The Price of a Stocking-Frame

I allowed myself my first cash transaction today since this pandemic began. While buying a soda at an auto supply store, I decided after a moment's hesitation that I would not bother to put the handful of dollars involved on my credit card. Instead, I reached into my wallet and pulled out a twenty that had been sitting there untouched since early March.

Seeing it in my hand, I realized the bill was freighted with a ghastly symbolism it would not have possessed for me just two weeks ago. A twenty dollar bill. As with any other bill that finds its way into my wallet, I had no first-hand knowledge of this one's provenance. It had just been churned out of some ATM in a 7-11 months before. Who knew if it was a legitimate bill or not.

Yet, I had handed over bills like this one to store clerks all my life, without ever once imaging that it might set in motion events that would lead to my murder by police. I don't worry about this still. Because I am white.

“I am asking you, is that what a black man’s life is worth? Twenty dollars?” This is what Philonise Floyd asked Congress today, testifying about his brother's murder. As is well known by now, his brother George was tortured and killed during an encounter with police, through the use of a chokehold tactic, because of a call involving nothing more than a single counterfeit twenty.

This is far from the first time in the history of capitalism that the powers of the state have chosen to value property over the life of poor people. In the early 19th century, during Luddite uprisings in which displaced weavers sought to break the mechanized looms that were putting them out of work, the British parliament passed a law making the destruction of such looms a capital offense.

In his maiden speech in the House of Lords, the poet Lord Byron asked essentially the same question that Philonise Floyd asked Congress today. Conjuring an image of a weaver ejected from the life he had known by new technology, forced by desperation to take action against the machines putting him out of a livelihood, Lord Byron spoke of this man as possessing "a life which your lordships are perhaps about to value at something less than the price of a stocking-frame."

In so many words, the poet-politician was asking: Is that what a person's life is worth? Less than the cost to an employer of a mechanized loom?

We can see the same elevation of property over personhood not only in George Floyd's murder, but in many of the events that followed it. In the protests that came after his murder, there were incidents of property destruction, the burning of police vehicles, looting of stores, with some placing a greater degree of moral condemnation on these property crimes than they did on the killing of Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and so many other innocent people.

One does not need to swing to the foolish extreme of trying to defend these acts -- many of which harm businesses and neighborhoods that may struggle for years to recover-- in order to see the inhumanity of arguments that have tried to draw a false moral equivalence between these actions against property —and the infinitely graver offense of the taking of human life, which first motivated the protests.

Meanwhile, these protests are unfolding against the backdrop of right-wing initiatives at the state level that seek to criminalize protest activity itself. Though these laws do not result in capital sentences, they could well be regarded as the spiritual successors to the frame-breaking act that Lord Byron was speaking against, back in 1812.

A series of so-called "critical infrastructure" bills, for instance, that have been promoted by the right-wing lobby ALEC, are trying to amp up penalties for non-violent civil disobedience actions targeting pipelines and other fossil fuel infrastructure. Plainly aimed at suppressing the kind of protests that surrounded the construction of the DAPL pipeline at Standing Rock, these laws would put people away for years in prison, for harmless acts that are more than sufficiently covered by criminal statutes already on the books—such as trespassing.

One such bill, in Louisiana, could result in activists being sent away for as many as five years. We have to ask, with Lord Byron, if that is how much our society values five years of a person's life, as well as a lifetime of diminished opportunities due to a felony conviction on their record—at less than a day's work because a person set foot on a pipeline construction zone?

I am not of the school of thought that would go so far as to say we should have no property, or police protections for property. There are of course some people who are saying this. In a recent interview in Jacobin, for instance, Alex Vitale called for both the end of policing as well as the private property regime on which it allegedly rests. In their place, he argues, we should invest the same level of resources in "community needs."

To me, there seems a basic incoherence in this proposal. I agree with Vitale that we need generous welfare provisions as a society—especially in the midst of the pandemic. But these require, rather than contradict, a system of private property. The society has to have a base of wealth if it is to be taxed, as well as a legal framework by which that wealth is allocated.

As an alternative, we could of course live in a society in which the state simply expropriated all wealth. But trying to accomplish such a thing without police power is unthinkable. And to say that a step in such a direction would reduce the role and power of policing in our society is belied by the experience of every Marxist police state that has ever existed. (Whether or not capitalism invented policing, after all, the Bolsheviks certainly didn't have any objection to utilizing it to their ends. Same with prisons, for that matter.)

The state, as Max Weber famously argued, is inherently a coercive institution. To seek to use it to redistribute wealth, fund social programs, tax those wealthy enough to afford it, or any other worthy purpose, is necessarily to entangle oneself in the use of policing power. We therefore cannot escape what Weber called the bargain with satanic powers, which lies at the heart of any political action utilizing the state.

We could perhaps abolish the police, if by "abolition" we mean simply the creation of a new institution that serves a similar function but has a different name and structure, and which plays a far more limited role in society. If this is what we're talking about, then I am in support. But I would add a note of caution that both police and prisons have been through various changes of euphemistic camouflage before, without fundamentally altering their function—or the inherent dangers they pose.

There is no possible configuration of a state that does not betray tendencies toward authoritarianism and violence, because—as Weber put it—the state is nothing other than a system of organized violence. We could choose not to have a state at all, I suppose, and try our hands at anarchism—and I do not mean this pejoratively. The belief that it is possible to have a society organized entirely through voluntary non-coercive relations has a storied heritage behind it, as is not to be dismissed.

So long as we wish the state to do some things for us (including accomplishing left-wing policy goals), however, and are not yet willing to cast our lot with anarchism as an ideology, there must be some institution in our society that wields coercive power—including the power to arrest and detain. We can choose to call that institution something other than police, but police—in the ultimate sense—it will remain.

The question to my mind, therefore, is not whether we want police at all, but whether those police are bound by the same rule of law they ostensibly enforce—that is, whether there are checks and balances that ensure police cannot violate the civil and human rights of the members of our society.

For this reason, I think the package of accountability measures currently being debated in Congress, including the end of qualified immunity, press in the right direction. (I am less sure of measures included in the package that would lower some barriers to prosecution of police and create new federal criminal penalties—we have seen that even apparently liberal measures that rely on prosecution and criminalization can still be used to fuel mass incarceration.)

Separately from this legislation, however, it is indisputably true that we must also "defund the police." This is not because abolishing the state's police power entirely seems a desirable or attainable goal to me; but because armed police should be doing far less in our society, should be intervening in far fewer situations, and should be relied upon less often to enforce penalties for minor and harmless crimes.

So long as police are able to burst into people's homes unannounced using "no-knock warrants"; so long as they can lock people up for harmless drug violations; so long as they can bring military-grade weaponry into situations involving people with mental illness or protesters denouncing injustice; so long as bench warrants are being put out for the arrest of people because of unpaid traffic citations—violence will be the inevitable result.

In pursuing these policies of criminalization and over-policing, the state has sowed the wind. These last weeks, we have reaped the whirlwind.

It is this situation—the product of relatively recent policy decisions—that allowed a person's life to be taken from him because of a single bad bill. It is these policies that have created a world in which a Black man's life, as Philonise Floyd put it, is being valued at less than twenty dollars. The remedy for this unconscionable reality is not to eliminate the state itself, and its coercive function, but to render it accountable to the same law it ostensibly upholds.