UPRISING: Confronting the Violence of State Power
June 3, 2020
For whom and for what does the state keeps its territory safe? The answer has
become harder to conceal over time, writes Jonathan Cook.
Vigil for George Floyd at Chicago Avenue & 38th Street, Minneapolis, May 30,
2020. (Fibonacci Blue, Flickr)
By Jonathan Cook
Jonathan-Cook.net
Here is one thing I can write with an unusual degree of certainty and
confidence: Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin would not have been
charged with the (third-degree) murder of George Floyd had the United States
not been teetering on a knife edge of open revolt.
Had demonstrators not turned out in massive numbers on the streets and refused
to be corralled back home by the threat of police violence, the U.S. legal
system would have simply turned a blind eye to Chauvin’s act of extreme
brutality, as it has done before over countless similar acts.
Without the mass protests, it would have made no difference that Floyd’s murder
was caught on camera, that it was predicted by Floyd himself in his cries of “I
can’t breathe” as Chauvin spent nearly nine minutes pressing his knee to
Floyd’s neck, or that the outcome was obvious to spectators who expressed their
growing alarm as Floyd lost consciousness. At most, Chauvin would have had to
face, as he had many times before, an ineffectual disciplinary investigation
over “misconduct.”
Without the current ferocious mood of anger directed at the police and sweeping
much of the nation, Chauvin would have found himself as immune from
accountability and prosecution as so many police officers before him who gunned
down or lynched black citizens.
Instead he is the first white police officer in the state of Minnesota ever to
be criminally charged over the death of a black man. After initially arguing
that there were mitigating factors to be considered, prosecutors hurriedly
changed course to declare Chauvin’s indictment the fastest they had ever
initiated. Minneapolis’s police chief was forced to call the other three
officers who stood by as Floyd was murdered in front of them “complicit.”
Confrontation, Not Contrition
If the authorities’ placatory indictment of Chauvin – on the least serious
charge they could impose, based on incontrovertible evidence they could not
afford to deny – amounts to success, then it is only a little less depressing
than failure.
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Worse still, though most protesters are trying to keep their demonstrations
non-violent, many of the police officers dealing with the protests look far
readier for confrontation than contrition. The violent attacks by police on
protesters, including the use of vehicles for rammings, suggest that it is
Chauvin’s murder charge – not the slow, barbaric murder of Floyd by one of
their number – that has incensed fellow officers. They expect continuing
impunity for their violence.
Rob Bennett 🤠
✔
@rob_bennett
Oh my god. What is the @NYPDnews doing?
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Similarly, the flagrant mistreatment by police of corporate media outlets
simply for reporting developments, from the arrest of a CNN crew to physical
assaults on BBC staff, underlines the sense of grievance harbored by many
police officers when their culture of violence is exposed for all the world to
see. They are not reeling it in, they are widening the circle of “enemies.”
Aleem Maqbool
✔
@AleemMaqbool
This was before curfew and our cameraman @p_murt clearly a member of the press,
a block away from the White House this evening...
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Nonetheless, it is entirely wrong to suggest, as a New York Times editorial
does, that police impunity can be largely ascribed to “powerful unions”
shielding officers from investigation and punishment. The editorial board needs
to go back to school. The issues currently being exposed to the harsh glare of
daylight get to the heart of what modern states are there to do – matters
rarely discussed outside of political theory classes.
Right to Bear Arms
The success of the modern state, like the monarchies of old, rests on the
public’s consent, explicit or otherwise, to its monopoly of violence. As
citizens, we give up what was once deemed an inherent or “natural” right to
commit violence ourselves and replace it with a social contract in which our
representatives legislate supposedly neutral, just laws on our behalf. The
state invests the power to enforce those laws in a supposedly disciplined,
benevolent police force – there to “protect and serve” – while a dispassionate
court system judges suspected violators of those laws.
That is the theory, anyway.
In the case of the United States, the state’s monopoly on violence has been
muddied by a constitutional “right to bear arms,” although, of course, the
historic purpose of that right was to ensure that the owners of land and slaves
could protect their “property.” Only white men were supposed to have the right
to bear arms.
Today, little has changed substantively, as should be obvious the moment we
consider what would have happened had it been black militia men who recently
protested the Covid-19 lockdown by storming the Michigan state capitol, venting
their indignation in the faces of white policemen.
Armed protesters against Covid-19 lockdown in Michigan state capitol, May 1,
2020. (YouTube screenshot)
(In fact, U.S. authorities’ reaction to the Black Panthers movement through the
late 1960s and 1970s is sufficient for anyone who wishes to understand how
dangerous it is for a black man to bear arms in his own defense against the
violence of white men.)
Aleem Maqbool
✔
@AleemMaqbool
This was before curfew and our cameraman @p_murt clearly a member of the press,
a block away from the White House this evening...
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Brutish Violence
The monopoly of violence by the state is justified because most of us have
supposedly consented to it in an attempt to avoid a Hobbesian world of brutish
violence where individuals, families and tribes enforce their own, less
disinterested versions of justice.
But of course, the state system is not as neutral or dispassionate as it
professes, or as most of us assume. Until the struggle for universal suffrage
succeeded – a practice that in all Western states can be measured in decades,
not centuries – the state was explicitly there to uphold the interests of a
wealthy elite, a class of landed gentry and newly emerging industrialists, as
well as a professional class that made society run smoothly for the benefit of
that elite.
What was conceded to the working class was the bare minimum to prevent them
from rising up against the privileges enjoyed by the rest of society.
That was why, for example, Britain did not have universal health care – the
National Health Service – until after the Second World War, 30 years after men
received the vote and 20 years after women won the same right. Only after the
war did the British establishment start to fear that a newly empowered working
class – of returning soldiers who knew how to bear arms, backed by women who
had been released from the home to work on the land or in munitions factories
to replace the departed men – might no longer be willing to accept a lack of
basic health care for themselves and their loved ones.
It was in this atmosphere of an increasingly organized and empowered labor
movement – reinforced by the need to engineer more consumerist societies to
benefit newly emerging corporations – that European social democracy was born.
(Paradoxically, the post-war U.S. Marshall Plan helped subsidize the emergence
of Europe’s major social democracies, including their public health care
systems, even as similar benefits were denied domestically to Americans.)
Creative Legal Interpretations
To maintain legitimacy for the state’s monopoly on violence, the legal
establishment has had to follow the same minimalist balancing act as the
political establishment.
The courts cannot simply rationalize and justify the implicit and sometimes
explicit use of violence in law enforcement without regard to public sentiment.
Laws are amended, but equally significantly they are creatively interpreted by
judges so that they fit the ideological and moral fashions and prejudices of
the day, to ensure the public feels justice is being done.
In the main, however, we the public have a very conservative understanding of
right and wrong, of justice and injustice, which has been shaped for us by a
corporate media that both creates and responds to those fashions and trends to
ensure that the current system continues undisturbed, allowing for the
ever-greater accumulation of wealth by an elite.
That is why so many of us are viscerally appalled by looting on the streets by
poor people, but reluctantly accept as a fact of life the much larger
intermittent looting of our taxes, of our banks, of our homes by the state to
bail out a corporate elite that cannot manage the economy it created.
Again, the public’s deference to the system is nurtured to ensure it does not
rise up.
Muscle on the Street
But the legal system doesn’t just have a mind; it has muscle too. Its
front-line enforcers, out on the street, get to decide who is a criminal
suspect, who is dangerous or subversive, who needs to be deprived of their
liberty, and who is going to have violence inflicted upon them. It is the
police that initially determine who spends time in a jail cell and who comes
before a court. And in some cases, as in George Floyd’s, it is the police that
decide who is going to be summarily executed without a trial or a jury.
The state would prefer, of course, that police officers don’t kill unarmed
citizens in the street – and even more so that they don’t carry out such acts
in full view of witnesses and on camera, as Chauvin did. The state’s objections
are not primarily ethical. State bureaucracies are not overly invested in
matters beyond the need to maintain external and internal security: defending
the borders from outside threats, and ensuring internal legitimacy through the
cultivation of citizens’ consent.
But the issue of for whom and for what the state keeps its territory safe has
become harder to conceal over time. Nowadays, the state’s political processes
and its structures have been almost completely captured by corporations. As a
result, the maintenance of internal and external security is less about
ensuring an orderly and safe existence for citizens than about creating a
stable territorial platform for globalized businesses to plunder local
resources, exploit local labor forces and generate greater profits by
transforming workers into consumers.
Increasingly, the state has become a hollowed-out vessel through which
corporations order their business agendas. States function primarily now to
compete with each other in a battle to minimize the obstacles facing global
corporations as they seek to maximize their wealth and profits in each state’s
territory. The state’s role is to avoid getting in the way of corporations as
they extract resources (deregulation), or, when this capitalist model regularly
collapses, come to the aid of the corporations with more generous bailouts than
rival states.
Murder Could Prove a Spark
This is the political context for understanding why Chauvin is that very rare
example of a white policeman facing a murder charge for killing a black man.
Chauvin’s gratuitous and incendiary murder of Floyd – watched by any American
with a screen, and with echoes of so many other recent cases of unjustifiable
police brutality against black men, women and children – is the latest spark
that risks lighting a conflagration.
In the heartless, amoral calculations of the state, the timing of Chauvin’s
very public act of barbarity could not have been worse. There were already
rumblings of discontent over federal and state authorities’ handling of the new
virus; fears over the catastrophic consequences for the U.S. economy; outrage
at the inequity – yet again – of massive bailouts for the biggest corporations
but paltry help for ordinary workers; and the social and personal frustrations
caused by lockdown.
There is also a growing sense that the political class, Republican and Democrat
alike, has grown sclerotic and unresponsive to the plight of ordinary Americans
– an impression only underscored by the fallout from the Covid-19 pandemic.
For all these reasons, and many others, people were ready to take to the
streets. Floyd’s murder gave them the push.
George Floyd protests against police violence, Minneapolis, May 28, 2020.
(Fibonacci Blue, Flickr)
Need for Loyal Police
In these circumstances, Chauvin had to be charged, even if only in the hope of
assuaging that anger, of providing a safety valve releasing some of the
discontent.
But charging Chauvin is no simple matter either. To ensure its survival, the
state needs to monopolize violence and internal security, to maintain its
exclusive definition of what constitutes order, and to keep the state as a safe
territorial platform for business. The alternative is the erosion of the
nation-state’s authority, and the possibility of its demise.
This was the rationale behind Donald Trump’s notorious tweet last week –
censored by Twitter for “glorifying violence” – that warned: “When the looting
starts, the shooting starts.” Not surprisingly, he invoked the words of a
racist Miami police chief, Walter Headley, who threatened violence against the
African-American community in the late 1960s. At the time Headley additionally
stated: “There’s no communication with them except force.”
Trump may be harking back to an ugly era of what was once called “race
relations,” but the sentiment lies at the heart of the state’s mission.
The state needs its police forces loyal and ready to use violence. It cannot
afford discontent in the ranks, or that sections of the police corps no longer
identify their own interests with the state’s. The state dares not alienate
police officers for fear that, when they are needed most, during times of
extreme dissent like now, they will not be there – or worse still, that they
will have joined the dissenters.
As noted, elements in the police are already demonstrating their disenchantment
over Chauvin’s indictment as well as their sense of grievance against the media
– bolstered by Donald Trump’s regular verbal assaults on journalists. That
sentiment helps to explain the unprecedented attacks by the police on reliably
compliant major media outlets covering the protests.
CNN
✔
@CNN
Minnesota police arrest CNN reporter and camera crew as they report from
protests in Minneapolis https://cnn.it/2AlGl9s ;
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Ideological Twins
The need to keep the security forces loyal is why the state fosters a sense of
separateness between the police and those sections of the populace that it
defines as potentially threatening order, thereby uniting more privileged
segments of society in fear and hostility.
The state cultivates in the police and sections of the public a sense that
police violence is legitimate by definition when it targets individuals or
groups it portrays as threatening or subversive. It also encourages the view
that the police enjoy impunity a priori in such cases because they alone can
decide what constitutes a menace to society (shaped, of course, by popular
discourses promoted by the state and the corporate media).
“Threat” is defined as any dissent against the existing order, whether it is a
black man answering back and demonstrating “attitude,” or mass protests against
the system, including against police violence. In this way, the police and the
state are ideological twins. The state approves whatever the police do; while
the police repress whatever the state defines as a threat. If it is working
effectively, state-police violence becomes a circular, self-rationalizing
system.
Throwing Protesters a Bone
Charging Chauvin risks disrupting that system, creating a fault line between
the state and the police, one of the state’s most essential agencies. Which is
why the charging of a police officer in these circumstances is such an
exceptional event, and has been dictated by the current exceptional outpouring
of anger.
Prosecutors are trying to find a delicate compromise between two conflicting
demands: between the need to reassure the police that their violence is always
legitimate (carried out “in the line of duty”) and the need to stop the popular
wave of anger escalating to a point where the existing order might break down.
In these circumstances, Chauvin needs to be charged but with the least serious
indictment possible – given the irrefutable evidence presented in the video –
in the hope that, once the current wave of anger has subsided, he can be found
not guilty; or if found guilty, given a lenient sentence; or if sentenced more
harshly, pardoned.
Chauvin’s indictment is like throwing a chewed-dry bone to a hungry dog, from
the point of view of the state authorities. It is an act of parsimonious
appeasement, designed to curb non-state violence or the threat of such violence.
The indictment is not meant to change a police culture – or an establishment
one – that presents black men as an inherent threat to order. It will not
disrupt regulatory and legal systems that are wedded to the view that (white,
conservative) police officers are on the front line defending civilizational
values from (black or leftwing) “lawbreakers.” And it will not curtail the
state’s commitment to ensuring that the police enjoy impunity over their use of
violence.
Change Inevitable
A healthy state – committed to the social contract – would be capable of
finding ways to accommodate discontent before it reaches the level of popular
revolt. The scenes playing out across the U.S. are evidence that state
institutions, captured by corporate money, are increasingly incapable of
responding to demands for change. The hollowed-out state represents not its
citizens, who are capable of compromise, but the interests of global forces of
capital that care little what takes place on the streets of Minneapolis or New
York so long as the corporations can continue to accumulate wealth and power.
Why would we expect these global forces to be sensitive to popular unrest in
the U.S. when they have proved entirely insensitive to the growing signals of
distress from the planet, as its life-support systems recalibrate for our
pillage and plunder in ways we will struggle to survive as a species?
Why would the state not block the path to peaceful change, knowing it excels in
the use of violence, when it blocks the path to reform that might curb the
corporate assault on the environment?
These captured politicians and officials – on the “left” and right – will
continue fanning the flames, stoking the fires, as Barack Obama’s former
national security adviser Susan Rice did this week. She denied the evidence of
police violence shown on Youtube and the very real distress of an underclass
abandoned by the political class when she suggested that the protests were
being directed from the Kremlin.
Aaron Maté
✔
@aaronjmate
· May 31, 2020
Apparently Susan Rice just told CNN that Russians might be backing or financing
this week's protests in the US. If that is true and someone has the clip,
please send my way.
Aaron Maté
✔
@aaronjmate
Susan Rice on unrest and violence at the George Floyd protests: "This is right
out of the Russian playbook as well."
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This kind of bipartisan denial of reality only underscores how quickly we are
entering a period of crisis and revolt. From the G8 protests, to the Occupy
movement, to Extinction Rebellion, to the schools protests, to the Yellow
Vests, to the current fury on U.S. streets, there is evidence all around that
the center is struggling to maintain its hold. The U.S. imperial project is
overstretched, the global corporate elite is over-extended, living on credit,
resources are depleting, the planet is recalibrating. Something will have to
give.
The challenge to the protesters – either those on the streets now or those who
follow in their wake – is how to surmount the state’s violence and how to offer
a vision of a different, more hopeful future that restores the social contract.
Lessons will be learned through protest, defiance and disobedience, not in a
courtroom where a police officer stands trial as an entire political and
economic system is allowed to carry on with its crimes.
