Who needs cops when...

Who needs cops when we on the left have learned to destroy ourselves using spectacular displays of infighting often more attached to egos than to the movements to which we attach ourselves. The state need not attack us, for we will destroy each other just fine. That is unless we stop viewing everything through the lens of our conditioning to a carceral society.

If as most of us claim, we wish to abolish carceral society, we need to stop thinking in terms of punishment as a means to get what we want. Violence and even threats of violence, things like doxxing that impose implicit threats to safety are not activities we should engage in for anything but the defense of ourselves or our communities. When used within, we splinter leftist solidarity and we become even more vulnerable to attacks from the right.

First and foremost, for my other arguments to construct a cogent narrative, I think it’s important to explore the idea of punishment. Often we hear the mantra that “punishment doesn’t work.” I think it should be revised, “punishment doesn’t work the way you think it does.” Punishment is often a powerful motivator, when it is known to be consistent, however it has a very limited effect on behavior as a whole. For the sake of brevity, see the explanation here: (https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/feeling-our-way/201401/punishment-doesnt-work). However we do find that punishment often acts as a reward to the person carrying out the punishment. Lets say you want your dog to get off the couch, so you yell, “off,” and you point, provided the dog does what you want, you develop a correlation between yelling “off,” and getting what you want. However you can bet that all day while you are at work, nowhere in sight to chastise your dog, they are sitting on the couch enjoying the fine apolstery. That is hardly the change in behavior you had hoped for. The same is absolutely true in our relationships to each other. We often go to punishing behaviors first because it has been rewarding to us in the past, but it has not created an extinction of the behaviors we are trying to punish, in fact it has often created new and more extreme sets of behaviors that will have to go through their own extinction routine before they can be eliminated. In essence we have created chains of behaviors that we have tried to address with punishment and seen none of the desired results over time, even if in a moment, punishing served our immediate interests.

Second we should examine how and why we are using punishment on our own communities to often protect our egos rather than ward off anything resembling an existential threat. What do we seek to accomplish by punishing an individual? In the case of the state they may wish to see us stop protesting, so they deploy tear gas. As studies conducted in both New York and Portland can attest, this escalation, while having the effect of dispersing a crowd immediately caused a cyclical escalation in protest tactics, which ultimately lead to both protesters and police burning out and nobody getting what they wanted. Everybody is more frustrated than before and we are sitting on a powder keg of animosity. So why do we replicate this same struggle on smaller scales within our own communities? Threatening people we disagree with on issues ranging from minute personal quarrels all the way up to large policy objectives and entire ideologies. I think often this happens at the burnout stage of a movement, which I would argue we are very much witnessing currently. People feel their audience slipping away, their voice feels less powerful, so we exacerbate internal quarrels and blame each other for the failures, not recognizing that the failures will stack up mountains high, long before we see anything that looks like success and through these failures we need each other to get through if we are ever to come to the success at the end. But as we have learned from the carceral society in which we all navigate our day to day lives, punishment is often a useful tool in maintaining power. This reveals a deeper cancer in our movements than we may imagine.

In our ranks their are a lot of people that would appropriate struggles that don’t belong to them, there are those that would make struggles of which they are affected about them personally, there are those that would speak for us as a monolithic whole through the limited lens of their own personal experiences. The thing is; that often what somebody says might even feel true, maybe it has always felt true, maybe mostly true and maybe it even is true, but we latch onto people and not ideas and when we perceive these people to have failed us, we desire retribution. Our biggest secret weapon against a carceral state is a critical mind that validates and invalidates ideas on the veracity of their arguments, not based on the people who espouse them. The ability to absorb ideas and not idols is crucial to our future success. In so doing we will begin to abolish carceral society in ourselves.

We have for a long time now conflated accountability and punishment. These are not the same thing. Accountability requires the support of the community, it turns us into better people and allows us to begin to abolish carceral society on a social level. The goal of accountability shouldn’t be to hurt anybody, to diminish their humanity, to destroy the person they are, but to change a toxic behavior which they are currently manifesting, maybe to address the material conditions driving that behavior and change them as well. We should seek the most efficient means of doing so, not just the most immediately gratifying. It requires that we as individuals make a choice to pursue justice in the sense of not just making the victim whole again, but making our community whole again and that often includes people we might wish to punish.

This is not a rebuke on violence in a tactical sense at protests or in warfare. Often it is unavoidable in combating a violent adversary. It is not ever going to be the means to an end and should only be used when all other options have been exhausted and we should have grave concerns about those that might wish to turn that tendency inwards in the absence of an immediate adversary. Now I’m sure that will mean a lot of different things to a lot of different people and I intend that ambiguity as I cannot speak to everybody’s beliefs about when it is appropriate and when it isn’t. What I can speak to is violence as a form of punishment, as retaliation, even threats of violence, express or implied, will not function the way most people have come to expect. We cannot rely on punishment the way the state has and expect any better results.

In the art of war, Sun Tzu suggests avoiding armed conflict in favor of recruitment. If you can make your enemy join you, you have still defeated your enemy in the sense that they no longer pose a threat to you, but that victory is twofold as opposed to a traditional military victory. You have lost an enemy while simultaneously gaining a friend. In this sense, the tactical disadvantage of infighting cannot be overstated. When we “cancel,” a member of our community, that loss may in fact become two fold as well. In banishing a person from our community, we make ourselves weaker, but we also present an opportunity for our enemies to make themselves stronger. We push people to question the strength of their convictions, but we do so without the support of the community to guide them. Some people may choose to improve themselves in that vacuum, but others may turn to the support of other communities and this effect is impossible to quantify.

In healing those among us who do harm, we do the necessary work of keeping us safe. We all grow stronger for this effort and we create a social safety net around us that teaches the virtue of failure and how we can rely on each other to lift us up when we do. I would argue that what we need in our difficult times and in all times, is the spirit of a collaborative society, where we work together to achieve a lasting peace. On our current trajectory it is hard not to wonder if the goal is to fight some enemy, somewhere indefinitely instead. If the fight is not a means to a safe, free and loving society; to what end is the fight and is it worth undertaking at all? The trifling posturing for internet clout has ceased to serve it’s purported goals and I suggest we reflect on how we might change our own behavior to achieve the results we desire. We cannot become free using the tools of the oppressor.