The Focus on Looting Shows How Our Systems of Power Value Capital Over Human Lives Rather than indicting the racist police murder of George Floyd and other black Americans, our leaders are up in arms over protests and property destruction. That’s the twisted logic of U.S. capitalism.
The principal stretches back to America’s anti-democratic founding. Popular control, James Madison famously wrote, must be stopped in order “to protect the minority of the opulent against the majority.” The government’s job was to act as a guardian to protect such a plainly unfair distribution of wealth, property, and power, because those who “labour under all the hardships of life” would “secretly sigh for a more equal distribution of its blessings.” That principle would come to life in the mid-19th century when, as historian Sam Mitrani has written, modern policing was “created by the ruling class to control working-class and poor people, not help them.” In the South, the slave empire had its patrols. And in the North, the titans of wage-labor capitalism recruited police to discipline an unruly working-class, who were indeed organizing “for a more equal distribution” of the nation’s “blessings.” “Their basic job,” Mitrani writes, is “to enforce order among those with the most reason to resent the system.” In other words, the poor and working-class black people who are being hammered by multiple crises all at once.
BY ELI DAY
Trump’s words shine useful daylight on the depraved tendencies of the nation’s ruling class.
As it is with any season of protest, nothing brings out the murderous authoritarianism in the ruling class quite like the sight of disobedience by ordinary black people. It comes if you rally by the thousands to deem their authority illegitimate. If you call for an end to a hailstorm of brutality. Or bring chaos upon property in the shadow of yet another destroyed black life.
Since the public murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police, protests have swept cities across the country. Hundreds of thousands have risen to demand justice for Floyd, and to voice their exhaustion with a system of punishment that tyrannizes poor communities of color. Predictably, the outrage has turned combustible, and property has not been spared in the unrest’s many explosions. Shelves licked clean at Target and Sephora. An AutoZone set ablaze while its spokesperson trembles with horror at the “disturbing and tragic events.” By this, he apparently means a few charred buildings, but not the man whose neck was crushed by an agent of the state. Eventually, Minneapolis’s third police precinct was evacuated before protesters lit the building and the night sky up in flames.
In response, certain corners of the media and political ecosystem have been in complete meltdown. None more so than the White House, with President Trump sending a deranged tweet, warning the “THUGS” of Minneapolis that “When the looting starts, the shooting starts.” The “THUGS” here are those who strip food and televisions from the shelves of lifeless stores, but not a police department with a record of horrific cruelty against actual living humans, or the prosecutors, like now Sen. Amy Klobuchar, who looked the other way. We should be clear about what Trump is promising here: That an extrajudicial death sentence is a fitting punishment for petty theft. That property is so sacred that people ought to be gunned down for it in what is, quite plainly, a call for public lynchings.
But Trump’s words also shine useful daylight on the depraved tendencies of the nation’s ruling class, who place human life in the same category as inanimate objects.
The principal stretches back to America’s anti-democratic founding. Popular control, James Madison famously wrote, must be stopped in order “to protect the minority of the opulent against the majority.” The government’s job was to act as a guardian to protect such a plainly unfair distribution of wealth, property, and power, because those who “labour under all the hardships of life” would “secretly sigh for a more equal distribution of its blessings.” That principle would come to life in the mid-19th century when, as historian Sam Mitrani has written, modern policing was “created by the ruling class to control working-class and poor people, not help them.” In the South, the slave empire had its patrols. And in the North, the titans of wage-labor capitalism recruited police to discipline an unruly working-class, who were indeed organizing “for a more equal distribution” of the nation’s “blessings.” “Their basic job,” Mitrani writes, is “to enforce order among those with the most reason to resent the system.” In other words, the poor and working-class black people who are being hammered by multiple crises all at once.
On one side is a rampaging pandemic, with nearly 23,000 black Americans dead from Covid-19. As scholar Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor writes, “coronavirus has scythed its way through black communities, highlighting and accelerating the ingrained social inequities that have made African-Americans the most vulnerable to the disease.” On the other side is the relentless and devastating force of racism and racial hierarchy itself, which undergirds every major political, economic and social institution in the country. Our (often for-profit) punishment system and the police who serve as its shock troops are only the most dramatic example. Desperate for better and safer lives, and with the nation’s political leaders flailing around hopelessly, people have been driven into the streets, and thus right into the buzzsaw of the pandemic.
In the devastating collision of these crises, the priorities of the ruling class have come into sharp focus. White House economics adviser Kevin Hassett tells CNN that “Our human capital stock is ready to get back to work,” a clear window into elite opinion on the lives of working people, who are transformed into raw economic material themselves, whose lives can be sacrificed at the temple of profit. George Floyd was arrested and killed for alleged forgery, a crime of poverty punishable by death. Destroyed like faulty machinery. Capitalism, and its many enforcement arms, can obliterate you if you are found in violation of the service of profit.
In Michigan, white protesters stormed the capital last month, some armed to the teeth, demanding a “reopening” of the economy. They asked for nothing but a return to their status quo and faced no challenge from police, whose entire motive is upholding that status quo. In the more recent unrest, peaceful protesters have been calling for radical changes in the American fabric, and have been met by waves of unprovoked police violence. That the first type of protest would be met by soft acceptance, and the second by brutal suppression reveals a nation desperate, as author and poet Hanif Abdurraqib writes, to “return to normal—howling with grief, soaked in blood.”
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. summed up the moral horror of America’s “normal” in his 1967 “Beyond Vietnam” speech, when he condemned our “thing-oriented society” where “machines and computers, profit motives and property rights, are considered more important than people.” This quote is often shared as if it were an abstract or squishy moral assessment about the shallowness of American culture. But it’s actually a serious examination of the country’s basic economic priorities, in which people and things that are not living at all share the same social footing. King did not mince words: this line of thinking had to be overthrown in order to “conquer” the “giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism.” The reaction to today’s uprisings only confirms that it still needs to be vanquished.
Protesters have not lost legitimacy because they lack grace or decorum or break with the social contract. Rather, they have gained their footing by pointing to the cruel underpinnings of our current political order. When Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin dug his knee into George Floyd’s neck, he did so with the power to use lethal force in the state’s name. In this instance, it was to discipline a member of the most despised group in the nation’s history. A group with countless justifiable grievances against the United States—and the cruel priorities of American capitalism.
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The Police Were Created to Control Working Class and Poor People, Not ‘Serve and Protect’ U.S. police forces were created to protect the new form of wage-labor capitalism that emerged in the mid- to late-19th century from the threat posed by that system’s offspring, the working class. BY SAM MITRANI
The police were not created to protect and serve the population. They were not created to stop crime, at least not as most people understand it. And they were certainly not created to promote justice. They were created to protect the new form of wage-labor capitalism that emerged in the mid- to late-19th century from the threat posed by that system’s offspring, the working class.
This is a blunt way of stating a nuanced truth, but sometimes nuance just serves to obfuscate.
Before the 19th century, there were no police forces that we would recognize as such anywhere in the world. In the Northern United States, there was a system of elected constables and sheriffs, much more responsible to the population in a very direct way than the police are today. In the South, the closest thing to a police force was the slave patrols.
Then, as Northern cities grew and filled with mostly immigrant wage workers who were physically and socially separated from the ruling class, the wealthy elite who ran the various municipal governments hired hundreds and then thousands of armed men to impose order on the new working class neighborhoods.
Class conflict roiled late-19th century American cities like Chicago, which experienced major strikes and riots in 1867, 1877, 1886, and 1894. In each of these upheavals, the police attacked strikers with extreme violence, even if in 1877 and 1894 the U.S. Army played a bigger role in ultimately repressing the working class. In the aftermath of these movements, the police increasingly presented themselves as a thin blue line protecting civilization (by which they meant bourgeois civilization) from the disorder of the working class. This ideology of order that developed in the late 19th century echoes down to today—except that today, poor black and Latino people are the main threat, rather than immigrant workers.
Of course, the ruling class did not get everything it wanted, and had to yield on many points to the immigrant workers it sought to control. This is why, for instance, municipal governments backed away from trying to stop Sunday drinking, and why they hired so many immigrant police officers, especially the Irish. But despite these concessions, businessmen organized themselves to make sure the police were increasingly isolated from democratic control, and established their own hierarchies, systems of governance, and rules of behavior.
The police increasingly set themselves off from the population by donning uniforms; establishing their own rules for hiring, promotion and firing; working to build a unique esprit des corps and identifying themselves with order. And despite complaints about corruption and inefficiency, they gained more and more support from the ruling class, to the extent that in Chicago, for instance, businessmen donated money to buy the police rifles, artillery, Gatling guns, buildings, and money to establish a police pension out of their own pockets.
There was a never a time when the big city police neutrally enforced “the law,” or came anywhere close to that ideal. (For that matter, the law itself has never been neutral.) In the North, they mostly arrested people for the vaguely defined “crimes” of disorderly conduct and vagrancy throughout the nineteenth century. This meant that the police could arrest anyone they saw as a threat to “order.” In the post-bellum South, they enforced white supremacy and largely arrested black people on trumped-up charges in order to feed them into convict labor systems.
The violence the police carried out and their moral separation from those they patrolled were not the consequences of the brutality of individual officers, but were the consequences of careful policies designed to mold the police into a force that could use violence to deal with the social problems that accompanied the development of a wage-labor economy.
For instance, in the short, sharp depression of the mid-1880s, Chicago was filled with prostitutes who worked the streets. Many policemen recognized that these prostitutes were generally impoverished women seeking a way to survive, and initially tolerated their behavior. But the police hierarchy insisted that the patrolmen do their duty whatever their feelings, and arrest these women, impose fines, and drive them off the streets and into brothels, where they could be ignored by some members of the elite and controlled by others.
Similarly, in 1885, when Chicago began to experience a wave of strikes, some policemen sympathized with strikers. But once the police hierarchy and the mayor decided to break the strikes, policemen who refused to comply were fired. In these and a thousand similar ways, the police were molded into a force that would impose order on working class and poor people, whatever the individual feelings of the officers involved.
Though some patrolmen tried to be kind and others were openly brutal, police violence in the 1880s was not a case of a few bad apples—and neither is it today.
Much has changed since the creation of the police—most importantly the influx of black people into the Northern cities, the mid-twentieth century black movement, and the creation of the current system of mass incarceration in part as a response to that movement. But these changes did not lead to a fundamental shift in policing. They led to new policies designed to preserve fundamental continuities. The police were created to use violence to reconcile electoral democracy with industrial capitalism. Today, they are just one part of the “criminal justice” system which continues to play the same role. Their basic job is to enforce order among those with the most reason to resent the system—who in our society today are disproportionately poor black people.
A democratic police system is imaginable—one in which police are elected by and accountable to the people they patrol. But that is not what we have. And it’s not what the current system of policing was created to be.
If there is one positive lesson from the history of policing’s origins, it is that when workers organized, refused to submit or cooperate and caused problems for the city governments, they could back the police off from the most galling of their activities.
Murdering individual police officers, as happened in in Chicago on May 3, 1886 and more recently in New York on December 20, 2014, only reinforced those calling for harsh repression—a reaction we are beginning to see already. But resistance on a mass scale could force the police to hesitate. This happened in Chicago during the early 1880s, when the police pulled back from breaking strikes, hired immigrant officers, and tried to re-establish some credibility among the working class after their role in brutally crushing the 1877 upheaval.
The police might be backed off again if the reaction against the killings of Eric Garner, Michael Brown, Tamir Rice and countless others continues. If they are, it will be a victory for those mobilizing today, and will save lives—though as long as this system that requires police violence to control a big share of its population survives, any change in police policy will be aimed at keeping the poor in line more effectively.
We shouldn’t expect the police to be something they’re not. We ought to know that origins matter, and the police were created by the ruling class to control working class and poor people, not help them. They’ve continued to play that role ever since.
This post first appeared at the Labor and Working Class History Assocation blog.
JUNE 5, 2020
In Minneapolis, Cops Were Kicked Out of Schools. Cities in 7 Other States Could Soon Follow Suit.
Activists around the country are rallying for #PoliceFreeSchools.BY INDIGO OLIVIER, In These Times
National groups like the Movement for Black Lives and Scholars for Black Lives have launched campaigns to get schools, colleges and universities to cut ties with the police.
Activists around the country have intensified calls for police-free schools following the Minneapolis Board of Education’s decision on June 2 to terminate its contract with the city’s police department. The school board’s announcement came in the midst of the nationwide protests in response to the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police. The move was celebrated widely on social media, with organizers pointing to the victory as a model for other school districts to follow.
45% of American schools report having “school resource officers” nationwide, and there are 52,000 of them nationwide, according to Education Week. Incidents of police brutality for minor offenses like refusing to get up from a desk or using phones in class have sparked outrage in recent years, but institutional reform has been slow. Law enforcement’s presence on school campuses increases the likelihood of student arrests and facilitates a school-to-prison pipeline, with particularly disastrous consequences for Black students. It also drains hundreds of millions of dollars from school budgets across the country. Though the movement to decarcerate schools is decades old, efforts to end relationships with police departments have grown in force in recent years. Now, that movement is gaining new urgency.
There is a visible ripple effect taking place. The hashtag #PoliceFreeSchools has been trending on social media, with a number of activists, organizations, students and educators demanding that their cities follow Minneapolis’ lead. And national groups like the Movement for Black Lives (M4BL) and Scholars for Black Lives have launched campaigns to get schools, colleges and universities to cut ties with the police. “Now more than ever, as we envision anew schools, colleges, and universities in what will follow the Covid-19 pandemic, we believe the discontinuation of contractual relationships between local police organizations and educational institutions is a moral imperative,” an open letter on Wednesday from Scholars For Black Lives said.
But the real action has been on the local level. Ahead of the Minneapolis vote, school board member Josh Pauly told the Huffington Post that school district representatives in “Arizona, North Carolina, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Washington, Oregon, New York and Illinois” reached out to ask for support on drafting similar proposals. This is already yielding results; on Thursday, for instance, the superintendent of the Portland, Ore., public schools announced that he was “discontinuing the regular presence of school resource officers,” adding, “we need to re-examine our relationship with the [Portland Police Bureau].”
Activists want to make sure this momentum continues. Shortly after Minneapolis’ decision, the Urban Youth Collaborative, a youth organization that has been working on ending the school-to-prison pipeline in New York for over a decade, called on Mayor Bill de Blasio to follow Minneapolis’ lead. “Now is the time for New York City to take the same action, along with other schools around the country,” the group said in a press statement. Over the past four days, IntegrateNYC, a youth group working to integrate New York City classrooms, has collected 16,000 signatures in a petition calling on Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York City Board of Education to defund the police and remove them from public schools.
Similar drives have been launched in Phoenix, Seattle and Oakland, while members of the Denver school board and the superintendent of the Denver Public Schools announced on Tuesday that they would begin a critical conversation around schools and police.
In addition, the Chicago Teachers Union, students, and a number of community organizations started a campaign on Wednesday demanding that the Board of Education and Chicago Public Schools (CPS) end its $33 million-a-year contract with the Chicago Police Department and reinvest in school resources. (The contract was approved in 2019; in comparison, the overall 2019 CPS budget allocated $2.5 million to hire 30 school nurses and $3.5 million to hire 35 social workers in a school district that serves over 355,000 students, making it the third-largest in the United States.)
Pointing to the precedent Minneapolis just set, the coalition wrote, “What we’re asking for is not just reasonable and responsible, but entirely possible.” The campaign has been endorsed by a number of organizations including Students Strike Back, Assata’s Daughters and the Brighton Park Neighborhood Council.
Derrianna Ford, 16, spoke in front of the Chicago Board of Education in the summer of 2019 to oppose the police contract but said students’ concerns weren’t heard. “We were calling on this money to be spent on nurses because we are so understaffed. We were asking for counselors,” she said in an interview this week.
Derrianna, who just finished her junior year at Mather High School in Chicago’s North Side, said her school is overcrowded and under-resourced, with one nurse coming in on Tuesday and Thursday mornings to serve nearly 1,500 students. “I’m going into senior year next year and I’ve never met my counselor. Never,” she said.
Derrianna described an environment of fear among the student body when it comes to “school resource officers,” whom, she said, teachers will call upon to handle minor transgressions like students refusing to do their work or putting their heads on their desks.“It’s like [teachers] use them as a weapon or something,” she said.
Derrianna started organizing with Voices of Youth in Chicago Education (VOYCE), a youth-led organizing alliance for education and racial justice, about two years ago, though the group has been organizing to dismantle the school-to-prison pipeline in Chicago schools for much longer.
“VOYCE has been working on this from the start and we are not quite where [Minneapolis is] at, but we will keep pushing and keep fighting until we’re there,” Derrianna said. She’s been out protesting peacefully every day and mentioned that VOYCE is continuing to organize around safe learning environments. The Minneapolis school board’s decision, she believes, has put more pressure on Chicago Public Schools to consider students’ demand to rid the city’s campuses of its police presence in the future. “Minneapolis really showed that it’s possible. All we have to do is keep fighting,” she said. “They see it coming.”
Progressive journalism is needed now more than ever, and In These Times needs you.
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