UTOPIAN CONSIDERATIONS(3) : A copless world
Obvious content warning for everything going on. Discussions of Whiteness, Blackness, police, violence, you know the drill.
What has been different about the recent wave of protests against police brutality and more specifically white supremacist brutality ?
What has been different enough about the death of a Black man (and the death of the Black people in the days that followed) ?
What has been different enough to see (more) non-Black people actually pay attention and time and energy to this when they didn’t before ? It’d be tentative to say people have developped an ethic and a different morale but the truth is that, in America specifically and in the world in general, the rates of joblessness have peaked, the pandemic has made obvious the fascist inclinations of the White higher-middle class/petty bourgeoisie, those people who could still larp as being of the grassroot but were effectively first in line to force people back to work, the gap between rich and poor has never been higher in living memory.
To the Black people who still wonder : white people, regardless of their wealth, will always be quicker to help you when out of perceived necessity rather than out of moral impulse. This is a general rule for people throughout history but at this point in time I think it bears repeating that we’re not dealing in abstractions here. This is not about abstract blackness oppressed by some phantomatic whiteness, this is decisively about extended domination, a prolonged humanist genocide, who gets to live and who has to die. Necropolitics.
What is a cop ?
A cop is a singular tendril of systems it can’t possibly destroy all on its own. (insert still from the 1973 movie Serpico).
I don’t think it’s controversial to say that an individual cell of a body can’t, on its own, destroy the entirety of the body. To take and distort a recurring image : there’s too many “bad apples” to make their tree into a good tree, or too much of the tree for one “good apple” to reverse its tendency to bear bad apples. Especially if the tree in question has been genetically engineered to give off this “bad kind” of apple. In fact, the full saying is “bad apples spoil the bunch”, not “bad apples disappear when you come up with a few rules for how they ought to behave”.
Thinking about this specifically in regards to the “arrest the cops who killed Breonna Taylor” memes making the rounds (which is its own can of worms) : The fact is that arresting three cops doesn’t do anything to change what allowed these three people to do what they did. Yes : they’re at fault as individuals, sure. But they’re not the only ones doing it, they’re not the only ones who’ll keep doing it. Retribution doesn’t solve anything. A better slogan would be “dismantle the system that killed Breonna Taylor”.
Reforms have not made the institutions of police, prison, artificial scarcity, school-to-prison-pipeline less frequent, they’ve in fact solidified these processes. No disrespect to people pushing for reforms but this system is nothing but reforms pilled onto one another. So-called “sensitivity trainings” operate as bureaucratic veils ; proofs that people have tried what they could and that maybe the problem is really with the people who got killed, after all the cop got told that racism is mean, surely they can’t be racist anymore ? It must’ve been the victim’s fault this time, right ?
Reforms either operates on a surface level or on a structural level; there’s reforms that are just a show of intention, an optics thing, and then there’s reforms that try to actually actively change things. Both meet opposition and thus give the impression that they’re on the same level but they’re not.
As I’ve said before, it often feels like some people (mostly reformists) have decided that to have too ambitious a demand would disqualify them from actually getting what they want, for that reason they ask for something lesser, something incremental, some small demand they think they’ll be able to build upon in the month-to-years that follow. This is not just a loser script, this is bargaining with empty hands and no teeth. It’s what happens when you believe (or realize) you have no real leverage and can only ask rather than tell the adversary what you “want”.
The problem of small, “lesser evil”, reformist bargaining is the problem of a strategy that can only think in slow-built, additive and progressive, straight-line change, adding to what’s already there and hoping you can mitigate violence you deem inevitable. It’s about bargaining with a system that’s litteraly built to wound and kill “blacks”. The extent to which people’ve been fucked over by this system means you have to be ignorant, desperate or incredibly cynical to think it’s to be salvaged rather than done away with.
The adversary in question here is not just “the State”, it’s also capital invested in making sure it can secure its interests. That’s why we’re seeing so-called “woke capital” entities (white people stop saying woke challenge 2020) trying to assert their non-racism rather than taking any anti-racist measures : this well paid actor stops voicing a Black character, this company changes its twitter handle to “follow black leadership”, this company sends an ice-cream truck into the CHAZ/CHOP, all of it to seem carefully supportive while not actually doing anything of substance. Capital has no loyalty, only investments.
Social unrest creates enough chit-chat, talk and social media exchanges that corporations want to get in on the action, the optics of seeming progressive without any of the downsides of actually doing anything.
The abolition of the police is not a project for (only) causing ruckus, though it certainly uses agitation to attract attention to itself. Non-violent protests can only generate so much coverage before being completely obscured: look at all the US based peaceful protests that don’t get mainstream coverage even though their sheer number is awe-inspiring. Look at the New York occupied zone, contrast this with the CHOP’s current death toll and its coverage. (Never forget there’s an author for any piece of writing).
This is not a polemics (i hope), this is not a hot take, this is an incomplete piece of writing on a work that predates the police itself. The project of police abolition is the project of taking a boot off a collective neck and it started long before the thin blue line named itself.
Societal Fascism’s watchdogs
The formation of the police in America, as a force of settler colonialism, differs from its formation in other territories like the UK, France or Europe in general, where police was created to handle the riots and popular uprisings that aimed at improving the conditions of the working and nonworking/beggar class.
The function of the police back then was stopping demonstrations and unrest without making martyrs : breaking and not killing. Police in Europe basically started as hired muscle to protect the interests of the owning class and as time went by it got more institutionalised, developed new ways of generating revenue, established itself as the rampart between chaos and civil society, etc.
The Police Force in the US are not just goons and crowds-handler, they’re hunters : The origin of the american police is found in runaway slaves patrols and because of that they’re not concerned with the notion of martyrhood in the same way as their european cousins. Their focus was always already on property, cargo.
This link between slave-hunters and police mirrors the transition in America of the enslaved population into the imprisoned population. Effectively, slavery was never abolished in the USA, it was simply reformed to create a distance between the general population and the coerced labor-force : The prison industrial complex is a distant, palatable, tasteful, reformed version of the american chattel slavery system. It’s not just its descent or a horrible repetition but its direct historical continuation, away from public eye and public life, its image mediated through dramas that humanize prison guards and give inmates satisfying or tragic endings even as they paint the existence of prison and of the Justice System as inevitabilities. Necessary evils.
The fact is that, through American history, goes to prison anyone who’s deemed incapable of integrating into society and thus requires punishment. Crime is the proof of “incapacity to integrate” but crime is necessarily defined according to some standards of living and sociality that demands to already have certain levels of privilege. You need to already be integrated in order to avoid going to prison but anyone found not fitting enough will be punished for it : Vagrancy is a crime that was purposefully created to arrest homeless people. You’re litteraly punished for being poor. (obviously the origin of vagrancy laws is found in the post-1865 jim crow reforms, meant to capture “freed” laborpower and put it in the hands of the State.) Drug dependency is treated as a criminal condition rather than a mental illness, etc.
It’s no coincidence that all of these have historically been tied to the condition of being Black in america. This is not a case of conspiracy, this is not a big bad plan by an evil god (though Black gnosticism would be interesting), this is simply social relations conditioned by racism and white supremacy, intensified by Statepower and Capitalism.
Symbiotic structures that feed off the populations to maintain their presence : with the privatisation of prisons and the rise of the prison-industrial-complex, the State acts more and more as a lender of labor to private actors. Slavery loops back on itself, not as a come back of the practice of coerced labor (it never stopped) but rather as a come back of this particular shape of coercion, as the welfare state lets out its final sighs and companies can reduce their costs as much as possible by employing slave labor at meagre cost.
With all of this in mind, it doesn’t come off as a surprise that multiple white supremacist and propertarian groups (formal or informal) would have a deep presence and influence on what the police does, says, expects and aims for when it kills citizens and non-citizens alike. The fact that it targets “black bodies” to a seemingly disproportionate rate is not a coincidence, nor a fact of genetic proving Black people to be wilder than white people and not just bad luck either. This is simply colonialism and its brother fascism doing what they do.
That the definition of crime and who gets to be punished is pinned down through a hierarchical structure that favors the voice of those already in power doesn’t mean that the practice of punishment simply demands more input from marginalised communities in order to suddenly become good and progressive. In fact it would be far more important to put in question the very practice of retributive justice. The idea that punishment alone can reform criminals, when we have the explicit proof that this is not its function at all.
“fascism is colonialism gone home”
But what do you make of a fascism that is the very cradle of that home ? The United States of America, as a project of secession from the british Empire, did not emancipate shit ; it simply reproduced the relations of exploitation and subjugation already present under the veneer of “enlightened and rational” values. The constitutional right to bear arms is not proof of concern for the troubles of the workers within the settler population but a clear evaluation of the fact that the regime of american life required everyday violence, against the populations displaced and murdered by the arrival of settlers and by the populations reduced to the level of property through slavery.
Racism starts out as a technology for narrative and social control : Capitalism kickstarts itself by intensifying localised ethnical strife, morphing “hatred of the other” into “hatred of Blackness”.
At the beginning of what will be known as the trans-atlantic slave trade, it quickly becomes obvious to the White owning class that they’re gonna have to justify the continuous mass degradation, depersonalisation and destruction of people, their way to do that is by simply making them out to not be human in the eyes of the White proto-working class. Which doesn’t mean racism exists and functions purely as an opportunism today still, even though it expresses itself through a perceived opportunism. What I mean to say is that white people would rather die than prevent Black people from suffering.
Fascism follows and applies the logic of abuse at societal scale, it requires the affector and the affected. One can’t live without the other and needs to mold the other into complete dependance to its movement and effectively, American societal fascism, also known as White supremacy, expresses itself as the drive to exterminate the Black body without ever doing it. The extermination, the final act, the destruction is always on the horizon but never happens. It never happens because people fight it but also because the project of White supremacy is not a project that could survive the elimination of what it deems abject.
The dominator needs something to dominate, which is why it can’t get rid of the dominated once and for all. The very contradiction at the heart of White supremacy is what allows it to sustain itself.
Is Black what isn’t white. And White is always defined in proximity and opposition to Blackness. If this sounds circular it’s because it is. White supremacist rethoric is not just an ideology, it’s a thought-engine, it requires circularity and recursion of thought in order to prevent any critical thinking : to really, actually put White Supremacy into question is to stop the engine and we can’t do that because the engine is what’s carrying us forward.
To decenter whiteness is to be a direct threat to it, therefore it has to reassert itself constantly, and the best way to do so is to cater to the people who uphold and benefit from it, to always distance them and their material condition from the violence necessary to their comfort.
White Supremacist mythology, as all fascist myths do, requires to have a Truth, one that’s unwavering and never changes even when the world does. That Truth of White supremacy is the truth of inferiority and superiority : “inferiority as a weakness is always trying to exterminate superiority and therefore it’s necessary to squash it out if needed and subjugate it if possible.”
From this claim, from this justification of all that’s been done, keeps being done and will be done to people who don’t get to be human, White Supremacy hides its face behind normality, or democracy, or america, or whatever else name it can muster to defend itself.
“In the sunflower patch” - Betye Saar - 1963
What is to be weaved
Abolition teaches us a better world is possible. Either you believe that or you don’t. Either you think you’ll see its potential and act on it in your lifetime or you don’t. But it’s not just about belief, right ?
The fact is that the end of capitalism doesn’t mean the end of prison or police. Though it will transform prisons as we know it, calls to end market-logics will just mean that prison labor will be re-oriented or maybe even reduced to a minimum, it still doesn’t stop prisons from being a punitive apparatus. Prisons with less people in it are still prisons. Likewise, the disappearance of capitalism doesn’t mean the end of White Supremacy.
What we have here is systems in symbiosis ; If you truly wanna rid the world of whiteness, you need to rid the world of cops, and if you wanna get rid of cops you gotta get rid of capitalism as it stands, and if you truly seek to see Capitalism disappear you need the State to be disarmed. All these knots that can’t be untied from one another, rooted and holding as the same weight over all of us but over some more than others.
According to the Afropessimist claim and analysis there’s no end to Black pain and social death as long as civil society persists. (not civil society as an abstract model but as an enduring historical fact and presence). There’s no ethical reconciliation, integration, assimilation possible, Afropessimism asks for nothing less than for the end of the world as it stands. In that sense Afropessimism is not only oppositional but also works through negation. Which is good. Negation is about making space, ridding this place of what exists, creating space for something else to be planted there.
You rid the world of what has been making it work in a certain way, you take the engine off the car and have enough space to put something else instead which will change the function of the car, maybe make it into something else than a car altogether : maybe traction is not what you wanted, pollution probably is the last thing you wanted.
If you’re reading these lines there’s very few chances you believe Oluwatoyin Salau deserved to die, nor Georges Floyd, Tete Gulley, or Breonna Taylor.
In fact maybe you’re of the ones who know guilt and merit is a broken way of looking at this. Punishment doesn’t come to those who deserve it, only to those who couldn’t stop it. And that’s true as much in the USA as in any country in the world.
The notions of criminality, guilt and punishment are themselves, as instruments of State and Capital, always already reinforcing the models and practices of state and capital. In using them you’re not necessarily giving your money and power to either but you’re certainly buying into the way they work and potentially closing off other paths for yourselves, your practices, your rituals. Using these notions as absolutes that are misused rather than situated elements of a society means losing sight of the myriad of possibles and suddenly the world as it stands today appears as inevitable.
Obviously, if we are to live a different world, it’ll demand more than just imagination, we already have an idea that things could be less shit, what we don’t have but need is the sustained practice of care, accountability and transformative justice on a communal level. Forms of sociality that have existed and still exists in certain communities but are very far from having the same worldly prevalence as the entwined practices of judgement and punishment.
Retributive, punishing justice bases itself on the idea of repentance through suffering, you have to go through pain and isolation in order to reflect and become better, the reality is that shame doesn’t change people that effectively.
This method of punishment acts through unwavering violent coercion. It bends bodies regardless of their willingness to bend, things break under the weight of this method. Bodies are thingified ; breaking them is tolerable.
The very definition of crime is bullshit and in fact all of us have committed a crime at some point in our lives, we simply justify it to ourselves in one way or another, depending on how visible the after effect of the crime is in our direct lives. You can easily justify to yourself borrowing a disabled person’s parking spot because you don’t have disabled people in your life and after all, you only stayed there a few hours, it’s probably right, right ? But when you have to choose between two electronics products you are faced with the dilemna of potential consequences (re: images flash before your eyes : coltan, Africa, anthropocene, etc) when actually neither option is a fully, purely ethical action with a clean outcome. Purity is a lie.
When I think about a world after the Knots of punishment and shame, I think about a world where suffering doesn’t have to be useless and in fact might very well never be useless again.
Imagine : a world where you’re not afraid of realising something about yourself because you know it won’t mean you’ll end up on the streets by yourself, hungry and empty. And in fact, you couldn’t be a vagrant because housing would not be a human right guaranteed by some external authority but a necessity provided by the people you live with and for.
Imagine a world where things are not problems to be cut but ties to bind, free or support, relations that are not about squashing out what doesn’t fit but allow it to adapt to the world as the world adapts to its presence.
What if all the things that are deemed abject by the world as it stands today could simply be things to handle and bargain with rather than hide them from view like infected wounds, in shame, in fear of punishment and abuse ?
That’s a possible.
What’s needed in order to bring about a world beyond policing, and beyond imprisonment and beyond Whiteness is a different kind of entanglement, knots that bind people to each others differently than those we feel and see (and grow) as of now. A social life beyond the harm reduction of inevitable punishment, from outside to the inside.
The vagueness of my writing here probably comes from my own lack of active, experiential knowledge about this kind of life. I’ve been a bystander and a reader of accountability procedures but have never conducted one (or been the subject of one). I can only presume and try and foster what would make accountability easier to implement.
I can sense where I need to begin, I just don’t know where your thread comes in.
Ospare@protonmail.com - Ospare@substack.com