A few preliminary notes on crime and punishment

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Crime, punishment, capitalism and the struggle for world socialism

1. Under the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie crime is broadly defined as theft or destruction of property.
2. Marginal areas of the economy are also criminalized to increase both their profitability and the scope of action for cops and courts.
3. Police and prosecutors are not in the business of solving crimes.
1. They are in the business of keeping a certain percentage of the working class, particularly from oppressed nationalities, within the jail-to-court-to-prison food chain.
2. This cows, demobilizes, and intimidates. The social churn and anxiety created pushes us further apart.
4. Crimes in working class districts and oppressed communities are not investigated and solved a la C.S.I. Cops and prosecutors select people close at hand to become suspects. They are brow-beaten and tortured to confess, then offered plea-bargains to eliminate the risk of taking such cases to trial.
5. In working class and particularly oppressed communities cops and criminals both prey upon the people.
6. Criminality has a matrix of causes under capitalism.
1. Normal workings of the law of value erode social and class solidarity.
2. Fundamental morality of capital: each against the other; the other is seen as a money resource only.
3. The individual is taught to regard themselves as both Napoleon and Narcissus, or Robinson Crusoe.
4. Individuals are taught to negotiate the social geography of class society by the compass of the cash nexus.
7. The cops are not “ours”.
1. Cops, no matter their origins, race, or gender, are trained and act upon the ruling class judgement that workers districts and oppressed communities are enemy territory.
2. Cops carry out punitive harassment, arrests, assaults, and killings with freedom and impunity. They have a “license to kill.”
3. Cops consistently remind the most marginal and lumpen workers and oppressed peoples of their subordinate position: psychologically atomized and alienated individuals with no horizon to their lives.
4. The cops cannot be made to become “ours” pr “protect” our districts and communities.
5. It is not a bureaucratic error or oversight or institutional incompetence that prevents cops from solving crimes and protecting us from criminals. It is not a problem of governance that can be corrected with new city leadership in cop institutions or consent decrees from the courts.
6. The book, TV, and movie cultural-media monopolies use their outlets to promote sympathy for cops, especially by focusing on cops as profound individualists doing a thankless job for an ungrateful population. Cop and lawyer are the only occupations depicted in dramatic television programs.
8. Ruling class spokesmen, elected representatives, and cops have ready answers to any criticism directed at them about crime.
1. Longer sentences for our sons and daughters, mothers and fathers.
2. We are told to purchase and carry sidearms.
3. We are told from an early age to narc on our peers and neighbors.
4. We are told [and told to teach our children] to think of others as strangers and potentially dangerous threats.
9. An ideological and propaganda campaign pointing out double standards of the cops, courts, and prisons is only the beginning of wisdom. All too often, it collapses back into liberalism, individual solutions, and a psychological social worker or parole officer mentality.
10. Fundamental components of a working class campaign against austerity and unemployment and to reawaken the struggle for world socialism are also fundamental components of a working class “anti-crime” campaign that needs to be promoted and recruited-to today.
1. Work or wages for all at union scale.
2. A massive WPA-style public works program.
3. Fully funded youth summer employment.
4. Fully funded employment and social services for returning prisoners.
5. Fully funded drug rehab.
6. Fully funded women’s shelters.
7. A moratorium on foreclosures and evictions.
8. Legalize Drugs, immediately. The war on drugs is a war on the poor. The same for the "war on gangs."
9. Fire and jail cops who beat and kill. Creating an environment where cops are afraid to step out of line because they know they will be punished is an important early step.
10. End the death penalty. The capitalist class should be prevented from using this weapon on anyone, as they have proven time and time again they do not use for "general social good."
11. As revolutionary struggles by workers and oppressed people for their own socialist government advance, community militias and squads should replace the police forces. Just as corporations have their own "security guards" and there is a move to privatize the military and police forces, the working class and organizations of oppressed people should establish their own courts, security forces, and institutions of dual power.

7/31/11