As US Protests Show, the Challenge Is How to Rise Above the Violence Inherent in State Power
Jonathan Cook • June 3, 2020
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
US 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. Yesterday 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.
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.
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 harboured 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”.
Nonetheless, it is entirely wrong to suggest,
as a New York Times editorial did yesterday, 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 that
recently protested the Covid-19 lockdown by storming the Michigan state capitol, venting their indignation in the faces of white policemen.
(In
fact, the US authorities’ reaction to the Black Panthers movement
through the late 1960s and 1970s is salutary enough for anyone who
wishes to understand how dangerous it is for a black man to bear arms in
his own defence against the violence of white men.)
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 organised and empowered labour
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 US Marshall Plan helped
subsidise 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 rationalise 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
globalised businesses to plunder local resources, exploit local labour
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 minimise the obstacles facing global
corporations as they seek to maximise 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 US 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.
The 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 monopolise 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.
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-rationalising system.
Throwing the protests 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 civilisational 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 is 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 US 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 US 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.
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 US streets, there is evidence
all around that the centre is struggling to maintain its hold. The US
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 learnt 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.
Jonathan
Cook won the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. His books
include “Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan
to Remake the Middle East” (Pluto Press) and “Disappearing Palestine:
Israel’s Experiments in Human Despair” (Zed Books). His website is www.jonathan-cook.net.
(Republished from Jonathan Cook by permission of author or representative)
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