When it is moral to be in conflict with police, and why, depends on when you are writing
by zunguzungu
I think there’s something interesting about the way this line from George Orwell, from Homage to Catalonia:
I have no particular love for the idealised “worker” as he appears in the bourgeois Communist’s mind, but when I see an actual flesh-and-blood worker in conflict with his natural enemy, the policeman, I do not have to ask myself which side I am on.
Becomes this quote, as paraphrased by Jesse Kornbluth:
Many of us have knee-jerk reactions to cops beating citizens. Mine comes from George Orwell, the subject of my honors thesis. He wrote something like this: When I see a policeman with a club beating a man on the ground, I don’t have to ask whose side I’m on.
This is, in fact, quite different from what Orwell said; Orwell was talking about a class struggle, a natural enmity between worker and state, whose implicit violence need not explode into tangible body-and-blood force to be real, a conflict that was always ongoing, even when it didn’t seem to be. Whether or not it is true — I tend to think it is — it’s fair to say that we have generally forgotten that this is a thinkable thought — that the general mind has forgotten what the words “natural enemy” implied here — and that it is precisely this thing we’ve forgotten that has disappeared when that quote becomes a condemnation of power misused (but still legitimately held). The first knows the conflict to be occurring even before it sees it; the second requires the spectacle before choosing sides. And without accusing Kornbluth of anything intentional, it is worth noting that claiming the revised version to be “something like” what Orwell actually said — while making substantive changes — is to make a claim for the essential truth of the original, and in the act of making that claim, to rewrite it.
well, dont dote on it, the honorable sir orwell’s esteem. i’m pretty sure orwell was a tool of the state, to give cathartic relief to the slaves. see the history of his service and life: military, subsidation, etc. i know it’s a tall order, but, hell, julia childs?
he faught for anarchy you little bitch. he took a bullet in the neck for it. He gave his professional life to thinking about how the state uses words against us, to keep us in submission. you are the fucking tool anonymous
very persuasive stuff, M.
Thanks for the interesting thoughts. This has got me thinking about the distinction you see between the two articulations of the policeman in the two texts you cite, and the reasons for this.
If I understand correctly, we should be pointing our fingers at the policeman’s role as enforcer of state authority whether or not it is being actualized before our eyes in the form of rubber bullets, batons, or pepper spray. And we should do this because we ought to understand the essential violence the state imposes on human activity.
When this post suggests that “we have generally forgotten that this is a thinkable thought,” I understand this to mean that we have generally forgotten the policeman’s role as enforcer of the states’ authority, and an embodiment of the violence this interaction (state-individual) represents.
Then, the policeman’s essential role is to use violent means to enforce a certain (embodied) script, according to which people must be kept legible in terms the state understands and operates through – basically reifying state procedures and policies as enforceable fictions.
And in concrete terms for us this means (scripted as free speech practitioners), practicing free speech in designated areas and going home when the curfew comes into effect, or becoming rescripted as criminals and shipped off to jail. Policemen are the ones who make sure these scripts are in effect at all times, and they have the specific task of using violent means to accomplish this.
Perhaps part of the false mask of the policeman (that the above post tries to put a finger on) lies in the notion that police also (sometimes) keep (some of) us from becoming victims of petty crime. If we are in danger of being brutalized by some local thugs, we might call the police and hope to be rescued. The police in this case function (ideally) as keeping bad guys from victimizing the rest of us. Every community needs some way to prevent the victimization of its members, and this seems like a legitimate role (during the Seattle general strike early last century, activists self-organized and reportedly enforced norms of decent behavior with policing contingents that were unarmed and permitted to use persuasion alone as a means of preventing unsanctioned behavior).
But then when the same police are called by the Mayor to beat people for protesting nonviolently in a park, are they doing something else, a different function (no longer the community anticrime function but now the state’s enforcers), or are they essentially one and the same, sometimes functioning legitimately (arresting a murderer or recovering a stolen car), sometimes illegitimately?
Or perhaps it is precisely the rubric of “criminality” that permits the conflation of two very different actions, one which protects members of the community from violence, the other which violently enforces the state’s will and authority upon those members.
To be fair, Kornbluth’s next paragraph (after the nod to Orwell) does talk about class warfare. My sense is that somewhere in the palimpsest of his mental files he retained an understanding of Orwell’s point; he should have looked up the actual quotation (especially since he take the trouble to mention his honors thesis).
Have we forgotten this thought is thinkable? Perhaps some have, and beautype’s reflections above perhaps reveal part of the explanation. In response to those thoughts, I would caution that we must carefully delineate police authority/power from “the state.” The state wields its power through the military; the police are a different matter, and both in Orwell’s reporting from Spain and in the present case with the OWS protests, the cops (the violent ones, at least) are acting as tools of authorities in the *private* realm–namely, universities and banks–not the state. Orwell wrote about how the law in Spain at the time was anything the police wanted it to be. Today, we have banks calling the police in to arrest citizens trying to close their accounts on Move Your Money Day and universities using their fear of what they appear to think of as peasant uprisings to expand their police/security budgets. A few months ago I read somewhere (alas, my memory is as bad as Kornbluth’s) that there has been a sharp increase in business for private security firms and companies that train guard dogs–because the 1% are getting very nervous about those restive peasants. The mayoral pow-wow that led to crackdowns on OWS sites across the country may seem to undermine this division of private and state authority, but it’s important to understand that these were local efforts, guided largely by concerns over business interests, particularly in the financial industry. (This has been especially obvious here in NYC, with Michael Bloomberg.)
But the Right has so blackened the reputation of the government, and so whitewashed the behavior of the market and private industry, that even people on the left buy into the rhetoric. We forget that businesses wield much greater power over employees than the state over its citizens; rights such as free speech are not protected in the private sector. Companies can tell you, e.g., when and where to pee (mandatory drug testing), and they can tell you that you can’t pee until your shift is over (many factories). The amount of control exerted over employees can be jaw-dropping.
In fact, political theorist Corey Robin has brilliantly argued that the last 40 years of conservative politics have been about the restoration of feudalism; I think readers of this blog would appreciate his “Fear: history of an American idea” as well as his very provocative blog.
I would be interested in learning more from Vielle regarding her comment that
|| “I would caution that we must carefully delineate police authority/power from “the state.”
In many instances of police violence against Occupy sites, which one sees often labelled as “paramilitary” (cf. Oakland incidents, among others), we are definitely seeing an action ordered not by private entities but state representives (i.e., city Mayors). But I would be interested in hearing more on the nuances Vielle has in mind.
I also am not sure I follow this part:
|| “The state wields its power through the military; the police are a different matter.”
In Egypt, currently, for example, it is hard to see where one ends and the other begins. Granted that they are separated at an institutional level; but both perform functions of state violence (or imposition of authority if you like); both are radically hierarchical and I see them as the performing fists of the state; with the police doubling as well as also performing a function of community protection (from inter-member violence) (though the context of Egypt makes reverses this ironically, since the police there were detested torturers of the people while the army was, at least during the revolution, seen as a friend to the people and a source of protection, though that is a notion that is fast fading).
Beautype: first of all, thanks for your thoughtful comments (both sets) and apologies for the delay in response — I’ve been hunkered down working on fellowships all weekend and just decided to check back.
You are very right about the militarization of police action we’ve been witnessing in OWS crackdowns, which blurs the two categories of police and military (if indeed they are discrete categories). One distinction traditionally bandied about is that police are ‘weaponized’ only to the extent that they need to protect themselves; the military is trained and expected to use lethal force, though sometimes as you note they are called on in emergency circumstances. Police thus have been considered to be a part of the community rather than an outward-facing segment of society. But the advent of non-lethal weapons has paradoxically (but predictably) *Increased* the use of physical force by police. What’s so shocking and disturbing about the raids on OWS is that the riot police are acting militarily but with nonlethal weapons, apparently on the assumption that it is easier and quicker to get people to do what you want when you can stun them or spray them and be pretty sure they’re not going to die. At this rate, OWS is going to be able to call on the posse comitatus act.
I was attempting to caution against the perhaps too-broad use of the word “state,” in part because I want to avoid the error of the right-wing, which is paranoid about the potential for coercion by the State (let’s call it big-S State when we’re referring to the federal gov’t in the US) while completely ignoring the various coercions of the market and within the private sphere of labor and family (hierarchies abound in business, industry, factory work, and in the home, which is why the right is so threatened by unions, reproductive rights, child labor laws, etc). There is a series of videos on YouTube called “Bill Whittle’s Firewall,” in which he explains “What the Tea Party Believes.” It’s fairly creepy, esp. in that it shows the conservative preoccupation with violence, even in the visual symbolism of the firewall. Here’s the first of the series, and it’s about ten minutes long: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OLD6VChcWCE In any case, Whittle keeps talking about how the federal government can force you to do something (e.g., pay taxes) “at gunpoint” but that in the market you can just go somewhere else if don’t like a service. There are all sorts of problems with this argument, obviously. But the funny thing is, the State is (usually) not coercive in this militarized way, because supposedly we operate under the rule of law.
In the U.S., however, much of politics (and power) is local. It’s not that the mayors did not call on an official small-s state-supported apparatus to squelch the protests, but rather that they don’t need to call on the big-S State to do so. I think on the left we tend to fear centralized power but miss the importance of the local.
This ideological hemi-neglect got Naomi Wolf in trouble with her recent Guardian article, as Corey Robin explains here: http://coreyrobin.com/2011/11/27/the-occupy-crackdowns-why-naomi-wolf-got-it-wrong/#comments
The post and the comments following are quite interesting, but here’s a tidbit I found that address this local/central issue:
“One of the things one often hears on the left is that we don’t want to empower a national centralized state to do the good things we all (or at least most of us) want that state to do b/c such a state is repressive, coercive, etc. One also hears that we don’t want a movement to contest for state power at that level b/c not only would such a state either be repressive or invite repression but b/c such a movement would itself mimic the authoritarian, undemocratic, repressive ways of the national state. If you can establish that such a concern, though real in other historical and political contexts, is for the most part a bit misplaced in the US, you can take out one of the props for the decentralized politics argument you often hear on the left.”
I look forward to your thoughts.
There are interesting things in Vielle’s post to think about, and I’ll only mention a couple that I have immediate thoughts on, mostly moving in reverse through her post.
In response to the citation of CR (whose work I am unfamiliar with), it seems clear: the state is already there, and already massively violent and quite authoritarian. The question then is what to do; and one important point is the “expand the size of the cage” metaphor – that is, every welfare-style gain within that “national centralized state” is a real-world gain for those disempowered and repressed within it. To argue that we should decenter the state is misguided because it ignores the real-world consequences for real folk in service of a self-indulgent “someday…” set of aspirations. A centralized state that enforces, say, a higher minimum wage or a strong set of workers rights is extremely important, just as it was important to those children working yesteryear in sweatshops in london that the “strong centralized state” once enacted anti child-labor laws. Each gain enables a position from which greater levels of emancipation can be demanded and greater potential for struggling for them has been attained. Finally, the whole time we should be pointedly building extra-state alternatives that make the state irrelevant, so that we both learn and prove to ourselves what we can do without the need for a coercive centralized state authority.
Regarding the police, the best I can come up with right now is the concept of the police and the military as two forms of state coercion that are narrated differently, and which self-identity differently, even while they potentially, and often actually, perform overlapping functions. Examples within the US abound. The ATF comes in with machine-gun fire and concussion grenades against the “Branch Dravidians,” just as the Chicago Police raid Black Panther activists’ (such as Fred Hampton) residences with machine guns and shotguns (at the bequest of the FBI). Police can be less reliable than regular military. At Berkeley, Reagan called in the national guard when he had the protestors gassed by helicopter on Sproul Plaza. But sometimes, it is the opposite: the army are less loyal to the state’s authority than the police. The Egyptian army was seen as having protected the people against the police repression during the 14 days of Tahrir revolt. This also sends me to think about the Paris Commune (1871), where the local militia, established to oust the Prussians, sided with the people against the (albeit very different sort of) state. And finally, since I have already made the subject rather incoherent, the basij force in Iran is said to be a kind of paramilitary and parapolice force with loyalties specifically designed to be used as a fail-safe in a situation where neither the conventional police nor the army are considered sufficiently loyal to the authorities running the state to be counted upon in a confrontation with a mass-based protest.
So I am left with the thought that the police, like the army, are invested with an institutionalized coercion function (and means) against whatever the state’s threat may be, but that they are socialized differently and identify with different narratives, which then create different (though distorted) identities and general expectations for them – and thus somewhat different spaces of action (or engagement with them on the part of a peoples’ movement).
Lastly, I guess, I am very interested in paying attention to how intentional communities such as the Occupy collaborations in Oakland or New York find ways of performing policing functions (within the community) without reproducing the same structures and coercive or authoritarian functions as the very police harassing them.
Beautype: I will follow your lead and work backward (or upward from the bottom).
I think that what is required to support nonhierarchical communities in which people can participate on equal footing is actual _community_ in the “thick” sense of the word (cf. Zygmunt Baumann, Jürgen Habermas). I.e., the reason the Occupy collaborations have worked because the collaborators enter into/ create these communities quite explicitly, and the situation calls on them to be more three-dimensional than, say, an ordinary job would: one has to think about how to keep warm, how to get and share food, how to conduct all the necessary activities of living that are deliberately shoved into the background by modern life, as well as how to conduct group conversation, how to make communal decisions, how to handle disagreement, etc. In contrast, the ‘communities’ most people experience in contemporary American culture are transient, virtual, or “thin” in any of various important ways.
Your points about the militarized police are well-taken, and we agree on the benefit of each incremental gain for various vulnerable groups as we work to “expand the cage.” I still get the sense, perhaps mistakenly, that you view state power as behind the authoritarianism we’ve been witnessing lately, almost in the form of some ideological directive. You say the state is already massively violent and quite authoritarian. It can be, certainly; but I assume you are referring specifically to the US here and not states in general. The point I would make in response, to refine and not to deny your point, is that there is a broad swath of American culture–and I mean among the citizens, not in the state apparatus– that is highly authoritarian and valorizes physical force. To wit: the forceful, abrupt arrest of a 2nd year Emory PhD student who had gone over to a group of police standing around a homeless woman he knew, to inquire if she was ok: http://dirtseyeview.wordpress.com/2011/12/08/libraryarrest/
Note that this had nothing to do with the Occupy movement. But what shocked me is that this was not just a matter of cops behaving badly: the comments show a surprisingly large number of people who basically think the student was out of line and behaved in a way that deserved the horrific 34 hours that followed. If you watch the video (linked) on YouTube, again you see an appalling portion of commenters who just accept the forceful authority of the police. (Which gets us back to the point of the original post, I suppose.) These might be the same people who cheered at the Republican debates when execution or torture were mentioned…. or maybe they’re the people who laugh at Glenn Beck’s skit about poisoning Nancy Pelosi… or perhaps the ones who rioted at Penn State because the firing of the coach threatened to interrupt their winning streak in football…or maybe they’re the kind of folk who made up the Branch Davidians, since you mention them. The point is, when a sizeable segment of the population gets jazzed by violence, detests those who seek to arrive at new understandings through conversation and scholarship, why should we think that _state_ authority is our chief problem? “We have met the enemy and he is us.”
Vielle, I have enjoyed this dialogue and the chance to think through some of the ideas we’ve been discussing.
I would be interested in hearing your perspective on how there could be a state that would not be a violent structure. My impression of states anywhere is that they are hierarchical structures that violently impose a certain organization on society, and then function to regulate society according to whatever decisions those in charge of the state make, at both overarching levels and local ones. But perhaps there are examples I am missing?
Dear Beautype, I apologize for the length of time it’s taken me to return to the topic. I think we may be talking past each other a bit, and I want to try to focus in on what I think is the core disagreement: if I understand you correctly, you are claiming that state authority, hierarchy, coercion, and violence are coextensive, AND that it is possible to form a human society on a large scale (e.g., beyond several hundred occupiers in a given locale) that has none of these four attributes (which are actually one). I’m first of all concerned that our terms are sliding into one another a little too freely. I’m also deeply skeptical that there can ever be a human organization in which there is no use or threat of force of any kind–I get the impression that you might even label laws as ‘coercive’– and no possibility of violence. The reason I’m skeptical is that I think some people will enact violent acts, no matter what the social structure (though I absolutely believe that our current society greatly facilitates violence at all levels), and there has to be a mechanism to protect against this.
Has a state ever been formed without violence? Well, I guess it depends on how you define state. Do you envision societies of millions, even billions of people coordinating various endeavors without any hierarchical structure whatsoever? How would that work?