Let’s be clear. The issue is capitalism. There are a whole bunch of things wrong, and most of them, if not all, boil back down to the profit-over-people model that we’ve been running with ever since America became a thing.
Every time something happens that exposes the true nature of capitalism’s evil, policies are inevitably enforced that are intended to roll back (in the eyes of the public) some of the destruction that is being done on the surface. But so often those band-aids are much more than just “not enough”. They serve as a distraction and an alibi to the magnitude and centrality of the issue. Property is valued more than people, it has been since 1619, and that is the problem. That is what has to change.
Capitalism is the cause of climate change, of poverty, of police brutality and mass incarceration. It supports human trafficking and sexual violence. It is top-down domination; it is stolen labor, land, and life, and it is antagonistic to the good of the general public. The abolition of police and prisons means the abolition of capitalism.
Marx said religion was “the opiate of the masses”. Nowadays we have other solutions. Like “greenwashing”, which is more than just companies making misleading claims, like the not-so-paper straws from McDonald’s, but actually is more of a name for an entire ideological shift in perspective amongst people that we can reverse the inevitable destruction of the planet by making little changes, rather than focusing on the main thing that is driving the mechanical bull through the china shop.
By using paper bags instead of plastic and electric vehicles, we are able to buy capitalism more time as it pillages the earth and its inhabitants for the benefit of the increasingly few and disgustingly wealthy. We have problems designed as solutions. Prisons are scapegoats to our violent tendencies. We hide some of the greatest victims of violence behind walls that make them invisible and we celebrate our purging of evil, while tragically missing the irony. We use physical barriers as distortions of our perception, creating a class of people who are different, hopefully, from ourselves.
Every time there is a reform that happens within capitalism, it serves only to solidify a system of exploitation and intentional pain. Reforms within prisons, training for police officers, paper f*cking bags; small offerings are public relations tactics designed to convince us the problem is being taken care of while it actually becomes further entrenched. These “reforms” effectively alter the connotation of the conversation on behalf of the institutions who continue to reap rewards from our ignorance.
This invades nearly every aspect of our lives. We are bombarded regularly by offers and invitations for pleasurable objects and experiences as well as signals to our good virtue. We can donate money so others can have a meal, or help children with their diseases. It feels good to give our hard-earned money away, until we realize that not only are we still relatively broke, but our lifestyle contributes to a lack of care for so many. We consent to it because we think that we would have to give up swaths of our good fortune in order for others to have basic needs and care. But the way we are living is quickly eating up all of the resources for everyone. In reality, the majority of people on the earth would benefit from a socialist reimagining. The way things are going, pretty soon none of us will have the basic things we need.
The fact is, we are being eaten up. We are doing it by allowing the government to torture and murder its people, unaware or unwilling to see the connection to our own lives. Prisons represent a warehouse where the state keeps dissenters and poor people who are dangerous destabilizers of the status quo. If they are too much of a threat to capitalist ideology, they don’t even make it to jail. See Fred Hampton. Police are the enforcers, the hired hand of the government who are sanctioned to kill indeterminably. After the fact of a murder they are often left with enough grey area where they can claim self-defense even after arriving upon a scene armed with a deadly weapon. And they murder people, make no mistake. Yet we still agree this is the way things should be.
These are problems in our society, and the only way that they are allowed (by us!) to continue is that they are effectively labeled as solutions to our more vague problems of “violence and crime.” The real violence is that which is perpetrated by profit-seeking juggernauts who team up and feed off of poverty, creating the very conditions that they then use in the media as a justification for their continued enforcement and ultimate rule over society.
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