Abolition Everything
Tags: America, Prison, Politics, Abolition, Climate Change

Part II: The unlearning

The political science department at my university prides itself on its objectivity. They also wouldn’t stop lying to me.

My notes read:

The state is powerful because it has a monopoly on violence. “Tragedy Of the Commons”: if the state creates public good programs, people will misuse them. Food, shelter, etc. must be regulated by institutions to make sure that people do not take advantage of resources. The government has three branches. They check and balance each other.

The more I read, the more it didn’t hold up with what I saw in the world.

The state doesn’t have a monopoly on violence — I’ve seen lone wolf white supremacists and school shooters kill people on TV. Plus, there was a paradox here: a violent state could not possibly have power over a dead body. A state needs people alive to exist. Further, I knew that power had to be something culturally affirmed, something that could change throughout history. Power could not function without societal agreement. Power must be more than just one’s ability to enact violence — since it must be consistently affirmed by the masses in order to maintain itself. The Tragedy of the Commons rang with that sweet, all-too-familiar social darwinism that just tickles Nazis. It is a concept taught, despite numerous studies which disprove its claims, as fact. While we constitutionally had three branches of government, there was nothing to be said in class about the fact that “dark money” had just as much power (if not more) than any other arm of the state. The checks and balances system didn’t seem to actually check or balance itself — instead, that winter we were living through a historical, 35 day-long government shutdown, enacted by an executive order that left around 800,000 government employees without work… all because the president wanted money for a border wall.

I came to each lecture more curious — not because of the material — but because of the spectacle of it all. A room of mostly white, mostly male, mostly middle-class, privileged students, sitting in a class taught at a public university, scribbling furiously in their seats. Awkward, stressed, sleep-deprived bodies, preparing for a future full of nice paychecks.

I began to raise my hand: both an experiment, and — though I did not know it then — protest.

Why were we talking about laws, and the homogenous group of wealthy white men who wrote them, but not the people whom these laws actually affected, or killed? Why were we talking about civil liberties, but barely glossing over the human beings to whom they were being denied?

Why is it that to study this nation is to realize its consistent failure to provide the very virtues it claims to represent?

When I asked these questions, I was met with incredible force. It was all “devil’s advocates” and those who said my interest in “identity politics” was just a symptom of my soft, artistic femininity, making my concerns uncredible. As if my professors and peers were somehow unbiased by virtue of seeing history like a flat line of events and numbers — rather than a constant, impassioned struggle between human beings. They lied about the present just as much as they did the past. I felt crushed.

It was not just that I disagreed with what was being taught. It was the realization that I had been lied to, that the fight was unfair. Here I was, my whole life, believing that “politics was about compromise” when it very clearly, historically, was not. Maybe somewhere, that is true — but not in the United States. Politics in the United States is, and always has been, about domination. It is for this reason that anyone who cares about equality never actually feels like they belong once they cross over to the “inside.” We do not belong.

Expanding freedom, equality, liberty, and justice to the marginalized has never been the will of the American government. It has never endowed rights without bloodshed. If anything, progress manifests in spite of our system.

I am no longer enchanted by the fairy tale that is the American state.

The state is not as advertised.

P art III: The current state of the current state

Under our system, the human body is not valuable unless commodified. That is why the American government may, in the same swing: kill civilians, deny them healthcare, and still function as it is intended to. The state is not built to protect human life.

One of the state’s most incredible powers is its dominance in the business of human bodies. While much of the popular discourse focuses on privatized prisons, the imprisonment of human bodies is almost entirely a project of the United States government. Only around 8% of prisons are private entities. 92% of people imprisoned exist in state-sanctioned space. Discriminatory housing policies and law enforcement (which is rooted in the slave patrols of the Antebellum South) both work to control which bodies exist in which spaces.

The wealthiest, most revered capitalists in the nation, who, upon profiting from cheap and exploited labor, are met with government subsidies and tax breaks. Further, when individuals try to make profit from their own bodies (like sex workers, athletes, etc.) the state refuses to provide proper protections, making their work undervalued and overly dangerous. These are only a few examples of the consistent energy the state exerts in order to maintain its monopoly on human bodies.

With the present circumstances of the coronavirus, human bodies are even more alienated from political spaces. We may not enter our city halls or catch our representatives on their way out of the chambers. We organize and educate on screens. We wear masks when we protest so we become anonymous, a sea of unrecognizable bodies. Some say it’s better this way, so that the state surveillance cannot see us either.

An officer tries to bring food to inmates on hunger strike in a California prison (New York Times)

Technology, too, is widening the gap between humans and the state. Predictive policing and artificial intelligence in warfare are transforming how the state enacts imperialism, violence, and terror. Someone is building artificial intelligence that may write laws, adjudicate laws, enforce laws. To think of the future is dizzying.

I do not think it will be too long until people begin using technology to replace human judgement in court. Artificial intelligence will most likely fully replace human law enforcement officers in the next generation or so. It is already becoming the largest component of warfare. If AI doesn’t literally assume elected office, it will percolate into every aspect of politics in the near future. Perhaps court rooms and assembly chambers, places notorious for the sweating, heaving, and fervor of human bodies — will one day completely be inhabited by computers. Some might say that this is a good thing: that AI will be less prone to human flaws. I think that if you look at the state, and its history, that AI will only make its violent functions more efficient. More lethal.

The same way political scientists claim the objectivity of their history, scientists, mathematicians, and giant tech monopolies fiercely assure the neutrality of their algorithms. They are lying. By virtue of our humanity, we are flawed. Motivations will forever be implemented in everything we create. We cannot use “science” to evade that truth. I fear a world where the human is totally dismembered from the political. I feel we are closer to that reality than we realize.

We find ourselves, as people of flesh and blood and a million things in our heads, displaced, estranged, and dislodged from our political agency. In the United States, corporations are people under Citizens United. Our government, which is a plutocracy, has no loyalty to us. And so, like children abandoned, we grow to resent this body, (which is impossible to comprehend because it is built in such a way that it relies on our resentment), with the hope that we will grow cold and ever further apart from it; so that it may continue to feed itself and not you, or me, or anything human at all. We know laws pass because corporations, not human beings, support them. We feel that voting creates only an illusion of control in a system completely subdued by corporate interests.

The American state may have the upper hand when it comes to violently enforcing the racialization, gendering, stratification, and misuse of human bodies. I believe that the people, however, have the exact resources necessary to save ourselves.