Minnesota State Patrol Troopers on Scene of George Floyd Protest (2020) | Creative Commons / CC BY-SA 2.0
Editorial note: The following essay was originally published, in a slightly different version, in edition 708 of the German monthly magazine, analyse & kritik. The author is an advanced graduate student in the politics department at the New School for Social Research, invited to submit a piece on the US presidential election due to his residence in the United States, where he is completing his PhD on the history and contemporary state of what he calls “the abolitionist movement.” As he explains below, this term describes a variety of extra-parliamentary groups targeting police violence, mass incarceration, the death penalty, border controls, migration and naturalization law, as well as military and arms policies.
analyse & kritik is a nonprofit monthly politics magazine based in Germany, with a circulation of 7,600 copies sold per month. It aims to assist left-wing, anti-racist, feminist, and ecological movements in Germany through the publication of analyses and opinion pieces written by journalists, activists, and scholars from around the world. As the author summarizes its editorial policies, “despite having strong affiliations with the German national party Die Linke, it continues to dedicate itself to a decidedly undogmatic and extra-parliamentary audience, following similar news outlets such as Der Freitag, Neues Deutschland, or Junge Welt.”
What Ranajit Guha has called the “prose of counterinsurgency” surely comes closest to characterizing the current state of abolitionist struggles within the context of the US presidential election campaign. With this concept, the postcolonial historian describes the strategies by which uprisings against imperial forms of domination have been degraded as nothing but vandalism—a “fanatical rampage” and “pure rioting” against property, the rule of law, and the guardians of civil order.
It is precisely this “prose” that resounds everywhere in the electoral campaign. Speaking of the uprisings of 2020 that followed the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officers, a spokesperson for Democratic vice presidential candidate Tim Walz described the largest popular upheaval in the country’s history, mobilized under the demand to “abolish the police,” as a “tragic time for our state and our country.” At the time, Walz, as governor of Minnesota, had signed an executive order deploying the National Guard to Minneapolis, decrying a “dangerous situation” that threatened “extensive damage to private property.”
When it comes to the central issues of abolitionist politics—police violence, mass incarceration, the death penalty, border controls, migration and naturalization law, as well as military and arms policies—Democratic and Republican leaders are in near-unanimous agreement.
Each party has tried to surpass the other in expanding punitive institutions, tightening racist legislation, and suppressing resistance movements. It is precisely this dynamic that Guha has identified as the political core of discursive strategies of counterinsurgency: oppressive social conditions are not simply “maintained” through the suppression of resistance; rather, they are used to justify the further intensification of these very constellations of power.
Throughout the campaign, Walz has been criticized by Trump, Republicans, and dominant media outlets for hesitating to call the National Guard against the massive upheavals in the summer of 2020. Instead, he left citizens to the sheer destructive rage of “left-wing mobs.” In Walz’s public statement following these accusations, however, there was no mention of the murder of George Floydor any reference to the movement’s calls for structural police reforms. What Walz referred to as a “tragic” chapter in US history was the destruction of police stations and public and private property, as well as his regret at not having called in the National Guard earlier. Jacob Frey, Democratic mayor of Minneapolis, even praised him, emphasizing that it was “Governor Walz, not Donald Trump,” who called in the National Guard: “During one of the city’s most difficult moments” Walz proved himself “a friend, an excellent governor and I am proud to support him as vice president.”
The strategy of the Democratic presidential campaign toward migration politics similarly surpasses the repressive approaches of the Republican Party. Harris has repeatedly praised the Senate for having passed, with bipartisan support, the “strongest border security bill we have seen in decades”; though the bill was sharply opposed by Trump and died in the House, Harris has promised to get it implemented if she becomes president. This bill followed a presidential decree by Biden that announced the rejection of all asylum applications if more than an average of 1,500 irregular border crossings are recorded in one day.
Human rights organizations have deemed the measure a clear continuation of Trump-era violations of the United Nations Refugee Convention. Harris even lamented that her administration could have further reduced the total number of irregular border crossings had the Republican caucus not blocked her party’s bill for over one year: “But Donald Trump tanked it. He picked up the phone and called some friends in Congress and said, ‘Stop the bill.’” Trump, Harris concluded, “prefers to run on a problem instead of fixing a problem. And the American people deserve a president who cares more about border security than playing political games and their personal political future.”
At her recent visit to the Arizona-Mexico border, Harris launched the new slogan for her campaign in the Republican-dominated border states of the South: “Never Backed Down.” Referring to her time as attorney general and senator of California, toughness on “illegal migration” would also form the leitmotif of her own presidency. Stricter legislation, more police officers, and better surveillance and security infrastructure would be rigorously enforced at US borders under her tenure.
During Trump’s time in office, the Democratic Party criticized his policies at the US-Mexico border as “cruel” and “inhumane,” yet Biden and Harris have now fully embraced Trump’s agenda. Biden even used Trump’s infamous asylum ban to enforce deportation policies, overseeing more than three million expulsions in just three years, the largest number of deportations during any presidential term in US history.
Migration scholar Hilary Goodfriend recently argued that this Democratic takeover of right-wing policies would not only be a self-defeating strategy, repelling her progressive electorates and further providing general legitimacy for Trump’s bleak racist agenda. Beyond that, the Democratic Party’s turn to the right has threatened to deprive Republicans of their party program, pushing them to escalate their rhetoric even further.
It is within this political dynamic that we must understand the recent xenophobic and racist fervor of Trump and his supporters, such as the absurd claims that Haitian migrants are “eating the pets of Americans,” or accusations that irregular migrants are “drug traffickers,” and J. D. Vance’s suggestion to increase deportations to 20 million and invade Mexican territory to “fight organized crime.” It is this self-destructive logic that liberal-democratic parties seem to pursue almost everywhere throughout the global Northwest—in the U.K., Germany, France, or Italy—attempting to defeat the far right by co-opting their policies while right-wing parties increasingly escalate their racist strategies without suffering the votes.
The most emblematic new development in the counterinsurgency against abolitionist politics is arguably the establishment of “cop cities.” Planned or already under construction across all major cities in the US, with costs estimated between $70 million and $220 million, cop cities are new training centers and barracks where police forces will be explicitly instructed in counterinsurgency tactics against popular uprisings, thus continuing the US’s longstanding imperial and colonial tradition of building and deploying colonial outposts, police fortresses, and foreign military bases.
As the president of the Atlanta Police Foundation explained, these institutions are intended to improve the public image, to “lift the morale and optimism of police officers tenfold” after decades of outcry against the structural nature of police brutality against non-white, and particularly Black, people. Atlanta, the site of the first construction of a cop city, was immediately opposed by abolitionist groups who, following similar strategies used by environmental activists, occupied the forest that was slated to be cleared for construction. After weeks of failed eviction attempts, the activists were classified as a terrorist organization, which allowed the police to use extreme force. One result of these measures was the murder of Manuel Paez Terán, a protester shot almost 60 times while their hands were in the air.
Following the start of construction in Atlanta, Baltimore, and Chicago, a cop city was also announced in New York City in April of this year. Planned to be the largest and most expensive facility to date, both in terms of size and personnel, it is expected to serve as a “model city for the entire country.”
This came just a few weeks after the New York Police Department used massive force to clear students from Palestine solidarity encampments at the City University of New York, Columbia, and New York University.
These encampments, spreading across the entire country and internationally, must be understood as among the primary sites of current abolitionist struggles, not only against extreme police violence but also against Israel’s ongoing war in Gaza—a war which has been condemned as at least a “plausible genocide” by all authoritative human rights organizations, the majority of member states of the United Nations, and the International Court of Justice.
Beyond this, the rallying points of these student uprisings against the massive investments and resulting profits of their universities in Israel’s arms economy, as well as the apartheid regime and the occupation of Palestinian territories, are part and parcel of a longstanding political heritage dating back to the Civil Rights and Black Power Movements, which struggled for an end to racial segregation, US imperial interventions, and the abolition of the military-industrial complex—a phrase that describes the intimate relationship between global warfare and the profits of private sector companies and investors.
The campus protests must thus be seen as a continuation of the largest popular movement in US history, which erupted after the murder by police of unarmed Black people such as George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, and Breonna Taylor.
It is precisely here, within the various forms of resistance to the US government’s financial and technological support for the Israeli military—amounting to 18 billion US dollars this year alone—that another chapter in the history of abolitionism may have begun.
An abolitionist strategy against war is based on the simple principle that military injustice and brutality can only be brought to an end by stopping the supply of weapons. As former Israeli general Yitzhak Brik put it: “All of our missiles, the ammunition, the precision-guided bombs, all the airplanes and bombs, it’s all from the US. The minute they turn off the tap, you can’t keep fighting. You have no capability. Everyone understands that we can’t fight this war without the United States. Period.”
But, fully in line with the logic of the manifold “prose of counterinsurgency,” the nationwide protest movement against the war in Gaza has been defamed by the leaders of both parties as “supporters of terrorism.” Shortly after her nomination, Harris pledged to continue Biden’s unwavering support for the Israeli government. It remains questionable, however, how long this stance can be maintained, when recent polls have shown that more than six out of 10 voters favor an arms embargo, with support reaching over 77 percent among Democratic Party voters.
This essay is adapted from an article first published in German in analyse & kritik (Edition 708) on October 15, 2024.
