The following is an extract from the Introduction to The Global Police State, a new book by William I. Robinson that was released early this fall by Pluto Press.
In her novel Everything is Known, Liza Elliott describes a future dystopia where five global mega corporations, dubbed Affiliations, rule the planet. “Infested with the inescapable surveillance industry, the five global Affiliations manipulated Big Data to commodify and commercialize all human activity for profit.” The Affiliations had subordinated states to their domination: “George Orwell got it wrong. Big Brother did not come from a totalitarian state, but from a totalitarian non-state.” Big Data was “a relentless cybernetic grandmaster who with sneaky eyes and listening ears spied on everything: your clothes, your friends, recording every word you spoke or wrote. It kept account of all this and more to amass the info power it needed to control the market, the heartbeat of the money economy.” The world’s population had become divided into three segregated social clusters, the members of the Core, the Peripherals, and the Outliers who comprised a majority of humanity:
Outliers were the discarded people. If they could not function in the Affiliation run world, they were cast off. Their lives, such as they happened, were their own fault. There would never be sympathy. They scrounged out a life with the dregs, the overruns, and the un-sellable excesses from the opulent Core and stark Periphery. Some worked unpredictable marginal field-labor jobs while others scrounged in the leftovers, the scraps, and the trash.
The world Elliott describes could well be, with not much of a stretch, a portrait of the one we live in. The unprecedented concentration of capital at the global level has cemented the financial power of a transnational corporate elite that uses its economic power to wield political influence and control states. In 2018, just 17 global financial conglomerates collectively managed $41.1 trillion, more than half the GDP of the entire planet. That same year, the richest one percent of humanity, led by 36 million millionaires and 2,400 billionaires, controlled more than half of the world’s wealth while the bottom 80 percent had to make do with just 4.5 percent of this wealth. It is this mass of downcast humanity that make up Elliott’s Peripherals and Outliers, what in the pages to follow are referred to as surplus humanity.
Yet the technical infrastructure of the twenty-first century is producing the resources in which a political and economic system very different from the global capitalism in which we live could be achieved. Through popular political control of the new technologies we could collectively transform our world for the better. Machines are accomplishing tasks that were unimaginable a decade ago. As Srnicek and Williams remind us, the internet and social media are giving a voice to billions who previously went unheard, bringing global participative democracy closer than ever to existence. Open-source designs, copyleft creativity, and 3D printing all portend a world where the scarcity of many products might be overcome. New forms of computer simulation could rejuvenate economic planning and give us the ability to direct economies rationally in unprecedented ways. The newest wave of automation is creating the possibility for huge swathes of boring and demeaning work to be permanently eliminated. Clean energy technologies make possible virtually limitless and environmentally sustainable forms of power production. And new medical technologies not only enable a longer, healthier life, but also make possible new experiments with gender and sexual identity.
If we are to free ourselves through these new technologies of the fourth industrial revolution, however, we would first need to overthrow the oppressive and archaic social relations of global capitalism. At a time when both fascism and socialism again appear to be on the agenda around the world, it behooves us to study the system of global capitalism, less as an intellectual exercise in itself than in order to struggle against its depredations with a view towards replacing it with one that can avert catastrophe and meet the material and spiritual needs of humanity. Rather than serving to liberate humanity, the new technologies are being applied at this time by the agents of this system to bring about a global police state.
While I am hardly the first to talk about a police state, I mean in this book considerably more than what we typically associate with a police state — police and military repression, authoritarian government, the suppression of civil liberties and human rights. Certainly, we see this, and more, around the world. In this study, however, I want to develop the concept of global police state to identify more broadly the emerging character of the global economy and society as a repressive totality whose logic is as much economic and cultural as it is political. By global police state I refer to three interrelated developments.
First is the ever more omnipresent systems of mass social control, repression and warfare promoted by the ruling groups to contain the real and the potential rebellion of the global working class and surplus humanity. Savage global inequalities are politically explosive and to the extent that the system is simply unable to incorporate surplus humanity it turns to ever more violent forms of containment. The methods of control include sealing out the surplus population through border and other containment walls, deportation regimes, mass incarceration and spatial apartheid, alongside omnipresent new systems of state and private surveillance and criminalization of the poor and working classes. They also include the deadly new modalities of policing and repression made possible by applications of digitalization and fourth industrial revolution technologies. The global police state brings all of global society into what in Pentagon jargon is called “battlespace,” concentrated in the world’s megacities that are now home to more than half of humanity.
Second is how the global economy is itself based more and more on the development and deployment of these systems of warfare, social control, and repression simply as a means of making profit and continuing to accumulate capital in the face of stagnation — what I term militarized accumulation, or accumulation by repression. If it is evident that unprecedented global inequalities can only be sustained by ubiquitous systems of social control and repression, it has become equally evident that quite apart from political considerations, the ruling groups have acquired a vested interest in war, conflict, and repression as a means of accumulation. As war and state-sponsored violence become increasingly privatized, the interests of a broad array of capitalist groups shift the political, social, and ideological climate towards generating and sustaining social conflict — such as in the Middle East — and in expanding systems of warfare, repression, surveillance and social control. The bogus wars against drugs, terror, immigrants and refugees are enormously profitable enterprises. We are now living in a veritable global war economy.
And third is the increasing move towards political systems that can be characterized as twenty-first century fascism, or even in a broader sense, as totalitarian. The increasing influence around the world of neo-fascist, authoritarian, and rightwing populist parties and movements, symbolized above all by Trumpism in the United States, has sparked a flurry of debate on whether fascism is again on the rise. There has been a sharp polarization around the world between insurgent left and popular forces, on the one hand, and an insurgent far Right, on the other, at whose fringe are openly fascist tendencies.
A project of twenty-first century fascism is on the ascent in the civil societies of many countries around the world. The project has made significant advances in recent years in its competition to win state power, and in some cases, it has gained a foothold in the capitalist state. At the same time a neo-fascist culture appears to be emerging through militarism, misogyny, extreme masculinization and racism. Such a culture generates a climate conducive to mass violence, often directed against the racially oppressed, ethnically persecuted, women, and poor, vulnerable communities. But a fascist outcome is not inevitable. Whether or not a fascist project manages to congeal is entirely contingent on how the struggle among social and political forces unfolds in the coming years.
This global police state is emerging at a time when world capitalism descends into a crisis that is unprecedented, given its magnitude, its global reach, the extent of ecological degradation and social deterioration, and the sheer scale of the means of violence that is now deployed around the world. In the first instance, the global police state is a story of control and repression of the poor and working classes. There are growing movements against the many expressions of global police state — mass incarceration, police violence, U.S.-led wars around the world, the persecution of immigrants and refugees, the repression of environmental justice activists.
Yet often these movements are based on moral appeal to social justice, which by itself begets, at best, mild reform. If these movements are to attack the global police state in its jugular vein, they must identify global capitalism as the driver of the systems of social control and repression that they are combating. This book attempts to do just that. It sets out to identify the contemporary dynamics of capitalist transformation and the novel forms that are emerging. This concept of a global police state allows us to specify how the economic dimensions of global capitalist transformation intersect in new ways with political, ideological and military dimensions of this transformation….
I offer a “big picture” of the emerging global police state in a short book that is eminently readable. The book may startle many readers and make them angry. I trust the work will serve as a warning to the dystopic future that is upon us. More importantly, by exposing the nature and dynamics of this out-of-control system, I hope it will contribute to the struggles to bring about an alternative future based on human freedom and liberation. We do face a crisis of humanity. The destruction under global capitalism of the social fabric worldwide and the extreme alienation of labor, our very species being, raises fundamental questions about what it means to be human and how to recover our humanity. It is in the nature of our species to work together to assure our collective existence. But the capitalist system that throws up a global police state turns such cooperation into a process of destruction for masses of humanity as we are made to compete with one another to survive. Crises of values, identity, meaning, and community ensue.
If we are to recover our humanity we must — contra capital — re-embed ourselves in relations of reciprocity and mutual well-being. [What are] the prospects for a renewal of emancipatory projects around the world? [We must] face [the] challenge of revitalizing a Left that could help bring about an ecological socialist future. Once we have exposed the brutal world of global capitalist inequality and exploitation the most urgent matter becomes how we can move forward toward greater social justice.
Community Control of Police = Autonomous Zone of People Power
Pan-African Community Action organizer Netfa Freeman told a panel organized by Black psychology students at Bowie State University, in Maryland: “Community control of police is a way to create autonomous zones of power, so that people can actually take control of public safety.” Dhoruba Bin Wahad, who spent 19 years as a Black Panther Party political prisoner, urged creation of a national front of organizations demanding community control of police. “Unless we abolish policing as it’s presently constituted, we are not going to get anywhere,” said Bin Wahad.
“Our society created the framework for this atrocity just like the trenches of World War I created perfect incubation zones for the 1918 flu,” Truthout’s Kelly Hayes talks with Eric, an organizer with Oakland Abolition and Solidarity about the escalating COVID-19 outbreak at the California Substance Abuse Treatment Facility, where some imprisoned people have launched a hunger strike over unsafe, unlivable conditions.
TRANSCRIPT
Note: This a rush transcript and has been lightly edited for clarity.Copy may not be in its final form.
Kelly Hayes: Welcome to “Movement Memos,” a Truthout podcast about things you should know if you want to change the world. I’m your host, Kelly Hayes. By the end of the year, COVID-19 will be the third leading cause of death in the United States. In the wake of Trump’s defeat at the ballot box, people in the U.S. are grappling with the second wave of COVID-19, or in some cases, ignoring the problem and contributing to the spread. Some of us are lucky enough to work at home, while others are forced to mask up, sanitize and do their best to navigate the viral gauntlet. But tragically, some people in the U.S. are not allowed to take even the most minimal precautions to protect themselves from a virus that has already killed more than a million people. The plight of imprisoned people during the pandemic is not a popular discussion right now, but it is an essential one, which is why we will be devoting this episode, and some upcoming episodes, to the COVID-19 crisis in jails, prisons and immigration detention centers, and what we can do about it.
For those of us who are careful, who don’t leave home without a mask and a face shield, who use hand sanitizer every time we touch a surface outside, or who maybe even get our groceries delivered, it might be tough to imagine being trapped in a building where the virus is rampant, trying not to touch anything, knowing you don’t have hand sanitizer or soap. Now, imagine that the building is packed full of people, and a lot of them are sick, and you don’t have a mask. You can’t leave, or even decide where you’re going to stand or rest. The rooms are small and the hallways are narrow, and there is no way to keep your distance. The building is poorly ventilated and there’s black mold all over on the walls, so the longer you’re there, the more you’re hurting your lungs, making yourself more susceptible to the virus. It’s dark, it’s dirty, and you know the virus is hanging in the air and on surfaces throughout the building. People are getting sick. You can see them, you can hear them, but you can’t help them and you can’t leave.
That’s what life is like for people living in jails, detention centers and prisons during this pandemic.
I know a lot of you turn away from discussion of what’s happening in prisons even in the best of times. We have been conditioned to look away and to forget. We have also been conditioned to see ourselves as being different from imprisoned people. I have frequently heard people say, for example, that they don’t approve of the conditions or approve of the practices in U.S. prisons, but that the thing to do is not wind up there. “I wouldn’t do something to wind up in prison,” is something I have heard from people many times. So before we dive into today’s discussion of what’s happening in the California Substance Abuse Treatment Facility in Corcoran, California, I want to say a few words about how we relate to the people inside.
I have no trouble relating to people inside prisons, but I know that’s not everyone. I don’t have any illusions that I am any better than people ensnared by the system. I have broken the law many times over the years, and not always for the sake of justice. I spent the better part of my 20’s grappling with a misdiagnosed mental illness, I was in and out of institutions, and I broke many, many laws. Eventually, I got the right diagnosis and the right medication and things started to change in a big way, but for nearly a decade, there were countless occasions on which I could have been sent to prison for the things I was doing, even though I was mostly only hurting myself. In my 30’s, which are now coming to a close, I have taken a lot of legal risks for the sake of causes I believe in, and I have been very aware of my proximity to incarceration during that time as well. I don’t really see a moral distinction between those different versions of me winding up dead in a cage, but I know the world does. I also know that people tend to exceptionalize activists, as though our criminalization is different, and we’re somehow better than other people who face charges. I believe, for example, that if I staged an act of protest today and went to prison, a lot of people would advocate for me. There would be a #FreeKelly campaign on Twitter, and I am not getting down on that, because I am extremely grateful and please do get me out if they ever come for me — seriously, I will be counting on you all. But please also understand that the Kelly in her mid-20s, who could not function in the world, who could not stop hurting herself, who experienced homelessness, who couldn’t hold down a job, whose mental illness made her hard to deal with — there would have been no campaign to free her, and she deserved to live too. One of my primary struggles during that time was an addiction to heroin. But after getting the right psych meds, it was infinitely easier for me to avoid hard drugs, so I was able to begin the process of rebuilding my life, and twelve years later, here I am, talking to you.
But that very lucky turn of events isn’t how most stories like mine end. Keeley Schenwar, for example, did not get her happy ending. Keeley was the beloved sister of one of my best friends, Maya Schenwar. Keeley was a vibrant, passionate person and she was brave. The stories Maya told me about Keeley when she was in prison and rehab, sticking up for other people who were being bullied or abused, or smuggling an injured animal into the facility to care for it, I felt like I knew her. And when we finally met, and I saw the joy in my friend’s eyes when she was able to put her arm around her sister at a party, in the free world, I thought I was seeing another story like mine — someone who had been kicked around by this world, but who was going to make it. I was so happy for my friend, and happy for Keeley. But it didn’t end that way.
Keeley’s memorial service was the last social event I attended before the pandemic. I watched my friend weep as she talked about Keeley’s love of animals, her kindness, and how brave she was in defending others. Keeley kept trying to get well, but she had been locked up so many times and endured so much violence, from the state, from people and also from the medical system.
There’s a lot of confusion in this country about treatment and care, as they relate to punishment and drug use, and this is especially important now as the Biden administration approaches. One thing Keeley and I agreed on was that what passes for treatment in the U.S. is usually just another form of incarceration. The conflation of punishment with treatment has led to a culture of violence against people criminalized for mental illness and addiction, and that culture manifests itself in many ways. It turns hospitals into prisons, and it sometimes conjures notions of “care” around torture facilities that don’t even attempt treatments of any kind. The California Substance Abuse Treatment Facility in Corcoran California is one such place. There is no treatment at Corcoran, or CSATF, as it’s often called. It is a brutal prison, through and through. There is also no meaningful activity of any kind for imprisoned people. There are no masks, there is black mold everywhere, there is no way for prisoners to physically distance themselves and COVID-19 is rampant.
We have so much to reckon with in this country, and even those who are inclined to embrace those reckonings may struggle to do so now, with COVID-19 beating down our doors. But we cannot abandon the people in those buildings. Our society created the framework for this atrocity just like the trenches of World War I created perfect incubation zones for the 1918 flu. Our society has built a system of millions of cages, where conditions were already so bad that years were being stripped years off of people’s lives, and we have shuffled people through that system. The United States created a system of disposal that’s now part of a perfect storm. Because while it may feel as though prisons exist in some state of separation from the rest of society, they do not. Guards are vectors, and they very effectively redistribute the disease in our communities. COVID-19 is being manufactured on a grand scale inside jails, prisons and detention centers. In the case of jails, people are being cycled in and out of their communities, causing further spread, but in all facilities, you have guards who are bringing the disease back to their neighbors and communities. In many cases, they are the only vectors.
There are countries that have emptied out entire prisons during this crisis. They didn’t do that because they discovered Mariame Kaba’s work and became prison abolitionists. They did it because they knew they could not afford to create manufacturing centers for the disease.
So these are just some things I want to ask you to think about as we hear from today’s guest, Eric, who is an organizer with Oakland Abolition and Solidarity. Because I know that a lot of you skip over stories about what’s happening in prisons, and you may even distance yourself emotionally from what’s happening inside, but I am asking you not to do that this time. I am asking you to empathize, and if you have trouble imagining yourself in their shoes, or relating to what they’re going through, think about me. Think about Keeley. And ask yourself what must be done, for the sake of the people locked in those cages, and for the sake of your own humanity.
[Musical interlude]
KH: Today’s guest is Eric, who is an organizer with Oakland Abolition and Solidarity in Oakland, California. Oakland Abolition and Solidarity has been providing long term support for people trapped inside the California Substance Abuse Treatment Facility, which is the largest prison facility in the state of California. Eric, what can you tell us about what’s happening at the prison?
Eric: Cases at CSATF have been hovering around 500 positive cases for about three weeks. And we know that this is likely a kind of understatement of the crisis for two reasons. Basically one is that [California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation] CDCR moves cases to the quote “resolved” category after two weeks without retesting people. And the second reason is the rate of false negatives that we know about, even in testing on the outside. The yard in which the outbreak began, D Yard, there are two people on hunger strike, and today will be day 17 of that hunger strike. Toward the beginning of the outbreak, they were very fed up and shocked by the handling of the crisis by the institution. And they decided to take action.
KH: Whenever I talk to people experiencing a particular crisis in a prison, whether it’s a natural disaster or an outbreak of disease, I pretty much always hear that conditions were already very bad, and even potentially deadly, prior to whatever disaster unfolded. Can you tell us a bit about what people in CSATF were already up against?
E: Absolutely. Yeah. So there’s kind of two answers to that one being like the, before COVID “normal,” before this current outbreak. So before COVID, I mean, going back several years, there has been unresolved leaks, across this facility, and that’s something that Oakland Abolition and Solidarity has been tracking for a long time, as well as people’s various attempts to address that situation through grievances and legal means.
So tons of leaking across the facility, the hunger strikers are now housed, they were moved recently. They’re now housed in a leaky facility, and those leaky facilities almost always precipitate black mold. So that’s the kind of before COVID situation. After COVID, and I’ll get to this when I talk about their second demand, a little more, but basically prisons respond to crises by taking stuff away like that is. That is always their go-to solution and often their only solution. So despite the fact that guards are sort of constantly bringing COVID-19 in and out. In fact, in California, they’re like the sort of only possible vector, since visiting has been, there has been no visiting since the very beginning of the pandemic. And across various facilities, people like people have across the system lost access to programming, classes, anything like anything that the state will call rehabilitation, is basically gone down to bare minimum quality of life resources, which after this outbreak started in CSATF, had been curtailed even further.
KH: People talk about comorbidities and how you are more likely to die of COVID-19 if you have diabetes or various disabilities. We know there are many, many disabled and chronically ill people in prison, but the conditions you are describing really create their own potentially fatal vulnerabilities.
E: Yeah, absolutely. You know, before the outbreak, I mean prison in general, but the black mold specifically has basically rendered people immunocompromised across the facility in ways that are likely undiagnosed.
KH: So how are the people who are on hunger strike holding up?
E: Psychologically, remarkably well, sort of maintaining a lot of energy, a lot of regular communication and a lot of. A lot of spirit, a lot of like, they’re feeling the fight in, in a big way. Physically their health is taking a toll they’ve each, at least two of the three have developed a skin condition all over their body, which they attribute more to the poor air in the facility and to the lack of access to showers more than they do to the hunger strike itself. But you know, no doubt, that kind of a toll on the body isn’t helpful. And we know that not eating is likely taking a toll on their immune system. Which is especially scary considering that outbreak.
KH: So we know that a number of groups that are advocating for imprisoned people right now are making demands, and we will have links to some of that work in the show notes of this episode on our website, but I want to ask: what are the specific demands that the prisoners on hunger strike at CSATF are making?
E: The prisoners who were on hunger strike have made three demands of the facility, and then kind of one, one like big statement, which I’ll get to at the end, but these demands are also a helpful lens into what people across the facility are experiencing. So the first demanded universal and voluntary testing. So the institution has, since about the time of the beginning of the hunger strike, about 80 percent of the facility has been tested, but there are two issues with this. One is that people are often not given their own results until up to a week after testing. And two, very often tests are carried out very forcefully and violently, and without the kind of attention to consent that we would associate with like normal, regular medical professionalism. So this has led people across the facility to be sort of reticent to get tested and wary of being forced into circumstances where they’re tested and it’s in this sort of severely uncomfortable way. So this is why it’s like universal access to voluntary testing and not just universal testing, cause we know how these facilities treat or dehumanize people who it’s meant to be treating medically. Another reason this is important is because it’s like that having the information about one’s own status allows people to make actual decisions about their safety, about their distancing practices, about the ways that they engage with other people. The institution has been moving people a lot, around the facility in really, really inexplicable ways and ways that have demonstrably put people at risk and exposed new people to the virus. So people just having the basic knowledge about their own status in order to make those decisions for themselves, or at least to know what their risk level and risk factors are.
So yeah, pretty, pretty bare minimum.
KH: I have heard a lot of reports about that kind of moving around of prisoners you describe. Alan Mills, who’s with the Uptown People’s Law Center told a story on the show in April about how a prisoner in Stateville prison here in Illinois contracted COVID-19, and then somehow frustrated the staff while being quarantined, so they just put him in solitary, which led to everyone who was in solitary at that time contracting the virus. Like, this was an entirely predictable outcome and an undeniable act of violence.
E: Yeah, and so people have no control and often no knowledge of things like that happening.
KH: So what was the second demand that the hunger strikers are making?
E: So demand number two is to restore safe programming. Like we call programming basically anything that happens in prison that’s relatively positive. That’s like not sitting alone in a cell, so classes, rehabilitative activities, quote unquote “sports,” these are things that people have not had access to for a long time, but the sort of issue is beyond that. Like the first step towards safe programming is the restoration of like bare minimum quality of life stuff, like telephone calls with loved ones, regular access to showers and regular access to commissary stores and packages. And the stores and packages are survival necessities specifically because the food situation at CSATF is absolutely egregious. People are getting like tiny silver dollar pancakes and a radish for breakfast, a few crackers and some cheese for lunch, and a boiled potato for dinner. That’s like one little snapshot of a day’s worth of food at CSATF. So people have to, like for survival, supplement their diets with quarterly packages that they can get from families and supporters on the outside, and commissary, neither of which they have had access to for at least a month now.
KH: I don’t think most people who have not been incarcerated, or had a loved one incarcerated, understand the importance of commissary access. Prisons do not give people what they need to stay nourished, they do not give people what they need to stay warm — to even get a tiny fraction of their needs met, prisoners need commissary funds and access.
E: It is so unacceptable and, even when, oh, cleaning supplies, that’s the other thing. That’s one thing that after the hunger strikes started, and after we started to apply some pressure on the outside with phone zaps, we did see some return of access to cleaning supplies. Albeit like really watered down and really sporadic. But that’s another part of their demand that they have basically. And that’s, again, it goes back to like health autonomy, and like the ability of people to like keep themselves safe.
The third demand is mechanisms for transparency. So we’ve talked already about people needing to be informed of their own status when all this testing is happening. CDCR also needs to also be in regular communication with people inside and their families about what is going on about why, like, why these movements are happening.
Like we know that we know that early last week, several people with positive cases were moved into F yard. And they were there for about four hours and then moved out with the officials claiming that it was a mistake for them to have been there. But now there’s a huge outbreak in F facility where, where I know people whose loved ones now are positive for COVID. So no there’s been no accountability and no communication with people on the outside about what’s happening. So CDCR needs to explain these movements. And explain its overall plan for restoring better conditions and getting the outbreak under control. And we think that video visiting is a good way to create some actual transparency and visibility to what’s happening inside. It’s not likely that it’s safe to restore in prison visiting, although that’s an ultimate goal, video visiting will allow people to sort of safely communicate with their loved ones and report what’s happening.
KH: I think so many of us are in a constant state of anxiety. We have our masks, our hand sanitizer, our face shields, we get things delivered when we can, and we are avoiding other people like the plague because we think they might actually have the plague. What do you think those of us who are really caught up in our own fears and anxieties need to understand about how people in prison are experiencing this moment?
E: I think that it’s difficult to imagine how much being in prison can or does ratchet up the kind of paranoia that we’re just getting used to on the outside about the surfaces that we touch, about sanitizing our hands, about the people that we come in contact with. Imagine having no control. Imagine having no ability to be more than six feet away from someone, or no ability to control the amount of people and the sort of status of people that you’re exposed to on a daily basis. And this, in addition to all the other background conditions that we’ve described, so basically to know that you’re in this situation where COVID-19 is everywhere and have zero empowerment to do anything about it and to constantly held in that kind of precarity.
KH: I don’t think most people understand that submersion, that total evacuation of autonomy, and what that means when your environment is barbaric and in a constant state of deterioration.
E: Yeah, absolutely. And it is like, COVID-19 is just another kind of node in this systemic just the, the way that people’s autonomy is like absolutely violated and consistently violated by prison, like COVID-19 is just another aspect of that — like a new way for institutions to keep people scared disempowered and in danger.
KH: So there’s a new administration around the corner, and a lot of us are hopeful that we will finally see a coherent response to COVID-19 from the federal government. But unfortunately, the mass expansion of the prison industrial complex and the torturous conditions of the system were not invented by the Trump administration. The nightmarish system that created a perfect framework for incubating this disease has been a bipartisan project, and Biden and Harris have both been extreme purveyors of carceral violence. While I believe I will have a better chance of not dying of COVID-19 under a Biden administration, I am not sure how quickly anything will change for people inside the prison industrial complex, or if it will. Is there any real discussion among the prisoners about whether Trump’s exit will change anything for them, or are folks just kind of trying to survive the winter?
E: That’s a really good question. I think in a lot of ways people are just trying to survive the winter. I think the biggest danger of moving into a Biden administration is that people will be less apt to pay attention to things like this. And I think like there’s not to my knowledge, any signs of improvement. And I think like what new restrictions and safety measures we see on the outside, like it takes people looking really hard and creating accountability just to make sure they happen at all on the inside. And I think one of the talking points that the hunger strikers have been emphasizing is that if this were any other kind of situation where human beings were in danger, these facilities would be evacuated, would be like absolutely emptied out. Because they’re incubators of COVID-19, because they’re supercharging this pandemic that we’re supposedly contending with and supposedly trying to get rid of prisons, our prisons are amplifying that virus. So the call is to free them all and to evacuate these places. But yeah, there’s that, that often feels a long way off.
KH: It really can. But here, in this moment, I feel like we still have a lot of decisions to make, and that in each of those decisions, there is potential. Like the decision people made to listen to this entire podcast, even though this is a tough subject that they could easily sort of divide from themselves and dismiss. That’s a decision, and that decision might make something else possible, like them looking up y’alls website or checking out the show notes for ways to get involved, or even just reading up more on the subject. We all have so many choices to make that can lead us places, and that can lead us to people, people who share our values, or at least one value — one that’s enough to galvanize us. Because whatever else we all like or don’t like about each other, we are all locked in a battle over what life and death mean. And I think there are so many ways to show up for that fight, and advocating for the people this system is telling you to forget, is a really essential way to do that.
Things are going to get worse before they get better, and we know that, but trauma doesn’t always break people. When people work together to survive a crisis, and to keep other people alive during a crisis, it can strengthen their bonds, and their determination and their values. That could happen. Or we could become more insular, more detached from each other’s fates, and we could wind up setting up the lowest bar imaginable, because Trump, as a point of comparison, makes it very easy to do that. My feeling, in this moment, is that our choices, our organizing, and the things we make and share and build in this moment, will help drive those outcomes. We could come through this winter valuing life more, and valuing each other more, and making bigger demands than ever. We could, as my young friend Bresha Meadows says, “care more and more about what happens to people over time, not less and less.” I really think the way that we handle this crisis is going to dictate so much that comes after. So I am so grateful for everything that you all are doing, Eric, to support imprisoned people who are fighting for themselves right now. And really for all of us, because that’s a fight for all of our humanity.
E: Yeah, absolutely. And thank you so much for saying that. Yeah, I think, you know where the hope is, is in that notion of collective survival. And like, and we have to, like if we’re going to get through this and like you say, if we’re going to get through this with our humanity, I mean, we have to see people inside as, as us because they are us, and that’s something that so many people are sort of inculturated against. The dividing line between inside and out in this, is this well-maintained political force that, that keeps us from having this kind of solidarity or sense of collective survival. And, and I’m glad to see that there could be hope of breaking that down. And I appreciate you so much, you know, putting, putting this under the, under the magnifying glass.
KH: Well, if you all want to learn more about this struggle and what you can do to support, we are going to have some materials to check out on our website, so please do get involved, in whatever way that you can, and please remember that the crisis we are talking about today is just one of many, and that there is probably a similar crisis playing out at a facility near you. There may already be organizers like Eric, who are already working on it, whose efforts you can join. If not, there are a lot of tools and resources out there to learn from, in terms of how to support people who are trying to survive inside of jails, prisons and detention centers and we will hook you up with as much as we can in the show notes.
Eric, I want to thank you so much for joining us today.
E: Thank you so much for having me. It’s been, it’s been a real pleasure and an honor.
KH: And I want to say to anyone imprisoned in the path of this disease, if you can hear or ready this: we haven’t given up, and we won’t. I also want to thank our listeners for joining us today, and remember, our best defense against cynicism is to do good, and to remember, that the good we do matters. Until next time, I’ll see you in the streets.
Show Notes
Organizing Resources:
Can you make a call or send an email? Organizers with the Chicago Community Bond Fund are calling on the Cook County State’s Attorney and Chief Judge to take bold action to reduce the number of people incarcerated in Cook County Jail. Current incarceration rates and practices at the facility are putting thousands of people at risk, both in and outside the facility. You can find call-in and email scripts here.
Want to take action? The American Friends Services Committee will be hosting a week of action to #FreeThemAll from December 10 through December 18 with events and actions for people to plug into across the country. Resources will also be available for people who would like to organize their action. You can learn more here.
The idea that we can resolve racism by integrating a fundamentally anti-Black institution is the most absurd notion of all.
Amid recent growing calls for defunding police this summer, a set of billboards appeared in Dallas, Atlanta, and New York City. Each had the words “No Police, No Peace” printed in large, bold letters next to an image of a Black police officer.
Funded by a conservative right-wing think tank , the billboards captured all the hallmarks of modern pro-policing propaganda. The jarring choice of language, a deliberate corruption of the protest chant “no justice, no peace,” follows a pattern we see frequently from proponents of the police state. Any word or phrase made popular by the modern movement is quickly co-opted and repurposed until it’s rendered virtually meaningless. But perhaps the most insidious aspect of modern pro-police propaganda is reflected in the choice to make the officer on the billboard the face of a Black man.
This is in keeping with a narrative pro-police advocates seek to push on a regular basis in mass media — that policing can’t be racist when there are Black officers on the force, and that the police force itself is an integral part of Black communities. When Freddie Gray died in police custody, police defenders quickly pointed out that three of the officers involved were Black , implying that racism couldn’t be a factor in a case where the offending officers were the same race as the victim.
Pro-police advocates push a narrative that policing can’t be racist when there are Black officers on the force.
When I scaled the flagpole at South Carolina’s capital in 2015 and lowered the Confederate flag, many noted that it was a Black officer who was tasked with raising the flag to the top of its pole again. When an incident of brutality brings a city to its brink, Black police chiefs are paraded to podiums and cameras to serve as the face of the United States’ racist police state and to symbolically restore a sense of order.
One of the most frequent recommendations from police reformists is to recruit and promote more Black officers. This is based on an argument that the primary problem with policing centers on a “breakdown of trust” between police forces and communities they have terrorized for decades; the solution, then, is to “restore trust” between the two parties by recruiting officers who resemble the communities they police.
Images of police officers dancing or playing basketball with Black children in economically deprived neighborhoods are often published as local news items to help drive this narrative home. The idea gained traction in the aftermath of numerous urban rebellions in the 1960s and has seen a resurgence in the wake of the 2014 Ferguson uprising.
When protests broke out in Atlanta this past summer in response to the killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery, the city’s Black mayor, Keisha Lance Bottoms, held a press conference flanked by some of Atlanta’s most famous and wealthy Black residents. Together they pleaded for protestors to go home and leave property alone. Soon after, Rayshard Brooks was killed by white police officers in Atlanta.
The moment exposed a class divide that exists in cities all over the nation: A chasm between the image of Black affluence promoted by Black politicians and the Black petite bourgeoisie (middle class) and the lived realities of the majority of Black residents in those cities, many of whom still face disproportionate unemployment, displacement by rapid gentrification, and policies that cater to white corporate interests. If the solution to racism were simply a matter of a few select Black people gaining entry to anti-Black institutions, we would see different outcomes than what we’re witnessing now.
But the idea that we can resolve racism by integrating what is perhaps the most fundamentally anti-Black institution in the U.S. — its policing and prison industry — is the most absurd notion of all.
Part of the reason why calls to defund police have sent such shock waves through the nation, prompting placement of pro-police billboards and pushback from figures of the Black establishment, is because it cuts right to the heart of how structural racism operates in the United States. At a time when the Black elite would prefer to measure progress by their own tokenized positions of power and symbolic gestures like murals, the push to defund police would require direct confrontation with how the white supremacist system has been organized since the end of chattel slavery — when the prisons replaced plantations as the primary tool of racial control. Actions that may have been widely seen as adequate responses to injustice just a couple of decades ago now ring hollow to many observers who see that Black people continue to be killed by a system that remains largely unchanged.
Police forces represent some of the oldest white fraternal organizations in the United States. The rules of who is empowered to police and who is subject to policing are fundamental to the organization of the racial caste system. Even in the earliest days of integrating police forces, Black officers were often told they couldn’t arrest white people . The integration of police forces does nothing to alter their basic function as the primary enforcers of structural racism on a daily basis, and the presence of Black officers only serves as an attempt to mask this fact.
The push to defund police would require direct confrontation with how the white supremacist system has been organized since the end of chattel slavery.
Police forces in America began as slave patrols, and their primary function has always been to act in service of the white ownership class and its capitalist production. In one century, that meant policing and controlling enslaved Black people, with the purview to use violence against free Black people as well; in another, it involved cracking down on organized labor, for the benefit of white capitalists .
Receiving a badge and joining the force has been an entryway to white manhood for many European immigrants — providing them a sense of citizenship and superiority when they would have traditionally been part of the peasantry rather than the white owner class.
That spirit of white fraternity remains deeply entrenched in the culture of policing and its unions today, regardless of this new wave of Black police chiefs and media spokespeople. Police forces became unionized around the same time various other public employees sought collective bargaining rights — however, under capitalism, their role as maintainers of race-property relations remains the same. The most fundamental rule of race established under chattel slavery was that Black people were the equivalent of white property (if not counted as less than property).
This relationship between race and property is most overt during periods of open rebellion against the police state, where officers are deployed to use lethal force in the interest of protecting inanimate property. We see swifter and harsher punishments handed out to those who vandalize police cars than to police who assault and kill Black people. (This is a major reason why the press conference in Atlanta with T.I. and Killer Mike struck people as classist and out of touch with the majority Black experience.)
This same pattern extends throughout the carceral state. Roughly a quarter of all bailiffs, correctional officers, and jailers are Black , yet there’s no indication that diversifying the staff of a racist institution results in less violence and death for those who are held within it. That’s because the institution continues to operate as designed. It is not “broken,” as reformists are fond of saying. The fallacy is in believing the function of police and prisons is to mete out punishment and justice in an equitable manner and not to first and foremost serve as a means of maintaining the race, gender, and class hierarchy of an oppressive society.
Believing that the system is “broken” rather than functioning exactly as intended requires a certain adherence to white supremacist and anti-Black beliefs. One has to ignore the rampant amount of violence, fraud, and theft being committed by some of the most powerful figures in society with little to no legal consequence while massive amounts of resources are devoted to the hyper-policing of the poor for infractions as minor as trespassing, shoplifting, and turnstile jumping at subway stations.
The Trump era has provided some of the starkest examples of this dynamic. The most powerful person in the nation and his associates have been able to break the law and violate the Constitution — including documented crimes against humanity — in full view of the public while he proclaims himself the upholder of law and order. Wealthy celebrities involved in the college admissions bribery scandal have gotten away with a slap on the wrist for orchestrating a multimillion-dollar scheme while a dozen NYPD officers surrounded a Black teenager, guns drawn, for the “crime” of failing to pay $2.75 for a subway ride.
The propaganda that depicts this type of policing as being essential to public safety and order is fundamentally classist and anti-Black. It traces its roots to the Black Codes that were passed immediately after the Civil War to control the movements of newly freed Black people. It relies on the racist assumption that Black people would run amok and pose a threat to the larger society if not kept under the constant surveillance of a police force that has authority to kill them if deemed necessary, and with virtual impunity. That’s why we are inundated with a narrative that depicts the police officer who regularly patrols predominantly Black communities as being an essential part of maintaining order in society.
One of the primary talking points against calls to defund and abolish police is that Black communities would have no way to maintain peace and order, and that a state of chaos would ensue. In wealthier neighborhoods, if an officer is present at all, they’re most likely positioned by a gate at the top of the neighborhood to monitor who enters. Meanwhile, the officer assigned to the predominantly Black community is there to keep a watchful eye on the residents themselves, and to ensure they are contained in their designated place within the larger city or town.
Massive resources are devoted to the hyper-policing of the poor for infractions as minor as trespassing, shoplifting, and turnstile jumping.
The current political divide on this issue falls exactly along these lines, separating those who think the system is simply in need of reform and those who correctly define the problem as the system itself. The reality is that Black people fall on both sides of this divide, which is why we find so many Black officers in uniform arguing for a reformist agenda even as every reform they propose is vociferously opposed by the powerful, majority-white police unions and most of the rank and file. Reformists remain committed to preserving the existing system even though the idea of reforming it to be the opposite of what it was designed to be is an unproven theory that’s no more realistic than the idea of abolishing police altogether.
The most pressing question remains: Why are we seeking to integrate and reform modern manifestations of the slave patrols and plantations in the first place? In Mississippi and Louisiana, state penitentiaries are converted plantations. What is a reformed plantation — and what is its purpose?
We must remember that many of these so-called “reforms” are not new. For as long as the plantation and chattel slavery systems existed, there also existed Black slaveowners, Black overseers, and Black slave catchers who participated in and profited from the daily operations of white supremacy.
The presence of these few Black people in elevated positions of power did nothing to change the material conditions of the millions of enslaved people back then. And it makes no greater amount of sense to believe they indicate a shift in material conditions for Black people now.
Bree Newsome Bass is an award-winning artist and activist known for her historic act of civil disobedience when she removed SC’s confederate flag in 2015. www.breenewsome.com
This article is part of Abolition for the People , a series brought to you by a partnership between Kaepernick Publishing and LEVEL , a Medium publication for and about the lives of Black and Brown men. The series, which comprises 30 essays and conversations over four weeks, points to the crucial conclusion that policing and prisons are not solutions for the issues and people the state deems social problems — and calls for a future that puts justice and the needs of the community first.
Call for the formation of solidarity groups to support those facing repression steaming from the ongoing George Floyd rebellion. As the summer of the George Floyd uprising comes crashing into the chilling electoral politics in the winter of 2020, we face new dynamics and the challenges they present. The initial shock the pigs felt of… Read Full Article
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Last night, Donald Trump went on air to say he won the election. Tonight, small right-wing protests emerged around the country. In Arizona, where the election is very close and the votes have not yet all been counted, right-wing vigilantes gathered at a polling station armed with assault rifles and handguns. They are demanding that all the votes be counted — which was what poll workers were doing until the protesters showed up.
Demonstrators also spoke out against Fox News, which had called Arizona for Biden early on election night, making it significantly more difficult for Trump to legitimately claim a victory. As of 7 p.m. on Wednesday, Biden maintained a lead over Trump in Arizona but 400,000 votes in Maricopa County had not been counted. Maricopa is heavily trending towards Trump but it is unlikely that this will turn around the whole state. Nevertheless, the votes in Arizona are still quite close and could — although it’s unlikely — swing Trump’s way.
As a result of the protest, the polling station had to stop counting ballots and shut down, evacuating those inside the building.
BREAKING: Maricopa is now CLOSING due to concerns about unrest from sizeable crowds protesting vote counting per @CNN
— Dana (Store Name) #AmplyBlackVoices (@sagesurge) November 5, 2020
Though the county sheriff’s office showed up to guard the polling station, the police did not make any moves to arrest these protesters, who were disrupting the vote count and prolonging the election results. The police didn’t come with tear gas or pepper spray as they did in North Carolina when they severely repressed a peaceful “souls to the polls” group walking to a voting station.
Congressman Paul Gosar in the middle of this protest outside the county recorder’s office. Protestors, many armed, talking about debunked Sharpie conspiracy. Some chanting “count the vote.” County deputies now clearing reporters from the lobby out of caution. #12Newspic.twitter.com/3yyMBiF3dU
But Arizona isn’t the only place where Trump’s base is mobilizing on his behalf. Small right-wing protests have also occurred across the country. But unlike in Arizona, in Detroit and Michigan, where Biden is sure to win by a landslide, Trump supporters have tried to stop the vote count to try to maneuver a Trump victory.
Trump loyalists try to disrupt and enter the absentee ballot counting center in Detroit. They banged on windows chanting “Stop the Count” as guards hold them off. (📹@DonGonyea) pic.twitter.com/4nEJ1QPqZe
Meanwhile, there were also several protests by progressives and the left demanding that votes be counted. In New York City and in other cities across the country, they were met with violence and were arrested by the police. While the left is beaten and criminalized for protesting in the streets, the armed far right can disrupt voting stations without fear of repercussion. It’s clear what side the cops are on.
Recent debates have centered on whether it’s appropriate to compare Trump to European fascists. But radical Black thinkers have long argued that racial slavery created its own unique form of American fascism.
A training program for Kentucky State Police quoted Adolf Hitler and the Nazis not once, not twice, but three times, a student newspaper in Louisville recently reported.
The following is an extract from the Introduction to The Global Police State, a new book by William I. Robinson that was released early this fall by Pluto Press.
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