Defund the Police

Discussion

Abolishing the Police Has Never Been the Default Left Demand

Freddie de Boer:

“The widespread belief that abolishing or defunding the police has historically been a central aim of far-left politics is ahistorical, a matter of taking relatively recent framing and retroactively applying it to our history. While many contemporary activists indeed embrace slogans like “defund the police,” this does not mean that police abolition has been a longstanding, universal goal of traditional socialist or communist movements; in fact, most historical left movements have supported law enforcement in theory, albeit with lots of conditions and aspirations, seeking to reshape them rather than to do away with them wholesale. I will hasten to say that this doesn’t mean that we’re beholden to those past commitments, not at all. But to have had the debate intelligently back in 2020, most of the people glomming on to “defund the police” would have needed to be aware of the history there, and most weren’t. That’s just reality.

What’s inarguable is that left theory has not defaulted to a broad assumption of police abolition throughout our history. The idea is, in fact, quite alien to many left traditions. To pick the most influential and inescapable example, communism as articulated by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels does not include an agenda to eliminate policing within pre-communist society. The Communist Manifesto, the foundational text of Marxism, analyzes class struggle and state power and says plainly that the state’s violent apparatus serves the upper classes and their hegemony; this is, obviously, well in keeping with “defund the police” rhetoric.” But the Manifesto and other core explications of Marxist theory do not call for abolishing law and order institutions in existing societies. Rather, they see state violence as tied to class rule and as something that will, in theory, be subject to the spontaneous “withering away” of the state - but only in the context of a fully realized classless society after workers have seized political power. This is a teleological point about the effects of a communist revolution, not a policy platform to abolish police in current societies. And attempting to skip steps and implement post-revolution goals in pre-revolutionary states is a notoriously bad idea in the history of radical politics. Socialist and communist revolutions often used appeals to law and order as core parts of their messaging in trying to win the support of the people. The Bolsheviks, for example, were able to consolidate power in part because they so ardently signaled that they would be able to establish real order in post-Tsarist Russia, out of the chaos of the February revolution. The Viet Minh in North Vietnam made similar promises; so did Fidel Castro’s Cuban revolution. I’m sure my commenters are going to pipe up and ponderously explain why those revolutions were Bad, Actually, but that’s simply besides the point. What I’m trying to establish here is that the idea that far-left politics necessarily entail anti-police animus, assumed in 2020 by many people who should have known better, was and is simply ahistorical. The question is far more complicated than that.

There is of course the endless debate about whether any 20th century state ever actually amounted to a communist government; I am one of those annoying types who insist that the answer is no, principally because the idea of a communist state is an oxymoron. (The old Trotskyist-Stalinist divide over the concepts of permanent revolution and socialism in one country stems from this contradiction.) But it is at least notable that the Soviet Union, the People’s Republic of China, Cuba, and other states that at least claimed to be communist republics demonstrate that law enforcement institutions were maintained and, in many cases, expanded under far-left rule. The nascent Soviet Union established the militsiya as its regular police force to maintain social control, enforce laws, and protect the governing order, with the communist party tightly intertwined with state functions. The early Soviet secret police, the Cheka, and its successors likewise played roles in internal security and counter-revolutionary suppression, roles directly tied to maintaining order. That’s the opposite of eliminating policing altogether. Post-revolutionary China and Cuba continued similar models, with significant national police and public security force expansion and police tasked with maintaining stability and enforcing the laws of the socialist state. Again, I have zero interest in debating whether these developments were good. I am interested in why exactly a lot of people decided that defunding/abolishing the police was something the left has always called for. That simply isn’t the case. This piece from the Communist Party USA notes that even the Black Panthers, a very obvious point of comparison for contemporary anti-police activism, didn’t call for an end to policing but instead demanded community control of the police. Their goal was to shift accountability to local communities so that police would protect Black and working-class neighborhoods rather than oppress them. Again, you are fully free to say that this is the wrong model and that defunding/abolishing the police is the right move. That’s fine. But to have a useful political debate, you have to be grounded in left history and theory, and the 2020 “debate” did not; in general, that debate amounted to a lot of screaming, often on social media, often waged by people who appeared to have zero grounding in either theory or history.

The assumption that left movements have always been anti-police conflates several different strands of thought - radical critiques of how police are used under capitalism (that is, to enforce property relations and suppress dissent); local demands for accountability or community control; and very specific policy debates in contemporary U.S. politics about policing budgets. Those are all different things. We should know that. We should call things by their right names. We should be rigorous. We have to be.”

(https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/defund-the-police-failed-because)