(This excerpt is from an article by Robin DG Kelley that is behind
Spectre Journal's paywall. It should be an incentive to subscribing to
this nonpareil new Marxist voice.)
This narrow conception of the US left has largely rendered invisible a
Black Marxist critique of state violence and policing/within/established
socialist and communist movements—one exception being the Communist
leader William L. Patterson’s landmark appeal to the United Nations,/We
Charge Genocide/.^9
<https://spectrejournal.com/insecure-policing-under-racial-capitalism/void(0)>
There has been surprisingly little discussion of the CPUSA’s National
Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression, which grew out of the
campaign to free Angela Davis. Nor has anyone, as far as I know,
acknowledged Paul Boutelle (later known as Kwame Somburu) who called for
abolishing the police when he was the Trotskyist Socialist Workers
Party’s (SWP) vice-presidential candidate in 1968.
The Harlem-born Boutelle left school at age sixteen, tired of being
indoctrinated with “Christianity, Capitalism, and Caucasianism.” He
drove a taxi for a living and became active in a number of Black
nationalist and anti- imperialist organizations during the early ’60s,
including the Fair Play for Cuba Committee and the Freedom Now Party, an
all-Black political party that endorsed African American SWP leader
Clifton DeBerry for president in 1964. That year Boutelle ran
unsuccessfully for a New York State Senate seat on the Freedom Now Party
ticket.
He joined Malcolm X’s short-lived Organization of Afro-American Unity
and witnessed his assassination in the Audubon Ballroom on February 21,
1965. Boutelle immersed himself in SWP politics, running for Manhattan
Borough president in 1965, state attorney general in 1966, chairing
Afro-Americans Against the War in Vietnam and the Black United Action
Front, before his historic vice-presidential bid as Fred Halstead’s
running mate.^10
<https://spectrejournal.com/insecure-policing-under-racial-capitalism/void(0)>
Boutelle’s campaign plank in 1968 could be adopted today. In one of his
early stump speeches in Philadelphia, he called for free college
education and medical care for all, a reduced work week with no
corresponding reduction in pay, ending the Vietnam war and reinvesting
those resources in “schools and hospitals” and “decent low-rent homes,”
nationalizing banks and major corporations and placing them “under the
control of democratically elected workers committees,” and the
“abolition of police.” The latter, it should be noted, was not part of
the SWP’s platform, but Boutelle nevertheless proposed a public safety
alternative that would entail electing representatives from communities
to “replace troops and police.”
Following a wave of urban rebellions against police violence during the
summer of 1967, Boutelle argued that the militarization of police
mirrored US counterinsurgency measures abroad. “The capitalist class
determines the means of the struggle in this country, and their means is
violence. They are ready to do anything at all to suppress the black
movement—helicopters, armored tanks, chemical warfare, even
concentration camps.”^11
<https://spectrejournal.com/insecure-policing-under-racial-capitalism/void(0)>
In other words, the Black left’s protracted struggle to dismantle the US
police state has for too long remained at the margins of Marxist thought
and praxis. The problem was highlighted recently in/Spectre/by Peter
Ikeler in his excellent response to Dustin Guastella, the Democratic
Socialists of America (DSA) leader who not only opposes defunding the
police but affirms their role in ensuring public safety—particularly the
safety of people of color and the poor.^12
<https://spectrejournal.com/insecure-policing-under-racial-capitalism/void(0)>
Ikeler demolishes Guastella’s arguments, point by point, and his
fundamental conclusion repeats what police and prison abolitionists such
as Mariame Kaba, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Angela Davis and, indirectly at
least, Paul Boutelle (Kwame Somburu) and others have been saying for
decades: “To End Police Violence, End Racial Capitalism.”^13
<https://spectrejournal.com/insecure-policing-under-racial-capitalism/void(0)>
Ikeler’s piece is compelling and persuasive, but it opens up a larger
question: what is the role of police in reproducing racial capitalism?
This article is an attempt to offer some schematic answers to this
question, particularly with respect to the function of police in real
estate, finance capital, and technology, as generators of revenue, and
as “labor.”
https://spectrejournal.com/insecure-policing-under-racial-capitalism/
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