No good cops in a racist system
P1. The traditional Marxist theory of the state has been that of police; insofar as the state is gradually dissolved in tandem with stages or steps to higher-stage communism (lower to higher; i.e., the most advanced), the police is likewise, and insofar as there is a state no longer in the proper sense of the word but still remaining, there is police in a “transformed” formation. Police “cannot be abolished” in one shift movement, police “cannot be dissolved” in a night and there are various reforms proposed for the present instead.
P2. But police and prison abolition has been as much about construction as it has been about destruction. In fact abolition is principally construction as opposed to destruction as principal. Abolition has thus not simply been about burning the prisons in a day, tearing down the precincts in a day — although it desires shift action in this direction as opposed to tardiness. Abolition reveals the police cannot be fundamentally reformed, and that if they cannot be fundamentally reformed, they cannot and will not exist in a new class form either; insofar as there is police there is a vestige of that bourgeois, he remains insofar as a police force remains; insofar as policing continues, the practicing of colonial and capital social relations is continuing.
P3. There can be no police without domination, no police without oppression of the oppressed; they cannot be so smoothly, elegantly, “transformed” into an instrument of a socialist dictatorship of the proletariat, and insofar as they still exist mark the existence of a nascent new bourgeoisie, and of a marking and development of capitalism from within the socialist state.
P4. The traditional Marxist perspective has proposed it will be smashed like any state instrument over time but that the abolition demand is comparatively utopian. I am flipping this on its head. I am stretching Marxism again as did Fanon. And insofar as the police and the prison exist, revolution will be prevented, and to the extent that they are eradicated, revolution will be facilitated.
P5. Police are permanently an inherent hindrance on revolution. They cannot be kept after the culmination of revolution and will simply sabotage revolutionary tide back in the other direction.
P6. The capitalist can be said to be capital embodied, and he is but the interest of capital; if he does not follow this interest, if he does not strive to maximise it, he will die as the capitalist. The cop is the embodied appendage of capital, and he becomes this embodiment in a more indirect yet no less ideologically and practically redefining way. He has become the armed dog, the vassal, of capital. He will shoot, torture, tase, attack whoever is seen as a threat to capital. Insofar as there is the continuation of the yoke of capital, there is the continuation of police brutality. Police brutality is an expression of the accumulation of capital that is derived from the subduing of all forces deemed relationally to be a force antagonistic to it. The capitalist is overthrown insofar as communism must mark the dissolution of capital; the capitalist must be overthrown promptly, and any historical examples of his continuance in state power has either been by way of absolute forced concession (NEP-era USSR) or counter-revolution (post GPCR China). The capitalist is overthrown forthwith because he is the barrier to the proletarian revolution. And the cop is the same, he is just the appendage of this capitalist. He is no longer a worker. He may not own capital, but he has become a part of it.
P7. There is a certain kind of rot that sets in from being this armed appendage of capital that exists to terroristically assault all to whom you are opposed in this class-colonial struggle antagonism. The police officer has quite literally subsisted off of blood. Capital sucks labour-power vampire-like; the cop sucks living life vampire-like. The cop takes a man who has shoplifted a simple item, and he shoots him. The cop takes a trans woman who has sold sex in order to pay rent, and he rapes her. The cop takes a child who has “misbehaved” (so-called) in school and he tasers him. It can be said the cop literally, relationally, is a blood-sucking force, not just a labour-sucking force. Capital has brought thousands of workers with it into the grave, into the catacombs, and we can say the capitalist’s duty is to be the facilitator of middle man of this process — perhaps even the initiator, or the grave digger. The cops who have taken their jobs as cops are bastards relationally because they are serving a colonialist-capitalist-imperialist racist system and a transfemicide institution. They are, to wit, bastards personally because their lives have subsisted off of so much human misery, so much incarceration, torture, isolation, sound deprivation, food deprivation, driving people into mental illness deliberately, even to them bemusingly, that they can no longer be said to have a personality that exists in independent of this simply colonial sadist social and political function.
P8. A cop is a violence worker. He knows nothing except the gun and the taser and the stick he uses to beat up students. He is the executor at Soweto, Watts, Jenin, Rafah, Ferguson, Minneapolis, and My Lai. He is the torturer par excellence; we call him a he because his work as a violence worker inserts him into a tool of violent colonialist-imperialist patriarchy that has developed and flourished off of colonial dispossession of an explicitly (trans)femicidal character. He is almost always cisgender and this is an occupation designed principally and exclusively for the cisgendered male and for his unmitigated, open, flagrant savagery on the oppressed.
P9. Prison is the deprecation of sensation of the prisoner. Prison is torture. Prison has deprived the prisoner of the right to be a social human creature. A social human creature has developing their own skills, their own habits, and particularities over a life time — their life activity is inextricably linked to social human interaction. Prison is the antithesis of interaction; healthy human interaction on one pole is the forced seclusion and imprisonment on the other pole. This is an antagonism. There is a section of the oppressed allowed the right to have basic right to communication and human interaction, and a section of the oppressed so hyperoppressed they have not even got that.
P10. Prison is behavioural, psychological manipulation and brainwashing. It has broken people down — its purpose is to break people down, and it is rooted in a colonial and simultaneously capital practice of attempting to break people down insofar as their resistance must be hindered and broken and they themselves stulified into being the vassals, the unquestioning appendages, of capital. Prison has sought to brainwash people into being meek, unquestioning — moldable, able to be taken and distorted, “reformed,” deprived of even the most basic human rights and even thinking itself.
P11. In prison you are not allowed to think. Thinking is something the bourgeois society is seeking to eradicate in the imprisoned person insofar as this thinking is reflective of a social consciousness that has come from practice which has been deemed notably threatening to the status quo (political prisoner), or which comes from a super-exploited and nationally oppressed strata that is seen as in need of extermination or population control for the sake of settler-colonialist imperialist order. They are seen as disposable.
P12. Prison is a rape reich. Trans women are v-coded, as they become the sex objects of the prison. The prison has sought to reduce down the imprisoned cisgender man down, purposefully, to violent patriarchal ideology, and then used to rape a trans woman, typically of whom is a trans woman of colour, especially a Black trans woman. This is essentially a transmisogynoirist and transphobic rape reich. Transmisogynoir is the fulcrum of the prison regime and the state macho rapist.
P13. The capitalist [parasite] state is a macho rapist, is the consolidation of the control and power of the male rapist. The woman is thrown in prison. The sex worker is thrown in prison. There is no mercy and they are punished for breaking the patriarchal relation that erupts in the violence of rape and sexual harassment.
P14. Prison is an ableist institution. Prison has killed and is killing thousands of disabled people, or it is making them disabled and thereupon depriving and denying them of accommodations, medicine, and whatever is needed for the continuance of life.
P15. Prison is a racist genocide institution, and has been instrumental in oppressing and subjugating the occupied native nations and the Black nation in New Afrika; it has thrown countless lives into prison to control and prevent another national liberation uprising, another watts, another Detroit, another Ferguson. Prison is an expression and elaboration of genocide itself. Prison is genocide.
Shut it down
C: The revolution in Paris burned the guillotine to mark its qualitative leap over the bourgeois society [Marx, Paris Commune]. The decolonial proletarian revolution will be principally marked by the destruction of the police precincts, the end of all the criminalisation of sex workers, the liberation of all imprisoned people from prison, the end to all imprisonment and end to all caging.
C: The decolonial proletarian revolution will be principally embodied and exemplary of a prison abolition and a police abolition.
C: The decolonial proletarian revolution abolishes forthwith the police and prison.
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