[Note: This essay was originally prepared for the CPUSA’s online blog. It was rejected, having been characterized as too far afield of the party’s Constitution to warrant any internal party discussion it would have provoked, however fruitful. I reproduce it here in its entirety.]
Judging by the left’s activities, this past year will live on as the year of uprising against police brutality. Centuries of discontent erupted as yet more black, brown, working-class, and poor people were murdered last year: 1,126 by one count. Indeed, there is no justification of any kind that can be made. And yet one simple fact remains: the very same people brutalized by the police year in and year out keep calling them back. The Vera Institute estimates that around 240 million 911 calls are made every year. It might seem strange that many of the victims summon their own killers, but what other option exists in a country that has no other effective means of conflict resolution or maintaining order? What’s more, the police aren’t even very good at their job. [1] How irrational is it then to have to rely on a body that purports to solve our problems only to end up killing us?
And herein lies the challenge for today’s left. The outrage over police brutality exposes a problem and opportunity for the left to manage its own expectations. Seriously, what else other than brutality should we expect from our police forces? They are nothing but the enforcers of bourgeois property relations, relations that have become reified and self-contradictory in the face of superior industrial economic relations. As such, there is literally no reform that can address this. Nothing can be done to change the politics or class content of the police. They operate like this out of necessity.
By contrast, the left can change its politics. The left could start from the contradiction of the working class’s reliance on the police, instead of making demands of an irredeemable institution. Why is it that ordinary people have nowhere else to turn in the face of emergencies, petty or grand? In other words, why has the working class not yet taken responsibility for capitalism? Why has the left not organized it so as to awaken its own potential to do so? Asking these questions is much more revealing than the usual battery of why the police is so racist, etc. For this line of questioning gets us to the heart of the problem of capitalism: that of assuming responsibility for history; of taking our own hyper-productivity into collective, conscious control. The bourgeoisie and its police are far too inept to rule at this point, not by their own idiosyncrasies but rather their necessary class position. By contrast, the proletariat is the only class capable of overcoming capitalism, of overcoming the self-contradiction of bourgeois freedom, but it has thus far shown its unwillingness to take on this responsibility. Where the left should exist to bridge the gap, it too has fallen by the wayside, concerned more with the raciality of policing rather than its ultimate extinction.
But there is no reason this need continue. If the left can take up the problems of irrationality and Bonapartism at policing’s core, then it just may be able to have its cake and eat it too: there can be no racist policing if the police cease to exist at all. Can the CPUSA become the party to put forth this kind of analysis? Doing so would surely run the risk of getting ‘cancelled.’ But these times call for bravery. And what could be more brave than telling the truth, the truth about class that has been (un)wittingly submerged in the left’s passionate but misguided efforts over the last 50 years?
A tale as old as Bonaparte
To tell the whole story about policing, we need to revisit a concept Marx and Engels intimately described: Bonapartism. The French Revolution, which expressed the Third Estate’s political consolidation after centuries of its slow development, set the model for bourgeois revolutions the world over. But the actual intricacies of the events during and after the revolution are not as linear as they may appear to us now. The bourgeois revolution did not yield the democracy of labor hoped for by many. Rather, it went through successive stages of terror to culminate in Napoléon Bonaparte’s first empire. After the restoration of the monarchy in 1814, the legacy of the French Republic was in serious doubt. Thus the abortive revolutions of 1848 attempted to change course, but those too only produced Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte, about whom Marx would pen the infamous line about history repeating first as tragedy then as farce. What was farcical about Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte’s second French empire, and the phenomenon to which it gave its name?
1848 marks a turning point in history. The series of revolutions emanating from and around it [2] represented the self-contradictoriness of the bourgeois era itself. The bourgeoisie found that the world as-it-was was already what it had hoped for all along. And yet that still wasn’t good enough for anybody, themselves included. The rationally-organized, competitive market had birthed an industrial society capable of reproducing society autonomously without human intervention. That is, industry promised to eliminate labor. But human labor was the foundation of bourgeois freedom, even if it had already become fetishized as private property. [3] Thus, the spirit of bourgeois revolution could no longer push the world forward, no longer advance the dialectic it itself had introduced. It instead stagnated, hardened, clung to the world as it was instead of pushing ahead to the world as it could—and should—be. The bourgeoisie lost its class-wide revolutionary dynamism after 1848, not by choice but by necessity. Danton could not but be reincarnated as Bonaparte. The bourgeoisie as a class thus became incapable of taking responsibility for history any longer.
And yet, bourgeois governance persisted! The Bonapartist empire made active use of the ideals first institutionalized in the French Revolution and even made life better as compared to the Hungry ‘40s. Bonaparte’s administrative bureaucracy feigned at managing society. But all it could really do was sloppily hold the inherently unstable pieces together. Imperialism is just another name for Bonapartism in the changed condition of the presence of international commercial monopolies. [4] World War I was the logical outgrowth of Bonapartism that Marxists had been predicting for decades. And yet it still happened. More to the point: it still happens, as bourgeois governance ever since has exhibited the same characteristic.
All the violence of imperialism aside, this arrangement is irrational and problematic because it does not have to be so. Equally since 1848, since the industrializing process revealed the contradiction between bourgeois life as-it-is and as-it-could-be, since the class struggle became real and unobstructed for the first time in history, [5] the working class has been capable of stepping into the vacuum of power created by the bourgeoisie’s descent into conservatism. The condition of subject-objecthood that the proletariat embodies reveals that it alone is capable of becoming self-conscious of the dialectic of labor-capital that is moving history forward toward the emancipatory society. [6] It is not precisely that its interests line up with its historical mission, nor that the bourgeoisie’s interests compel it to conservatism. We know from any trade-union politics just how much of an interest the working class has in maintaining the status quo; likewise, the bourgeoisie’s interest in the status quo is self-evident. Rather, it is that the bourgeoisie cannot but fail because its solutions to the problem of history are always capital-driven. That is, they always advance that which embodies radical human self-alienation from its productive labor. [7] Labor-ists, such as unscientific socialists back in the day, are also hopelessly incapable of leading society. This Marx and Engels critiqued ruthlessly: the proletariat’s task is not to win the game of Monopoly, but rather to play the game so as to render it unplayable. Since the Paris Commune, we have known that this will necessitate the taking of state power, but that is not the end in itself. Rather, the proletariat’s mission points to its own self-extinguishment in the fulfillment of the bourgeoisie’s own revolutionary promises—because no one should ever have to live like a modern worker! This is, in other words, an argument from history, from the necessary task capital imposes on us by solving the problem of society’s reproduction, of surplus value, for us. We just need to take ownership of the daily revolution all around us that is capitalism. Otherwise, we will reproduce its crisis forever.
Thus the source of the historical repetition in capitalism. The miserable state of Bonapartism, or the bourgeoisie’s incapability and the proletariat’s immaturity to govern, means that history will keep replaying itself until we work our way out of it. But each time it repeats it also changes, giving rise to Lenin’s conception of history as spiral: repetitive, yet always also slightly translated, either progressively toward ‘the better’ or regressively toward ‘the worse.’ Both are possible and ongoing occurrences. Thus, we will continuously be tasked with fulfilling the past rather than creating the future. Indeed, the future is only accessible through the past that must be put to rest through the dictatorship of the proletariat. [8] Clever phrase, that: for it is nothing other than Bonapartism conscious of itself. That is the working class’s duty as of 1848. To it and only it falls the imperative to liberate humanity from the contradiction of its own labor-power. A humble if necessary goal in the grand scheme of things, all ironies aside.
I mentioned the proletariat’s ‘immaturity.’ Because obviously we wouldn’t be here if World War I had given rise to the world dictatorship of the proletariat instead of the League of Nations. For the working class as yet has not assumed this responsibility for capitalism. The crisis continues. But of course it was never capable of doing so spontaneously or immediately. The left existed precisely to mediate the crisis of capital via the state. The socialist party was thus originally conceived not as an interest group representing the workers in a redistributive fight against their bosses. Rather, the party was the instrument for manifesting this historical duty. Of course, throughout time and place the two conceptions of the party have blurred, sometimes strategically. But the left must only exist as the necessary but ultimately dispensable means of awakening the proletariat to its task. Thence arises the left’s ‘leadership,’ by no means a small feat.
But the left has systematically abandoned this self-conception, in the process turning its back on the working class. In the wake of the world-historic civil war that was World War I, the left shrank back from the task it formerly accepted responsibility for. The world saw just how deep the problem of bourgeois freedom really goes and just how much blood would be spilled trying to resolve it. So the left gave up, threw its hands up, and retreated into other pursuits (Heideggerianism, post-structuralism, postmodernism, etc.). The right then was left to take up the proletariat’s revolutionary urges, and what we got was fascism. This further increased the left’s suspicion toward its own task until the point we find ourselves in now: a conscious attempt to obliterate the legacy of the Enlightenment from history. The very desire for revolution is now regarded as suspect, as leading to fascism all along. No wonder the despair of entire generations! But that is a tale best left for another time. We ought to get back to it, namely, what all this has to do with the police.
Property, police, and maybe one day, socialism
We can rather easily diagnose the origin of policing. The police have always existed to protect private property against labor, which is itself a self-contradictory and impossible task. Capital, it turns out, is best not left to the anarchic freedom of the marketplace. Those who would see in American chattel slavery the origin of modern policing are thus correct precisely where they are incorrect. The police have nothing to do with racism per se. Against Malcolm X, capitalism can still be capitalism without racism, for indeed it already has been. Rather, racism has everything to do with property, with the self-contradiction of bourgeois freedom, with the pathology of the human transition from class society to communism. Far from reductionist, the return to a class analysis thus absorbs and overtakes a purely racial analysis, but once again I digress.
The real tragedy of police brutality is not the loss of life per se but rather the sheer senselessness of it all. The fact that the bourgeoisie are unfit to rule and yet still do is the deeper problem. By our own labor, we shouldn’t have to rely on them for anything. And yet by the self-alienation of our labor expressed as it is through bourgeois social relationships, we have no other choice but to depend on them for everything from our wages to our public safety. This very situation distills the century-and-a-half of Bonapartism down into every single interaction between worker and police (themselves workers!). Bonapartism is replayed again and again on a daily level. The real tragedy and cause for outrage is thus this very trap.
How else might we make sense of the consistent working-class demand for law and order? The working class is the most enthusiastic in its support for the police. Some would like to demonize its desire for law and order rather than recognize how each is warped into self-contradictoriness in capitalism. The proletariat’s desire for law and order reflects a desire for something beyond this society as it currently is, as neither is currently attainable so long as bourgeois social relations persist. Thus what could be an avenue into class consciousness is instead vilified as ‘internalized racism.’
Some would go in the other direction and call to merely reform the police. Police shouldn’t have weapons, some say; others clamor for body cameras. Still others are seduced by the magical words, ‘community control.’ The existence and apparent stability of so many other countries around the world who already implement some or all of these practices is apparent evidence of the backwardness of American policing. As if the goal were to catch up to the rest of the world! For has capitalism disappeared in those far-off lands? One may want to cite China here. But even if we became a police state like China, one that relies more on surveillance than on direct physical coercion, would we be better off? The police can still be brutal without being physically violent. Being locked up for the slightest sedition or having bank assets frozen for minor infractions hardly seems an improvement. [9] Why not just get rid of the police altogether and replace them with an unarmed, interdisciplinary team of ‘experts?’ That sounds good, but it too is a sham. The self-contradictory divorcing of capital from labor cannot be sustained by anyone. Left to itself, this dynamic will tear society apart; indeed, it is already tearing earth’s environment apart. Not that the solution would be to reunify what really are two halves of the same whole production process. Their nonidentity is precisely what yields such historically unprecedented productivity. No—the only solution left would be to self-consciously manage the dialectic until it no longer governed history, until the reproduction of society were removed from human concern completely. Only then could labor melt into play, and capital become unremarkable in its free and communal access.
There is thus nothing to be done about the current state of policing this side of revolution. You might think it still worthwhile to reform the police to ‘save lives,’ but that too is an illusion. While the point of socialism is to create a better world for everyone, that cannot be our immediate goal. We deny utopia now precisely to achieve it later. Our goal in the here-and-now must be singularly focused on arousing the proletariat to its historic task. Ameliorating its everyday woes by engaging in the struggle for ‘reforms’ takes that entire project and balances it on the knife’s edge of failure. Reforms cannot be pursued because they would make people’s lives better now. Rather, they can only be pursued to creatively harness people’s justifiable disgust at this irrational life we all live. Reforming the police is thus an utter oxymoron. Leading the working class down this path is worse than useless—it is treasonous!
From protest to politics?
So how do we change the narrative? We might begin by starting from the contradiction I pointed out earlier: the necessity to call upon the police even though they are more likely to kill than solve a crime. This situation no longer befits human life. Our immense industrial productivity beckons us toward a life that is worthy to be called human. But to get there we need to drop the bourgeois social relationships weighing us down literally to death. The justifiable public outrage over police brutality is such a fearsome point of access into just such a consciousness. Never before have such large and sustained protests been witnessed in this country. How might we channel all that discontent into the movement to overcome its source? That is the only question that can be posed before such a phenomenon as police brutality. To ask anything else, including how to obliterate institutional racism, is at best a second-order question that obscures just as much as it potentially illuminates.
Imagine the new kind of politics such a theory could produce. The left could break free from its self-imposed irrelevance simply by changing its narrative. Real, hard-core proletarian socialism could grace the earth once more. Such ‘innovation’ really derives its poetry from the past, as this was the mainstream of socialist politics until the 1920s. The fact that we must return to the past for our future is indicative of the depths of historical regression we have to climb out of. The persistence of the police is but one manifestation of this regression. We don’t need police anymore, yet we do crave law and order (and property!). As long as the square hole is the only option, we’ll keep shoving the round peg into it to no avail.
Furthermore, this kind of sea change would pull the rug out from under the right. The right has a field day when The Squad or any other progressive blurts out calls to defund the police. Why? Because the right listens to working people, most of whom don’t want to defund the police! But many of them are also fed-up with the state intruding into the modicum of liberty they do enjoy. We, and only we, could offer them a means to have both. Only socialism can provide the service that the police pretend to be providing while eliminating them full-stop. Moreover, this narrative would neutralize the conservatism of police unions and turn them into siblings in the class struggle. While the left has despaired at the decline of union membership, some 240,000 workers are represented by police unions, according to the National Association of Police Organizations. The silliness and near-fascism of progressive anti-racism automatically turns these workers into enemies. [10] Let’s face it—we have a hard enough fight as it is to discount the support of almost 300,000 trained and well-armed workers. No revolution will succeed without them.
Or is that too ‘racist’ to admit? Because that is perhaps the hardest problem to overcome. The left’s own anti-neoliberalism has produced a democratic revolution in terms of access to the ill-gotten goods of capitalism. But it has not been able to hold intact the notion of society’s integral self-contradiction from previous generations. As such, ‘cancel culture’ emerges as an authentic expression of liberatory tendencies when it really just glorifies the fact that Marxism has died. The thrust of the question then pivots from the capitalists and their police, who are as impotent as ever, to us. That is, the left has always had the capacity to decide the outcome of this struggle. Whether we advance this narrative shift is up to us—no one but the rest of the left is pressuring us to the contrary. So, is our party brave enough to take this on? Is it brave enough to go against the grain and pose the question of capitalism anew? The world is literally dying for someone to do so. Where and when will the buck stop? That is the true insight that the issue of police brutality can offer to us.
Endnotes:
See for example Baughman 2020a, https://dc.law.utah.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1202&context=scholarship and 2020b, https://theconversation.com/police-solve-just-2-of-all-major-crimes-143878; Young 2020, https://www.huffpost.com/entry/the-police-arent-good-at-solving-crimes_n_5ee7b4fbc5b614b68adec9b1; and Mark 2020, https://www.insider.com/police-dont-solve-most-violent-property-crimes-data-2020-6.
1848 is not confined to a single year or continent, although the European revolutions of 1847-48 get the most attention. For example, the American Civil War of the 1860s and the Indian Mutiny of 1857 were also theaters of this world-historic event, to name only two.
Here ‘property’ is to be understood in the Lockean sense as the ability to change the world embodied in human labor and objectified in capital, a usage that is lost on us contemporaries. It survives only when we speak of the ‘properties’ of a thing to talk of its characteristics.
See Kotlas 2016, https://platypus1917.org/2016/10/06/future-instead-past-bookchin-marx/.
See Gabrellas 2011, https://platypus1917.org/2011/08/05/on-the-marxism-of-rosa-luxemburg/.
See Cohan 2011, https://platypus1917.org/2011/08/05/lukacss-abyss/.
See Cutrone 2014, https://platypus1917.org/2014/11/04/political-party-marxism/.
See Kotlas.
See Smith, et al. 2020, https://platypus1917.org/2020/09/01/police-brutality-and-the-left/.
See Reed Jr. 2018, https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10624-017-9476-3.