The liberal identification of security with liberty and property in fact masks an underlying insecurity at the heart of the bourgeois orderthe insecurity of propertywhich is deeply connected to the question of classSecurity is part of the rationale for the fabrication of order. In terms of the demand for order in civil society, it is under the banner of security that police most often marches. Mark Neocleous, The Fabrication of Social Order
Police function to produce race, a category essential to the workings of the state-market under racial capitalism. Any analysis of US policing must consider its constitutive relationship to the racialization of Black and brown subjects, not only theoretically but also in history, with the US polices structural formation as an antiblack force. Micol Seigel, Violence Work
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IN THIS FEATURE !
The modern police force in the US was created to protect capital and the owners of capital. As the coercive arm of the state, the police are the primary instruments of state violence, particularly racialized state violence. They function as an occupying force in Americas impoverished ghettoes, barrios, reservations, on the Southwest border, and in any territory with high concentrations of subjugated communities. Their defense of corporate property and capitalist extraction was clearly on display during the protests against the Keystone XL and Dakota Access pipelines.
The Other BLM (Bureau of Land Management) hired armed officers, employed local police forces, and worked with the FBI to stop what US officials called domestic terrorism. At Standing Rock, North Dakota, the police and private guards used tear gas, batons, attack dogs, water cannons, rubber bullets, bean bag rounds, and mass arrest to attack Indigenous land defenders and water protectors and their alliesall in the name of protecting the interests of TC Energy Corporation, Energy Transfer Partners, and their various
CHALLENGING ONE OF THE CORE INSTITUTIONS OF RACIAL CAPITALISM
R O B I N D . G . K E L L E Y ( H T T P S : / / S P E C T R E J O U R N A L . C O M / AU T H O R / R O B I N D G K E L L E Y / )
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Insecure: Policing Under Racial Capitalism
(https://spectrejournal.com)
Insecure: Policing Under Racial Capitalism Spectre Journal https://spectrejournal.com/insecure-policing-under-racial-capitalism/
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investors. And despite the handwringing and outrage over the Trump administrations flagrant violation of the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878 limiting the use of the military in domestic matters, the police have long functioned as an army against dissident social movements.
The police are the first line of defense against strikes and protests by Black, Brown, Indigenous, antiracist, antifascist, left-wing, queer, and feminist assemblies, while often becoming a cordon to protect Klansman, Nazis, and the Alt Right. For readers of Spectre this is all common knowledge. The idea that the police were created to uphold bourgeois class rule and white supremacy has pretty much been accepted wisdom among various Marxists for at least a century. And yet, abolishing the police has only recently become a chief demand among broad sectors of the Marxist leftand even now, it is not universally embraced.
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Abolishing the police has only recently become a chief demand among broad sectors of the Marxist left.
We shouldnt be surprised since the current push to defund or abolish the police grew from a decade of organizing by radical movements that are frequently relegated to the margins of the left or dismissed as identity movementsnamely, anticarceral feminists, Black, Latinx, and Indigenous radicals, community and youth-based mobilizations against police violence. Among them are Black Lives Matter, the Dream Defenders, Black Youth Project 100, We Charge Genocide, BOLD (Black Organizing for Leadership and Dignity), Million Hoodies Movement for Justice, Dignity and Power Now, Ellas Daughters, Assatas Daughters, Black Feminist Futures Project, Leaders of a Beautiful Struggle, Let Us Breathe Collective, Hands Up United, Lost Voices, Organization for Black Struggle, Millennial Activists Unitedorganizations that at some point fell under the umbrella of the Movement for Black Lives.
While the demand for police abolition surfaced in 2014 during the protests in Ferguson, Missouri, in response to the killing of Michael Brown, it doesnt begin there. Critical Resistance issued a statement calling for the abolition of police as early as 2009. Instead of police, the statement asks what if we got together with members of our communities and created systems of support for each other? We are capable of looking after and caring for one another, providing each other with our basic human needs, creating community self- determination. Relying on and deploying policing denies our ability to do this, to create real safety in our communities.
Critical Resistance was part of a wave of radical formations in the 1990s that laid the foundations for the current wave of police and prison abolition: the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement, Prison Activist Resource Center, the Prison Moratorium Project, Critical Resistance, Labor/Community Strategy Center, Project South, POWER (People Organized to Win Employment Rights), Southerners on New Ground (SONG); INCITE: Women of Color Against Violence, Sista II Sista, the Los Angeles Community Action Network, Black Youth Coalition Against Civil Injustice, Miami Workers Center, the Praxis Project, FIERCE (Fabulous Independent Educated Radicals for Community Empowerment), Queers for Economic Justice, the Sylvia Rivera Law Project (SRLP), to name a few.
That some of these organizations and many of the leading abolitionist thinkers identify as Marxist or Marxist- orientednotably, Angela Davis, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, and Mariame Kaba, among othersdoesnt seem to matter. There is a tendency among sectors of the left to treat these movements as narrowly focused on identity, at best, or race reductionist, at worst. According to this logic, the only movements that matter focus on universal issues of classjobs, healthcare, taxes, and the environment.
The problem with this argument is that it confuses opposition to institutional oppression and marginalization with identity politics. None of these movements are exclusionary. They not only resist racialized and gendered state violence but capitalism itself. Besides, what is more universal than a movement dedicated to
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eradicating all forms of oppression and exploitation; ending state-sanctioned violence; replacing police, military, and prisons with genuine, humane, noncarceral paths for safety and justice?
This narrow conception of the US left has largely rendered invisible a Black Marxist critique of state violence and policing within established socialist and communist movementsone exception being the Communist leader William L. Pattersons landmark appeal to the United Nations, We Charge Genocide. There has been surprisingly little discussion of the CPUSAs National Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression, which grew out of the campaign to free Angela Davis. Nor has anyone, as far as I know, acknowledged Paul Boutelle (later known as Kwame Somburu) who called for abolishing the police when he was the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Partys (SWP) vice-presidential candidate in 1968.
The Harlem-born Boutelle left school at age sixteen, tired of being indoctrinated with Christianity, Capitalism, and Caucasianism. He drove a taxi for a living and became active in a number of Black nationalist and anti- imperialist organizations during the early 60s, including the Fair Play for Cuba Committee and the Freedom Now Party, an all-Black political party that endorsed African American SWP leader Clifton DeBerry for president in 1964. That year Boutelle ran unsuccessfully for a New York State Senate seat on the Freedom Now Party ticket.
He joined Malcolm Xs short-lived Organization of Afro-American Unity and witnessed his assassination in the Audubon Ballroom on February 21, 1965. Boutelle immersed himself in SWP politics, running for Manhattan Borough president in 1965, state attorney general in 1966, chairing Afro-Americans Against the War in Vietnam and the Black United Action Front, before his historic vice-presidential bid as Fred Halsteads running mate.
Boutelles campaign plank in 1968 could be adopted today. In one of his early stump speeches in Philadelphia, he called for free college education and medical care for all, a reduced work week with no corresponding reduction in pay, ending the Vietnam war and reinvesting those resources in schools and hospitals and decent low-rent homes, nationalizing banks and major corporations and placing them under the control of democratically elected workers committees, and the abolition of police. The latter, it should be noted, was not part of the SWPs platform, but Boutelle nevertheless proposed a public safety alternative that would entail electing representatives from communities to replace troops and police.
Following a wave of urban rebellions against police violence during the summer of 1967, Boutelle argued that the militarization of police mirrored US counterinsurgency measures abroad. The capitalist class determines the means of the struggle in this country, and their means is violence. They are ready to do anything at all to suppress the black movementhelicopters, armored tanks, chemical warfare, even concentration camps.
In other words, the Black lefts protracted struggle to dismantle the US police state has for too long remained at the margins of Marxist thought and praxis. The problem was highlighted recently in Spectre by Peter Ikeler in his excellent response to Dustin Guastella, the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) leader who not only opposes defunding the police but affirms their role in ensuring public safetyparticularly the safety of people of color and the poor.
Ikeler demolishes Guastellas arguments, point by point, and his fundamental conclusion repeats what police and prison abolitionists such as Mariame Kaba, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Angela Davis and, indirectly at least, Paul Boutelle (Kwame Somburu) and others have been saying for decades: To End Police Violence, End Racial Capitalism. Ikelers piece is compelling and persuasive, but it opens up a larger question: what is the role of police in reproducing racial capitalism? This article is an attempt to offer some schematic answers to this question, particularly with respect to the function of police in real estate, finance capital, and technology, as generators of revenue, and as labor.
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Ruth Wilson Gilmore reminds us that Capitalism [is] never not racial. Capitalism emerged in Europe within a feudal system already built on racial hierarchy. Capitalism was/is racial not because of some conspiracy to divide workers or justify slavery and dispossession, but because racialism had already permeated Western feudal society. Racial capitalism extracts surplus value and structures exchange value by assigning differential value to human life and labor: through land enclosure, slavery, dispossession, displacement, predatory lending, taxation, disfranchisement, and the long history of looting through terror and government policies that suppressed wages of racialized subjects, relieved them of property, excluded Black people from better schools and public accommodations, suppressed Black home values, and subsidized white wealth accumulation.
Racial capitalism is dynamic. The last couple of generations have endured a neoliberal variant of racial capitalism that dismantled the welfare state; promoted capital flight; privatized public schools, hospitals, housing, transit, and other public resources; and resulted in the massive growth of police and prisons. These policies have produced scarcity, poverty, alternative (illicit) economies regulated through violence, and environmental and health hazards.
Just as capitalism emerged within the feudal order, so did the police. Capitalists may not have invented police, but they remade police into a tool to secure property, profits, and people who refuse to accept the terms of exploitation. In North America, the precursors to the police were the slave patrols citizen militias deputized by local, state, and federal governments to track down fugitive slaves and put down insurrections and militias deployed to suppress Native communities.
However, the slave patrols were not a police force, per se. They were closer to what Friedrich Engels described as self-acting armed organizations of the population. Using Europe as his guide, Engels recognized the danger that popular militias pose for the state, especially as the class divide sharpens. Fear of armed rebellion compelled the state to replace popular militias with units of armed men employed by the state (police and standing armies) and backed up with material adjuncts, prisons, and institutions of coercion of all kinds.
In settler societies like North America, however, race kept these popular militias loyal to the state and its colonial projects, even as class antagonisms grew. These units were white for a reason. Before the birth of the Republic, colonial landholders had to manage kidnapped African labor, unruly indentured white labor, and relations with what were then sovereign and often powerful Indigenous communities. Unable to stop white servants and Africans from running away together, finding refuge in swamps, hills, and among Native peoples, the landowning class decided to free white servants and turn them into small property owners, proletarian citizens, and/or slave patrollers invested in the white Republic and the dream of attaining wealth and power for themselves.
An armed white population was not only central to legitimizing antiBlack and anti-Indigenous violence, but it also shored up white propertyless and working class support for this regime. However, with the growth of industrial capitalism and the increase in European immigration during the late nineteenth century, the state and owners of capital could no longer depend on white workers to support the status quo. Professional police forces replaced citizen militias.
Although by the turn of the twentieth century the state held a monopoly of lethal force and assumed greater responsibility for maintaining order, upholding the color line, regulating sexuality, and suppressing dissent, bodies of armed whites continued to exist as adjuncts to racialized state violence. Therefore, it is important to make a distinction between the police as a formal, modern institution and policing as a broader set of practices and procedures that operate beyond (but sanctioned by) formal state structures. Historian Peter Linebaugh put it best: Investigation into the history of police soon finds it to be inseparable from conquest, slavery, debt, industrial discipline, and social hierarchies. Armed settlers, pioneers, militia, army units, slave
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patrollers, Texas rangers, posse comitatus, slave catchers, factory guards, troopers, private security forces, vigilante groups, MPs, lynch mobs, Fords service department, death squads, night riders, and the KKK have all served police functions.
Lets take lynch mobs. How do we explain the fact that Congress passed the first antilynching bill in US history in 2020? (As of this writing, the bill still has not passed the Senate since it is being held up by Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky. ) Since 1882, the nearly two hundred antilynching bills introduced to the US Congress were all defeated. Were inclined to either scratch our heads in befuddlement or blame die-hard racist Southern Senators, but the fact of the matter is that lynching was a form of policing.
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