Ending the police state vs. just changing your attitude: The meaning of the current protests as I see them

New York, June 6, 2020

It is a truism that opposition to racism can mean either just opposing prejudice and so policing attitudes, or trying to change institutions and forms of social life of which such attitudes are never more than a part, and not exactly the cause.  This difference divides materialists and idealists in explaining history, moralism versus social criticism in political style, and leftists and liberals.  

But what should you do if you find yourself subject to problematic sentiments resulting from traumatic experiences with other citizens that could well seem to place you on the wrong side of history, or simply the wrong side of right?  

Yes, I worry that things I have written will be misunderstood. Though I would like to think that I write in such a way that it would be hard for a carefully thinking person to get me wrong.

As someone who grew up in neighborhoods and schools that were not very racially integrated, I will probably never shake the feeling of estrangement—which can often be salutary, as various forms of artistic “sublime” have always maintained—when I observe poor black Americans, and am reminded as well of how little I have gone out of my way to try to understand.  While at the same time, I have personally had some back luck. 

My experience of bad luck with members of demographical social groups very different from my own, including in terms of formal education, has been not so much that of the victim of crime as that of the victim of injustice.  Many of us are, as I am, just narcissistic enough that we notice the injustice to which we are subjected much quicker than that which we, perhaps unwittingly, may seem to participate in or tolerate.  I believe I should write about it if I think it may be interestingly useful to some people, but I also know that in encounters or observations with people very different from myself, I should observe and listen more. 

The truth may be that in fact, in societies like ours, and especially in America, a great many people feel encouraged to some kind of political or ‘pre-political’ rage.  Undoubtedly, this is because of something that is under-thematized but that oppresses even when in the manner of something that cannot be ‘accused’ in the way that persons can be, and that operates through, as Michel Foucault put, ‘strategies without strategists. What I mean is that something, or many things, about life in a society that is extremely capitalist and highly managed through bureaucratic discourse and practices, can and does cause many people to feel a kind of ‘surplus powerlessness’ (as Michael Lerner, the editor of the Jewish liberal magazine Tikkun put it) and so frequently annoyed and easily angered. Life today can be full of annoyances, as any of us can testify to from having to deal with unresponsive or even abusive telephone customer service personnel, often after waiting on hold to the inspid sounds of a kind of repetitive and joyless musical sewage noise that seems intended to produce feelings of paradoxically extreme but manageable annoyance. People get annoyed by various things, including traffic jams, crowded subway trains, long lines, unpleasantly bossy bosses, or children who may act badly unless you scream at them, who may themselves come to be super-annoyed by your doing so. Not to mention the police, who are quite routinely unfriendly, unless maybe you are calling about a property crime and look suitably like a property owner; then, if they have their criminalizing gaze oriented to someone else, they will spare you for the moment; and if they don’t, you might be “privileged” enough to get away with verbal abuse and vague threats that they cannot help conveying (does shooting people’s dogs mean '“Next time, we come for you?”), instead of literally risking your neck and losing your life while trying to breathe in a land that apparently is not designed or run so as allow people who look you to breathe or do much else. A while ago there was a comic showing in adjacent panels youths from America and Cuba, both walking down a street: the American is clearly afraid and prepared only to react that fear somehow, while the Cuban, in a society that at legendarily supplies to the world who want to help people instead of get rich, that eliminated illiteracy with a fraction of our country’s wealth, and neighborhood committees that both participate in governance and help sustain a feeling of community, however much that may be paired with a less than perfectly liberal government. It may be that Cuba is not the best model for a breathing polity, but ours has a lot to learn from that standpoint, as is increasingly clear to many people. The broad problem is something about life under capitalism; among other things, it’s strenuous, sickening to many people, and scary. The problems may ultimately be structural features of capitalism and the kind of state authority that it needs to sustain itself. This would be a matter of “what” and “how” that goes beyond that of “who,” though certainly misery as well as luxury can be distributed more or less well. We may all suffer or be oppressed in some ways—how many white Americans will talk about their own national ethnic group and how they were oppressed, at least in the old country; and for that matter, the Protestant sects that founded most of the early American colonies, in addition to owning African slaves, were “dissenters” as they were called in England who among other things helped to promote a broad ideology or rhetoric of liberation from oppression that in part led to the American Revolution and its ambiguous gains. Often, people come to understand that their own tribe is oppressed, and they want to make a lot of sound and fury about that.  Often, too, the frustrations of modern life, which seem more social than natural, in the ways people really do, as Hamlet put it, “suffer / the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,” perhaps because they seem to involve humiliation, are met with a response of wanting to demand respect, and claim it in what is often pseudo-political stance that verbalizes the notion that our nation is “e pluribus unum,” a ‘one’ composed out of many, with a universality that depends on rights of expression and representation for all who can claim to have come from somewhere. And voilà the politics of identities that are easily borne as they are cheaply for sale. If you see enough of some of this coming from people whose experience of reference is much less extreme than their talk about it suggest, you may think that there is something wrong with that picture.  

After all, terrible wars have been started by people who were certain that they were combatting oppression as in some its unique victims.  And if you want to hate or oppress someone, what better way than to pawn it off on them, saying that they hate or oppress you.  Sure, it might be true.   But unless you want to be a hypocrite, thinking about your experience in that way is at least not enough.  In a time of the primacy of the political, it is nowhere near enough.  No one is made holy by being oppressed, and oppression is banal; what is not is a good response to it.  

And bad responses to oppression have led to murderous fascisms.  

I have added my voice to the many who criticize identity politics and other aspects of neoliberal capitalist ideology.  Like all socialists, I don’t think liberation means just electing someone to represent us who happens to belong to a minority group.  That is not liberation, it is just representation. 

Nor is a radical politics formed out of sanctions regimes against miscreants with bad attitudes towards some of their neighbors or fellow citizens.  That yields not a politics but a demand for policing and punishments.  

My own experiences were formed in liberal environments, including a couple of universities.  In the 70s the in thing in California was the New Age.  Like ecology, it was a big thing in part because white liberals who had moved to the suburbs were tired of having to deal with uppity black people.  The conservative liberal successor to the hippies of a few years back, the New Age—which in various forms still enjoys immense popularity, including among liberal Protestants and Jews—was promoted as some vague alternative to perhaps all of Western civilization.  It did this in the name of something that does not even exist: some amalgamation of the extremely different Sanskrit and Chinese religious traditions in antiquity, as best assimilated by white middle-class Americans who of course never bothered to learn even the languages, let alone much about these, to them obviously, better traditions. 

What I finally realized is that the New Age is simply the ad hoc mass marketing of vague notions of a “spirituality” that is less an ethics than an idea of “therapy." Maybe that is the new religion. It is false because unlike a genuine ethics, it is not really a form of thinking, and so doesn’t engage history and art works, nor is it political, unless that just means some new or ad hoc dietary and holiness code. Therapy is the new ideology of a spirituality that mirrors the now largely psychological social control techniques of the state, including private organizations that help people manage their lives. Lacking losers in need of management that we all supposedly are. And this management by experts and the self is sold to people as the solution to whatever bothers them. But to see what is wrong with this, just consider, how might this be a solution to the problem of rampant police violence and mass incarceration? Would such a solution just be a new and improved set of correctional procedures and institutions, which used to be a name for prisons? In the end, of course, the incoherent set of ideas bandied about in endless ideological declarations based on the nonexistent Indian and Chinese ancient wisdom, and applied in whatever technology or set of techniques for managing vulnerable minds and bodies so that they are happier living with their assigned lot in life?

I went to Berkeley, which is a great place to study if you want to at least take classes with some world-class scholars.  I have always considered myself on the left politically, and in a serious way, not the left wing of the right wing that defined for so long much of the Democratic Party.  I looked for signs and instances, and everything I found was very disappointing.  I am not the only person with such experiences; recounting them is a staple of neo-conservatism, which is by definition the conservatives of those who used to be liberals or on the left. 

It seemed that in practice now what remained of the left was safe spaces and speech codes.  Radical feminism was all the rage, but on the ground it never seemed to mean much more than hating men.  Something in whom was always threatening to rear its ugly head (ha ha).  There was no radical black activism, though mass protests that swept the campus against Apartheid in South Africa (and the corporate university’s investments in it) helped to bring down that regime, after the divestment demands spread to the U.S. Congress.  Some black activists wanted to change the curriculum, but no one ever challenged the university’s instantiation of the administrative state, and there was no radical anti-capitalist movement of any consequence anywhere to be found, neither one that would center on the oppression still experienced by black people, including in nearby, mostly black, Oakland.  I wish. 

But in societies like ours political activism and thinking that goes beyond politicians and elections (or interest groups that support politicians financially in return for being allowed to be stakeholders—the ones whom the politicians answer to, not the voters) is simply rare.  In the 60s the very idea of protest acquired a legendary and almost sanctified meaning.  I was nine at the time of Woodstock and Kent State, but I certainly would encounter my share of people who would grow old believing that their generation was itself a movement and that this is the most important, or even only, way of living a life that has a public and political dimension, and of the kind that should be available to all citizens.

Politics is rare (and it is not the same as government or management), and when it erupts, it comes with a heady sense of both excitement and danger, given that what is in the air calls on participants to engage in a kind of struggle, with stakes and risks.  We live in a time, surely, of the primacy of the political, and have for at least a century, maybe two or a bit more.  (It was already true in some ways the 16th century with English Protestant “dissenters,” and the political culture of the U.S. is in part their heir). 

But things are happening right now, and the character of our society could begin to change, and perhaps soon, very much for the better, if we benefit, against all usual odds, from the right combination of hard work and luck. 

Good luck would include getting expressions of sympathy from elites and many middle-class and white people, and then using those strategically to try to push further in the direction of changing the laws and institutions involved. No one believes that mass protests are themselves an image of a better society; what they image is the intensity and depth of opposition to the present one. And that is important.

At the center is race, as was the case with the American “New Left” in the early 60s—-before the Vietnam War began to dominate oppositional discourse, in part creating a horizon for the anti-capitalist politics that alone are compatible with opposition to neo-colonialism and its genocides.

In genuine social movements, people do undertake work that is meant to change themselves and not only social institutions.  This cannot be done merely by having 100 million people see therapists, because therapy is based on a premise of the normality of the society and its state and the abnormality of individuals who need to be better adjusted, an objective that is thinly hidden beneath that of getting what one is able intelligibly to want in a neoliberal society, in which social control of the working class and that part of which may be called poor or is racially semi-excluded or both.  Nor is it the case that we need massive popular tribunals (or offices of universities and other corporations who will sanction inappropriate remarks and attitudes.  

In genuine social movements, the relationship between public and private, individual and society, undergo a shift.  The proof of this is that some people feel angry and know that their anger is a call for justice, not for therapy. 

People usually get angry not just because they did not get something they wanted and believed themselves entitled to getting (whether or not there are real entitlements—or “rights,” which posit them as permissions conceded by the authorities—and notwithstanding that to think of anyone this way is to consider them as an infant who has the deficit characteristic of the infant’s age, which is lack of access to language and articulate speech). Though that would be what is appropriate for Therapy. Language in itself is a medium in which what is said (not just by someone, and expressing a mere feeling, but about something, and to someone) normally is at once private and public. There is a sense in which if “I” say something to “you,” it is, necessarily, somehow a statement that is both from me and to you, and about something the understanding of which we can and partly do share. The therapeutic society is a privatized world of idiots, the idiot being by definition the one whose speech is only about himself. Some people in managerial professions, and in ways that have tended for some obvious reasons to be marketed particularly to women, believe that God has, so to speak, the exclusive two names, Relationships, and Feelings. But that is to say that social life in a shared world and form of life constituted in and through language, is just about the familiar, which is the familial. The political then is made personal, perhaps while pretending that the personal and it alone is the political, as some feminists used to say. In any case, the therapeutic society is an alternative to being political, but we are political animals, as Aristotle first said, more than we are in need of personal conversion, confession, teshuvah, healing or help. Only a society with a totalizing, totalitarian state considers (or its managerial class is supposed to consider) all of its citizens as Lacking and needing its compassionate (and condescending) help. Charity. Which also is not political. Billionaires now give to charities in Africa money to help poor people who are victims of predatory governance in ways that directly follow from colonialism. Revolutions are made by the wretched of the earth, not the aristocrats who pity them. That is one good reason why political movements need to be constructed as alliances on the basis of which belonging is not driven by moral considerations alone but solidarity. Solidarity is possible between “you” and “I” when we can both understand ourselves as part of a “we.” This is not something that can be just found; it is constructed, and through hard work. This calls for radicals who want to build a movement to look for ways in which the more “privileged” people also have real complaints for themselves. That they have lesser urgency or importance is not the issue; so what if they do. Solidarity is not a relationship constructed through measurements comparing individuals or groups, as if they were in competition. It focuses more on the reality and intensity of problems than any such judgment of more and less. It derives its possibility from two things: the axiomatic conviction that people are equal, and their sufferings of any injustice are equal in having that quality, whatever its quantity; and from shared dissatisfaction. This is the judgment that what you have as the conditions of your life are somehow or other not enough.

People usually get angry because of an injustice that they believe has harmed some person, thing, or idea that they love.  And one gets angry at the person we hold responsible if we believe that they will listen and maybe be persuaded.  This is the difference between anger and hate.  But it also involves an intuitive assessment of whether we believe what we say will be listened to sincerely and understood with good faith and good will, and they can seem lacking. We should not now want much to persuade the police; we should persuade our governments to downsize them.  The problem with the police is not bad behavior that counts as exceptions to the rule of good policing; it is the institution itself. This country does not just need some better laws and people in position of power; it also needs new and different institutions that in their form will serve different purposes.

In 2014, the Black Lives Matter movement erupted in the wake of the deaths of two black men at the hands of police, in New York and in a mostly black St. Louis suburb named Ferguson.  Not long after, there were protests across the state at the University of Missouri.  These protests made the kind of demands that I find familiar: basically, they were about a kind of Affirmation Action for the campus’s black students.  I believe that these are two very different movements, and I have always suspected what people in the professional class claim on behalf of the entirety of a demographical group to which they belong.  These students wanted professional jobs and were certainly not wrong to; but the people in Ferguson were protesting because they wanted to stay alive.  

Staying alive is a political demand today.  It is a desire that also characterizes most people who come to America as immigrants through its southern border.  People are fleeing El Salvador, which has the world’s highest murder rate.  That fact is in part a consequence of failed U.S. foreign policy which, in the late 70s, supported right-wing death squads, destabilizing a society that today is largely run by drug lords, selling cocaine and heroin to the American market, to feed our addiction problems, which are one individual response to social disintegration and ruined lives.  

Of course, what we need, and declare that we need and struggle for, need not be framed as limited. This is why if there were a specific denumerable right to one’s life, if that is all it was, limited to that, then our human rights would be animal rights. Prisoners of various kinds may get all of their health needs met; often this is scandalously not true, but it can be, but consider: do people in refugee camps, or in mental hospitals, have the right to read books or seem videos of their choosing, associate with people of their choosing, even pursue their profession, and you can see a problem. The right to not be murdered must also be linked with other rights or claims, and these can be expansive. They are “rights” to a form of life that they refer to, though it certainly is not based on them; except in carceral regimes, where “right” and “need” are assimilated, and the latter are provided by expert professionals in coordination with broad policing authorities and tasks. The beneficiary of social control is always entitled to whatever those exercising it need. Just as they will project onto you their own disposition and will to violence, they will also see that you need, and if possible, want and like, what they are prepared to give you. Such regimes are guaranteed to be annoying and boring in the way that a visibly policed life normally is.

The social theorist and veteran labor organizer Stanley Aronowitz has said that today power is normally psychological, and when that fails, it resorts to violence. (It may be added that for many black people and others, that is only the good-luck middle class and usually white alternative to the normal situation for poor blacks or the state’s resorting to violence as its resort both first and last.) And there is also the violence wherein lives and forms of life are systematically damaged or reduced to recognizable and measurable minimums of interest and the intensity of its joys. For of course we on the left have always believed that “everyone is an intellectual,” as Gramsci said, that is, everyone can be, as people study and learn about the things that most interest or concern them and by their own determination, and so too, “everyone is an artist,” as German artist Joseph Beuys put it.

Criticize friends and seek the defeat of opponents; this is my idea of the social life of the political person.  As Jodi Dean in her recent book “Comrades,” points out, the political comrade need not be someone you like; they are only someone you can work with based on shared goals).  I have criticized ways in which sometimes people who are black, female, or something else that “should” put on the side of the oppressed, have acted in support of political and social repression and state violence, and I wish they wouldn’t.  Of course, generally, I should demand more of myself and expect less of others.  

It remains the case that black people in America are treated like colonial subjects, ruled over by police departments that behave often not so differently from the overseas military units that many officers learned much of their skill set from.  They literally treat ordinary citizens as enemy combatants.  Colonialism like all forms of oppression breeds psychical malaises and reproductions or reiterations of what may be considered forms of evil.  

I have met ideologically rigid black people, as well as white liberals, who cannot believe that someone like myself could ever be or have been oppressed.  My own experience testifies to the contrary.  Does this mean I hate you?  Hatred is not a destiny; changing things, and ourselves, can be.  What is needed is alliances between different groups that are united in a set of goals that are inspired by a democratic and socialist, or post-capitalist, vision.   

Jews are commanded in the Torah to not oppress those who may be identified with their own oppression, and to not favor in judgment either the rich (or powerful, or normal, or….) because he is rich, nor the poor and powerless just because he is that.  We all have a moral duty to oppose all of the oppression we are aware of and able to speak about or act against, and to struggle and work, patiently, though sometimes in moments of great energy and excitement, to end it, to create a more just and happier world.  

I also think the police state is a problem in itself, regardless of the “who” of the matter.  We don’t need a black police force, or a feminist or gay one, though I am certain any change in that direction would help in some ways and cases.  

No one owns oppression.  No thinking person can be genuinely interested in saying, My oppression is bigger than your oppression.  Its existence alone could be, and is, adequately acknowledged in some very cynical stances.  What is remarkable and even holy in its way is not that there is so much barbaric cruelty and violence and injustice in the world, but that anyone is able and courageous enough to stand against it, and for something else, and say that that something else is possible, not impossible, that injustice is not necessary, and the world is not ruled by a God of domination, which would be cynical indeed, but by some force of goodness, creativity, and even love that underlies claims to justice and that is no stranger to anger or the discipline that it imposes, so different from the cynical kind specialized in by all of the petty spokespersons for bosses everywhere who only ever really have one thing to say: “Get back to work, you lazy slaves!”   

Black people in this country are often treated like enemy combatants by officers who are themselves returned soldiers from Iraq or Afghanistan.   But a government that treats tens of millions of its own citizens and residents on its soil as enemies cannot long stand.  At least in its current form; something must change. 

Therefore, stand with the idea that Black Lives Matter.  Most Americans believe this, yet in a way it is still not the case.  It is denied. 

All of the qualifications that this statement might be hedged with are irrelevant, because they are obvious truths that no one denies.  But that Black Lives Matter is an obvious truth that has obviously been ignored.  Not just by white men with weapons and badges, though all too often by them also.    But even more so by billions of dollars and massive amounts of military equipment that have no other interpretation in facts on the ground but that these officers are supposed to be, and all too often may suppose themselves to be, at war against their own citizens.  And that means us.  We must all say this.  

Confessions normally belong in a confessional, though it is true that like the Church, the police tend to think everyone is guilty.  The truth is that you are a subject of moralized hatred once you are so much as noticed, which is why everything that you say can be used against you.   

If I believed in guilt and confessions of sin more than I do, then I would be more chagrined than I think needful in criticizing myself mainly for not trying much harder to understand many people whose life experiences and ways of thinking are obviously different from mine.  But politics is not a legal tribunal.  

Nothing any detractor of some people in some situations such as me could say could, of course, in any way change or lessen the basic truths of the matter about our society.  That “Black Lives Matter” is true politically because it is both true morally and not true in empirical fact, since the universal moral truth that people are equal is denied.  It is a truth that wears on its face the fact that it is inscribed in a contradiction. 

Yesterday I read in the NY Times that three former presidents (Obama, Carter, and George W. Bush, this last a conservative) have ‘come out’ in favor of reforms and the protests.  The city of Minneapolis is considering a plan to eliminate their police force and replace it with something more effective in solving problems and far less violent.  

We have the police and prisons that neoliberal capitalism deserves.  What is needed is to radically transform a whole set of institutions, including public schools and universities, the information, entertainment, and advertisement industries, and the health care industry, including that form of policing that is mental health as we know it.  All of these institutions in their present form serve capitalism and the billionaire elite.  They have failed the rest of us.   

Is the good life the managed life?  For most of us, reflection on our experiences in this society will reveal that the answer is no.  

We can, and must, end the police state.  Starting now; or, as it has already started, on an ‘eve’ of now, continuing. Could we win this cause, if there are enough of us? This question can only be answered in practice.