By J. Steelman

As the street protests cool off for the moment, the question is posed to the new abolitionist movement–that is, prison abolition and police abolition: where does the movement go from here? Over the past 5 years of BLM activity there has been a consistent analysis that the oppression faced by people of color is systemic in nature rather than a reflection of the personal failings of white people. This analysis was affirmed during the summer protests by the demand to Defund the Police as well as the demands that emanated from CHOP/CHAZ. This analysis, prevalent as it is, fails to explain adequately the underlying nature of current society and by what means is this society will be transformed into a society without police or prisons.

In broad terms most activists would agree that a new society would provide living wages for all, universal healthcare, guaranteed access to jobs, housing, food, a green economy, open borders, greater democracy both at the national and local level, equality between the races and genders, including the LBGT community, greater economic equality and a robust social safety net. This was largely the vision promoted by Sanders in the 2016 and 2020 Presidential campaigns, taken up by a number of abolitionist groups, whether in part or in full. This is evidenced by the Defund the Police camp wanting to redirect the police budget to fund social programs, something the Abolish the Police camp views as a necessary step toward full abolition. It is clear to nearly everyone in the movement that our society falls well short of the conditions needed to abolish police and prisons.

Many parts of the Left, regardless of political tendency, identify the main source of society’s ills in capitalism, with an emphasis on the greed and avarice of the CEOs of the biggest corporations, generally personified in Jeff Bezos. Of course greed plays a role but it is the laws of capitalist competition that reduce the living standards of the workers to the bare minimum. In either case, the left correctly identifies capitalism as the cause of the misery and poverty of the working class. It is these conditions, which lead to the need for police and prisons, and that must be abolished in order to abolish the police and prisons. Irrespective of tendency, the methods for alleviating these conditions is State intervention, to make the distribution of wealth “fair” and thus relieve the working class of its misery.

The problem with stating the question of social change only in terms of poverty and misery, conditions we also seek to abolish, is that the solution inevitably becomes the redistribution of wealth from the rich to the poor; yet regardless of the means used to carry this out, a change in the distribution of wealth leaves the mode by which wealth is produced wholly untouched, and it is not distributions, but the capitalist mode of production that is the source of poverty and misery for the working class.

Every mode of production is founded on specific relations. The capitalist mode is founded on the relation of wage-labor to capital. The wage-labor relation inherent to capitalism is exploitative regardless of the greed of an individual or company. The capitalist system regards labor-power as a commodity like any other. Assume for instance that a worker’s wages are equal to their cost of living; during the workday they would add value equal to their wages to the products or services they produce. However, as a commodity a worker’s labor-power belongs to the capitalist for the whole working day. If the worker produces value equal to their wages in 4 hours, the capitalist can work them for the full 8-hours forcing the worker to produce twice the value of their wages. This difference, the value produced by the worker but pocketed by the capitalist, is surplus value, which is realized on the market as profit.

The poverty and misery of the working class are expressions of this relationship and it is this relationship that must be abolished in order to abolish poverty and misery.

The specific relationship between capitalist and wage-worker also contains within it, in embryonic form, the whole contradiction of capitalist production. Namely, the antagonism between socialized production involving the global working class and the private appropriation of profit by a handful of capitalists. Any attempt to abolish poverty and misery on the basis of the capitalist mode of production will inevitably be undermined, not due to the greed or avarice of the capitalist class, but on the basis of the capitalism itself.

Under capitalism, the tendency for the rate of profit to fall is the driver of economic crises. Profit, the surplus value realized in the market, is divided up between different sections of the capitalist class, commercial profit, interest, ground rent, etc. Taxes paid to the State is also included in the distribution of profits. The rate of profit fell from a high point in 1952 through the 1970s when the oil shocks caused an economic crisis. In order to boost the rate of profit, the capitalist class and the State began a process of upward redistribution, that is redistributing wealth to the capitalists in order to raise the rate of profit. The strategy was two-fold. On the one hand breaking up the unions made it easier to impose reduction in wages or at least fend off demands for wage increases. On the other hand, the State cut taxes, primarily to the capitalist class but the effects of those tax cuts also reached the small capitalists and even the top strata of the working class. As a result of the tax cuts, the social safety net was also cut. The efforts of the capitalist State was not able to increase the rate of profit since the 1970s. Even after the 2008-2009 financial crisis the economy has not fully recovered, and that already weak recovery was interrupted by the recent pandemic and associated economic crisis. The social welfare State of the 1950s through the 1970s, even as black workers still faced Jim Crow laws and were excluded from many of the State programs, was the result of the post-World War II economic boom. There hasn’t been a boom on that scale since. Today, with the rate of profit remaining low, it is unlikely that we will see a return to the Welfare State of the 1950s and 1960s.

Ultimately, State intervention in the economy will always run into the problem of the falling rate of profit and crisis. Europe, UK, and even Scandinavia, are neoliberalizing, albeit far slower than the US. Further, wages and profit are inversely related, as wages go up profits fall, relatively speaking. Rising wages further the rate of profit to fall, which led to the crushing of the unions in the 1980s. It should be noted here that the policies of neoliberalism were a response to an economic crisis and not specifically driven by an individual ideological motivation. In fact, both capitalist parties have embraced neoliberalism. Competition between workers for jobs also drives down wages. Unions are able to control competition within workplaces or industries, however, the tendency for wages to fall to the minimum still exists and exerts itself in times of crisis. It would be a mistake to think that the New Deal policies of the 1930s-1960s can be reasserted by fiat, that the collapse of the Democratic Socialism in the US was the result of a few greedy people asserting their political power over society.

Having briefly explored the economic basis for capitalist society we turn to the relationship between that economic foundation and the police. The connection between the economics of capitalism and the police lies in the nature of the modern State. The State is an organ of class domination, namely of capital over labor. It exists to manage a society in crisis, the crisis of capitalism. The modern State apparatus broadly comprises the government, administrative bureaucracy and the police and army. In the US, the executive branch is made up of the president and everything they have control over; the bureaucracy and the military. It is this executive that carries on most of the work of governing the country. This became crystal clear when President Trump and the bureaucracy enacted a number of measures including the continuation of UC extension and the CDC halted evictions until 2021. The legislative branch, trapped in deadlock, took vacation without passing any form of relief, and the executive took action. The bureaucracy, unelected as it is, may seem to stand above society, a neutral administration mediating conflict. In reality, its origin is the class conflict that gave rise to it and thus it remains the executive strictly of the capitalist class.

The Welfare State is only one form of social control exercised against the poor and working class, brought about by the crisis of capitalism and to ensure the continuation of capitalism. The other components of the executive of a modern state, the police and the military, are also forms of social control, more obvious forms to be sure. The rapid rise in incarceration rates took place in the mid-1980s as unemployment was on the rise. Social conditions engendered by unemployment and poverty, are ripe for criminal, or perhaps “criminal” behavior. The social role of the police is to maintain social order for the continuation of capitalism. Incarceration becomes tool for the maintenance of the surplus population. It’s not surprising that Law and Order presidents tend to follow periods of social unrest; Nixon in 1968, Reagan in 1980, and Trump in 2016.

All that has been said here demonstrates that, given the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, the social safety net which existed in the 1950s and 1960s (not to mention the high wages) is not coming back. To whatever degree it might, its existence will be short-lived for economic, not simply political or ideological, reasons. The path to a new society, then, must be through the abolition of the capitalist world order, not its reform. And not just in one or two countries; capitalism is global and the struggle against it must be global as well.

Socialism arises as a reflection of the contradictions in capitalism and the need to overcome them. The struggle for higher wages reflects the demand that the workers receive the full value they produced through their labor. Further, only the working class is situated to abolish the wage relationship precisely because they own no property in the capitalist sense. All previous revolutions have only changed who secures dominance over this or that form of property. The working class, having no property of its own, can seize the means of production in the name of society as a whole and immediately work to overturn capitalist relations of production, abolish wage-labor, and create new relations of production. The immensity of the means of production that exist today and the science and technology applied to production are exponentially more powerful than even 100 years ago. The productive capacity exists to provide everyone in the world, not just with the bare necessities, but with nearly all their wants and needs. Under capitalism, a system driven by profit, those means of production cannot be unleashed to their full potential. They are put into motion only insofar as they produce, by way of the labor-power of wage workers, profit for the capitalist. When production outstrips demand, the capitalist mode of production lurches to a halt, and millions of workers are thrown out of work. Abolishing private property, taking over the means of production by society as a whole will free them from the contradictions of capitalism and allow for the full development of our productive forces for the benefit of the whole of society.

It must be emphasized that only the working class can emancipate itself. In the course of its struggle for power, the working class must become conscious of itself as the working class and organize along class lines, both in the economic sphere as unions and in the political sphere as a Socialist Party. Class struggles are political struggles and political struggles are struggles for State power; thus, the working class cannot look to the capitalist state to carry out its program. The capitalist State is an enemy of the working class. For this reason, the working class’s relation to the State and to the capitalist class must be a negative one. That is, it must be based on restricting the power and scope of the capitalist State’s authority over society. Positive demands on the capitalist State, demands that the State carry out active programs to support the working class, lead inevitably to the working class and its party becoming complicit in the management of capitalism and ties the working class movement to the State.

The State as an organ of class domination, is not neutral ground to be contested, but a class enemy to be exposed and resisted at every turn. There is no liberation in the capitalist state.

In order to build the society we want, a society free from police and prisons, the capitalist mode of production, as well as the State must be overthrown.