{"id":16616,"date":"2021-08-30T13:12:00","date_gmt":"2021-08-30T17:12:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/workersvoiceus.org\/2021\/08\/30\/books-an-abolitionist-world-is-possible-2\/"},"modified":"2021-08-30T13:12:00","modified_gmt":"2021-08-30T17:12:00","slug":"books-an-abolitionist-world-is-possible-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/workersvoiceus.org\/es\/2021\/08\/30\/books-an-abolitionist-world-is-possible-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Books: An abolitionist world is possible"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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By WAYNE DELUCA<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Geo Maher\u2019s new book, \u201cA World Without Police: How Strong Communities Make Cops Obsolete\u201d (Verso Books), is impossible to read without feeling the anger and the sense of possibility that surged during the summer of 2020 after George Floyd\u2019s murder. Maher channels both these sentiments throughout the book and creates from them a vision of a world where the police as an institution no longer exist.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cA World Without Police\u201d is incendiary; it celebrates the burning of a Minneapolis police precinct and titles its first chapter \u201cThe Pig Majority.\u201d This is part of a lengthy expos\u00e9 of the well-known crimes and racist, sexist, anti-working-class history of American police that spans the first two chapters of the book. Maher is careful to not exclude vigilantes and private security forces from his gaze, and later will indict so-called \u201cborder security\u201d as well. This gives the book a comprehensive and thorough vision that goes beyond immediate issues of police brutality.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In \u201cThe Mirage of Reform,\u201d he goes on to show that most police reform measures are actually counter-productive. The modern spate of training, \u201cnon-lethal\u201d weapons, and body cameras have increased, rather than decreased, police violence. Diversity and community policing are shown as illusions, as when Maher writes the book\u2019s most damning line:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThe ultimate goal of community policing is to destroy<\/em> any sense of true community, leaving only a community of snitches and bootlickers in its wake.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This is followed by a condemnation of so-called police \u201cunions,\u201d as Maher demonstrates clearly that cops are not part of the labor movement and have always stood in opposition to workers\u2019 demanding rights and a better living. He also notes with some irony that the \u201cblue flu,\u201d when officers call out in protest, can sometimes demonstrate that their presence is unnecessary, such as in the 2017 attack on New York Mayor Bill De Blasio. But primarily he demonstrates that the cop \u201cunions\u2019\u201d main bargaining point is complete impunity for police actions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Maher\u2019s positive vision, detailed across two chapters, shows fragmentary and incomplete ways that a world could be built without police surveillance. He takes hard looks at models\u2014such as Camden, N.J., which dissolved its police force only to be patrolled by county police\u2014that aren\u2019t solutions to the underlying problems of poverty and injustice. He speaks only with some reservation of self-defense networks, noting that many neighborhood watches produce vigilantes like George Zimmerman, who killed Trayvon Martin in a Florida suburb in 2012. But he sees hope for an abolitionist future through community building.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This is followed by a look at the border, where Maher sees the same issues coming to the forefront, and plenty of blame for both Democratic and Republican politicians. His stance is unflinchingly internationalist both in terms of abolishing borders and standing against U.S. imperialism.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The book concludes with a frank discussion that democracy itself requires abolition; that the unaccountable, brutal armies of occupation that are the police need to be swept away for communities to rule themselves\u2014and that the capitalist system they serve and protect needs to be done away with as well. Maher is unflinching about both, and makes it clear that a world without police would be a world without capitalism, a necessary connection.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Perhaps the most important facet of Maher\u2019s book is the attitude it manages to take in the face of often painful divisions within the movements for racial justice over what strategies to pursue. He is uncompromising in his hostility toward the police, but optimistic about any efforts that really take power away and give it back to working and oppressed people. His concern that moves to \u201cdefund the police\u201d or \u201cabolish police\u201d will be turned against impoverished areas is tamed by an optimism that cracks in the \u201cthin blue line\u201d are crucial for developing an alternative.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Maher sums the book\u2019s mass action perspective clearly: \u201cWe can\u2019t allow the abolitionist horizon to become an abstract moralism that divides struggles from one another and, more importantly, cuts organizers off from communities in struggle. Abolition is a mass struggle or nothing at all.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cA World Without Police\u201d is a tour de force. It inspires vivid feelings of outrage toward the rampant injustice and impunity of the police. What makes it a masterpiece, though, is how skillfully it channels this anger toward constructive steps that could create the momentum needed to break through and end the whole racist, sexist, capitalist system once and for all.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Photo: Sid Hastings \/ AP<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By WAYNE DELUCA Geo Maher\u2019s new book, \u201cA World Without Police: How Strong Communities Make Cops Obsolete\u201d (Verso Books), is impossible to read without feeling the anger and the sense of possibility that surged during the summer of 2020 after George Floyd\u2019s murder. Maher channels both these sentiments throughout the book and creates from them […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":13882114,"featured_media":15640,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_crdt_document":"","_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"_wpas_customize_per_network":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[30822,30850],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-16616","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-books-the-arts","category-police-and-prisons"],"translation":{"provider":"WPGlobus","version":"3.0.2","language":"es","enabled_languages":["en","es"],"languages":{"en":{"title":true,"content":true,"excerpt":false},"es":{"title":false,"content":false,"excerpt":false}}},"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/workersvoiceus.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/08\/ferguson17.jpg?fit=1200%2C797&ssl=1","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pdQxqk-4k0","amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/workersvoiceus.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16616","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/workersvoiceus.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/workersvoiceus.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/workersvoiceus.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/13882114"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/workersvoiceus.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16616"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/workersvoiceus.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16616\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/workersvoiceus.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/15640"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/workersvoiceus.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16616"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/workersvoiceus.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16616"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/workersvoiceus.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16616"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}