Kick The Cops Off Your Block

07/31/20

Abolish the Police: 

Our communities are occupied by the cops. They put our friends, loved ones, and neighbors in prison, they consistently use unjust violence, they enforce property at the expense of human freedom and life, they criminalize dissent against the state, and they disproportionately target the working class, the dispossessed, Black people, Brown people, Indigenous people, trans people, and disabled people. Cops are defined by a double standard of violence. The very political, economic, and social inequality and unjust laws that cops are defined by enforcing–regardless of the intention of any individual cop– are the biggest causes we know of for overall violence in society (Link to statistics and analysis at end of pamphlet).

As of 2020, The USA has the most prisoners per capita in the world and has less than 5% of the world’s population and over 20% of the world’s prison population. One in three Black men born before 2001 will go to prison in their lifetime, and Black women are over 5 times as likely to go to prison as white women. 76% of people who go to prison are arrested again within 5 years, the highest repeat offense rate in the world. There has been a 700% increase in women incarcerated since 1980. (Links to statistics are at the end of this pamphlet). Although cops in the USA are particularly egregious, there are fundamental problems with any kind of cops.

Cops by definition necessarily enforce hierarchical laws and political economic class relations. Such hierarchical laws and class relations are unjust because they increase overall violence in society, decrease overall happiness in society, and do not allow individuals and collectives to make decisions proportionate to how they are affected by decisions. Therefore the position of cop is unjust, because cops by definition necessarily enforce unjust laws and unjust relations. Given cops enforce hierarchies, and that many of such hierarchies require cops (and other kinds of enforcement), we need to do more than just abolish cops; we also need to abolish hierarchical institutions and relations. Additionally, we need to find ways to meet our needs and organize with each other politically, economically, and socially without rulers.

Alternatives to the police:

Most of what the cops do is enforce inequality and unjust laws (such as victimless crimes like drug possession, enforcement of property over human freedom, and unjust ways of solving real problems that exacerbate overall injustice). We do need conflict resolution, and ways to interdependently support one another, but we do not need the cops to manage that for us. Instead we can handle conflict resolution through talking with each other directly–or in a way that is mediated by an agreed upon facilitator (or conflict resolution council)– to work through a conflict and decide how to resolve it. Transformative and restorative justice processes reduce recidivism and have a higher victim satisfaction rate than punitive justice. Additionally, we can use self defense against people who are unjustly using violence against us or others– distinct from punishment.  We can train each other in self defense so that self defense isn’t monopolized. We can organize collective self defense without hierarchical structure and without arbitrary rule. People should also learn and teach each other about an ethics of justified self  defense so that it is used in a way that advances freedom and equality while minimizing overall violence. People can call their friends, neighbors, and community assembly communication networks in times of emergency conflicts. Non-violent unarmed third party mediation teams can be on call. And additionally, we can abolish authoritarian relations that are the biggest causes of unjust violence towards people.

From here to there: 

Do you have three to five friends in a given area that have similar politics in favor of abolishing the police and providing mutual support to one another to meet each other’s needs? Then you can get together with other people in your block or neighborhood to start working on mutual aid projects and police abolition. Community assemblies can help to address the ways that cops–and the politicians who unleash them and the business as usual that cops protect– are harming people. Community assemblies can pool needs, abilities, tools, resources, and ideas together to help people and groups mutually support one another. In and beyond community assemblies, people can make decisions together about how to go about abolishing the police, how to build community, how to create infrastructure to meet each other’s needs (and the needs of others), how to take action against unjust inequality and unjust limits to freedom etc.

This can look like organizing or co-organizing protests, supporting uprisings with mutual aid networks, hosting skill shares and public education events, forming community copwatch groups, forming community tenants’ unions, providing tools and resources to each other, assisting direct actions, free food distribution for people, and teaming up with other neighborhoods and groups and individuals to make entire sections of the city a cop free zone. By supporting each other within and across collectives and communities, we can make every block ungovernable by the state while providing non-hierarchical solutions to social problems. It is important for people-powered organizations to generalize in society along with direct actions and mutual aid so that long term idealistic goals can be practically arrived at through dialogue, coordination, and collective decisions before, during, and after uprisings and revolutions.

Community assemblies can make decisions together through direct democracy, free association and non-hierarchy. Together, these principles foster collective decisions, free participation and dissent by individuals, and an assembly with a form and content that does not create or support any ruling class or strata over and above people. These cellular block by block community assemblies can link up in networks of mutual support with other neighborhoods, communities, and collectives. Mutual aid infrastructure can assist any direct action effort– as every direct action effort has a sphere of social reproduction. Whether its an occupation, a blockade, a picket, or an insurrection, mutual aid organizations, networks and infrastructure can help literally fuel the needs of participants increasing the overall capacity of people powered organizations and actions allowing them to sustain overtime while reaching out to people and helping people at the same time.

Organizing community assemblies can be done through a potluck, then a meeting, followed by an informal gathering. Some meetings can be specifically issue oriented– such as mutual aid based or rooted in abolishing the police (or some other kind of oppositional politics and direct action). This can help keep give them a common goal and political focus. The assembly can overtime branch into a plurality of issues. People can then get to know each other, form friendships, talk politics, and find shared action projects to do together– within and beyond the assembly project. Overtime, assemblies can develop mutual aid collectives and infrastructure, create direct action networks and help with direct actions (such as occupations, pickets, blocking infrastructure, and assisting strikes), develop conflict resolution infrastructure (rooted in transformative and restorative justice as opposed to judges, police, and prisons), and find ways to strategically oppose the police and assist movements against the police in their neighborhoods and beyond.

People can promote community assemblies through door knocking, flyering, handbills, an online presence of some kind, and connecting with like-minded groups as well as with individuals one on one. These assemblies can build on already existing community ties and bring them into solidarity for a world where people make direct decisions about what affects them without bosses, politicians, cops, or oppression. Community assemblies have the potential to unite the widest array of people along common liberatory practice and are required for self-management to exist on every scale. If people are not making decisions about what affects them directly then decision making power is de facto privatized. Direct decision making should exist on a community scale in a way that does not arbitrarily limit the individual freedoms that we should have. This is not just about strategy, but what it means to live in a good society.

Process for meetings can be as simple as making an agenda, having a temporary facilitator who calls on people as they raise their hands, having a discussion, proposing decisions and alternatives, and then making collective decisions through dialogue. Assemblies and collectives can form committees and have delegates to implement specific decisions. Committees and delegates of assemblies and collectives should not make any decisions over and above the groups they are delegated by– instead they should carry out decisions they agree to do that are made by people directly.

Community assemblies are not the only kinds of organizations one can create for a better world; for example, there is the affinity group form which allows a small group of people to work together on specific actions. This can make sense for stuff that is intended to be underground, but also has other functions. Additionally people can form medic collectives, gardening collectives, mutual-aid collectives, bail-fund collectives, direct action collectives, community defense collectives, childcare collectives, community or worker controlled cooperatives, land trusts, radical unions, etc.  All of these different forms should use some kind of direct democracy (direct collective decision making) internally for ethical reasons and strategic reasons; cooperative conflict between people working on common goals allows better decisions and allows everyone to participate, agree, disagree, amend, question, critique, dissent, etc.

Different and similar kinds of groups can link up together for mutual aid, common projects, and joint actions. When working together, each group can communicate through direct written communication from groups and meetings of delegates from each group. This should be done in a way where collective decisions are made between groups but where all decision making power resides directly within each group’s membership–where delegates are communicative rather than representative policy makers. This can build towards something like a police abolition coalition that is in favor of defunding and abolishing the police and in favor of mutual aid and transformative justice. This kind of coalition can exist within and between regions. Such a coalition can catalyze and create momentum for police abolition, fuel liberatory social movements with capacity, can develop people powered infrastructure for meeting needs and resolving conflicts, and can win concessions from the state that minimize the police, while building towards revolution. Of course, we need to do more than just win concessions and we need to do more than just abolishing the local police; we also need to abolish sheriffs, state police, federal police, private police, and be prepared to oppose right wing militias who try to fill the void of the police. In order to abolish the police we must abolish the class relations which necessitate a police force ruling over and above people. In order to make sure that hierarchy does not emerge, we are going to need to develop horizontalist democratic processes for decision making as well as egalitarian cultural dimensions that can abolish and replace white supremacy, patriarchy, and other forms of oppression.

We need a diversity of tactics and a diversity of organizations to fill different niches. If we want to kick the cops off our block, we must strategically work within our given contexts as they develop and find out how to make decisions together without resorting to rulers and without arbitrarily limiting the freedoms people should have.

More Info: 

Statistics Sources: 

Criminal Justice Facts

https://www.sentencingproject.org/issues/racial-disparity/

https://www.bjs.gov/index.cfm?ty=pbdetail&iid=4986%20

Transformative Justice: 

Community Accountability

Organizing 101:

https://thenewmunicipalagenda.wordpress.com/2020/02/03/libertarian-socialist-method/

https://libcom.org/organise/general/articles/decision-making-and-organisational-form.php

Poverty and Inequality increases rates of violence:

https://www.equalitytrust.org.uk/violence

Direct Action 101 Guide:

https://archive.org/details/DirectActionSurvivalGuide_210

Mutual Aid 101:

Mutual Aid

https://mutualaiddisasterrelief.org/mutual-aid/embed/#?secret=VPAFsWUDHL

Communalism 101:

https://thenewmunicipalagenda.wordpress.com/2017/09/19/introduction-to-neighborhood-assemblies/

https://www.communalismpamphlet.net/

Click to access Bookchin%27s%20Social%20Ecology%20and%20Communalism.pdf

https://libcom.org/library/mountain-river-has-many-bends

Origins of Police: 

https://libcom.org/history/origins-police-david-whitehouse

Community Self Defense Manual:

https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Let-Your-Motto-Be-Resistance%3A-A-Handbook-on-New-and-Movement/44879ede18e7176efa0d9aff3601fdf44c13fcb0

Social Ecology and Social Immunity in the time of Sars 2

03/26/2020

Social Ecology and Social Immunity in the time of Sars 2:

The current pandemic of Sars 2/Covid 19 has become an almost all pervasive social problem. We are deeply social animals and depending where you are the current pandemic and responses to it loom over every social relationship. In the following essay, I will try to demonstrate the following points: Hierarchical relations–defined by institutionalized forms of ruling classes and ruling strata– cause and exacerbate infectious diseases. To create a robust and resilient kind of social immunity, we ought to create radical egalitarian institutions and social relations. The goal will not be to provide an exhaustive explanation of the above thesis and the various ways in which hierarchical relations inhibit good health and egalitarian relations promote good health, but merely to demonstrate its strength as a framework to inform praxis to increase social immunity.

Causes of diseases:

Pollution and ecological destruction–caused by hierarchy– inhibit immune systems. Most infectious diseases are caused through destruction of ecosystems (Robbins 2012) and more biodiversity generally leads to less infectious diseases (and inversely less biodiversity generally leads to more infectious diseases) (Keesing et al. 2010). A social ecological theory explaining such ecological destruction would point out that destruction of ecosystems and biodiversity is not mere human activity, but a specific kind of activity that is most significantly caused by hierarchical relations between humans that instrumentalize human and non-human life towards maximizing profit and power over others (Bookchin 2007). In such a process, capitalists and states that fail to utilize cheap nature will be less able to compete with capitalists and states in a zero sum game where nature (including social nature) is sacrificed to hierarchical power (Moore 2017).

Structural violence–inequality and hierarchy– inhibit overall immune system functioning throughout society (Wilkinson et al. 2011). Structural violence causes increased amounts of abuse and unmet needs and increased stress (Wilkinson et al. 2011) and toxic amounts of such increased stress inhibit immune system functioning (Mate 2019). Structural violence also causes greater prevalence of adverse childhood experiences (Wilkinson et al. 2011) and such adverse childhood experiences can cause toxic stress response in children which generally causes greater frequency and risk of infections as well as other negative outcomes throughout childhood and adult life (Franke 2014). The growth of structural violence can only happen at the expense of egalitarian decentralized participatory community organizations and networks. Such people-powered institutions and infrastructure can help with mutual aid work in times of disasters– and in times when there are not disasters.

Deprivation of resources existed prior to capitalism. Under capitalism, deprivation of resources happens through commodification, markets, wage labor, class relations, private property. Healthcare as a commodity inhibits treatment and access to treatment when it comes to infectious diseases. Universal decommodified healthcare, by providing care to the general population, enables greater social immunity. However, healthcare that is merely universal and decommodified is necessary but not sufficient for further healthcare optimization and other ethical criteria: for such decommodified healthcare can still exist in a broader context of commodification, other kinds of hierarchical power, or scientific ignorance. Furthermore, nationalization of healthcare and reforms such as single payer healthcare are distinct from communalized healthcare. Under communalized healthcare, decisions about healthcare are made through communities, doctors, patients, healthcare workers, and relevant experts talking together to find out what needs are and how to meet them through the scientific method guided by ethical practice. Such communalized healthcare would create a participatory process in regards to healthcare along with standard operating procedures as opposed to rule by market forces or top-down management. This would create more cooperation between the healthcare industry, more transparency, better communication, and cooperative conflict in regards to self-managed decision making –which is shown to produce better processes and results worth striving towards than competition (Kohn 2017). The prescription that decommodification of healthcare is necessary but not sufficient—and that communalization should be an additional feature to decommodication– will also apply to other commodities talked about in this essay. Furthermore, healthcare knowledge should be generalized rather than highly specialized and coveted (although some people will of course excel in this specific field of knowledge and various subsets thereof). In Rojava, healthcare systems embedded in self governed communities aim to teach everyone first aid and medical skills to create greater redundancy of skills– an important feature of a good healthcare system that the entire world should learn from.

The commodification of food and nutrition makes it so access to such food and nutrition is conditional upon how much one can afford within market systems. Nutrition of course contributes towards good immune system functioning which can help prevent, minimize, and fight off infectious diseases. This helps overall social immunity given how many infectious diseases are contagious.

Housing as a commodity inhibits people from having access to personal space. Such access to personal space helps people rest, recover from infectious diseases, and not spread infectious diseases when they are contagious. Without personal space, people have less ability to distance themselves from others when they are contagious.

Wage labor is the buying and selling of human time and capacity. People are forced to sell their labor power on the market in order to get access to the necessities of life. This forces people to go to work while they are contagious. This decreases overall social immunity and helps spread contagious diseases. Commodities themselves create transactional relations with money and cashiers and customers which apart from only serving market functions helps spread infectious diseases through unnecessary human contact. If one person a cashier comes into contact with is contagious with something like Sars 2/Covid 19, then that could spread the disease to a specific cashier and the many people that cashier is in contact with (on and off the job) overtime during the incubation period. For many reasons that go far beyond Sars 2/Covid 19, we need to abolish wage labor and market economies. Instead of a money system, we need a system of free distribution of resources according to needs. Many jobs currently only exist to move money around.

Automation outside of ethical social relations leads to all sorts of ethical problems such as anti-ecological production and humans competing with technology for jobs they need to survive (within a system that should not exist). However, in a good society, automation would be done through ecological development (through regenerative and recycled materials) and would free humans from arduous undesired labor. At least some of the services needed in times of pandemics could be done by machines– minimizing spread of contagious diseases and allowing more people to stay at home. Outside of a context of pandemics, such automation should be used to minimize arduous labor and give people a larger realm of freedom to do what they want to do within good ethical bounds.

An important and simple way to increase social immunity is for people to wash their hands. The commodification of soap, hygiene supplies, masks, gloves, bathrooms etc. makes it so not everyone has access to basic resources to keep themselves and others from getting sick and spreading infectious diseases.

What should we do in the time of Sars 2/Covid 19: 

In some sense, the task at hand is to continue with revolutionary reconstructive and oppositional politics via organization building, direct action, mutual aid, and popular education. Such a process aims to meet people’s needs, oppose hierarchies, while building the new world in the shell of the old. All of the above will always have to adapt to new relevant variables as they emerge. The Sars 2/Covid 19 crisis creates obstacles to the kind of social organizing needed to deal with both the pandemic and other social and ecological problems. Adapting libertarian socialist politics to Covid 19 is not enough, for we must also adapt such politics to specific locales and social relationships with all their unique social variables.

First and foremost, we do not need authoritarianism to help with social immunity. Aside from states causing infectious diseases to spread through destroying biodiversity (in the various ways they do this from their own internal logic to enforcing capitalism), states squander resources on non-solutions such as police, curfews, hierarchical enforcement, prisons, surveillance, emergency powers, their own internal bureaucracies etc. Instead of such authoritarian solutions, we need mutual aid, free healthcare, decommodification more broadly, free access to means of existence and production (including free access to housing and personal space), radical direct action, increased scientific literacy, community accountability and responsibility to each other to make sure we increase social immunity, and participatory organizations to help make all of the above a reality. The protocols and rules people should follow to keep good physical distance during the Sars 2 crisis do not require state enforcement.

Here are some things that can be done during the Sars 2 crisis to increase social immunity while also focusing on other social problems: Relying more on video calls, phone calls, and texting for communication, deliberation, and collective decisions– and finding encrypted user friendly ways to do so as much as possible. Mutual aid projects to help provide necessities of life to people. This could look like neighborhood mutual aid delivery systems towards people who are contagious and people who are not contagious, or it could look like providing necessities of life and hygiene supplies to people– or stuff like mask making and distribution as well as creating public handwashing stations. Taking over abandoned buildings and class property and turning them into housing and people powered infrastructure is a way to meet people’s needs while turning exploitative and socially useless property into something socially useful. More broadly, other kinds of ethically justified expropriation can be useful to help meet people’s needs. Rent strikes and pushes towards rent cancellation can help people not pay their rent while staying sheltered. Rent strikes can be practiced while keeping good physical distance and also directly speaks to worsening conditions of increased unemployment and rent still being due. Such rent strikes can build tenant power that can continue onward beyond the Sars 2 crisis to help oppose landlordism and hierarchy more broadly. There is also the potential for striking at one’s workplace and even general strikes. Escalated radical demands against hierarchs of various kinds backed by direct action and community solidarity can help people meet their needs in this current crisis and in many other crises. Prison abolitionist work is also crucial as aside from prisons being their own moral atrocity beyond the context of Sars 2/Covid 19, prisons are hotbeds for spreading diseases as people are forced to be in close proximity to others without access to personal space. This list is of course very incomplete and you can help by adding to it.

Anti authoritarian left social movements are related to what people need to live and live well. As the Woodbine Collective pointed out, we need to learn from people who have been working in the midst of this crisis (grocery store workers, healthcare workers, etc.) about health precautions to find the right ways to organize together while giving extreme consideration to overall social immunity (Woodbine 2020). After the Sars 2 pandemic, there is likely to be an economic depression. As people are increasingly unable to find work or pay rent, there will be a continued crisis of extreme magnitudes. Hierarchical institutions will try to restructure hierarchical power to meet such new conditions. Horizontalist and egalitarian movements must be prepared to respond to future crises with ethical and effective solutions that bridge short term goals and long term goals. Political actions done during crisis moments is not all that matters: actions done years prior and decades prior to give us capacity to respond ethically and effectively to disasters are very important, as are the kind of follow up organizing done to arrive at long term goals after specific crisis moments. As hierarchy continues to destroy the natural world and instrumentalize it towards increasing power over others, more crises will follow including more pandemics. It is the task of radicals to get to the root causes social and ecological problems (not limited to pandemics) through reconstructive politics and oppositional politics– linking short term goals and long term goals together towards a good society while using a process consistent with the principles thereof.

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End notes

1. Bookchin, Murray. Social Ecology and Communalism. Edinburgh: AK Press, 2007.
2. Franke, Hillary. “Toxic Stress: Effects, Prevention and Treatment.” Children 1, no. 3 (March 2014): 390–402. https://doi.org/10.3390/children1030390.
3. Keesing, Felicia, Lisa K. Belden, Peter Daszak, Andrew Dobson, C. Drew Harvell, Robert D. Holt, Peter Hudson, et al. “Impacts of Biodiversity on the Emergence and Transmission of Infectious Diseases.” Nature468, no. 7324 (2010): 647–52. https://doi.org/10.1038/nature09575.
4. Kohn, Alfie. No Contest: the Case against Competition. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2017.
5. Maté Gabor. When the Body Says No: the Cost of Hidden Stress. Brunswick, Victoria, Australia: Scribe, 2019.
6. Moore, Jason W. “The Capitalocene, Part I: on the Nature and Origins of Our Ecological Crisis.” The Journal of Peasant Studies 44, no. 3 (2017): 594–630.https://doi.org/10.1080/03066150.2016.1235036.
7. Robbins, Jim. “The Ecology of Disease.” The New York Times. The New York Times, July 14, 2012. https://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/15/sunday-review/the-ecology-of-disease.html.
8. Smith, E G. “Coronavirus and the Need for a Social Ecology.” Institute for Social Ecology, March 22, 2020. http://social-ecology.org/wp/2020/03/coronavirus-and-the-need-for-a-social-ecology/.
9. Wilkinson, Richard G., and Kate Pickett. The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger. New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2011.
10. Woodbine. “From Mutual Aid to Dual Power in the State of Emergency.” ROAR Magazine. Accessed March 26, 2020. https://roarmag.org/essays/from-mutual-aid-to-dual-power-in-the-state-of-emergency/?fbclid=IwAR3YLL-MbvllBcoe_t_h9o1RsnB11zMlQSzis3Mfg5so5r303CplxepIvrY.