And why we should fight to keep it alive
In 2020, during the height of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests, the streets of Sydney were flooded with over fifty-thousand protesters, consistently calling for the cops to be disarmed, defunded, and dismantled. Support for the explicit abolition of the police and the wider carceral system was one of the defining political aspects of the vb movement, and for a time was mainstream. In the US, books advocating for the abolition of the police and prison system were reviewed in major publications, and the New York Times published an op-ed arguing for it. Some Democratic Party politicians – however insincere – even advocated for it.
In the few short years since, however, we seem to have experienced a collective amnesia. As anarchists, we have always held to a politics of abolition, but some sections of the left have opportunistically dropped and taken up these demands inconsistently in recent years. A large part of this is due to BLM losing momentum, but it also signifies a rightward shift, a less radical and defensive turn towards a singular focus on abolishing our local New South Wales anti-protest laws, without any discussion of broader abolitionist politics.
The exact criticisms of abolitionism given vary, but are often based on a paternalistic attitude towards workers and their ability to engage with anti-carceral arguments; a reflection of their more general unwillingness to engage with workers about anti-capitalist politics. More generally, these leftists are pessimistic towards the ability of different anti-police social struggles to be linked up. In other instances, abolitionism is attacked outright as being “ultra”.
Police militarisation and brutality have only intensified since 2020. The anti-protest laws currently on the books are the toughest ever and the arguments from 2020 are even more relevant now than they were then. In every struggle the left is engaged in, we find the cops there, enforcing the will of the state and capitalists violently.
For the reformists on the left, abolitionist politics are unpalatable because they threaten their popularity on election night. They also know pretty well that abolishing the police means abolishing capitalism – a subject they have no intention of broaching. The wider revolutionary left recognises that cops are agents of the state, but have similar fears of “alienating workers”; they also know that police abolition conflicts with their quiet dream of becoming the masters of their own state.
Police militarisation and brutality have only intensified since 2020. The anti-protest laws currently on the books are the toughest ever and the arguments from 2020 are even more relevant now than they were then. In every struggle the left is engaged in, we find the cops there, enforcing the will of the state and capitalists violently. This could not be any clearer: it can be seen in the way the police smash pickets, arrest climate protesters, and partake in genocide against Indigenous people.
Unsurprisingly, the anti-protest laws are also being used to suppress unionists and activists protesting Israel’s genocide in Gaza; as many as 40 people were arrested at two Port Botany actions for Palestine alone. Many of these people face the possibility of years in gaol or massive fines. Not to mention the homophobic, transphobic, and racist abuse metered out to comrades arrested when they were at the cop shops.
The police’s international connections don’t stop at oppressing protests that target oppression overseas. Australian cops have been directly trained by Israeli experts, and there’s even been embedded New York City Police Department intelligence officers in the city. Police techniques developed in the United States are exported here, which gives added relevance to the significant protest movement against Cop City in Atlanta, Georgia. The chronic use of the police as a tool of colonial repression ensures that the links to international western imperialism are many and deep.
As the police become increasingly militarised, the interchangeability between it and the army becomes concerningly more so. The police are not only turning into a paramilitary organisation, but are also cooperating with the military much more closely, and much more often. Such collaboration has become formalised through co-operation and interoperability doctrines, meaning that the police receive training from the military about “non-lethal” tactics — including detention, patrols, and the alignment of military and police practice. This manifested in their joint crackdown on Western Sydney at the height of lockdowns, and in response to the Lismore floods—both authoritarian measures to restore “order” following disasters, thinly veiled as “public service.” Such occurrences can only be expected to become more frequent in the future. This growing lack of distinction between the police and the military make it imperative that an anti-carceral movement is necessarily anti-imperialist and internationalist.
The exact criticisms of abolitionism given vary, but are often based on a paternalistic attitude towards workers
and their ability to engage with anti-carceral arguments; a reflection of their more general unwillingness to engage with workers about anti-capitalist politics.
It’s clear that these anti-protest laws need to be smashed, and that cops should have their access to firearms limited, particularly in the aftermath of the Beaumont Lamarre-Condon case. But this recognition alone is too limited a perspective! The reality is that the anti-protest laws are only truly as effective as the power of law enforcement. Challenging police authority not only works to undermine the legitimacy of the enforcement of the anti-protest laws, but it also paves the way for the movement to proceed with clarity under inevitable further legal attacks.
We must reorientate, and look to communities such as the Yuendumu – who in their statement of demands in 2022, called for the disarming and defunding of the Northern Territory Police, with those funds being directed instead towards community controlled alternatives. More locally, we can look at Pride in Protest – who have consistently called for the abolition of the carceral system, and the removal of cops and screws from community events like the Mardi Gras Parade. Such a reorientation necessarily means reviving the BLM movement. Following the Voice referendum we have seen a dearth in Blak anti-colonial solidarity. We need to start mending the deep rifts within the left, caused by the vicious identity politics of the Yes vote. We should be looking back at the large open meetings that were held at the height of the BLM movement as a source of inspiration for building the movement back up.
At the moment whenever there’s an eruption of police violence, opportunistic members of the left will protest it – like we saw at the anti-cop protest that happened the night before Mardi Gras this year – and then go back to ignoring demands for abolition until the next eruption. This isn’t to say that comrades who selectively attend these protests aren’t doing the right thing in these instances: they are. But we all need to be more consistent at integrating abolition into mass movement building and organising. If we don’t, we fail future organisers through not passing down the knowledge required to build such a movement.
Fundamentally, we all know the class nature of the institution and their role in reproducing capitalism. We also know the horrific history of racism, queerphobia, and sexism as well. The police cannot be reformed. They need to be dismantled at their root, just like all other aspects of class society. So yes – down with the anti-protest laws, and yes to cops out of Mardi Gras. But also yes to cops out of Trades Hall, yes to their disarmament, and ultimately their entire abolition. Without mass movements that know their own class enemies, how can we truly hope to overcome capitalism itself? Or prevent the state from simply redirecting resources to domestic military forces that would take up the reins of the police in their absence?
These are ambitious goals, but so is our ultimate goal of a stateless communism. The right steps must be taken to get there. Malatesta put it succinctly when he wrote that “whoever sets out on the highroad and takes a wrong turn does not go where he intends to go, but where the road leads him”. Let’s not take a wrong turn.