“Every capitalist state is a police state,” writes brian bean in his new book, Their End Is Our Beginning: Cops, Capitalism, and Abolition. This statement could serve as both a pithy summary of this excellent new volume on police abolition, and a slogan pointing toward the most effective abolition movement.
Abolition of the police and prisons is much-discussed on the left, and by opponents of police violence more generally. bean’s book is a very welcome addition to this literature. Their End Is Our Beginning explains in lucid depth the origins of the police, how cops fit into the economic system, and what abolition would actually mean. It covers basic aspects of abolition for people new to the subject, and it engages in debates within the abolitionist movement. It is a must-read for anyone who supports abolishing the police, and will help convince those not yet in favor of abolition.
The oppressive origins of the police
Too often people assume that the police have always existed. Their End Is Our Beginning goes into detail explaining why this is not true. Ruling classes have always used force to maintain their wealth and power, but the specific institution of the police is less than 200 years old.
The police only arose when the capitalist class needed to keep control of the growing urban concentrations of workers. As bean writes:
London experienced major riots almost every year of the second decade of the nineteenth century. and revolt was openly feared by those in power. Between 1825 and 1830, New York saw riots once a month. In Paris food riots were commonplace in the latter half of the 18th century.
The police were agents of capitalist domination from the beginning. They evolved out of more informal arrangements, over time becoming more regularized and professional. In the United States, another origin of the police was in the slave patrols of the South before the Civil War.
“The violent construction of the European proletariat and the obscenity of African chattel slavery were tightly bound together,” as bean puts it — and the ruling class’s solutions were bound together too.
In late-18th century England, “Prime Minister William Pitt argued that a solution was needed that was… cheaper and would provoke less alarm than resorting to the army.”
“The violent construction of the European proletariat and the obscenity of African chattel slavery were tightly bound together,” as bean puts it — and the ruling class’s solutions were bound together too.
bean’s detailed examination of the rise of the police gives a nuanced understanding useful even to those who have studied the issue. He explains that “the modern cops came about as the preferred tool through a process of ruling-class experimentation.” This was because the ruling class needed “a full-time, permanent force capable of continuously asserting the power of the capitalist state up and down every street in the city.”
Explaining the origins of the police and its relation to the rise of capitalism lays the basis for understanding the role of the police today.
The function of the police today
One of the book’s most valuable contributions is examining in detail what the police do today and who they “protect and serve.” The common myth is that police control or prevent crime by pursuing and arresting criminals. Politicians justify police budgets in the name of public safety. But as bean argues, “cops are uniquely ineffective at dealing with the actual social phenomenon of crime.”
The real role of cops is to repress worker dissent, whether that means breaking strikes or quelling riots, but they also play an important role in forcing people to become exploited workers. As bean writes, throughout their history police have always prevented “alternative means of survival outside the formal market…” Today this means a “focus on unregulated drug trade, sex work and other informal economies.” One only has to think of Eric Garner, who was murdered by New York police in 2014 for selling loose cigarettes!
In general, “The goal was to manage poverty and other social ills just enough so that working people keep working.”
Do police solve crime? In spite of the barrage of “copaganda” from TV shows, arresting criminals for violent crime is only a minor part of their job. As bean notes, “Seventy percent of all cops nationally are patrol officers and only 15 percent work in ‘investigations’ … The role of detective… didn’t actually exist in some American police departments for the first fifty to seventy-five years of their existence.”
Of investigations that result in arrests, “Eighty percent of them continue to be for minor drug and ‘quality of life’ offenses.”
Would chaos result if there were no police? bean gives the example of the 2014–2015 police slowdown in New York City. The only outcome of this was fewer arrests for quality-of-life offenses; but the social disorder predicted by the belligerent police union never transpired. A police strike in Finland in 1976 provides a similar example.
The common myth is that police control or prevent crime by pursuing and arresting criminals. But as bean argues, “cops are uniquely ineffective at dealing with the actual social phenomenon of crime.”
bean gives even more fascinating case studies of rebellious cities and countries handling their own conflicts temporarily and nonviolently without police. Some of the examples include Free Derry between 1969 and 1972; the township uprising in South Africa in 1984; the popular mobilization in Oaxaca, Mexico in 2006; and Tunisia, Syria, and Egypt during the Arab Spring in 2011.
bean’s final and most thorough example is the Russian Revolution of 1917. In that revolution, workers took full political power throughout the former Russian empire and began the transition to socialism.
bean cautions that social problems and conflict would still exist under capitalism if police were gone: “Parallel to removing police from the equation, we must create something new in their place that can better deal with social problems and bring about real safety.”
bean explains convincingly that police don’t keep people safe. In fact, cops kill one thousand or more civilians in the US, year after year. Mental-health interventions by cops regularly lead to injuries or death.
As more people realize, especially after the 2020 George Floyd Rebellion, the police and the justice system are fundamentally racist. bean reminds us that “getting killed by police is one of the leading causes of death for young black men.” Their End Is Our Beginning includes an excellent section on why racism is fundamental to capitalist policing.
However, it is not only Black people who are killed by police in the US. Forty-five percent of police victims are white. As bean points out, over the population as a whole, one-third of all killings by strangers are committed by police, while three quarters of all killings are by people the victim knows.
Because of their role as agents of the ruling class against workers and the poor, the police are not part of the working class. This important understanding influences strategy within the abolitionist movement. The movement should never support police demands for better pay and more lethal equipment. Supporting those demands only strengthens the ability of cops to be the enemies of workers.
Police and the capitalist state
In explaining the function of the police, bean gives an excellent analysis of the capitalist state. The capitalist state is based on “special bodies of armed men” (as described by Friedrich Engels, later famously cited by Vladimir Lenin). These special bodies enforce the will of the ruling class. Besides the police, the special bodies include the court and prison systems, the military, and the other agencies entitled to use force against civilians, including the FBI, the CIA, and ICE.
bean describes the role of the state as follows:
The decisions of states and their managers are driven by the need to secure a positive business climate for capital investment… on behalf of their national capitalist class against other states and against challenges or disruptions by their own subjects.
Police and prisons are only one part of the state. Other sections of the state pursue the same pro-capital and anti-people goal. This means that abolitionism must include the whole state and not just the police and prisons.
Revolutionary abolitionism
For those already committed to abolishing the police, the book’s last chapter on revolutionary abolitionism is the most important. In this chapter, brian explains the connection of abolitionism to Marxism:
To put our society in the collective hands of the people requires the power of people’s collective hands, a social force broader and more powerful than state institutions. They who would be free… must strike the first blow; self-emancipation is not a value but a necessity.
Since at least the Paris Commune of 1871, Marxists have supported abolition of the whole capitalist state. Marx learned from the Commune that the working class had to smash the capitalist state and eliminate the special bodies that defend bourgeois rule. Marxists apply this not just to the police and courts, but also to the military and every other armed repressive apparatus.
This understanding informs the strategy for confronting the police. As bean says:
Police reforms are bound to fail because they do not affect the main purpose and inalterable role the cops play under capitalism. To attempt to change this core function would be akin to trying to reform firefighters so that they stop fighting fires.
Defeating the police requires revolution. Therefore, the movement needs to evaluate reforms on the basis of whether they contribute to complete abolition or not. bean correctly proposes that “abolitionist demands address the underlying purpose of policing head on.”
Defeating the police requires revolution. Therefore the movement needs to evaluate reforms on the basis of whether they contribute to complete abolition or not.
He then lists demands that can weaken the police, such as reducing their numbers, getting them out of schools, reducing the police budget, preventing rehiring fired cops, and eliminating qualified immunity. He rejects demands for reforms that would result in making the police look better or reconciling the police to the community, such as better police training, body cams, and community policing.
The goal of revolutionary abolitionist demands is to weaken the police’s ability to function, based on the understanding that functioning of police is the problem itself.
In explaining revolutionary abolitionism, bean is critical of other strands of abolitionism, which he calls procedural and autonomist paths. Procedural abolition’s goal is to reduce the need for police by creating “alternative institutions to promote more actual public safety.” These alternative institutions would be built while demanding a reduction of police and prisons. This strategy aims at putting demands on the state to reform policing and fund alternatives.
This approach assumes that public safety is the actual goal of the police. As already discussed, a major role of the police is ruling-class control of the working class and the public in general. Therefore, reducing the need for police to control crime would not necessarily reduce the capitalist class’s need for police. It would not convince the government to eliminate or even severely limit the police.
Though bean agrees with aspects of this approach, he concludes that procedural abolition will not ultimately work.
Related to procedural abolition is autonomist abolition. This approach is “primarily focused on building structures ‘outside the state.’” Instead of putting demands on the government, autonomist abolition sets up independent projects to try and reduce the need for police. Some of these efforts include mutual aid and self-organization of refugee asylum seekers.
The goal of revolutionary abolitionist demands is to weaken the police’s ability to function, based on the understanding that functioning of police is the problem itself.
This outlook suffers from the same problem: whether people “need” police or not, the state will still need them to maintain capitalist control. As bean writes, “Attempts to gradually chip away at the police state will sooner or later provoke a reaction by the ruling class.”
Gradualism will not bring about abolition. Anti-police reforms can be helpful, but do not eliminate the need for revolution:
Counterrevolution will not be defeated without destroying the means for counter-revolution to be carried out, which will mean breaking apart the police state the cops and repressive apparatus and seizing the means of production.
To eliminate the capitalist basis of policing, abolitionists will need “socialist revolution and it cannot be accompanied by any respect for private property or servility to bourgeois legality.” Winning a socialist revolution will require “political organizations with a revolutionary vision and perspective.”
bean’s polemic in favor of revolutionary abolitionism is needed for at least a couple of reasons: 1) Abolitionism will never ultimately succeed without socialist revolution. 2) Abolitionism will be less effective today if it is dominated by reformist strategies such as proceduralism and autonomism. Revolutionary abolitionism is vital to make the movement as effective as possible!
For these reasons and more, Their End Is Our Beginning is a crucial intervention in the debate on abolitionism.
