A note on police reform and socialism [*]
A Facebook friend is doing research on police reform and asked for my view on it. He comes at it from a personal and family experience of involvement in the New York Police Department, with a more conservative outlook than perhaps most of my readers, and with an academic background in political science and law.
In reply, I stated my views in very general terms, which — I admit — are not very concretely useful. I thought it better to avoid the issues of race, patriarchy, imperialism (and the intimate relation between police and the military), and cultural production (from the academy to the media, with the stereotyping of people as “bad” or “good,” as “smart” or “dumb,” etc.). All of these issues are closely related to the problem of police brutality, especially directed at young Black males. But these are all issues that deserve a separate treatment. My goal in my reply was to connect the problem with the general perspective of socialism. The following is an edited version of that reply.
To preempt misunderstanding, when people from my political tradition speak of policing as a function and the police as a social structure, as a component of the state apparatus, we separate function and structure from the particular individuals involved. This is, of course, an abstraction. The police attracts individuals (especially white males) with specific personal traits, traits that the function of policing then reproduces and amplifies. But this is an aspect of the problem that one can regard as secondary to the structural conditions that make policing possible and inevitable.
Also, when socialists refer to policing and the police, they are very specifically referring to those legally sanctioned functions and structures that enforce social hierarchies — more specifically, class division. In the legal sense, in any class society, rights and obligations are not equitably distributed among people, then enforcing rights and obligations means enforcing social hierarchies ultimately based on access to political clout and, more fundamentally, to wealth ownership.
In this sense, dismantling these rigid social hierarchies, eliminating the conditions that generate class division, is the definitive way to remove the ultimate social necessity for policing. This is the sense in which socialists fight for abolishing the police, the state overall (of which the police is an intrinsic part), and all class divisions. Of course, this doesn’t mean eliminating cops as individuals, just as abolishing slavery doesn’t mean killing slaves or slaveholders. It means dismantling social hierarchies so that the need to protect and reinforce these social hierarchies evaporates.
Of course, in our society today, there are functions, currently assigned to the police and that the police may perform more or less effectively in different times and places, which are not mainly about enforcing social hierarchies or outright capitalist rule. These are relatively genuine serve-and-protect functions, such as traffic management (making sure that school kids don’t get harmed as they cross busy streets, etc.), civil defense and logistical functions in case of natural disasters, etc. All of these functions are not per se policing and any workable society would have to preserve them and improve on them.
Socialists view these functions as social services, best assigned to social workers, psychologists, and other properly trained professionals. Again, the true policing functions are those that are aimed at protecting concentrated wealth ownership (i.e. capital), which in an unequal society like ours translates into enforcing the privileges of the wealthy and the politically powerful at the expense of the rest of society.
Clearly, the definitive abolition of the police (and of the state) is a strategic goal of socialists, but no serious socialist believes that this goal can be attained overnight, let alone in a context in which workers do not yet have decisive political power to organize a new type of state from the bottom up. Rather, police reforms are viewed by socialists as steps in the process of socialist construction, be that within a society still dominated by capital or in a transitional society in which working people wield dominant political power but are still far from a complete reorganization of social life on the basis of cooperation and equity. Of course, the nature of any reform — its scope, methods, etc. — will depend on the specific economic, legal, and political conditions; in particular, it will depend on which social class exercises economic and political dominance.
Obviously, for any police reform to be plausible, one has to consider the very specific conditions that exist in each given place and time, and how these conditions may shift along the way. And, of course, there has to exist a social force endowed with a political vehicle to push the reform — to enact it and make it stick in spite of stubborn opposition. What works in Denver may not work in New York City, what works today may not work in five or ten years, etc.
“Good ideas” are okay but not enough. One needs ideas that relate to heartfelt needs of people, ideas that can capture their hearts and minds, so that they can gain political traction, become law, and then be rolled out, enforced (and adjudicated in case of conflict) at a relatively low cost. If to be implemented, a reform requires an inordinate amount of resources and pushing too many people too much, opening loopholes plus the opportunities for people to use them, then one needs to rethink the approach.
As to agency, the groups of the population who are most likely to mobilize and fight for more profound, radical, and lasting reforms are those who suffer most directly the boot of police brutality. That is regular working people, including the permanently unemployed. All other social groups will tend to feel comfortable with more superficial changes, which can only compound the problem in the long run. This implies that the only police reforms that have the prospect of success are those fought, implemented, and controlled by organized and militant working people.
Even this will not make the reforms foolproof. There is always the possibility of corruption, degeneration, and betrayal of the original purpose of any reform, especially if the deeper social roots of policing (social hierarchies) are not removed. The organized activity, the mass impetus of working people is the only force that may prevent their derailment. This also means that the righteous indignation of working people against police abuse, the outrage of those sectors of the working population who are most directly brutalized by the police (Blacks, Latinos, Native Americans, LGBTQ people, etc.), typically the most impoverished and alienated, is the only sure and effective fuel for significant and durable social change.
Since these groups of people, by definition, as a result of their impoverished and alienated condition, are not yet properly equipped to solve the problems that they face, then they are likely to misdirect and squander some of their collective energy. The job of people who can better see the big picture, the interdependence of the problem with other problems, etc. is precisely to help these groups of people to best direct and organize their fight. The approach of highly educated people who want reform with respect to the victims of systematic police abuse should consist of, patiently and respectfully (not patronizingly), supplying them with the elements of self-education and organization that they need, so their fight doesn’t misfire or backfire.
In fact, this should be, in general, the approach that other working people must adopt toward them. To the extent the struggle for police reform promotes the combative unity of workers by prioritizing the needs of the most impoverished, exposed, and alienated groups, the general attitude of the more privileged or less exposed workers should be one of unflinching solidarity. In fact, solidarity with people affected by systematic police abuse is a precondition for the unity of working people. Any hesitation or conditionality in demonstrating this support stands directly in the way of genuine police reform, class unity, and the further political progress of workers.
And this leads me to another general point: Any police reform, even the most successful, will create a whole new set of problems! This is just life. For example, if a serious reform involves the massive disbanding of police ranks. Other things equal, this may increase the probability of at least some of the laid off officers turning to outright criminality, etc. But, if reforms can only lead to new problems, what’s the point then of a reform? Are we just going to run in circles?
We don’t have to. But to avoid historical vicious cycles, we need to have a compass — a general orientation of where we want to end up. This is the justification for the radical and comprehensive approach to social change that socialists, especially those inspired by Marx, advocate. Here, I repeat Donald Knuth’s famous saying: “The root of all evil is premature optimization.” Indeed, the solution of an individual, local, or temporary problem by worsening conditions for other people, the rest of the world, or generating larger problems in the future can never be a true or definitive solution. The global problems created by solving a local problem should not be larger than the problem at hand.
In other terms, if a solution doesn’t generalize, if it is not a solution for everybody at once, as opposed to a solution for only some people, then it cannot be a true solution. It is just another problem, perhaps worse than the initial one. Furthermore, a true solution has to incorporate the needs and interests not only of the people who exist today, but also those not yet born.
Thus, in accordance to this criterion, Trump’s slogan of “America First” is entirely ill conceived. In an unequal, divided society along the path to a free society, a better slogan could perhaps be “The global 99% first,” “The workers of the world first,” or — as the construction of a socialist order proceeds, “The human race first.” But even the latter, “The human race first, “ may not work well, if it leads to disregarding the ways in which human activity today affects the rest of nature, and our indispensable interaction with it in the longer run.
As far as the general direction of the reforms, one may want to start by thinking of a perfect Jeffersonian checks-and-balances institutional set. This is good because it doesn’t presuppose well-behaved people, but only that people check on one another and thus make one another behave in ways that better harmonize with the behavior of others.
This would have to be a flat society, with no social hierarchy — or rather, if there are social hierarchies, these are local or temporary, but never permanent and global. The natural heterogeneity of people, their diversity of talents, etc., would not be an excuse for any permanent social hierarchy. To illustrate the idea with something more or less familiar, imagine a relatively homogeneous “middle class” neighborhood or country with people from a more or less similar socioeconomic background, without perceived large racial or ethno-cultural differences so that people more or less share civic and ethical norms.
In this setting, the amount of social conflict would be so minimized that policing would become largely unnecessary. Now try to imagine how these conditions can be extended nationally and globally. Do not resist the idea as utopian, because it has never existed before. Even if it it turns out to be impossible to construct such a social order, allow at least for the possibility of marching in that direction.
You won’t be surprised to know that this ideal setting, conceived as a global human society, is another way of describing socialism. (Actually, Marx insisted that socialism was the movement towards it, rather than some polished society at the end. But anyway.)
In this context, people would have a large measure of control over their civic, political, and legal institutions as free individuals. Since they all are assumed to have equitable political influence, with their rights more or less evenly matched with their obligations to others, then it presupposes that they also have an equitable access to wealth. And this is actually its thorniest aspect: its political economy.
I am not referring here to a global economy where production is carried out by small privately-owned and independent units: a society of farmers and artisans, in which people transfer wealth from the point of production to their ultimate uses via market exchange. History shows that this type of society can only be compatible with a relatively low technological base. Such an arrangement would not be stable, because private ownership would tend to concentrate in fewer and fewer hands leading to a hierarchical social order.
In a technologically advanced society, much of society’s productive wealth consists of massive economic networks with highly integrated operations that extend over large areas of the planet. Think of the structure of an Amazon, a Walmart, an Alphabet (Google), or a conglomerate like General Electric. Picture them as shifting structures, getting upgraded and more complexly interdependent over time as knowledge grows with practice.
Some of the functions of these economic networks will be best managed by breaking them down into smaller decentralized, local units. That could get them more directly in touch with the needs of people and place them more directly under local supervision and control. But other functions will have to be managed more centrally or globally to avoid unnecessary redundancy, conflict, and waste. Regardless, to ensure more or less equitable popular control over them, to prevent abuse and corruption, their managers would have to be placed under tight bottom-up supervision, with a high degree of accountability to the ultimate co-owners, who would be everybody.
The ownership of these economic networks would have to be shared collectively, just like the ownership of today’s corporations is shared by their stockholders. And, again, among the co-owners one would have to include not only the people who exist but also those not yet born, as they can be legally represented today in bequest fiduciary instruments.
In this light, the issue of reforming the police today appears as a step in the direction of such a flat, non-hierarchical socialist society, where the solutions of your individual problems will not be at my expense, where your better living and working conditions won’t entail misery and alienation for others. As Marx and Engels phrased it in the Communist Manifesto: “An association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.”
[*] William Machi (John Jay College for Criminal Justice) offered me valuable and much appreciated comments on an earlier version of this post.
