal,” prior to any individual action. The essence of deploying the police as a “preventive” force is clearly predicated on determining that “crime” is “natural” to some more than others.
Any system of laws, to be effective, has to establish some universal legitimacy. Having the police known as purely protectors of property and order for the rich would not do. So they grew to include other auxiliary functions and were recast in popular culture and by the political elite as unbiased and heroic “public servants.” Policing became the generally accepted means by which two crucial needs are secured for the populace at large: personal safety and contract enforcement. This perceived legitimacy of the notion of policing gives the police as an institution tremendous cultural authority.
The real story
In reality, crime is at historic lows and what crime is out there isn’t being dealt with terribly effectively by the police. Less than half of (FBI described) “violent” crimes (46 percent) are ever solved, and only 17 percent of “property crimes.”
Despite the perception that the police are out there “fighting a war” as they always put it, being a cop is actually less dangerous than being a farmworker, groundskeeper, septic tank servicer, garbage collector, truck driver, roofer, or flight engineers — just to name a few of the 15 jobs officially more dangerous than being a police officer.
There is no real war with crime. Yet in city after city, militarized police drain 30 to 40 percent of municipal budgets. There is certainly a signal that something else is at play. Take for instance “Stop-and-Frisk,” widely lauded for years as a very effective “crime-fighting mechanism” in every major city in the U.S.. Many millions of people were stopped in New York, but only 0.3 percent resulted in a jail sentence longer than 30 days. Only 0.1 percent led to a conviction for a violent crime. Despite the racial disparities in the number of stops, whites who were stopped were 50 percent more likely to be found with a gun than Blacks.
The police were undoubtedly aware of these dismal results in real-time. So what other explanation can there be other than the issue wasn’t stopping crime but asserting dominance over areas pre-determined to be “criminal?”
