This article was first published in Constituting America, August 1, 2022.

 

Good government produces good administration, Publius has written. Good administration is what we need from the executive branch charged as it is with carrying out the laws enacted by the legislature within the framework of the supreme law of the land, the United States Constitution. A good executive must act with energy. To enable executives so to act, the offices they occupy must have unity, duration, adequate provision in terms of money and personnel, and competent powers. Publius therefore defends the Frames of the Constitution in their establishment of a presidency unlike the consular system of ancient Rome, which assigned domestic policy to one consul, foreign (and especially military) policy to another. The American president serves as chief administrative officer for domestic policy as well as Commander-in-Chief of the armed forces. Congress may not manipulate his salary and the president can exercise the power to veto Congressional legislation, thereby maintaining his independence of judgment. He is, hen, neither a monarch nor a legislator but a republican executive.

In Federalist 71, Publius presents the reasons for and the institutional means to enable duration in office, “the second requisite to the energy of the executive authority.” There can be no substitute for character for “the personal firmness of the executive in the employment of his constitutional powers.” Nor can there be any substitute for “the stability of the system of administration which may have been adopted under his auspices” as a consequence of that firmness of character. But no person can exercise such character or carry out such a system without an institutional framework which permits him to do so.

As always, Publius shows the link between the Constitution’s institutional arrangements and human nature. “It is a general principle of human nature that a man will be interested in whatever he possesses, in proportion to the firmness or precariousness of the tenure by which he holds it; will be less attached to what he holds by a momentary or uncertain title, than to what he enjoys by a durable or certain title.” The firmness of the man must be reinforced by the firmness of the office. The “unity” of the office, the fact that the president will share it with no one else, provides some of that institutional firmness. But even a unitary executive can find himself hamstrung if another branch of government has the power to dominate him, remove him at pleasure. In regimes whose executives serve at the whim of the legislature, as in many parliamentary systems, why would any person of character take the executive office seriously? Better to be a power broker in the parliament than the hapless holder of fly-by-night executive powers, powers that will not last if you exhibit the slightest hint of independence. And if you accept such an office, why risk anything to defend powers which are not truly yours to wield? Such an institutional arrangement undermines civic courage, inclining the one who suffers under it, “too little interested in it to hazard any material censure or perplexity from the independent exertion of his powers, or from encountering the ill-humors, however transient, which may happen to prevail, either in a considerable part of the society itself, or even in a predominant faction in the legislative body.”

This defect had already been on display under the Articles of Confederation, which did not separate executive power from the legislative branch. The Americans who wanted to retain the Articles regime against the proposed Constitution were “inclined to regard the servile pliancy of the executive to a prevailing current, either in the community or in the legislature, as its best recommendation.” They want representative government to mirror Athenian-style direct democracy as much as possible, to have it register the opinions and even the passions of the people and their elected legislators. Publius considers such notions as “very crude,” with regard both to the ends and especially the means of government.

The Declaration of Independence had set down the just purpose of American government—indeed of any government—as securing the safety and happiness of the people, a purpose justified by their natural right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness under the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God. Much of that is “self-evident,” the Declaration affirms. Publius agrees: “It is a just observation that the people commonly intend the PUBLIC GOOD. But as the American people themselves acknowledge, having learned it from experience under the Articles regime, they do not “always reason right about the means of promoting” the public good, “beset as they continually are by the wiles of parasites and sycophants, by the snares of the ambitious, the avaricious, the desperate, by the artifices of men who possess their confidence more than they deserve it, and those who seek to posses rather than to deserve it.” Democracy has its ‘courtiers’ as much as monarchy does.

If self-government is therefore dangerous, “the republican principle demands that the deliberate sense of the community should govern the conduct of those to whom” the people “entrust the management of their affairs.” Characteristically, Publius attempts to increase the chance that the distinctively human characteristic, reason, will have the greatest possible authority in government while acknowledging the impassionate—a Christian would say ‘fallen’—character of human beings.

There will, then, be circumstances “in which the interests of the people are at variance with their inclinations, it is the duty of the persons whom they have anointed to be the guardians of those interests to withstand the temporary delusion in order to give them time and opportunity for more cool and sedate reflection.” Thus to serve the people “at the peril of their displeasure” takes “courage and magnanimity.” Without well-designed institutions, such virtues will do no good, as statesmen in the late Roman republican learned; without such virtues, the institutions will stand unused, and may be undermined.

It is important to pause and appreciate the moral structure of Publius’ argument, here. He wants to see the rule of reason in the United States—to the extent possible, given human frailty. The Constitution generally, and a four-year, renewable presidential term in particular provides an institutional framework for such rule. But neither the rule of reason nor the defense of the Constitution can survive without two other virtues that array themselves against popular passion. civic courage is easy to understand and to appreciate, if not commonplace. We have all seen men and women, even children, who have refused to buckle under ‘peer pressure.’ Magnanimity is less well understood.

Magnanimity literally means greatness of soul: in Latin, magnus means great, large; anima means soul. The classic description of the great-souled individual comes from Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics IV.3. The great-souled man, Aristotle writes, “deems himself worthy of great things and is worthy of them.” This means that he possesses all the cardinal virtues—courage, moderation, justice, and prudence—to a very high degree. Accordingly, he stands ready to withstand the demands of others, however intensely they may clamor, when he sees that those demands are cowardly, immoderate, unjust, or imprudent. He can take the heat, and he can do it without resentment.

A republican regime undergirded by a democratic civil society will test him. He can pass that test, but without a firm institutional foundation on which to stand he will be physically overwhelmed by the majority tide, helpless to resist “the humors of the legislature.” The Articles of Confederation government had folded executive and judicial power into the legislature, giving inadequate support for reason, courage, or magnanimity—the finest human characteristics. “To what purpose separate the executive or the judiciary from the legislature,” as the new Constitution had done, “if both the executive and the judiciary are so constituted as to be at the absolute devotion of the legislative” branch? The powers would then be separated in name only, with the legislature “exert[ing] an imperious control over the other departments,” unbalancing the apparently balanced powers of the federal government as framed by the Constitution.

This is exactly what had been happening under the Articles. The same thing will happen again unless the president enjoys a stable tenure in office. In view of this, “it may be asked whether a duration of four years would answer to the end proposed,” whether such a duration of a presidential term will suffice to resist attempts b legislators to dominate the system. Publius does not pretend that he knows the answer since a four-year term was untried in previous American governments and the lifelong term of a European monarchy—in principle of not always in practice as stable a provision as can be had—was highly undesirable. It is nonetheless reasonable to think that a four-year residential term “would have a material influence upon the spirit and character of the government.”

Why? Because any person “endowed with a tolerable portion of fortitude” should see that there is “time enough” before the current term expires, and the prospect of re-election draws near, for the people and their legislative representatives to have calmed down to be ready to assess the president with equanimity. True enough, this would mean that he might not dare to resist popular disapproval so readily as hi term drew to an end, but for most of the time he would be able to hold steadily to his constitutional duties and best judgment. At the same time, unlike a monarch, a president won’t stay in office long enough “to justify any alarm for the public liberty.” Which is not to say that his enemies won’t try to raise such alarms.

Publius’ understanding of the presidency not only departs from the conception of executive power which prevailed under the Articles, it also contradicts the new conception of the presidency advanced by the Progressives, more than a century later. President Woodrow Wilson rejected the United States Constitution as an antiquated and constricting product of a bygone era, and equally rejected its moral foundation in the laws of Nature and of Nature’s God. In place of natural right he substituted historical right, claiming that the course of events, guided by divine Providence, provided the true moral light for humanity. In view of this continuing historical progress, the Constitution must be reconceived as an ‘elastic’ or ‘living document to be reinterpreted by political leaders such as himself who placed themselves on the cutting edge of that progress. In place of magnanimity, Wilson substituted compassion not so much a virtue as a sentiment, one intended to carry the people along on a tide of emotion with slogans like ‘I feel your pain.’ The president then should serve not so much as the executor of Congressional legislation within a stable constitutional framework but as the principal leader of the nation the person who senses where public opinion should go next, appealing more to popular passion than to prudence in the hope of inducing the people to follow him to that ever-new, ever-higher destination.

As a result, the Progressives raised expectations to unfillable heights, grafting their own unusual brand of moving-target ‘constitutionalism’ onto the old Constitution, with predictably confusing and self-contradictory result that have persisted to this day.

Michael Schellenberger: San Fran-sicko: Why Progressives Ruin Cities. New York: Harper Collins Publishers, 2021.

 

The book’s title more than suggests that we’re in for a polemic, most likely from the ‘Right.’ Not so, however: Schellenberger, “a progressive and Democrat all my life,” wants to know why progressives’ policies have failed to ameliorate the conditions of drug addiction, mental illness, homelessness, and ineffective law enforcement that have made life not only in San Francisco but in Seattle, Portland, and Minneapolis increasingly miserable for all residents, and especially for the afflicted. He has concluded that “much of what I and other progressives had believed about cities, crime, and homelessness was all wrong,” and “we needed to get it right.” Although not free of polemic, his book is for the most part a courageous and clear-sighted attempt to correct errors of policy which have had destructive consequences for tens of thousands of Americans. Progressives are not the only ones who ruin cities, nor are they incapable of saving them. But when they have ruined them, in recent years, they have done it “in similar ways, and for similar reasons.”

San Francisco has a large number of homeless people who have no place to shelter themselves, no alternative but to live ‘on the streets.’ This misery intensified in the 1980s, when expensive cocaine was altered into ‘crack,’ much cheaper and thus “available to the poor and working class.” Progressives responded by demanding housing for the homeless, including the addicts, simultaneously asserting the right of homeless people to “camp in public places. “By the early 1990s, advocates for the homeless were hosting seminars where they taught people how to camp out in the city,” one of several efforts to relax enforcement of city ordinances. Progressives also called for, and received, substantial increases in spending to support the homeless, which in effect subsidized drug use. These policies caused lawlessness generally to spike, with violence among homeless persons themselves leading the cutting edge of ‘History.’ By the time progressive mayor Willie Brown retired, he could think of nothing more to do, conceding that homelessness may be an insoluble condition.

Progressives want the homeless to be moved off the streets and out of those shelters that still exist into housing. That cannot work because the cost of housing in cities like San Francisco and Los Angeles is insupportably high; no government can afford to provide it, and even if they could, readily available housing would only exacerbate the dilemma by attracting more of the homeless to the city that provided it. Finally, although providing housing conditioned on abstinence from drugs does reduce homelessness, progressives have opposed that stipulation on civil-libertarian grounds.

One way to ‘house’ homeless persons who commit crimes is to jail them. Schellenberger observes that incarceration rates in the United States have quintupled since 1970. Many progressives claim that most prisoners have been convicted of nonviolent drug possession; the fact is that although 47% of inmates in federal prisons are indeed there for such crimes, less than 15% of inmates in state prisons are, and the state prison population substantially exceeds the population of federal prisons. Most prisoners in state prisoners are ‘in’ for violent offenses. “Violence, not stricter drug sentences, drove most incarceration, nationwide and in California.”

Or is racism to blame? It is true that police arrest African Americans at a rate far exceeding their percentage of the overall population. But on this matter, progressives’ memories are short. The 1994 crime bill, signed by President Clinton and produced by the Congressional Black Caucus working with senators Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders, which imposed tougher punishments for violent crime, was intended to counteract the unusually high murder rates in African American communities. As one scholar has asked, “How racist can a law be which the Congressional Black Caucus vigorously supported and even considered too weak?”

Progressives have claimed that the way to reduce the drug addiction which contributes to overcrowded jails is to legalize drugs. Schellenberger once shared that assumption: “Much of what I had believed about prohibition was wrong.” The original Prohibition movement, banning the sale of alcoholic beverages, did not (as progressives have long supposed) cause an increase in violent crime, as the decrease in “drunken murders” offset the increase in gangland murders. Deaths from cirrhosis of the liver declined sharply, and it is probable if unprovable that domestic violence also declined. The end of prohibition reversed all of these trends. Today, there are four times the number of abusers of legal alcohol than abusers of illegal drugs. Before the 1980s, most homeless persons were alcoholics, not drug addicts; the number of drug addicts increased because ‘hard’ drugs got cheaper. And as for law enforcement, “people are not dying from drug overdose…in San Francisco because they’re being arrested”; “they’re dying because they aren’t being arrested.” Decriminalization of illegal, addictive drugs has increased per capita deaths wherever it has been tried, from California to Portugal.

Progressives’ claims that drug addiction and homelessness can only end when “racism and poverty” are abolished is an example of false profundity. Such alleged ‘root causes’ don’t cause what progressives have said they cause. Straightforward mandatory treatment of drug addicts as persons, not merely of ‘drug addiction’ as a syndrome, is what works. And although the aspiration to eliminate racism and poverty evinces compassion, the progressives’ policy of drug decriminalization hardly qualifies as compassionate. As one former addict asked, “How compassionate is it to let somebody just shoot dope the rest of their life?” By contrast, European cities such as Amsterdam, Lisbon, Frankfurt, Vienna, and Zurich have shut down “open-air drug markets,” combining law enforcement with social services. In the United States, however, progressives now dislike cops and prefer not to work with them. But cops provide the necessary preliminary step toward a hastened recovery: coercion. Without coercion, drug addicts need to ‘hit bottom’ before they consent to working toward recovery. That often includes vicious crimes along the way; and sadly, the ‘bottom’ the addict hits may be death.

What happened to mental health hospitals? Governor Ronald Reagan is often blamed by his political enemies, the progressives, for closing the hospitals. He did, but he was (perhaps foolishly) only following the policy of his predecessor, Pat Brown, and the legislative act he signed to continue that policy passed the state legislature by 77 votes to one; “it would have passed even had Reagan vetoed it.” Such progressives as President Kennedy and Diane Feinstein were advocates of deinstitutionalization before and (in Feinstein’s case) after Reagan’s governorship.

In addition to drug addicts, over 120,000 mentally ill Americans now live on the streets. About 35,000 are in state hospitals and 356,000 are incarcerated. It is out-of-control mental illness that often gets homeless people shot by cops. Although California spends liberally on mental health treatment, the number of homeless mentally ill citizens has “risen dramatically” thanks to a shortage of beds in mental hospitals. But spending more on such hospitals by itself won’t solve the problem, especially so long as progressive reformers persist in claiming that “mental illnesses like schizophrenia and bipolar disorder” result from “class, racial, and other forms of inequality and oppression” that can only be addressed by redistribution of wealth and resources. “Idealism and ideology” have “triumphed over pragmatism and reason,” especially since the likes of Michel Foucault have persuaded two generations of progressives that treatments that work constitute evil ‘microaggressions’ against the ill; indeed, in their more radical formulations, Foucault and his followers deny that mental illness is an illness at all, but only a vile ‘social construct.’ The ideological move from humanism—including the reform of mental hospitals—to ‘post-humanist’ ideology hasn’t done much for humans.

Foucault argued that there’s no such thing as individual responsibility, which is only “a myth used by powerful people to punish and discipline others for things they could not control.” There is biology and there is environment; there is no free will. Following this claim, many progressives now rule it “taboo to suggest people are on the street for any reason other than poverty.”

“The problem with this line of thinking is that people appear to behave far better when they take responsibility for their actions than when they don’t.” They do exercise free will in their own way, however, by playing the role of victims of societal forces beyond their control because doing so brings them such rewards as welfare payments and, on occasion, ‘free’ housing—a strategy known as “victim signaling.” “As a result, there are more people who identify as victims today, even as actual trauma and victimization are declining.” On the contrary, parents now are more inclined to coddle their children, treating them as if they are “natural, pure, and fragile, requiring as little discipline as possible,” rather in the manner of Rousseauians who have never bothered to read the Emile. Without much capacity to handle stress, such children are found more likely to use drugs to ‘cope.’ “Lack of discipline to delay gratification makes people fragile.” “Even if we were to accept that everyone on the street has been victimized”—and many have not—and “even if we were to agree that victimization has grown worse” in recent decades—it hasn’t—does “that mean we should give them the identify as victims, and make them above the law?”

In contrast, an older addiction program, Alcoholics Anonymous, works because it holds people responsible for their actions throughout its famous Twelve Steps. This is what’s now called “contingency management,” which means that your advancement toward greater and greater rewards is made contingent on your behavior—a form of treatment psychologists call “operant conditioning.” Those who were introduced to this concept through college experiments with rats in mazes hunting food pellets might be offended by the thought that humans respond to similar treatment, but they do. Anything from gift cards to shelter works, swapping “one set of rewards, such as meth and heroin, for another set of rewards.” In one major trial, participants receiving contingency management treatment were nearly two-and-a-half times more likely to abstain from drugs than the control group, far less likely to be hospitalized for psychiatric reasons, and more likely to remain abstinent. The treatment is also less costly. “External reinforcements build internal strength over time.”

Counseling also works. As far back as the 1920s, the Viennese psychiatrist Victor Frankl established youth counseling centers in an attempt to reduce the rate of suicide among adolescents. He “demanded that his depressed patients find a reason for living,” asking, provocatively, “Why do you not commit suicide?” Faced with this question, they identified their purpose in life, typically personal relationships or some form of activity or work that held them back from taking the final step. Once they had specified a reason to live, a sense of responsibility began to develop. “Where Freud wanted people to orient toward the past, toward their childhood traumas, Frankl wanted people to orient toward their future, toward their goals.” To put it another way, teleology proved more effective than genealogy, Aristotle wiser than Nietzsche. 

What about the much-discussed issue of racial bias when it comes not only to drug crimes but crimes generally? Conservatives often ascribe the higher rates of police killings of African Americans (42% of the killings, 10% of the population) to the higher rates of violent crime by African Americans—nearly three times that of whites. But it isn’t that simple. The real question is whether there is any difference between the rates of police killings in circumstances that justified the use of lethal force—when a suspect pulled a weapon, for example. Harvard University researcher Roland Fryer found no evidence of racial bias in the data concerning police stops; however, data concerning justified police use of lethal force are obviously harder to assess. What is demonstrable is that in 2019, the most recent year statistics were available, 30 times the number of African Americans were killed by civilians than by police. Since “young men, street gangs, and large numbers of handguns have existed in American society for hundreds of years, and over periods where homicides declined, such as in the early 1990s” until 2018, what exactly accounts for the recent sharp increase in violent crime—e.g., homicides up 17% between 2014 and 2015?

It can’t be poverty or racism. Both were worse in the 1950s and 1960s, when rates of violent crime were much lower. Crime rates declined even during the period of the economic downturn of 2007. “Homicide is irrational and emotional, not a natural and predetermined response to personal setbacks.” Violence does, however, increase when the public’s trust in the regime, patriotism, fellow feeling with other citizens decline. In California, and not only California, those things have been occurring simultaneously with a two-decade-long reduction of penalties for using and dealing hard drugs. Of more recent origin is the movement to get rid of policing altogether, spearheaded by anarchists who re-branded themselves as ‘anti-fascists.’ Today, “there are fewer policy officers per capita than at any time since 1992.”

Nor is a proven response to the crisis beyond the mind of man. If you break up the open-air drug markets and impose “guaranteed, immediate, and short jail time for parole violations like failing a drug test,” crime rates go down. San Francisco ignored this approach, which has worked in Hawaii and New York City.

Of major importance in stiffening resistance to such commonsense measure has been one of the core sentiments animated most progressives: compassion. To view homeless, drug-addicted, and/or violent citizens as victims rather than as human beings capable of making rational choices when incentives and disincentives are rightly structured isn’t compassionate so much as patronizing. And as to liberty, a principle progressives often define doing whatever you want with ‘your own body,’ this misconceives liberty, ignoring its rootedness in self-government humanly understood—the government of the human ‘self’ or soul by reason, not by appetite or sentiment. 

Even Marx and Engels, among their demands for proletarian self-government and indeed dictatorial rule over the bourgeoisie, never supposed that the lumpenproletariat, the truly down-and-out, could possibly serve as a sound center for political life. Our neo-Marxists are operating on exactly that supposition. But since the lumpenproletariat manifestly cannot rule anyone until they have achieved personal self-rule, “the dark side of victimology is how it moralizes power,” first by pretending that “victims are inherently good because they have been victimized,” and then by making a claim to rule over those victims but especially over those designated as their victimizers. “This is not a phenomenon of ignorant people but rather of highly educated ones,” or perhaps of the ignoramuses amongst the highly educated, who don’t use their heads except when it comes to demanding ‘power’ for themselves. Their compassion “acts as cover for darker motivations,” as seen in such infamous tyrants as Stalin and Mao. The overwhelming majority of Americans who self-identify as progressives hardly approach to extremity, and one hopes they never will, but we do “need to understand how and why compassion, altruism, and love have created a blind spot, and not just in relationship to foreign despots but also to homegrown ones,” such as the mass-murdering ‘Reverend’ Jim Jones, who initially found allies in two San Francisco mayors and the Marxist ideologue Angela Davis. 

Such cults thrive when religion declines, as “the decline of traditional religion has allowed for the rise of untraditional ones.” Schellenberger calls “victimology” a “secular religion”; “it meets the contemporary psychological, social, and spiritual needs of its believers,” appearing “obvious, not ideological, to them.” To weaken this dogmatic attachment, he recommends using “specific words that refer people to the real world,” avoiding such abstractions as “homelessness” by distinguishing the reasons people become homeless, which include not only drug addiction and mental illness but family breakup and unemployment. Additionally, “we must train ourselves to be alert for misinformation ad manipulation of our emotions, including compassion, anger, and shame”; “gaining mastery of the facts is essential to gaining mastery over our thinking and feelings.”

With this advice (which might well be commended when considering any choice in politics, or in private life), Schellenberger recounts the six reasons why progressives ruin cities he has discussed so far. Progressives divert funding from homeless shelters to permanent housing; they endorse the right of ‘victims’ to break laws against occupying public spaces; they label those who disagree with their policies as uncompassionate, racist, and so on; they reduce penalties for petty theft, drug using and dealing; they “prefer homelessness and incarceration to involuntary hospitalization for the mentally ill and addicted”; they “misattribute the addiction, untreated mental illness, and homeless crisis to poverty and politicians dating back to the 1980s.”

Given their poor record, how have progressives managed to stay in charge of cities? Conservatives “ceded the issue of homelessness to progressives,” a move easily made because most Republicans don’t live in areas where homeless persons live. In California, the ranks of left-leaning voters swelled thanks both to the rise of the new professional class of ‘techies,’ who “emerged from the Sixties counterculture” and to the influx of Latin American immigrants. In contrast with the “civic spirit” of the earlier generations of progressives, the Sixties-generation progressives “sought to replace the principle of gratitude”—including patriotism and an appreciation for or at least toleration of opposing viewpoints—with “an attitude of entitlement” which allows for no give-and-take in political disputes. One might observe that the paradigm of political action shifted from that of Aristotle’s illustration of the relation of husband and wife, of reciprocity, of ruling and being ruled in turn, to Hegel’s master-slave dialectic, whereby the slave simply asserts his rights and fights to the death for them. 

Ruling and being ruled is what Aristotle calls politics. It is essential to a genuinely political understanding of liberty. The liberty of civil libertarians—and progressives uphold social laissez-faire even as they condemn the economic kind—permits no coercion of persons living under “the inhumane conditions of street addiction.” Beyond even the new progressives, “anarchists can cheerlead disruptive and even violent actions and then evade responsibility when things go wrong.” After all, being anarchists, they hold no public offices.

“And so it is to reconstructing a new moral foundation, one capable of uniting moderate conservatives and progressives, that we can now turn.” (Easier said than done, one is inclined to reply.) “We need a new, pro-human, pro-civilization, and pro-cities morality” to replace the now-decrepit ‘New Morality’ of the Sixties. “Freedom is essential but without order it can’t exist in cities,” increasingly unsafe, menacing, uncivic. This newer morality in fact resembles the older morality of (for example) James Madison, who understood genuine liberty as a condition of moral responsibility (a word he, as ‘Publius’ in several of the most important Federalist papers, popularized in American English).

Schellenberger proposes a sort of civic religion, although he doesn’t call it that. “Cities are sacred”—because the city “is, or can be, the place of the highest human possibility, flourishing, and freedom”—and “thus there must be rules for behavior in them.” “People must not be exempted” from the rules “because we feel sorry for them and label them Victims.” So, enforce existing laws, toughen those that have been relaxed by jailing violent offenders and stigmatizing hard drug use by breaking up the open-air markets, thereby dispersing the drug trade and making drug purchases a lot more inconvenient.

Since the true addicts will ferret out the drugs they crave, no matter how inconvenient that may be, Schellenberger (showing his old-progressive colors) advocates the formation of “a new and powerful state agency in California,” Cal-Psych, which would “efficiently and humanely treat the seriously mentally ill and addicts, while providing housing to the homeless on a contingency based system,” as he had previously discussed. He pins his hopes on the suggestion that “California is overdue for a turn toward pragmatism and moderation when it comes to these issues.” The head of the agency would report directly to the governor.

New York City’s experience with policing in the past half-century leaves little room for optimism on this. There, the police commissioner reports to the mayor. The mayor appoints the Police Commissioner. Ergo, public safety in the city has depended upon who the mayor has been. John Lindsay was weak, as was his less ideological but no less unfirm successor, Abraham Beame. Edward I. Koch turned things around, only to be followed by the dapper and ineffectual David Dinkins. Rudolph Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg tightened things up, but Bill di Blasio reversed their course, with predictable results. The current mayor, Eric Adams, made tough-on-crime noises during his campaign but has yet to deliver in office. And so it has gone. That is, New Yorkers themselves incline to return to the old bad ways as soon as things begin to get better. Are Californians any less foolish?

 

Angela Y. Davis: The Meaning of Freedom: And Other Difficult Dialogues. San Francisco: City Light Books, 2012. (Hereinafter designated as MF.)

Angela Y. Davis: Freedom Is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine, and the Foundations of a Movement. Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2016. (Hereinafter designated as FICS.)

Angela Y. Davis, Gina Dent, Erica R. Meiners, and Beth E. Richie: Abolition. Feminism. Now. Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2022. (Hereinafter designated as AFN.)

 

Angela Davis became one of the most prominent participants in the New Left movement of the 1960s, a status for which she was well-prepared. The daughter of Communist Party members, she studied with Herbert Marcuse at Brandeis University and later at the University of California, San Diego. Marcuse arranged for her to study with another celebrated Frankfurt School neo-Marxist, Theodor Adorno, who had returned to Germany from the United States after the Second World War. 

The ‘neo’ in neo-Marxism derives from its expansion of the field of Marxist dialectic. Marx held that the course of human events proceeds ‘dialectically’—specifically, through the ‘contradiction’ or struggle between a socio-economic ruling class and a rival class which challenges its rule. Social and political phenomena other than class—contradictions between or among ideas, countries, races, and the sexes are driven by the class struggle, which unfolds according to the Hegelian thesis-antithesis-synthesis logic according to rationally (and indeed scientifically) ascertainable laws toward a predictable conclusion: worldwide communism, which issues from a previously triumphant worldwide socialist state. There had been socialists before; Marx’s proudest claim was that he was the first genuinely scientific socialist, no mere sentimental dreamer. 

A couple of decades into the twentieth century, however, some Marxists began to have doubts. True, the Russian Communist Party had founded a socialist ‘dictatorship of the proletariat,’ but the expected revolution had stalled. The Great War hadn’t sparked the expected revolution in Europe. And in the more thoroughgoingly capitalist major European countries—Great Britain, France, and above all Germany—there were communists, to be sure, but no revolution. The Great Depression seemed to portend the predicted collapse, but despite Stalin’s maneuvers, capitalism rebounded triumphantly in the years following the Second World War, limited not by economic weakness but by the political control of Eastern and Central Europe and China by communist parties. 

It had become harder to argue that economic struggle understood as ‘dialectical materialism’ adequately explained, let alone predicted, ‘history’ or the course of events. Some of the supposedly derivative ‘cultural’ factors looked as if they had the status of independent or perhaps interdependent variables. How ‘scientific’ Marxism really be? How materialistic should it be? The neo-Marxists began to take ‘culture’ more seriously; Marcuse, for example, added Freudian psychoanalysis to the toolkit. The socialism and the yearning for communism remained, as did the dialectic. The ‘harder’ dimensions of Marxist thought were supplemented. 

As Davis writes in the 1990s, when socialism again had stalled after the collapse of the Soviet empire, “the crisis has been produced in part by our failure to develop a meaningful and collective historical consciousness”; “transformed circumstances require new theories and practices” (MF 19). To be sure, the new theories and practices must not issue from any one thinker or practitioner. That would only reinforce the grip of capitalism, even if intended to oppose it. “Social meanings are always socially constructed, but we cannot leave it up to the state to produce these meanings, because we are always encouraged to conceptualize change only as it effects individuals,” a tendency “not unrelated to the possessive individualism of capitalism” (MF 132). She might have added that the one undeniably great literary figure ‘produced’ by the centralized state of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn—a decidedly great individual, and one decidedly unsympathetic to the state socialism which had ‘produced’ the Gulag Archipelago. She needs a socialism that does not depend upon any state, a socialism that does not need the dialectical clash between the ‘capitalist’ states and the (now failed) ‘socialist’ ones to emerge triumphant, a socialism that emerges from the civil societies framed by modern states and may not go through a ‘statist’ phase at all to reach fruition. Indeed, it may never reach fruition at all, instead resisting long-lasting institutional structures, remaining in a condition of joyful Heraclitean flow—the notion of ‘permanent revolution’ advocated (although she doesn’t mention it) Leon Trotsky, not Lenin, Stalin, or Mao.

Davis retains Marxist historicism. When Hillary Clinton ran in the Democratic Party primary against Barack Obama in 2008, she reacted to the slogan “Black Lives Matter” by insisting that “all lives matter.” Davis pounces: “Does she not realize the extent to which such universal proclamations have always bolstered racism?” (FICS 87). For example, to say with the American Founders that “all men are created equal” has in practice meant that women, “people of color,” and other groups were regarded as less than fully human. This exemplifies “the tyranny of the universal,” whereby apparently abstract moral claims have “been colored white and gendered male.” Not universal nature but concrete history is the better source of moral and political guidance. As a young student reading Frederick Douglass’s autobiography, “I had not yet learned how to recognize the extent yet which the equivalence of ‘freedom’ and ‘manhood’ meant that women were excluded by definition from enjoying the full benefits of freedom.” Thankfully, “my training in German philosophy” eventually gave her “the conceptual tools that allowed me to analyze the complex trajectories from bondage to freedom (using, for example, Hegel’s approach to the relationship between master and slave in the Phenomenology of Mind)” (MF 194) undermined her esteem for Douglass’s natural-rights convictions, although it took the experience of incarceration and her study of the role of American slave women in their communities which brought a new ‘consciousness’ of the ineluctable historicity of human life. 

Hence “we” (i.e., Davis and her fellow neo-Marxists) “are interested not in race and gender (and class and sexuality and disability) per se, by themselves, but primarily as they have been acknowledged as conditions for hierarchies of power, so that we can transform them into intertwined vectors of struggle for freedom” (MF 197). Power: The Nietzschean, more than the original Marxist socioeconomic framework, frames neo-Marxist analysis, but of course neo-Marxists seldom openly profess their indebtedness to Nietzsche’s thought, with its hope for a ‘planetary aristocracy.’ It is a quasi-Nietzschean analysis with Marxist characteristics, at the service of a radical egalitarianism. Because “social realities always exceed the categories that attempt to contain them,” “we keep changing our vocabularies” (MF 198). This means that the Marxist claim that ‘history’ marches toward a predetermined ‘end’ disappears; neither state socialism nor the state capitalism that defeated it in the late 1990s is the ‘end of history.’ Francis Fukuyama is as mistaken as Marx. She prefers W. E. B. DuBois in his later, Communist Party, days, whose “theory of history” “relied neither on teleology—the idea that human history would inevitably lead toward social improvement—nor [Heaven forfend!] theology,” divine providence (AFN 56).  Davis remains a steadfast Communist Party operative in at least one way: “Despite its failure to build lasting democratic structures, socialism nevertheless demonstrated its superiority over capitalism on several accounts: the ability to provide free education, low-cost housing, jobs, free childcare, free health care, etc.” (MF 33). That this is nonsense, a reprise of Soviet propaganda, does not faze her.

This air of unreality is in a way principled. Having rejected the historicist rationalism of Hegel and the historicist scientistic materialism of Marx, Davis needs some other intellectual guidepost for her own non-teleological historicism. She finds it in imagination. “A necessary step to winning greater freedom and greater justice is to image the world as we want it to be,” to “imagine a world without war,” without prisons and police, and without social, economic, and political hierarchies of any kind (MF 132-133). In this, she is very much a child of the Sixties, replacing Lenin with Lennon, scientific socialism with Beatlemania socialism. We must “transcend the limits of nationalist patriotism in order to imagine ourselves as citizens of the globe,” a globe apparently to be devoid of national states or even a world state (MF 149).

This leads to some fascinating historical imaginings. We should “use our imaginations to try to come up with versions of democracy in which, for example, the practice of Islam does not serve as a pretext for incarceration in an immigration detention facility or in a military prison” (MF 149). Since the practice of Islam isn’t the reason for such incarceration—suspicion of links to Islamic terrorist organizations is—it doesn’t take much imagination to conceive of due process of law, which has proved rather more difficult to obtain under socialist regimes than under democratic-capitalist ones. Imagination can also lead one to fanciful conclusions in historical research, as when the Marxist historian Orlando Patterson, cited approvingly by Davis, claims that “the very concept of freedom must have been first imagined by slaves” (FICS 67). 

Whereas Marx and his followers scorned utopian socialism, the valorization of imagination enables Davis to exult in it. “We ardently embrace” the “utopian dimension” of the movement to abolish prisons, for example (AFN 15). But this dreaming is doable. “Far from utopian, this world is ready at hand, already underway” in the practice of neo-Marxian socialists, who continue to develop, dialectically, “political methods and practices” fitted “for these times” (AFN 1-2). These new and ever-renewing practices recognize, uncover, and forge “interconnections of race, class, gender, sexuality” against “racism, sexism, and imperialism” (FICS 18). There have been “those of us who by virtue of our experience, not so much by virtue of academic analyses, recognized that we had to figure out a way to bring these issues together” (FICS 19). Since there is “no finish line, no firm resolute end” to these interconnections and these struggles against power hierarchies, “we are our road map” (AFN 166). Admittedly, “the dominant power structures will attempt—often successfully—to absorb our labor and demands” with tactics of co-optation, “yet we still forge new language and practices, and we work, anyway,” inviting others to “write and to organize,” as “freedom is a constant struggle” (AFN 172-173). The eschaton of the ‘Left’ historicism is at once imagined and fully immanent. 

This gives Davis plenty of room to say more or less anything she wants. She may well like it that way. Although she associated herself with the New Left, she maintained her ties with the Old Left, running as the vice-presidential candidate of CPUSA on two occasions and happily receiving the Lenin Peace Prize from the Soviet Union in 19XX. As Soviet propagandists would say, that was no accident. And she remains unapologetic. “During the McCarthy era, communism was established as the enemy of the nation and came to be represented as the enemy of the ‘free world'” (MF 41). One must pause to admire the tactical use of the passive voice and of scare quotes in that sentence. But to continue: “Because of the moral panic that proclaimed communists to be enemies of the state, countless numbers of institutions were purged of communists, their allies, and people who simply believed in democracy” (MF 75). The fact that the genocidal tyrant Josef Stalin remained at the head of the Soviet Union during the “McCarthy era” remains absent from the Davis radar screen, decades after even the few remaining Old Leftists have admitted his crimes. 

Later, during the civil rights movement, “many of us thought we were changing the world,” “joining the revolutionary impulse that was happening around the world” in Cuba and in “the liberation movements in Africa and Latin America” (MF 131). That is, by “revolutionary impulse” Davis means Castroite tyranny and the tyrannies desired by other Soviet-backed “liberation movements.” 

Later, “the U.S. war in Vietnam lasted as long as it did because it was fueled by a public fear of communism,” a fear stoked by “the government and the media,” entities that “led the public to believe that that the Vietnamese were their enemy,” that “defeat of the racialized communist enemy in Vietnam would ameliorate U.S. people’s lives and make them feel better about themselves” (MF 42). Communism, you see, was really the friend of the American people; to think otherwise was to become a dupe of capitalist propaganda. (“Karl Marx revealed the manipulations underlying the equation of capitalism and democracy in chapter 6 of Volume I of Capital“) (MF 102). When South Vietnamese people took to seas to escape the Communist takeover, Davis must have been distracted by some more pressing issue. 

This means that interpreting Davis’s writings requires a dual task. One must attend to the arguments she actually makes and respond to them in the terms she makes them—a duty owed to any writer. One must also keep in mind the distinct possibility that this is only her latest ‘line,’ a rhetorical adaptation to current circumstances.

One of those circumstances is “the rise of global capitalism and related ideologies associated with neoliberalism” (FICS 1). In Marx’s time, and even in Davis’s earlier career, most capitalist corporations did the bulk of their business within the borders of their home country; even the major corporations were limited in their scope to ‘the capitalist world,’ largely excluded from ‘the socialist world.’ Now, the operations of those corporations are much more thoroughly worldwide in scope. At the same time, the corporations continue to promote “capitalist individualism”—holding up an Elon Musk, a Steve Jobs, for public honor, as an estimable human ‘type,’ a model of what a person should be. This also permits capitalists to perpetuate its system of law enforcement and punishment of those ‘criminalized’ by it. For example, campaigns “to convict individual police of white supremacist, misogynist, and transphobic ‘bad act’ have not resulted in contracting the power of policing or rendering it less repressive” (AFN 153). Only a mindset free of individualism will bring the downfall of capitalism and its ideology.

“This insidious promotion of capitalist individualism” presents “dangers” to the human race. Because “U.S. corporations have economically undermined local economies through ‘free trade’ agreements, structural adjustment, and the influence of such international financial institutions as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund,” tens of thousands of displaced persons leave their homelands, “often travel[ing] along the same routes that have been carved out by migrating corporations,” “simply retrac[ing]” those routes “in reverse,” only to be faced with criminal charges when they attempt to enter the United States (MF 47, 64). “It is the homelessness of global capital that is responsible for so many of the problems people are experiencing throughout the world,” as the corporations “evade prohibitions against cruel, dehumanizing, and exploitative labor practices”—a “freedom to do virtually anything in the name of maximizing profits” (MF 64). [1] That is, what parades as individualism lurks as corporatism.

It also parades as democracy. “Our system of capitalism eschews economic democracy even as it proclaims itself to be the vanguard of democracy around the world” (MF 102). By economic democracy Davis means the provision of ‘free’ education and health care, “services we all should be able to claim by virtue of our humanity” (MF 102). To be sure, publicly funded education already exists in the United States and Europe, but “a juggernaut of privatization of public services” in the Southern Hemisphere threatens them there, and even in the United States rumblings about privatizing Social Security may be heard. “As crucial as voting rights may be”—that “may” in tantalizing—we “have long recognized that the right to vote by itself does not guarantee democracy,” “since elections can be subordinated to the power of money” (MF 90). Such are the ways of “bourgeois democracy” (AFN 46).

All this was understood by W. E. B. DuBois (again, in his later, Marxist phase), as seen in his 1935 book, Black Reconstruction in America. As Davis summarizes his argument, when the postwar Reconstruction of the political regime of the former slave states was terminated in 1877, “the crushing force of the property-holding elites” quickly prevailed in the American South in the form of laws enforcing racial segregation in a way that subordinated the ex-slaves. (AFN 54). DuBois saw that “capitalism cannot be understood outside of a relationship of power and race” (AFN 55). True revolutionaries must understand that “it is inevitable that mainstream political responses to [social-justice] movements will attempt to reject radical understandings of social problems such as he the prison crisis and the gender violence pandemic” (AFN164). The existing regime of worldwide capitalist oligarchy must be replaced, not reformed.

Appeals to nationalism will fuel the capitalists’ resistance, although they themselves have not a patriotic bone in their bodies. According to Davis, the Bush Administration’s ‘War on Terror’ was racist, having nothing to do with Muslim fanaticism (MF 75-76). Oh, “how quickly so many people who considered themselves to be progressive and radical took refuge in this idea that we as Americans had to consolidate ourselves as a militarized nation, which inevitably meant excluding all of those who were not Americans” (MF 112)—although in fact immigration continued under tighter restrictions.  But don’t interfere when Davis is on a roll: We should have “reflect[ed] on community formations that extend beyond the borders of the nation” (MF (73), “imagining ourselves as citizens of the planet” (MF 98). If one were to answer that American policymakers did in fact do as Davis recommends, “reach out and create community with people in other regions of the world” against the terrorists (MF 73), well, that was the wrong kind of networking, networking among capitalist regimes. Against “the circuits of capital” we need “other kinds of globalities,” globalities “disentangled from the agendas of global capitalism” (MF 98). Such “new social relations are possible,” linking “human beings around the planet not by the commodities some produce and others consume, but rather by equality and solidarity and cooperation and respect,” relations defined by “a radical multiculturalism” (MF 102). Why are they possible? She does not say. It is a matter of the imagination, again.

Racism is the enemy of radical-socialist multiculturalism. While legal racial segregation no longer exists in the United States, “deep structural and institutional” racism remains (MF 129). Her main evidence of this is the differences among incarceration rates among the black, Hispanic, and white populations. According to a 1991 study, 5.1% of all U.S. citizens would be imprisoned at some point in their lives, if current rates of incarceration held—9% of all men, 1.1% of all women. (Davis doesn’t hold this up as evidence of bias against men, for some reason.) Of the men 16.2% were black, 9.4% were Hispanic, 2.5% were white. One problem with using statistics this way is that things may change; they did. And not the way Davis wanted her readers to believe. “If trends continue,” she wrote, “50 percent of young black men could be behind bars in ten years’ time,” and “in another twenty-five years it might be as much as 75%” (MF 29). She is counting on readers not knowing that simply extending a line on a statistical chart often does not result in an accurate prediction of future events. It didn’t.  Between 2006 and 2020, incarceration rates fell in all racial categories, 34% among blacks, 26% among Hispanics, 17% among whites. Blacks still go to prison more often than Hispanics or whites, but that may be a measure of crime, not of racism. The same 1991 study also anticipated that five out of six Americans would be victims of violent crime at some point in their lives, so the desire of the general population to lock violent criminals away may well register an interest in self-defense rather than prejudice. Don’t think that way; not when Davis stands by to assert, “Prisons are racism incarnate” (FICS 107). 

No such thoughts enter Davis’s mind. According to her, resistance to crime has “already become so implicitly racialized that it is no longer necessary to use racial markers” when talking in favor of it (MF 27). President Bill Clinton, for example, “is lauded as the quintessential warrior against crime, with his shrewdly racist policies divested of all explicit racial content,” policies concealed by “a rhetoric that focuses on victims of crime” (MF 24). Clinton used the murder of a “white girlchild” by a white man as his example of the kind of violent crime he intended to fight, but no matter: “there is enough socially constructed fear of crime entangled in the national imagination with the fear of black men” that the murderer was “perceived as one white face representing a sea of black men who, in the collective mind’s eye, comprise the criminal element” (MF 24). Hence “law-and-order discourse is racist” MF 30). No one can accuse Davis of being unclever, although one must note that in this instance she presents “imagination” as malign. Orthodox Marxism reigned in imaginings of all sorts by its (attempted) rationalism, its claims about the iron laws of history, its dialectics. The only discipline imagination finds in Davis’s thought is the rhetorical exigencies of the moment.

Such imagining may be seen in her racialized account of the Union victory in the Civil War. Following W. E. B. Du Bois’s argument, she claims that “it was the decision on the part of slaves to emancipate themselves and to join the Union Army—both women and men—that was primarily responsible for the victory over slavery” (FICS 36, italics added). This, Du Bois and Davis claim was a successful “general strike”—an anticipation of workers of the world uniting—which transferred the slave’s labor “from the Confederate planter to the Northern invader” and “won the war” (FICS 70). This rather minimizes the role of the white Union troops, who did most of the dying and, even more pertinently, most of the killing of Confederate soldiers in that war.

No matter to Davis, she’s on to a larger point. “Black struggle in the US serves as an emblem of the struggle for freedom” in all areas—not only race but struggles over class and gender (FICS 39). “Black history, whether here in North America, or in Africa, or in Europe, has always been infused with a spirit of resistance, an activist spirit of protest and transformation” (FISC 112). [2] Indeed, “people all over the world have been inspired by the Black freedom movement to forge activist movements addressing oppressive conditions in their own countries,” whether in South Africa, in India, or in Palestine (FICS 114). In turn, the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King “was inspired by Gandhi” (FISC 114). This is the new Internationale Davis would oppose to the international capitalist networks. Those networks in the United States do not merely incarcerate. They kill, massively. We know this because in 1951Communist Party attorney William L. Patterson and Communist Party member Paul Robeson submitted a petition, “signed by luminaries such as W. E. B. Du Bois,” “charging genocide with respect to Black people in the US” (FICS 132). The petition received backing from the Soviet Union and its satellites, then commanded by Comrade Stalin, criticism of whom for actual commissions of genocide was, she has assured us, little more than McCarthyite capitalist propaganda.

When it comes to ‘gender,’ Davis admits that she and her fellow Communists were a bit late to the game. “There was some measure of resistance from women of color, and also poor and working-class white women, to identify with the emergent feminist movement,” which initially seemed “too white and especially too middle class, too bourgeois” (FICS 95). But eventually her native ingenuity didn’t fail her. “Anticapitalist, antiracist internationalism” could be brought to drive feminism in resistance to “heteropatriarchy” (AFN 91, 95). Yes, “the more closely we examine it, the more we discover that [gender] is embedded in a range of social, political, cultural, and ideological formations” (FICS 101), “so much more than gender equality” but “involv[ing] a consciousness of capitalism, and racism, and colonialism and postcolonialities, and ability, and more genders than we can even imagine, and more sexualities than we ever thought we could name” (FICS 104). This is the new way to understand “the old feminist adage that ‘the personal is the political,'” a new pathway toward “recraft[ing] ourselves” (FICS 105). The effort at conquering nature, especially human nature, based not only on class struggle but on denying the primacy of male-female sexuality is “a Marxist-inflected feminist insight,” after all, with a dash of Foucault’s critique of the “carceral state” (FICS 106). What this new, anti-bourgeois feminism must resist is the tendency to desire the incarceration of “those who engage in gender violence” (i.e., rapists); such feminists only “do the work of the state”—the capitalist state (FICS 138). 

What is needed, Davis contends, is “abolition feminism,” by which she means a feminism that aims at ending the prison system of the capitalist state; “gender justice will not be realized without the incorporation of abolition praxis” (AFN 82). “Women have always been the major supporters of those in prison not only as organizers, but also as anchors of families and kinship networks deeply affected by incarceration practices. This is especially true of women of color.” (AFN 45). Prison abolition forms the centerpiece of Davis’s project of neo-Marxist regime change.

Why prisons? Because a critique of prisons “can help promote an anticapitalist critique and movements toward socialism,” a “society in which people’s needs, not profits, constitute the driving force” (FICS 6-7). Imprisonment, you see, is a strategy of “bourgeois democracy” (AFN 46) to deflect attention away from the “underlying social problems” of “racism, poverty, unemployment, lack of education” (FICS 6). Once again, Du Bois saw it. “His analysis” in Black Reconstruction in America “offers a challenge both to historians of the period and for the present in which he wrote” (AFN 55). He “call[ed] for dismantling institutions that are overtly causing social and civil death” by “broadening the liberatory agenda to include apparatuses of oppression beyond those specifically understood to be carceral” but at the same time “linking contemporary abolition praxis—or theory plus action and reflection—to questions of racial capitalism,” all seen “with an internationalist lens” and “always hinged to challenging capitalism” (AFN 55). [3]

Why capitalism, specifically? Because the “conception of justice” seen in “bourgeois democracy” “assumes that justice is retributive,” that “punishment is the very essence of justice,” a “proportional punishment” intended to rebalance “the aftermath of harm” (AFN 47). But this isn’t justice; it is only vengeance. And it is capitalistic vengeance because it is “individualistic,” focused on the criminal and his victim “in isolation from larger social contexts” in which alleged crimes are committed (AFN 47). We Marxists must “convinc[e] enough people that crime [is] not the unqualified cause of punishment” and (linking this now also to feminism) “central to this process of rearticulation [is] the recognition that race, gender, class, and sexuality were more important determinants of who goes to prison than simply the commission of a crime”; “this is especially true of women, both cisgender and trans[-gendered]” (AFN 47). This, Davis avers, is so much so that people in prison should be called “criminalized,” not “criminal” (AFN 48). How, indeed, could it be otherwise, if the economic, social, and political rulers and their institutions themselves are the real criminals? The regime of bourgeois democracy, the public order of capitalist statism, and the international network of capitalist corporations define criminality in terms of laws that bourgeois democrats make, laws that reinforce and both literally and figurative legitimize that regime, that order, and that network. In the new, socialist international and regime order, crime will be entirely redefined, even abolished along with the prisons built to enforce those laws. 

As “a tradition, a philosophy, and a theory of change,” prison abolition dates back to the early 1970s (AFN 50)—perhaps uncoincidentally, when the Nixon Administration’s abolition of conscription took the wind out of the anti-Vietnam War protests, which had been the centerpiece of New Left agitation in the years immediately prior. The movement drifted but then revived in the late 1990s linking prison abolition with increased funding for education. This was a shrewd move, as it forged an alliance with the now-powerful teachers’ unions which had supplanted the ‘proletarian’ industrial unions as the best-organized and most active labor organizations in the United States. Part of the proletarians’ weakness derived from “the deindustrialization of the US economy, which led to the elimination of vast numbers of jobs,” throwing many black men out of work (AFN 41). Although the jobless men, some now in prison, might have seemed the likely target for socialist organizers, Davis and her allies focused on the “decarceration” of women, especially those ‘criminalized’ for such nonviolent actions as prostitution and shoplifting, quite likely because their release from prisons would be a less intimidating prospect than the release of men.

But this is only a start, a relatively minor reform, the thin end of the proverbial wedge. One must never forget “the root causes of injustice and the impact of other systems of oppression, including, in the first place, global capitalism” and its attendant “racist and heteropatriarchal structures” (AFN 58-59). 

In the meantime, the decarceration of women should be supplemented by the abolition of the death penalty, which “remains a central issue” because “it incorporates historical memories of slavery,” memories of slaves being hanged for “very minor offenses” (FICS 30, MF 116). More, American bourgeois democracy “relies fundamentally” upon it, along with prisons (MF 56). “Today,” she writes in 1991, “there are more than 3,500 people on death row in the United States” (MF 57); this miniscule number of Americans, (admittedly, most of them white men) drawn from a population of more than 300 million, all convicted not of minor crimes but of murder, remains central to Davis’s polemic because guidelines for the application of the death penalty now “reflect the abstract individualism associated with liberalism and especially neoliberalism” (MF 107). Individualism, you will recall, serves as the ideological mask for corporate-capitalist class domination. And you will also recall that oppression in the form of punishment of white men stands merely as a signifier of punishment of black men, in the imaginative mind of Angela Davis. Even violent crimes committed by black men on other black men and on women must be explained as results of the racist order (MF 30). In this way, “institution of punishment have served as receptacles for structures and ideologies of enslavement” and racism, long after the abolition of chattel slavery itself (MF 140). 

“So how does one persuade people to think differently? That’s a question of organizing.” (FICS 22). As Foucault remarks, prisons as ‘penitentiaries’ arose with the criminal justice reform movement spearheaded by the Quakers, “around the same time as the idea of a society in which citizens are defined as rights-bearing subjects” (MF 59); prison “is the quintessential democratic institution, because it provides you with the negation of that upon which the whole concept of bourgeois democracy has been developed,” namely, the right to personal liberty (MF 143). Instead of killing or wounding the bodies of the ‘criminalized’ with torture, those bodies would be deprived of liberty, a “conception of punishment…only possible in a society that recognized its citizens as rights-bearing subjects” (MF 59). Imprisonment “was thought to be humane and democratic, especially because it replaced corporal and capital punishment” (MF 59). A humanly-designed and implemented criminal justice system that was once reformed, even revolutionized, can be revolutionized once again, even abolished altogether. It is only a matter of persuasion. 

“When you look at the population of death row prisoners, you see that almost every single person there is poor,” whether white or black (MF 63). Prisons “thrive on class inequalities,” “racial inequalities,” and “gender inequalities” (MF 142). (If women are oppressed, however, why are there not many more women in jail?) For this reason, “the hidden danger of relying on incarceration as the major solution to behaviors that are often the by-products of poverty is that the solution reproduces the very problem it purports to solve” (MF 142). In this way, Davis can steer the argument back towards the more fundamental orthodox Marxist insistence on class conflict as the driver of ‘history.’ After all, the “carceral machinery” emerged not only around the time of bourgeois democracy but, perhaps more significantly, “around the time of industrial capitalism, and it continues to have a particular affinity with capitalism” (MF 82).

How so? Because prisons are increasingly being ‘privatized’ at least in the sense that private corporations build and profit from them. The “prison-industrial complex,” feeding off the “structural racism” of American bourgeois democracy (MF 84), “has become so big and powerful that it works to perpetuate itself,” devouring “immigrant youth and youth of color throughout the world” (MF 148). That is, “prisons catch the chaos that is intensified by de-industrialization,” as capitalists build more prisons and incarcerate more people, “thus creating the momentum for further expansion and larger incarcerated populations” in the “so-called free world,” which thereby retains “obvious vestiges of enslavement” (MF 49, 51, 52).  

The prisons will be replaced by “educational institutions,” institutions which, as one anticipates, will be animated by a new, socialist spirit. For example, Davis recounts her pedagogic technique in a class she ran at the San Francisco County jail. Although her students from her class at San Francisco State University were expected to help her teach the prisoners, but when they arrived, Davis “position[ed] the prisoners as teachers”—a “reversal of assumed hierarchies of knowledge [which] created a radical and exciting learning environment” (MF 53).

Such a reversal must finally be “systemic,” not piecemeal (FISC 32). Not only prisons but police should be abolished. The first step will be “community control of the police,” by which Davis doesn’t mean bourgeois control but “community bodies that have the power to actually control and dictate the actions of the police”—a new sort of dictatorship of the proletariat, if you will (FICS 32). Since, “at this moment in the history of the US, I don’t think that there can be policing without racism,” (FISC 48), the communities in question will be populated by persons of color. According to Davis (and she is lying), police today “are encouraged to use violence as a first resort” (FISC 32), as “police are trained to use force rather than to prevent or address root causes of violence” (AFN 116). As a matter of fact, police are trained to de-escalate potentially violent situations whenever possible, but the interesting phrase here is “root causes of violence.” Davis seems to be suggesting that a new form of non-police policing will enforce “community” efforts to outlaw racism, sexism, classism, and, above all, capitalism. The slogan is “Care not cops” (AFN 66). This may be understood as yet another instance of ‘dialectic.’

Divide and unite: Davis shares the old hope of establishing ‘one big Left,’ a notion at least as old as the Popular Front of the 1930s. “We’d better figure out how to build a resistance movement together” (MF 26), since “in today’s era of global capitalism, resistance to racism can only be effective if it is anchored in global communities of struggle” (MF 80). this means organizing racial, sexual, and class communities around political goals (MF 118-119). “Internationalist engagements are imperative to illustrate the continuing and global repercussions of colonialism and imperialism embedded in police and carceral institution” (AFN 22-23). 

This can be accomplished by establishing “accessible, free, and horizontal political education” (AFN 144) by the relevant groups, an education—suspicious minds might take it for propaganda—that contests “the public-private dichotomy” of the capitalism state (MF 33). The heuristic technique deployed in this task will be what the “critical race theorist” Mari Matsudi calls “ask the other question” (AFN). For example, “When I see something that looks racist, I ask, ‘Where is the patriarchy in this?’ When I see something that looks sexist, I ask, ‘Where is the heterosexism in this?’ When I see something that looks homophobic, I ask, ‘Where are the class interests in this?'” (AFN 3). This aids coalition work; one big Left requires one comprehensive account of all grievances, giving the one big Left one big, if multifarious, target for its dialectical struggle. 

Davis laments the fact that “despite years of relentless work, by the 1990s the gulf between [prison] abolitionist perspectives and gender work was widening, and many survivors were falling into the dangerous space between two movement” (AFN 103). “Issues of racial injustice, sexual exploitation, pernicious state violence, and the analysis of linked forms of oppression became incompatible with an emerging conceptualization of gender violence that relied exclusively on gender essentialism,” by which Davis means the dichotomy of male and female and its attendant impulse to lock up male rapists (AFN 103). The Clinton Administration-backed Violence Against Women Act put this “essentialism” into law, thereby using the capitalist state to divide one oppressed class (women) against another (black men). One purpose of LGBTQ+ agitation on the Left is to break down a dichotomy that divides the Left, a ‘dialectic’ that works against it, and to replace that ‘dialectic’ with one that unites the Left against the enemies of socialism. “Key to this abolition feminist ecosystem are networks, organizations, and collectives. This work is never a solo project. Individuals tire, fade. Movements deepen and continue.” (AFN 13).

Or so “movement” operatives like to think. As a matter of fact, movements also tire and fade. For now, deprived of an appealing socialist state to rally around, Davis and her allies direct their efforts at civil-social organizing aimed at undermining the formidable institutions they decry. They may hope to skip the Marxist ‘stage’ of state socialism altogether and instead proceed directly to the communist stage directly, once global capitalism collapses. Davis’s own unstinting celebration of state socialism throughout the years leading up to the collapse of the Soviet empire makes one wonder at her bona fides. Such wonder is longstanding. In his speech before the AFL-CIO in July 1975, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn offered a ‘critique’ of his own—a critique of Marxism. Rightly describing Marxism as a pseudo-science, he observed that regimes animated by Marxism rule not by some scientific method but by abolishing political and economic freedom and state-sponsored terror, very much including a massive network of prisons. He told the story of how Davis, after her release from prison in America, toured the Soviet Union and rested in its resorts. When Czech dissidents appealed to her, asking her to back the release of prisoners held in the prisons of the communist regime in their country, Davis said, “They deserve what they get. Let them remain in prison.” In a later speech at East Stroudsberg University, Davis denied the story.

Assume that Davis is telling the truth, that Solzhenitsyn believed a false claim. Nonetheless, Davis never once condemned the prison systems of the Soviet bloc or of China. She has had plenty of time to do so. She has instead proved a faithful daughter of her Communist parents. Prisons deserved no condemnation when Communist regimes maintained them. They deserved condemnation only when instituted by ‘bourgeois democracies’—the regime the Communist Manifesto denounces as the most dangerous threat to the socialist regime of proletarian dictatorship. Solzhenitsyn’s theme in 1975 was that Communist tactics change but Communist ideology remains steady at its core, through its various Marxist, Leninist, Stalinist, Maoist, even Brezhnevian permutations. “The Communist ideology is to destroy your society. This has been their aim for 125 years and has never changed; only the methods of changed a little.”

 

Notes

1. This sort of ‘critique’ has its limits. According to Davis (following longstanding Marxist polemics), capitalism causes war. “Why, in the aftermath” of al-Qaeda’s terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, “have we allowed our government to pursue unilateral policies and practices of global war?” she asks, rhetorically. You will understand this if you take President George W. Bush’s “recent speeches” and “systematically replac[e] the words ‘freedom’ and ‘democracy’ with the word ‘capitalism'” (MF 89). This proves that if you change the words in a sentence, you will change its meaning—supposedly revealing its true meaning thereby. A certain circularity of logic prevails in this move, but that’s ‘deconstructionism’ for you.
2. Carried along by her rhetorical momentum, Davis does not pause to consider that postcolonial “African” politics has been as much about war and tyranny as resistance.
3. The definition of Marxist “praxis” as theory plus action plus reflection is orthodox Marxism. If, as Marx claimed, an idea isn’t a passion of the head, a longing for noetic apprehension of the whole, but the head of a passion, a mere instantiation of some underlying material self-interest, then theory has no intellectually independent status. Instead, there is a ‘unity of theory and practice,’ as one commentator called it—a materialist version of Hegelian immanence which denies that the separation of ideas from ordinary reality is possible. The only rationalism remaining must keep theory and practice united but with theoretical reasoning and practical reasoning (“reflection”) overcoming self-interest. In orthodox Marxism, this process will be hastened by the ‘consciousness-raising’ vanguard of the proletariat, those who understand the historical dialectic and can point the workers in the correct direction; in the neo-Marxist formulation, feminism, antiracism, and, in Davis’s case, prison abolition are added to the dialectical mix.