Who Made You the Boss of Me?

Hierarchies are not necessarily bad. There are indeed times whereby the imposition of strict equality seems to undercut the actual aim of the interaction. It’s hard to imagine a world where you and your doctor are on exactly equal footing; part of the reason why we have doctors is the recognition of the importance of that specialized knowledge for effective healthcare, which necessarily creates some sort of asymmetrical power relation. We would hope there wouldn’t be random patients arguing with the neuroscientist over how one repairs severe damage to the amygdala. This hierarchy, this relation of inegalitarianism, is deemed beneficial to all participants to interaction, and thus legitimated in precisely this sense.

Even anarchists, whose philosophy can be defined most simply as the abolition of hierarchy, accept this point. Chomsy often speaks of legitimate hierarchies in the case of a parent grabbing their child back from meandering into the street. Coercive force — physically restricting the child’s movement — is to their benefit; it is paternalism in the most literal sense. Children are not at a level of cognitive development where they are fully aware of the dangers of rapidly moving motor vehicles, which makes the imposition of a parents’ will without the niceties of deliberation and consensus quite necessary. If the child did have full rational faculties, and this was explained to them, they would most probably thank you for such an imposition.

Nonetheless, from these grounds, we don’t therefore believe surgeons should be free to incise whoever and whichever for their own enjoyment, nor that parents completely rule their children with an iron fist. A raft of accountability mechanisms are in play in the first case: bureaucratic supervision, legal parameters, professional oaths, and patient consent all ensure that the asymmetrical power deriving from their specialised aptitude does not slip into tyranny or corruption. And in the second case, modern ideas of childhood and progressive pedagogy have shifted us away from the disciplinary strictures of the Fordist family, the male breadwinner ordering the unruly and dangerous offspring as well as the domesticated wife. There therefore is a dual dynamic here: hierarchies are legitimated — but within reason, with circumscriptions of their power operating to maintain this legitimacy.

Really this amounts to a kind of liberal accountability; a micro-example of constitutionalism, which limits the power of the monarch over their subjects, while keeping it largely intact. What is telling is that such a position acedes to a core principle of relational egalitarianism; that hierarchies, while not necessarily being impermissible, are necessarily dangerous, and as such, the concentration of power within them should find some limitations and counterbalances. In actual fact, I think this is all one really needs to assume to set them on a path toward the abolition of most hierarchies in society, since it establishes a legitimacy criterion: if, in the first instance, this hierarchy benefits everyone, then it should remain. If, in the second instance, this is dependent upon a successful accountability regime, then the implication is that if it is unsuccessful, if it cannot be made accountable, then it is not legitimate, and should be duly abolished.

Thus we get a kind of legitimacy formula for hierarchies, a process of inquiry that allows us to, on the one hand, avoid the pitfalls of essentializing and universalizing equality in every case, and the indiscriminate maintenance of authority structures on the other. It is well worth noting that hierarchies themselves pose this same legitimacy criterion. For authority to be authority, rather than just the capricious use of power; that is, for a police officer to arrest you, rather than a criminal holding up a corner store, it is necessarily legitimate. In a sense, to speak of a legitimate hierarchy is a tautology, since it by definition presupposes its own legitimacy. It is a formalised, rightful apparatus of power — at least, this is what actors subordinate to it, without stepping down the path of insubordinate critique, presuppose in their engagements. It is Althusser’s policeman, who interpellates us as a specific subject, a citizen within the bounds of the just law, with little more than a call of “Hey you there!” We turn around, despite not doing anything suspicious, because we feel that we should, that we are normatively obliged to, in a way distinct from the force of a gun barrel.

The core point here is that hierarchies always seek to justify themselves, to propose a narrative for why they are right and just, as a core aspect of their functioning; but by doing so, they in some sense plant the seed of their own unravelling. Once you realise the first hierarchy fails its legitimacy criterion; once you can even recognise that they must, in the last instance, justify themselves to you, rather than the other way around, the spell is broken. As soon as you’ve placed the burden of truth on authority you’ve negated it. Hierarchies are, at base, an exclusion of deliberation, explanation, and justification. They are a matter of do as I say — not do as I say if, or why, or because you agree with it.

But just because hierarchies require the solicitation of legitimacy for their ultimate functioning, does not mean that the particular legitimation is authentic. It could be the case that, precisely because of their concentrated power, they’ve managed to solicit an assent that is not quite justified; that they’ve wielded their material power to distort our way of thinking about the world to prevent us from realising the emptiness of their presumed legitimacy. If power are the ones doing the talking, and constructing the parameters of debate, it’s quite possible that it can shut out the necessary insubordinate criticism required to actually pose the question of legitimation. One can’t easily pose the burden of proof on capitalism, because the profit-making structures which run our public debate have an incentive to avoid or marginalise this question at all cost. To the extent that the legitimacy criterion is operative within a hierarchy, it is largely a matter of habituation; we don’t actually think to ourselves everytime we enter the workplace whether submission to our boss is morally acceptable, or whether there could be alternative property relations wherein this infantilization is unnecessary. We rather just take it to be the case, as an unthematized, tacit consent, which therefore implicitly legitimates the fact that, once participating in it, the requisite disposition is to be quiet and refrain from asking questions.

It’s worthwhile returning to our trusty police at this point. The police have always justified their hierarchy — the legitimate use of force in society, literally, a kind of violence worker that executes the coercion at the base of state law — by arguing that police respond to pre-existing social dysfunction. The ebb and flow of state-sanctioned violence corresponds to the ebb and flow of criminality, and as such, order is maintained. The main claim is that we are all made safer by the presence of such violence workers, and thus alienate our power of force to them, concentrating it in a uniform social guard that does the things we won’t or cannot. I would prefer not to apprehend a violent criminal as he carjacks a pristine white SUV from the corner of 15th Ave. Nor, for that matter, would I wish to shepherd the bleating drunks away from intercinene fights on Brighton Beach at 2:30 am.

But if the murder of George Floyd has told as anything in recent months, it’s that the claim that the police make everyone safer seems dubious at best. For many people of colour, the social dysfunction is the police themselves. Rather than stopping violence, they escalate and execute, cutting the blood supply to a man’s neck by kneeling on it for 8 minutes straight, or shooting a 12 year old boy playing with a toy gun in the street in broad daylight. There is a well-documented epidemic of the illegitimate use of police force, in response to which we must pose the question: who, exactly, is being protected here? And from what should we be protected from?

From the perspective of many marginalised peoples, from working class African American’s to Canadian indigenous populations to French muslims, the answer to the second question is more often than not the police themselves. A black mother from the Bronx must engage with the fact on a daily basis that their teenage son is probably more likely to be humiliated or brutalised or murdered by the supposed denizens of Law and Order than the criminals they’re sworn to catch. Of course, one potential way around this issue is to set up some accountability structures; recent attempts at police reform — from body cams to de-escalation training — try and do precisely this. Illegitimate violence can be deterred by audio-visual records, since the bastards know they’ll be filmed whacking an unarmed girl they just pulled over for a routine traffic stop. And if the police only consider guns a last resort, only to be used once they’ve exhausted dialogue and other non-coercive means, they might not be so trigger-happy.

It is vital to note, however, that such attempts at reform have not amounted to much. It turns out, if you give the people wielding the power control over such accountability mechanisms — the body cams, of course, are attached to their bodies and under their physical control — they might not be as effective as hoped; the police often turn them off, or simply turn away. In any case, even if the footage emerges, it is invariably after the fact and still under the control of the police themselves. Minneapolis in fact was a kind of lodestar for these ‘procedural justice’ reforms; they murdered Floyd nonetheless. The putative solutions here in truth get no where near the crux of the issue, because the pathologies of policing are far deeper rooted in the actual purpose of the institution, a purpose which is mystified by the ‘ebb and flow’ defence of state violence proffered above.

To grasp this, we have to explore the first question: who is actually being protected here? What really is the function of the police? Problematising the premise of the ebb and flow defence — that police respond to pre-existing social dysfunction — is where this inquiry has to start, since the basic argument of police abolitionists is precisely that crime is not the cause or content of social dysfunction, but a symptom. Poverty breeds crime: one would have no need to carjack if they could put food on the table for their younger brother, and it is no accident that rates of crime correspond to more unequal and deprived areas. If this is the case, then sending in violence workers to apprehend a carjacker once the crime has already been committed is a far less effective way of solving the issue than addressing the underlying cause. If we can stop the conditions that breed crime before they occur, then vast sums of money and effort could be saved — not to mention the multitudes of lives brought back from the brink. Rather than giving someone painkillers to deal with the rock in their shoe — painkillers that come with a whole litany of horrendous side-effects — we should simply just remove the rock in the shoe.

AOC recently shared a video on Twitter that illustrates this alternative approach very astutely. A homeless man, who had left the local shelter since it was overfilled, was resting on a subway carriage; a police officer was drafted in to turf him out, and once the homeless man protested — as, of course, any one would if they were only trying to get a dry place to relax amidst the bitter streets of New York — he proceeded to repeatedly strike him and slam him to the grounds. As Ocasio-Cortez noted with characteristic directness, this whole altercation could have been avoided if we had properly funded homeless services and a housing market that wasn’t geared toward providing safety deposit boxes for the ultra-rich. What one has with the police, then, is not courageous detectives catching depraved serial killers as the media endlessly fetishises — most police calls are not for violent crime, but property rights infringements and miscellaneous law enforcement, in the most mundane sense of the phrase; Graeber calls them ‘bureaucrats with guns’ because most of the time they’re making sure people have sufficient IDs and tail lights that work — but rather a whole sickly apparatus that exists to criminalise poverty. And of course, the whole point of criminalising poverty is to control a populace that is fractured by the structural violence of capitalism; to ensure that the malcontent and the ‘rabble’, as Hegel called them, do not threaten the continuing process of capital accumulation.

One of course sees this historically: police have been instrumental in beating back resistance from below, enforcing an order of domination over suffrage activists, unions, anti-war demonstrators, and black liberation movements. When we are confronted with ‘disorderly’ or ‘disruptive’ subjects which the police must make orderly, must reshape and reform, we must ask what the order is that they are enforcing. In Salford, a local, non-violent anti-fracking movement was met with overwhelming violence by the Greater Manchester Police force; the shock-troopers role was not to protect local residents, but to effectively operate as the corporate — IGas — private army. Despite the fact the community never consented to fracking, the colluding state actors and IGas’ executives pressed ahead regardless; when vocal opposition emerged as active resistance, the police proceeded to physically pacify the unruly masses. Chastened, the “violence, brutality, bullying and general intimidation” used by GMP have “created a climate of fear such that the British people feel unsafe to come forth and air their views.” IGas completed their drilling operation, at significant risk to Salfords water supply and tectonic stability; many protesters were cordially brutalised by the Tactical Aid Unit; local activists were subdued; order was restored. The slow asphyxiation of the planet for the sake of quarterly returns continues largely unabated.

In this context, the fact that the United States currently incarcerates 22 percent of the world’s prison population, despite only having 4.4 % of the world’s population, strikes me as a palpably dystopian reality. In much the same way the Soviet Union used to send dissenters off to the gulags, the United States shuts away those subjects who threaten the accumulation imperative. Even apparently non-political actors still are criminalised for the ends of capital; thieves directly infringe upon property rights, the exact regime of which creates the reason for them to steal in the first place. The murder of Breanna Taylor, who was shot in her home 8 times by three Louisville officers during a supposed narcotics raid, has been linked to gentrification plans for the neighbouring Elliot Avenue. High dollar real estate effectively spurred the police to ‘clean out’ the ‘problematic’ individuals — read: black and poor — in and around the area, resulting in the death of an unarmed citizen.

This is all to say that the conventional, law and order, ebb and flow, justification of policing misses the actual function of the hierarchy; it ignores how the dysfunction they neutrally respond to is in fact the result of underlying pathologies, that their purpose is not to properly protect citizens and secure social stability, but to enforce the order that depends upon these pathologies. Abolitionism is therefore about unveiling the true function of the police as violence workers that protect capital accumulation, and identifying functional equivalents to treating the social dysfunction which the police only claim to.

The process of inquiry which flows from the legitimacy criterion, then, can actually be amended as the following: First, identify the immediate problem in order to problematize the hierarchy, to explicitly pose the question of it’s legitimacy. Second, identify whether the problems can be solved by procedural reforms and accountability mechanisms. If they cannot, then third, we must question whether the presumed goal of the hierarchy, what interests and purposes it claims to serve, are indeed the actual, effective ones, and whether these align with the communal interest. Lastly, If they do not, then we must identify alternate ways of solving the same problems that the hierarchy justifies itself by pretending to address without such pernicious concentrations of power.

In the case of police abolitionism, the initial object of problematization is the epidemic of police brutality; the potential accountability mechanisms are the body cams and de-escalation and bias training. Statistically, this reformism is more or less toothless, and this is precisely because it takes the hierarchies aim on its word; it mistakes the causal roots of the surface problem, misrecognizing how police brutality is an epiphenemona of policing as social control, as the criminalisation of poverty, which wields violence to enforce an unjust order, which always represents disorder for those structurally excluded from its plenty, who turn to crime as a situational response to their exploitation and expropriation. The last step, then, is to replace pepper spray and drug raids with affordable housing and adequate mental health services, a task which does not strike me as particularly utopian.

The hierarchy in question would simply be superfluous; it’s remit would be significant reduced to the point of being a radically different institution. One would still need, no doubt, some police for the few truly psycopathic mass murderes that are thrown up now and then, but their presence as the coercive binding agent of society would be dissolved. This is, of course, so long as the power relations the police actually serves themselves are forced to relinquish their grip. To address police authority is to address capitalist authority, and so the inquiry must continue. Insofar as the overwhelming purpose of our society is to accumulate wealth and power to a thin strata of capital owners, police violence will continue to be integral to that project, to pacify and ‘correct’ those who get mangled by the machine’s cogs. Thus we must pose the same question we did to our bobbies to our bosses: whose interests, exactly, are being served here? Who, really, made you the boss of me?