There’s a lot going on and I’m not remotely the best person to write about most of it, but a few people have asked me about police unions and police generally, so I’m going to explain some of my understanding. On a related note, I am organizing a reading group on Alex S. Vitale’s The End of Policing and other related works. We’re going to meet online weekly in duplicate Thursday evening and Sunday afternoon sessions. Over 225(!) people have already signed up. We start June 25 and you can sign up to get the materials.
Policing under capitalism
Let me be clear: Ending policing is the goal. Nothing less than that. Defunding is the immediate demand that builds toward abolition. Reform is mostly a distraction; liberals who cannot be convinced otherwise are welcome to pursue reform, but only insofar as it requires no additional resources and does not expand the powers of the police.
That said, let’s go into a Marxist understanding of why policing exists under capitalism, why policing cannot be fully abolished without eradicating capitalism, and why any class society, even a socialist society wherein the working class holds power, will feature policing.
Under capitalism, unemployment is a feature, not a bug. As I discussed in my last newsletter, the owners of capital require a surplus population to discipline their workforce. We live everyday under a threat: go sell your labor power to a capitalist or you will become surplus and be unable to afford the necessities of life. But what would happen if the reserve army of labor were to become an actual army of pissed off young men? They could rise up and seize the property of the capitalists. Thus the capitalists would be smart to pay an armed force to protect their property by subduing the surplus population. That’s a Marxist view of the police and prisons: they exist to protect the property of those on top of the system of production and to corral unused workers. Everything else they do, from peacekeeping domestic disturbances to marching in Pride, is a tactic to establish the legitimacy of the capitalist police force. It’s more effective for the property police to embrace some degree of liberal equality before the law than it is to ruthlessly dominate workers and the unemployed.
If police under capitalism exist to protect property, we would expect them to do things like protect vacant houses from occupation while people in the area are homeless. Of course, this is what happens. We would also expect police to interfere with workers organizing to challenge capital. I just watched Harlan County USA and it’s fantastic. It has footage of cops maybe trying to be impartial yet somehow they always end up smacking workers around. And to tease apart police from other kinds of emergency public services, we would expect to see police in conflict with other members of the working class, say, firefighters. It’s not hard to find; here’s an example in Spain and one in France. It seems police do something besides respond to emergencies. Finally, since capitalism in the capitalist core built its global dominance directly through enslaving Black people, when we watch police protect property against people, we expect to find disproportionately that the property belongs to a white person and the trespasser is Black. Of course, this is the case.
Now, let’s say we do the revolution and the working class replaces the capitalists as the ruling class of society. The continued existence of classes implies there is still some antagonism in play. Under socialism, we should fear that counterrevolutionaries will attempt to seize and privatize property that has been claimed by the public. This will, of course, be illegal. Who will enforce this law? A group of armed people, working on behalf of the working class, with some characteristics similar to police. But instead of indiscriminately beating up poor people, these armed people would repress profiteers. Anarchists deride such people as red cops, but I see their necessity in this theory.
To finish off my understanding of a very doctrinaire Marxist vision, the first time we can imagine a society with nothing resembling police would be in a society without classes. We have a word for a classless society: “We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things.” I am skeptical we will achieve this before climate collapse; we’re not trending towards the good quadrant.
But, as I said, abolition is the maximum demand, defunding is a practical step, and “reform” is a weasel word adopted by liberals and conservatives alike to drive a wedge within the anti-policing movement. That abolition can’t be accomplished under capitalism forces us to reckon with the understanding that capitalism must be surpassed. This is the structure of the demand from all kinds of liberatory thinkers. Socialist feminists understand that “any feminism aimed at liberating all women must itself be anti-capitalist”. Environmental activists know that “ending climate change requires the end of capitalism”. Even militant vegans I have met understand that an end to the manufactured suffering of animals necessitates the end of capitalism. Just because it’s not immediately practical doesn’t mean we shouldn’t demand it.
Abolition as a horizon
People sometimes have an idealized image of how society changes. Often we think of history as some sort of progression of ideas, as different ideas battle it out in the abstract. The whole marketplace of ideas myth is a contemporary rendition of this idealism. But really history plays out in the real world, in a material reality, within structures and institutions that only approximately embody ideas.
Here’s a caricature of this historical idealism: Let’s say that just before the Enlightenment, a bunch of smart white guys trade essays back and forth arguing on the topic of whether society should switch from feudalism to capitalism. They’re determined to come up with the best idea, convince everyone, and enact their plan. A complaint might arise: “Well, sure the growth is nice, but it seems capitalism requires a reserve army of labor which creates this new concept of unemployment. What should we do with unemployed people? Will they be left out on the street, homeless?” “Oh, good point. Let’s not do capitalism, then.”
Of course it wasn’t like that. But it’s pretty much the same as this contemporary conversation: “We should make changes to our society, some of them drastic, that would result in a world where policing in any recognizable form is unnecessary.” “Well, before we go any further, what would we do with Jeffrey Dahmer in such a world?”
Capitalism actually developed as a historical process involving conflict between classes of people. We named the system that came out of the conflict after its victors, the capitalists. Any change to society is going to require conflict and struggle. The idea of police abolition is to struggle against the structures that create a world that requires policing. It will be a generations-long struggle, but we agree upon the goal and we can come to agreement on immediate steps like defunding and disarming police.
Cop unions
So ideas don’t battle it out in some noumenal sphere on the astral plane. They are embodied in material reality and within institutions. If we want to confront the reality of policing under capitalism, we have to confront its earthly forms, and that means police unions.
I first encountered police unions while working on the No on H campaign against the San Francisco Police Officers’ Association’s ballot measure that would have secured funding to get SFPD officers taser guns. The stakes were high; if the POA won, they planned to fund more and more pro-police ballot measures every election. We were supposed to lose—the POA had a much larger budget and controlled the media narrative early on. It sounds good that cops would have tasers as a less-lethal option for subduing suspects, right?
At least, that was their story. In reality, in addition to the massive budgetary shift towards new weapons, the POA measure would widen acceptable use-of-force procedures but would not demote any situation from a use-of-lethal-force (gun) response to a less-lethal (taser) response. The POA’s reasoning was that the police’s lethal-force policies were already tight enough. So under their regulation there would simply be a net increase of armed police violence. I was inspired over the course of the campaign to find that people understood this once we explained it to them. In the end, we beat the POA and their Prop H badly enough that they gave up on other routes to acquire tasers outside the ballot, and to this day SF is one of the only major cities in the US where the cops don’t carry tasers.
My takeaway was that cop unions are powerful and well-funded, and they carry out their institutional imperative diligently. As they say in Systemantics, “The system behaves as if it has a will to live.” The POA will shovel as much funding toward itself as it is allowed. It will give its members as much free rein as allowed. Thus we should not be surprised when cops petition citizens for new toys or lobby against marijuana decriminalization in the interest of keeping their jobs.
Before I delve into what I think might be done about cop unions, I want to make it clear that the left is not of one mind on questions of police and their unions. I recently attended a discussion with Fred Glass, author of From Mission To Microchip: A History of the California Labor Movement where Fred discussed his view of policing. Rather than the orthodox Marxist view, Fred invoked Erik Olin Wright’s concept of contradictory class location, which I’ve referenced before. In this view, police are some part worker and some part servant of capital (my phrasing, not Fred’s). They get a paycheck, they come from the working classes, and they don’t have democratic control over their labor. But they also protect capital and violently oppress the labor movement. Fred’s opinion, to paraphrase, was that every worker deserves a union, but that doesn’t mean a union can protect a worker no matter what they have done. He supported harsh reforms of cop unions but not their abolition. I’d say this shows a trade-union consciousness rather than a full-on class consciousness.
Alex Press wrote maybe the definitive article on the left stance on police unions, and I recommend you read it. Here’s some excellent grounding from her piece:
The Left supports unions not because they’re an inherent good, but because they’re vehicles for building working-class power. If and when unions do not build that power, we should challenge and criticize them, pushing them to reform. And in the case of police unions, we stand against them as such, because no efforts for reform can change their very reason for existence, which is to undermine working-class interests in general, even as they increase the power of their limited membership.
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As Bill Fletcher Jr and Fernando Gapasin argue in Solidarity Divided, a key difference between liberal and left unionism — what they term “pragmatism” or “traditionalism,” and “leftism,” respectively — is who we consider the proper constituency of the union movement, and toward what end we’re struggling. While the traditionalist/pragmatist views union members as the movement’s constituency, with winning gains for the members (fighting for “bread and butter” as it’s often put) as the goal, the leftist takes all members of the working class to be the proper constituency of the union movement, with strengthening this class’s power our goal.
My evolving view is that what’s good for cops is largely bad for the working class, and it is critical that police be disempowered harshly and quickly. Defunding and disbanding PDs is one smart approach. And since police draw power from their unions, we should attack their unions. For starters, we should vote against any politician who takes money from cop unions. Jackie Fielder and Dean Preston are two SF politicians who have long shunned POA donations. We should identify and criticize people who donate to police unions.
But should we use the power of the state and legislation to ban collective bargaining with police unions? Currently, we often do the opposite. Alex Press points out that Scott Walker’s 2011 “anti-union bill — which struck down collective-bargaining rights for public employees — included an exception for the police.” It seems pretty easy for powerful people to understand that cops do something different from teachers. It just seems they like what cops do more than what teachers do. We should be able to understand the difference, too.
In the end, there are a lot of hard questions around ending police unions. Would any legal cudgel we used also affect other unions? Suppose we rapidly lay off a sizable fraction of the over 800,000 cops in the US? What would we do about the highly-armed, trained militants roaming around, many of them affiliated with white-nationalist extremists? Part of me wants to adopt a slow approach to drawdown, but we should also probably make the best of our time in the cool zone.