Category Archives: Abolition Of Work

Following recent weeks of racial justice protests and discussions, SAG-AFTRA, all of Hollywood's major agencies and several PR firms have announced Juneteenth will be a paid company holiday this year and going forward. Juneteenth marks the day, on June 19, 1865, when Union soldiers arrived in Texas to announce the Civil War had ended and all slaves were now free, thereby ending slavery in the U.S. two and half years after Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation became official on January 1, 1863.

Though celebrated in Black communities for generations, the day only recently has gained attention with white people and the call to recognize Juneteenth as a US federal holiday has gained steam. And though much of the entertainment industry will take Friday off, social impact agency Inspire Justice, which educates and trains stars, influencers and media companies to use their platforms for social good, has a different recommendation: "a day on."

Brea Baker, director of programming for Inspire Justice, and Taylor K. Shaw, social impact advisor for the organization as well as founder and CEO of production company Black Women Animate, talked to The Hollywood Reporter about how they recommend Hollywood spends Juneteenth, what they advise their celebrity clients to post and why the holiday's recognition is significant.

There's been lots of discussion recently around Juneteenth as a paid holiday, but your group Inspire Justice says we should focus on a day on rather than a day off. Can you explain?

Brea Baker: The idea behind the day on is similar to MLK Day and the idea that allies specifically should not be using the day as just another paid holiday, but rather a day to be specifically intentional about racial justice and anti-Blackness in this country specifically with the history of Juneteenth and its connection to the abolition of slavery, it should be day for self education on that legacy. The idea is that obviously Black folks should definitely take the day to rest and to celebrate and to enjoy, but for those who are not as closely tied to the specific history behind this holiday, they should take that time to learn about that history, to be in service to the Black community, etc.

What are some specific ways that entertainment companies should spend Juneteenth?

Baker: What we've been advocating to others is that they should be modeling for the rest of the industry and encouraging people, especially because this is so new and many teams have just made the decision to celebrate it as a day off this week, that in that time, they're able to model whether that's through their social media platform or internal communication with their team that they're letting folks know the intentionality behind what Juneteenth means. It's not just another day to just to be lax, but to maintain the sanctity of the day is really important. The industry obviously has so many different vehicles and platforms to be able to get that message out to a larger audience, so I think that's what the opportunity is on Friday.

Taylor K. Shaw:For the entertainment industry, having Juneteenth be less of a day of reflection and another day of action is what we should be encouraging across the board. I'm the founder and CEO of BWA studios, which was created to further build equity, specifically in the animation industry, but really serve as a blueprint for what is possible when we center the voices, stories and works of creatives of color. The industry also needs to take really big steps toward making solid, not momentary, but long-lasting commitment toward equity and that really has to be a key focus on Friday for the industry"Okay, like what real, tangible and actual change are we going to start to implement within our companies and how is that going to be spread throughout the industry?"

How do we make sure this day doesn't go the way of #BlackoutTuesday, when there was a lot of criticism over silence and performative activism?

Baker:Inspire Justice has been doing a lot of work to organize celebrities to be a part of this. I think what happened with #BlackoutTuesday was that something that was started specifically for one industry morphed into something larger and there just wasn't a cohesive narrative that was being shared, so it was updating as the day went on and as things were becoming clear that certain hashtags were being consumed. What we've been trying to avoid, one, is by holding webinars and educating those with large platforms on what the history of Juneteenth actually is; we did one of those webinars on Wednesday and had a really great audience of influencers and industry leaders in the space to be a part of that conversation. Then we follow up each of these webinars with calls-to-action assets and talking points to supporting people and understanding, "What are vetted ways that you can engage with us on social media? What are Black activists asking of us all in this moment?"

#BlackoutTuesday, because it was something that came up so organically, there wasn't that time to put in that preparation, but Juneteenth is something that has been celebrated since 1866 so Black communities specifically have been knowing that Juneteenth was coming up. We as a company have been able to pull together resources and assets and essentially a toolkit for how to engage with Juneteenth in that way. There are others doing great work as well, especially the #HellaJuneteenth team that is getting folks in the industry to commit to making it a paid holiday. They're also going further by providing them resources on what out-of-office emails could look like and what templates you can use to engage for the first time on the topic.

What's your message for how stars and influencers should be using their platform for Juneteenth?

Baker:The main thing that we've been encouraging folks is to really center Black voices; I think the times when things go most awry or when it's like, "Oh, I just got called out, my intentions are pure," are often when people are trying to speak for others. You can't go wrong by uplifting Black activists and community leaders who already have the trust of the community and also have that context, they can really contextualize what Juneteenth means in 2020. We've really been encouraging people to uplift from existing leadership like Movement for Black Lives and the Black Lives Matter Global Network. Also you can't go wrong by modeling for people what you don't know. I think sometimes, especially with influencers who are expected to be experts on a lot of different things, there's this urge to allow for that illusion and to try and maintain the illusion of being an expert. There's so much power in saying, "This is my first time hearing about this holiday, I'm taking the cues of Black activists who are asking us to do X, Y, and Z."

Something that we shared on Wednesday's Inspire Justice webinar was encouraging people to actually uplift the resources that they were going to dive into. So you're going to spend the day binge-listening to a podcast or watching the 13th documentary or reading a book by a Black author, share that with your followers and let them know: "For the day, this is the action that I'm taking to self educate and I encourage you to do the same." There's so many resources out there as to where we can start with that, I believe this was the first time that the New York Times bestsellers list was exclusively made up of books by Black authors. There's so much out there that we don't need to do too much digging about and there's a lot of great information that already exists so we don't really need to reinvent the wheel. That's what we've really been encouraging: when in doubt, repost and credit live leaders and black activists.

What's the importance of Juneteenth finally being widely recognized, both in Hollywood and beyond?

Baker: The biggest opportunity is raising awareness for the true history of the day. I think what's important to note is that the Emancipation Proclamation was signed in 1863 but all Black Americans weren't notified of their freedom until 1865. It's important to remember that because we have a history in this country of taking shortcuts at the expense of Black communities and that justice delayed is something that Black communities have traditionally been experiencing. When, especially those who are involved in entertainment and media and shaping the narrative that people knowingly or unknowingly take into their day-to-day lives and day-to-day actions, it's important that we continue to be honest about the history of this country. The narrative of "this isn't who we are" or "I'm just learning about these things" is coming from a place of being uninformed about the reality of how long and far this country has gone to ensure that Black lives were tertiary to the needs of the economy, to the needs of white society, etc. So just being really intentional about not letting this day be whitewashed or being diluted is really important, and then taking that time to also talk about "What does it mean for us to be celebrating a day about freedom in a time where most people do not feel free? What is the responsibility of the industry to be a part of creating action shifts?" to Taylor's point.

Shaw:We are in the business of story, so Hollywood, it's time to shift the narrative and get the stories right. Just as we encourage people to share the voices of color Friday on social media, Hollywood, it has to be even more than that yes, do that, but it's important to share the true narratives of black people and really start to do that now with Juneteenth. This story, people don't know it and the true history of Black folks and displaced people being emancipated, we didn't even get that information. So it's going to be important for Hollywood to to share the mic as we say, and to really be committed to doing that in a meaningful and not just momentary way.

What would you like to see Juneteenth become going forward?

Shaw: A national holiday and day of action.

Baker: Heightened political power. Something that I shared in Wednesday's webinar was that the first time that Juneteenth was celebrated, it was formerly enslaved Black people coming together, pooling resources and buying land. The idea was that we had achieved some wins but we still had work to do. To Taylor's point around day of action, I just feel like specifically action around building political power and ensuring that black people actually have not just a seat at the table but a stake.

What's your outlook at this moment and going forward?

Baker:I'm definitely optimistic about things. There's a beautiful Angela Davis quote that basically says, "To be an activist is to be an optimist because you have to believe that you can actually transform the world to engage in this kind of work." So I'm definitely optimistic and I'm also excited to see that many people are also interested in having the conversation of "Wait, we've been here before, why are we repeating the same conversations?" and looking to disrupt that cycle.

Shaw:For me as a black woman, of course I was aware and deeply connected to all of these issues, but the collective awakening that we're seeing, it feels like a paradigm shift. So I am energized and excited, with Inspire Justice, to play a key role in how Hollywood really takes this moment and is on the right side of history in this paradigm shift.

See the article here:

Inspire Justice Activists on Juneteenth in Hollywood and Using the Day Off as a "Day On" - Hollywood Reporter

Most of the Verzuz battles weve experienced so far have been the result of popular demand.

Swizz Beatz and Timbaland take requests into account, so that leads us to what will most likely be a spectacular piano battle between Alicia Keys and John Legend on Friday, June 19. The dynamic singer-songwriter virtuosos will celebrate Junetheeth 2020 by playing hit singles and hopefully giving us some Hazel Scott and Scott Joplin action on the piano.

So, what is Juneteenth?

Lets delve into a quick history lesson.

The Emancipation Proclamation was signed by Abraham Lincoln in September 1862 and went into effect on January 1, 1863. It abolished slavery in the Confederacy and freed over 3.5 million Black people, but it took a while before it was fully in effect. Lincolns first Southern reading of the Emancipation Proclamation took place that year in Virginia, at what is known today as The Emancipation Oak. That oak tree now stands at the entrance of Hampton University, one of the most well-known Historically Black Colleges and Universities in the United States. HBCUs began to pop up around the country, mostly in the South, shortly after the Emancipation Proclamation went into effect, in response to the need for freed slaves to learn trades and get an education.

However, some rebel forces continued to resist the abolition of slavery, and news traveled slowly in those days, so it took two years for everyone to get (and accept) the memo. Some slaveholders had migrated to Texas to escape the fighting, and they brought slaves with them. Its estimated that there were about 250,000 enslaved people living in Texas at that time. News of General Lees surrender didnt reach that region until April 1865, and some slaveholders withheld that information from their human chattel.

The last of the resisting forces didnt surrender until June 2, and on June 18, Union Army general Gordon Granger arrived in Galveston, Texaswith troopsand announced the emancipation of slaves.

The rest is history, as celebrations broke out the following day, which became known as Juneteenth or Freedom Day.

Juneteenth is rarely taught in schools, but it has long been part of the curriculum for African-American Studies courses.

Earlier this week, New York governor Andrew Cuomo issued an executive order making Juneteenth a paid holiday for state employees. Other places, such as Google, Target, Nike, and here at Fast Company, have followed suit by acknowledging Juneteenth as a special day to celebrate that auspicious moment in American history.

Now, back to Alicia Keys and John Legend.

Both Keys and Legend are known for positive music and their social justice work, so this is going to be the uplifting celebration we need, much like the last Verzuz led by Kirk Franklin and Fred Hammond.

Weve seen Keys channel Hazel Scott by playing two pianos at once.

And weve seen John Legend mostly playing it cool.

Alicia Augello Cook grew up in New York Citys Hells Kitchen neighborhood, where she was exposed to diverse sounds and cultures. She began taking piano lessons at age seven and started writing her own music about four years later. She attended Professional Performing Arts High School in Manhattans theater district, where she honed her vocal skills. She was musically and academically gifted, and she graduated from high school at age 16 as class valedictorian.

Upon graduation, she entertained offers from Columbia University and Columbia Records but found juggling school and a music career difficult. In the end, she continued pursuing music professionally under the name Alicia Keys. The deal with Columbia Records didnt work out, but she bounced back by aligning herself with legendary recording executive Clive Davis. At that time, Davis was with Arista Records, but when he left in 2000 and founded J Records, Keys followed.

Her debut album, Songs in A Minor, was released in June 2001, when she was about 19. It was driven by her No. 1 pop hit, Fallin. People fell in love with Keyss sound, which blended elements of classical music, due to her piano riffs, with hip-hop, contemporary, and classic R&B. She rocked braids with beads and fedoras and looked like a neo-soul star but had the edge of hip-hop. Both her fashion and musical stylings were unique and helped draw people in. She went on to release several other well-received albums, won several Grammys, and created life anthems such as Empire State of Mind (with Jay Z), Girl on Fire, and No One.

John Stephens got his musical start early in life, playing piano and singing in church. Like Keys, he was also an academic prodigy and enrolled in the University of Pennsylvania at age 16. He started to make a name for himself on the Philadelphia music scene and got his first break playing piano on Lauryn Hills 1999 hit Everything Is Everything.

He also contributed guest vocals to Jay-Zs Encore (2003) and Janet Jacksons I Want You (2004).

He began touring around that timeas John Stephens. He performed on the college circuit as an opening act at homecomings and also secured a major label deal. His debut album, Get Lifted, was released in 2004, and by that time he had replaced his last name with Legend. Combining gospel and R&B, Get Lifted turned Legend into a multiplatinum, Grammy-winning star.

Today, Legend is among the elite company of EGOT winners, having won an Emmy for executive producing Jesus Christ Superstar Live in Concert, along with those several Grammys; an Oscar for writing and performing Glory (the song from Ava DuVerneys Selma); and a Tony for producing August Wilsons Jitney.

Both stars have served as vocal coaches on NBCs The Voice, where they stood out with their honest but constructive advice. Keys flexed her acting chops in 2006s Smokin Acesand 2008s The Secret Life of Bees, while Legend appeared in 2008s Soul Men and 2016s La La Land.

Keys, through her AK Worldwide company, is set to produce a Barry Jenkins-directed biopic about the barrier-breaking choreographer Alvin Ailey, while Legends Get Lifted Film Co. has several projects on the horizon, having signed an overall deal with ABC Studios last year.

On top of all that, both Keys and Legend are deeply involved with social justice and humanitarian issues. Keyss Keep a Child Alive combats the physical, social, and economic impacts of HIV/AIDS around the world. Legends The Bail Project is setting the framework for reimagining the criminal justice system.

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The fans guide to the special Juneteenth Verzuz starring Alicia Keys and John Legend - Fast Company

In the wake of national and international protests against police brutality after the killing of George Floyd, activists and organizers affiliated with the group Campaign Zero released a plan called #8CantWait, listing eight policies that they claim would reduce police violence by 72 percent. The policies include banning chokeholds and strangleholds, requiring a warning before shooting, and requiring other officers to intervene when excessive force is being used. The campaign took off, with the #8CantWait hashtag trending on Twitter and explainer articles appearing across mainstream media.

It was quickly made clear, however, that some of these reforms have already been instituted by police departments implicated in high-profile police killings. The Minneapolis Police Department had seven of the eight reforms in place when George Floyd was choked to death. When Eric Garner was killed, chokeholds had already been banned in the New York City Police Department. More recently, NPR published a story pointing out that bans on chokeholds have proven difficult to enforce over decades.

More from Marcia Brown

Derecka Purnell, a police abolitionist organizer and lawyer, said in an interview with the Prospect that the morning after the #8CantWait campaign was released, her phone was flooded with messages, emails, and missed calls. My lawyer friends reached out and they were like, I dont know what to do, but we need to start moving on this, Purnell recalled.

The 72 percent number, she said, was faulty. The idea that we can reduce police violence with these eight reformsthe claim was just so false and I was just so shocked.

The pushback from police abolitionists, a loose network of organizers and lawyers who had been quietly laying the groundwork for their movement and now saw it being co-opted by weak reforms, was immediate and furious. Purnell established a group chat for brainstorming ideas for a response. At the same time, authors Cherrell Brown and Philip V. McHarris published a public letter on Medium showing that the #8CantWait campaign was based on faulty data science and calling for the campaign to be recalled.

Other organizers began developing a direct response to the campaign, calling it #8toAbolition. In just 24 hours, the website was live.

The reason it was able to come together so quickly is because there is such a rich history of abolitionist organizing, said Micah Herskind, one of the authors of the #8toAbolition campaign. This is a movement thats going back decades. The decades of scholarship and organizing on police abolition has largely been undertaken by black women. Critical Resistance, an organization spreading abolitionist politics, started in the 1990s. We honor the work of abolitionists who have come before us, and those who organize now, the #8toAbolition website reads. We refuse to allow the blatant co-optation of decades of abolitionist organizing toward reformist ends that erases the work of Black feminist theorists. Said Reina Sultan, another #8toAbolition organizer, Its mostly black women and femmes who work in this space and thats why its being erased.

ABOLITIONISTS ARGUE THAT this is a crucial moment, with the public much more open to the ideas of abolition politics and policies. Thats why the #8CantWait campaign is so harmful, they say, because it derails momentum toward the kind of non-reformist reforms that they say will lead to less harm and make obvious how existing systems reproduce harm. How do you have people in the streets calling to disband the police force and youre gonna put out a demand that says, Warn before shooting? said Herskind. He called the agenda items in the #8CantWait framework at best neutral and at worst harmful.

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In response, organizers for #8CantWait included some abolitionist frameworks on its website, even adding an abolition icon. But it did not eliminate the campaigns original reformist action items. Now that they see that the movement has shifted Campaign Zeros website has all the [abolition] stuff there, Purnell explained. But the core of what theyre about is still there. They change the name of the campaign. They released a very bad statement. Its frankly embarrassing.

During the same week, the Equal Justice Initiative released a report abolitionists say was aimed at reforms and not transformational change. Similarly, the abolitionist community online expressed worry that the report would distract from abolition when the Overton window among the public was shifting so dramatically.

In 2014, the year Michael Brown was killed in Ferguson, just 43 percent of Americans viewed police killings of black Americans as a sign of broader problems. In 2020, that number is 69 percent. The number of Americans who think racial discrimination in the U.S. is a big problem is up to 76 percent, from 51 percent in 2015. And according to The New York Times, American voters support for the Black Lives Matter movement increased in two weeks as much as it had in the preceding two years.

The Minneapolis Police Department already had seven of the eight #8CantWait reforms in place when George Floyd was choked to death.

Alex Vitale, a police abolitionist and author of the 2018 book The End of Policing, explained in an interview that reforms like those of the #8CantWait campaign are not designed to do what they say they willminimize contact between law enforcement and vulnerable people. Non-reformist reforms, the kind abolitionists champion, are designed to diminish the power of police in communities. Defund the Police, a slogan that has become popular among demonstrators around the country, speaks to this point: By reducing police funding, police are unable to have the kind of contact with communities that so often leads to violence and deadly force.

Vitale also explained that the moment was ripe because there already was an ecosystem of on-the-ground organizing since the 2014 Ferguson protests, preparing the public for an abolitionist message. These were small movements who had a concrete plan to demand shifts in police funding to community-identified needs and many of them had identified some specific dollar targets and specific programs they wanted eliminated or created, he explained. So when George Floyd was killed, the movements were already past the idea that body cameras were the logical fix. These organizers set the tone that said This is not about a bunch of superficial procedural reforms, this is about getting the police out of our lives in as many ways as we can, Vitale added.

The backlash has had an impact. On June 9, one of Campaign Zeros team members, activist Brittany Packnett, announced she was leaving Campaign Zero over the controversy and lack of transparency regarding the #8CantWait campaign. I take responsibility and apologize for having shared and posted its latest initiative, she wrote in her statement. What may have applied in 2014 is not necessarily relevant for the transformation we are precipitating today.

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Purnell, who said shes known Packnett for decades, said she thinks stepping down was the best thing she could have done.

A lot of people in Campaign Zero have a lot of popularity but being popular doesnt make you an expert, Purnell added. Because of the popularity, people default to them as people who know [solutions].

The same day as Packnetts announcement, The Daily Show hosted a roundtable with organizers and experts on radical police reform. Campaign Zero founder Sam Sinyangwe said that the #8CantWait organizers recognize that the moment was unique, which was why they shifted the campaigns message toward abolition. The ultimate demand that we are hearing is that people want to reimagine and transform the current system. They wanna defund the police, they wanna build alternatives But ultimately the goal should be ending police violence entirely. And we recognize that and we recognize that I think the best strategy to do that is to be supporting the work thats happening on the ground and shifting those resources away from police and into community-based alternatives.

While some have portrayed #8CantWaits pivot as a success for abolitionists, Herskind remains skeptical. Its not that these are not the best demands, but theyre the wrong demands, he explained. We need to be clear about the fact that these reforms do not put us on the path toward abolition.

THE #8TOABOLITION CAMPAIGN spread fast enough that just days after its release, Herskind said he was attending a rally when an organizer he didnt know handed him a flyer with the #8toAbolition organizing principles. Within days, Herskind tweeted that the campaign would be translated into over 20 languages. The campaign also now features community-led models of building safety and collective care in an abolitionist world.

Several #8toAbolition authors also published an essay in Wear Your Voice magazine about what an abolitionist world looks like. The long history of police reform in the United States shows how reformism has only functioned to embolden and escalate the carceral state, they wrote.

Organizers have pointed out that despite #8toAbolitions early success, the momentum of the #8CantWait campaign has already been harmful to the abolitionist movement, as cities and states have opted for the less disruptive alternative, adopting the #8CantWait campaigns proposals, and then shirking abolitionists calls for non-reformist reforms.

Weve seen the film. We know what happens, Purnell said. Theres the killing. Theres the uprising. Theres the DOJ investigation, the consent decrees, and then the non-indictment.

Vitale acknowledged that there is some stuff in the #8CantWait plan that could be understood as a non-reformist reform. But in a way, the defund movement is really what people are talking about Were engaged in a realistic concrete politics today that we believe will lead us in the direction of some dramatically better future.

Purnell emphasized how important this moment was for helping people understand the politics of abolition. The streets [right now] are the results of decades-long organizing, she said. These ideas may be new to some people but theyre not new to society. When you hear Defund the Police, ask yourself whos been talking about this, whos been doing this work and where can I learn more.

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How Police Abolitionists Are Seizing the Moment - The American Prospect

Police brutality has a surprisingly long history in comedy.

An officer swinging a nightstick was one of the most common images in early comic strips and Charlie Chaplin was always running from the police, dodging clubs and bullets. Those cops were generally portrayed as clownish bullies, and their violence, divorced from any racial context, played as a kind of shtick. When they swung their clubs, you never really felt the blow.

More than anyone else, Richard Pryor changed that.

He wasnt the first stand-up to take aim at racist policing. The pioneering political comic Dick Gregory, in his 1961 debut album, In Living Black & White, quipped: In Chicago, we have enough cops. Its just a matter of getting them on our side.

In the next decade, Richard Pryor, a student of both Chaplin and Gregory, applied a biting, more visceral perspective while making analysis of racist policing a hallmark of his. His albums and specials in that era laid the foundation for modern stand-up, and nowhere is that more true than in sets about police brutality. Some comics have broached the topic without bringing personal experience to the subject. But others, especially African-American stand-ups, have consistently examined the pain, costs and arguments around biased law enforcement in a way that has been rare in Hollywood.

Pryor once said he was raised to hate the cops, and his comedy was alive to the hurt and humiliations of everyday police abuse. He didnt just say the police beat up black people. They degraded them. His cops werent the bumbling fools of silent films. They were dangerous. And two decades before Ice Cube rapped about black police showing out for the white cops, Pryors set piece about I Spy cops a reference to the TV show starring Bill Cosby and Robert Culp as an interracial team of intelligence agents described black partners of white officers earning their stripes by harassing black civilians. About jail, he joked: You go down looking for justice, thats what youll find. Just us.

In his breakthrough 1974 album, Pryor wondered why persistent police brutality didnt make black people go mad. Then, using his masterful dramatic powers, he invited his audience to imagine a man who works hard during the week rewarding himself with a night out and getting dressed up, only to be pulled over because of a robbery in the neighborhood. Dramatizing the violation of the pat down, Pryor considers the impact, imitating the deflated man, who abruptly ends the evening to go home and beat your kids. That gut punch quiets the crowd, before Pryor adds: You have to take it out on somebody.

In contrast with the amiable treatment white people receive from a friendly cop who lives in their neighborhood, Pryor demonstrated how black people must make a show of being nonthreatening when stopped. Enunciating every word slowly at a volume and tension that performs compliance, he did an impression of what was required: I. Am Reaching. Into. My. Pocket. For. My License.

That record sold more than one million copies and was so popular that after one show, Detroit officers told Pryor they heard the line repeated from an African-American man they stopped.

Many jokes in the past few decades owe a debt to that four-minute bit. For instance, in his recent special, Michael Che says, My brother is a cop. I only see him over Thanksgiving and even then, Im like: Im. Reaching. For. The. Potatoes.

In Dave Chappelles classic debut special, Killing Them Softly, he also does a bit contrasting the difference between black and white people when stopped by the police that echoes Pryor, even down to some of the language of the cops. Chappelle, however, digs deeper into white privilege. Describing a time he was stopped with a white friend, he sounds flabbergasted when his pal immediately confessed to the cop that he was stoned and asked for directions. A black man would never dream of talking to the police high, he says. Thats a waste of weed.

Roy Wood Jr. also has a sharp bit about the lengths black people must go to appear nonthreatening to the police: He says hes going to start wearing a cap and gown. In recent years, that note of resignation had crept into comedy about this issue, as performers look at, for instance, how ordinary the killings of black men and women at the hands of police have become. In 2015, Jerrod Carmichael made a fake ad for Funny or Die about smartphones marketed to black families: The devices were designed to film police violence. (For a limited time, each member of the plan gets a special brutality-proof case for free.) Chris Rock began his latest Netflix special with this line: You would think the cops would occasionally kill a white kid just to make it look good.

Long before television and movie portraits of the police were being re-examined by critics and artists in the wake of the recent Black Lives Matter protests, Seaton Smith had a sharp, understated bit on Conan about his love for TV cops who follow their own rules. Now Im like, mmmm, follow the rules. In 2018, Wyatt Cenac dedicated an entire season of his HBO show Problem Areas to issues of policing, which has now been put online for free. He examined with nuance many of the reform ideas that were once seen as marginal but have now moved toward the mainstream, like the abolition of the police.

When Pryor joked about police brutality in the mid-1970s, he was speaking to a white audience that he assumed would be skeptical. His premise was that they didnt see what was going on in his community. But in stand-up, that perspective shifted, particularly after the police beating of Rodney King and the subsequent protests in the 1990s. By 2000, Dave Chappelle was saying that police brutality was common knowledge among white people, before needling them for once being skeptical. Didnt you think it was a little suspicious that every black person the police find has crack sprinkled on them?

Still, police abuses have become such a common subject in comedy that it can feel as if weve returned to the days of the Keystone Kops, when aggressive law enforcement was just another trope. In his new stand-up special Out to Lunch, shot before the recent protests, Mark Normand says that the news has been so disturbing that he looks to the little things, like those Fun Facts inside the cap of a Snapple bottle. He gives an example: Polar bears used to be brown, but through evolution they turned white, because police were shooting them.

Comics are doing work on police brutality with more gravity even if the pandemic has limited their ability to work on material. Some of the most powerful statements on social media have been from comics like Jon Laster, who turned his Instagram page into a collection of shattering testimonials from black people about interactions with the police.

As often happens, Dave Chappelle set the pace with a set he performed near his home in Ohio and released last week. At one point, he expressed anger at the CNN host Don Lemon, who had asked why celebrities had not spoken out. Exasperated, Chappelle asked if Lemon had ever seen his work? He had a point.

Over the past few decades, Chappelle has repeatedly made comedy from the pain of police brutality, but what stood out about his recent set was how his typically grave tone didnt pivot to a joke, how often he let his unfiltered outrage sit there. Just as Hannah Gadsby stopped offering punch lines in Nanette, Chappelle went long stretches without jokes, producing a kind of stand-up tragedy. When he asked what the police officer whose knee was on the neck of George Floyd could be thinking, he spoke with a righteous anger that comedy could not address. There are limits to what a joke can do.

What makes Chappelle such a master storyteller is how he telescopes broad swaths of history through his personal narrative in a way that lets you know the past haunts the present. Such continuity tells its own sad story. Look at stand-up comedy and youll find more than 60 years of jokes about police brutality. Whats not funny is how little theyve changed.

Link:

How Richard Pryor Changed the Way Comedy Sees Police Brutality - The New York Times

The Abolition of Workby Bob Black, 1985

No one should ever work.

Work is the source of nearly all the misery in the world. Almost any evil youd care to name comes from working or from living in a world designed for work. In order to stop suffering, we have to stop working.

That doesnt mean we have to stop doing things. It does mean creating a new way of life based on play; in other words, a ludic revolution. By play I mean also festivity, creativity, conviviality, commensality, and maybe even art. There is more to play than childs play, as worthy as that is. I call for a collective adventure in generalized joy and freely interdependent exuberance. Play isnt passive. Doubtless we all need a lot more time for sheer sloth and slack than we ever enjoy now, regardless of income or occupation, but once recovered from employment-induced exhaustion nearly all of us want to act.

The ludic life is totally incompatible with existing reality. So much the worse for reality, the gravity hole that sucks the vitality from the little in life that still distinguishes it from mere survival. Curiously or maybe not all the old ideologies are conservative because they believe in work. Some of them, like Marxism and most brands of anarchism, believe in work all the more fiercely because they believe in so little else.

Liberals say we should end employment discrimination. I say we should end employment. Conservatives support right-to-work laws. Following Karl Marxs wayward son-in-law Paul Lafargue, I support the right to be lazy. Leftists favor full employment. Like the surrealists except that Im not kidding I favor full unemployment. Trotskyists agitate for permanent revolution. I agitate for permanent revelry. But if all the ideologues (as they do) advocate work and not only because they plan to make other people do theirs they are strangely reluctant to say so. They will carry on endlessly about wages, hours, working conditions, exploitation, productivity, profitability. Theyll gladly talk about anything but work itself. These experts who offer to do our thinking for us rarely share their conclusions about work, for all its saliency in the lives of all of us. Among themselves they quibble over the details. Unions and management agree that we ought to sell the time of our lives in exchange for survival, although they haggle over the price. Marxists think we should be bossed by bureaucrats. Libertarians think we should be bossed by businessmen. Feminists dont care which form bossing takes, so long as the bosses are women. Clearly these ideology-mongers have serious differences over how to divvy up the spoils of power. Just as clearly, none of them have any objection to power as such and all of them want to keep us working.

You may be wondering if Im joking or serious. Im joking and serious. To be ludic is not to be ludicrous. Play doesnt have to be frivolous, although frivolity isnt triviality; very often we ought to take frivolity seriously. Id like life to be a game but a game with high stakes. I want to play for keeps.

The alternative to work isnt just idleness. To be ludic is not to be quaaludic. As much as I treasure the pleasure of torpor, its never more rewarding than when it punctuates other pleasures and pastimes. Nor am I promoting the managed, time-disciplined safety-valve called leisure; far from it. Leisure is nonwork for the sake of work. Leisure is time spent recovering from work and in the frenzied but hopeless attempt to forget about work. Many people return from vacations so beat that they look forward to returning to work so they can rest up. The main difference between work and leisure is that at work at least you get paid for your alienation and enervation.

I am not playing definitional games with anybody. When I say I want to abolish work, I mean just what I say, but I want to say what I mean by defining my terms in non-idiosyncratic ways. My minimum definition of work is forced labor, that is, compulsory production. Both elements are essential. Work is production enforced by economic or political means, by the carrot or the stick. (The carrot is just the stick by other means.) But not all creation is work. Work is never done for its own sake, its done on account of some product or output that the worker (or, more often, somebody else) gets out of it. This is what work necessarily is. To define it is to despise it. But work is usually even worse than its definition decrees. The dynamic of domination intrinsic to work tends over time toward elaboration. In advanced work-riddled societies, including all industrial societies whether capitalist or communist, work invariably acquires other attributes which accentuate its obnoxiousness.

Usually and this is even more true in communist than capitalist countries, where the state is almost the only employer and everyone is an employee work is employment, i.e. wage-labor, which means selling yourself on the installment plan. Thus 95% of Americans who work, work for somebody (or something) else. In the USSR of Cuba or Yugoslavia or Nicaragua or any other alternative model which might be adduced, the corresponding figure approaches 100%. Only the embattled Third World peasant bastions Mexico, India, Brazil, Turkey temporarily shelter significant concentrations of agriculturists who perpetuate the traditional arrangement of most laborers in the last several millennia, the payment of taxes (= ransom) to the state or rent to parasitic landlords in return for being otherwise left alone. Even this raw deal is beginning to look good. All industrial (and office) workers are employees and under the sort of surveillance which ensures servility.

But modern work has worse implications. People dont just work, they have jobs. One person does one productive task all the time on an or-else basis. Even if the task has a quantum of intrinsic interest (as increasingly many jobs dont) the monotony of its obligatory exclusivity drains its ludic potential. A job that might engage the energies of some people, for a reasonably limited time, for the fun of it, is just a burden on those who have to do it for forty hours a week with no say in how it should be done, for the profit of owners who contribute nothing to the project, and with no opportunity for sharing tasks or spreading the work among those who actually have to do it. This is the real world of work: a world of bureaucratic blundering, of sexual harassment and discrimination, of bonehead bosses exploiting and scapegoating their subordinates who by any rational/technical criteria should be calling the shots. But capitalism in the real world subordinates the rational maximization of productivity and profit to the exigencies of organizational control.

The degradation which most workers experience on the job is the sum of assorted indignities which can be denominated as discipline. Foucault has complexified this phenomenon but it is simple enough. Discipline consists of the totality of totalitarian controls at the workplace surveillance, rote-work, imposed work tempos, production quotas, punching-in and -out, etc. Discipline is what the factory and the office and the store share with the prison and the school and the mental hospital. It is something historically original and horrible. It was beyond the capacities of such demonic dictators of yore as Nero and Genghis Khan and Ivan the Terrible. For all their bad intentions, they just didnt have the machinery to control their subjects as thoroughly as modern despots do. Discipline is the distinctively diabolical modern mode of control, it is an innovative intrusion which must be interdicted at the earliest opportunity.

Such is work. Play is just the opposite. Play is always voluntary. What might otherwise be play is work if its forced. This is axiomatic. Bernie de Koven has defined play as the suspension of consequences. This is unacceptable if it implies that play is inconsequential. The point is not that play is without consequences. This is to demean play. The point is that the consequences, if any, are gratuitous. Playing and giving are closely related, they are the behavioral and transactional facets of the same impulse, the play-instinct. They share an aristocratic disdain for results. The player gets something out of playing; thats why he plays. But the core reward is the experience of the activity itself (whatever it is). Some otherwise attentive students of play, like Johan Huizinga (Homo Ludens), define it as game-playing or following rules. I respect Huizingas erudition but emphatically reject his constraints. There are many good games (chess, baseball, Monopoly, bridge) which are rule-governed but there is much more to play than game-playing. Conversation, sex, dancing, travel these practices arent rule-governed but they are surely play if anything is. And rules can be played with at least as readily as anything else.

Work makes a mockery of freedom. The official line is that we all have rights and live in a democracy. Other unfortunates who arent free like we are have to live in police states. These victims obey orders or else, no matter how arbitrary. The authorities keep them under regular surveillance. State bureaucrats control even the smaller details of everyday life. The officials who push them around are answerable only to higher-ups, public or private. Either way, dissent and disobedience are punished. Informers report regularly to the authorities. All this is supposed to be a very bad thing.

And so it is, although it is nothing but a description of the modern workplace. The liberals and conservatives and Libertarians who lament totalitarianism are phonies and hypocrites. There is more freedom in any moderately de-Stalinized dictatorship than there is in the ordinary American workplace. You find the same sort of hierarchy and discipline in an office or factory as you do in a prison or a monastery. In fact, as Foucault and others have shown, prisons and factories came in at about the same time, and their operators consciously borrowed from each others control techniques. A worker is a part-time slave. The boss says when to show up, when to leave, and what to do in the meantime. He tells you how much work to do and how fast. He is free to carry his control to humiliating extremes, regulating, if he feels like it, the clothes you wear or how often you go to the bathroom. With a few exceptions he can fire you for any reason, or no reason. He has you spied on by snitches and supervisors, he amasses a dossier on every employee. Talking back is called insubordination, just as if a worker is a naughty child, and it not only gets you fired, it disqualifies you for unemployment compensation. Without necessarily endorsing it for them either, it is noteworthy that children at home and in school receive much the same treatment, justified in their case by their supposed immaturity. What does this say about their parents and teachers who work?

The demeaning system of domination Ive described rules over half the waking hours of a majority of women and the vast majority of men for decades, for most of their lifespans. For certain purposes its not too misleading to call our system democracy or capitalism or better still industrialism, but its real names are factory fascism and office oligarchy. Anybody who says these people are free is lying or stupid.

You are what you do. If you do boring, stupid, monotonous work, chances are youll end up boring, stupid, and monotonous. Work is a much better explanation for the creeping cretinization all around us than even such significant moronizing mechanisms as television and education. People who are regimented all their lives, handed to work from school and bracketed by the family in the beginning and the nursing home in the end, are habituated to hierarchy and psychologically enslaved. Their aptitude for autonomy is so atrophied that their fear of freedom is among their few rationally grounded phobias. Their obedience training at work carries over into the families they start, thus reproducing the system in more ways than one, and into politics, culture and everything else. Once you drain the vitality from people at work, theyll likely submit to hierarchy and expertise in everything. Theyre used to it.

We are so close to the world of work that we cant see what it does to us. We have to rely on outside observers from other times or other cultures to appreciate the extremity and the pathology of our present position. There was a time in our own past when the work ethic would have been incomprehensible, and perhaps Weber was on to something when he tied its appearance to a religion, Calvinism, which if it emerged today instead of four centuries ago would immediately and appropriately be labelled a cult. Be that as it may, we have only to draw upon the wisdom of antiquity to put work in perspective. The ancients saw work for what it is, and their view prevailed (the Calvinist cranks notwithstanding) until overthrown by industrialism but not before receiving the endorsement of its prophets.

Lets pretend for a moment that work doesnt turn people into stultified submissives. Lets pretend, in defiance of any plausible psychology and the ideology of its boosters, that it has no effect on the formation of character. And lets pretend that work isnt as boring and tiring and humiliating as we all know it really is. Even then, work would still make a mockery of all humanistic and democratic aspirations, just because it usurps so much of our time. Socrates said that manual laborers make bad friends and bad citizens because they have no time to fulfill the responsibilities of friendship and citizenship. He was right. Because of work, no matter what we do, we keep looking at our watches. The only thing free about so-called free time is that it doesnt cost the boss anything. Free time is mostly devoted to getting ready for work, going to work, returning from work, and recovering from work. Free time is a euphemism for the peculiar way labor, as a factor of production, not only transports itself at its own expense to and from the workplace, but assumes primary responsibility for its own maintenance and repair. Coal and steel dont do that. Lathes and typewriters dont do that. No wonder Edward G. Robinson in one of his gangster movies exclaimed, Work is for saps!

Both Plato and Xenophon attribute to Socrates and obviously share with him an awareness of the destructive effects of work on the worker as a citizen and as a human being. Herodotus identified contempt for work as an attribute of the classical Greeks at the zenith of their culture. To take only one Roman example, Cicero said that whoever gives his labor for money sells himself and puts him- self in the rank of slaves. His candor is now rare, but contemporary primitive societies which we are wont to look down upon have provided spokesmen who have enlightened Western anthropologists. The Kapauku of West Irian, according to Posposil, have a conception of balance in life and accordingly work only every other day, the day of rest designed to regain the lost power and health. Our ancestors, even as late as the eighteenth century when they were far along the path to our present predicament, at least were aware of what we have forgotten, the underside of industrialization. Their religious devotion to St. Monday thus establishing a de facto five-day week 150-200 years before its legal consecration was the despair of the earliest factory owners. They took a long time in submitting to the tyranny of the bell, predecessor of the time clock. In fact it was necessary for a generation or two to replace adult males with women accustomed to obedience and children who could be molded to fit industrial needs. Even the exploited peasants of the ancien regime wrested substantial time back from their landlords work. According to Lafargue, a fourth of the French peasants calendar was devoted to Sundays and holidays, and Chayanovs figures from villages in Czarist Russia hardly a progressive society likewise show a fourth or fifth of peasants days devoted to repose. Controlling for productivity, we are obviously far behind these backward societies. The exploited muzhiks would wonder why any of us are working at all. So should we.

To grasp the full enormity of our deterioration, however, consider the earliest condition of humanity, without government or property, when we wandered as hunter-gatherers. Hobbes surmised that life was then nasty, brutish and short. Others assume that life was a desperate unremitting struggle for subsistence, a war waged against a harsh Nature with death and disaster awaiting the unlucky or anyone who was unequal to the challenge of the struggle for existence. Actually, that was all a projection of fears for the collapse of government authority over communities unaccustomed to doing without it, like the England of Hobbes during the Civil War. Hobbes compatriots had already encountered alternative forms of society which illustrated other ways of life in North America, particularly but already these were too remote from their experience to be understandable. (The lower orders, closer to the condition of the Indians, understood it better and often found it attractive. Throughout the seventeenth century, English settlers defected to Indian tribes or, captured in war, refused to return to the colonies. But the Indians no more defected to white settlements than West Germans climb the Berlin Wall from the west.) The survival of the fittest version the Thomas Huxley version of Darwinism was a better account of economic conditions in Victorian England than it was of natural selection, as the anarchist Kropotkin showed in his book Mutual Aid, a Factor in Evolution. (Kropotkin was a scientist whod had ample involuntary opportunity for fieldwork whilst exiled in Siberia: he knew what he was talking about.) Like most social and political theory, the story Hobbes and his successors told was really unacknowledged autobiography.

The anthropologist Marshall Sahlins, surveying the data on contemporary hunter-gatherers, exploded the Hobbesian myth in an article entitled The Original Affluent Society. They work a lot less than we do, and their work is hard to distinguish from what we regard as play. Sahlins concluded that hunters and gatherers work less than we do; and, rather than a continuous travail, the food quest is intermittent, leisure abundant, and there is a greater amount of sleep in the daytime per capita per year than in any other condition of society. They worked an average of four hours a day, assuming they were working at all. Their labor, as it appears to us, was skilled labor which exercised their physical and intellectual capacities; unskilled labor on any large scale, as Sahlins says, is impossible except under industrialism. Thus it satisfied Friedrich Schillers definition of play, the only occasion on which man realizes his complete humanity by giving full play to both sides of his twofold nature, thinking and feeling. Play and freedom are, as regards production, coextensive. Even Marx, who belongs (for all his good intentions) in the productivist pantheon, observed that the realm of freedom does not commence until the point is passed where labor under the compulsion of necessity and external utility is required. He never could quite bring himself to identify this happy circumstance as what it is, the abolition of work its rather anomalous, after all, to be pro-worker and anti-work but we can.

The aspiration to go backwards or forwards to a life without work is evident in every serious social or cultural history of pre-industrial Europe, among them M. Dorothy Georges England in Transition and Peter Burkes Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe. Also pertinent is Daniel Bells essay Work and Its Discontents, the first text, I believe, to refer to the revolt against work in so many words and, had it been understood, an important correction to the complacency ordinarily associated with the volume in which it was collected, The End of Ideology. Neither critics nor celebrants have noticed that Bells end-of-ideology thesis signalled not the end of social unrest but the beginning of a new, uncharted phase unconstrained and uninformed by ideology.

As Bell notes, Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations, for all his enthusiasm for the market and the division of labor, was more alert to (and more honest about) the seamy side of work than Ayn Rand or the Chicago economists or any of Smiths modern epigones. As Smith observed: The understandings of the greater part of men are necessarily formed by their ordinary employments. The man whose life is spent in performing a few simple operations has no occasion to exert his understanding He generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become. Here, in a few blunt words, is my critique of work. Bell, writing in 1956, the Golden Age of Eisenhower imbecility and American self-satisfaction, identified the unorganized, unorganizable malaise of the 1970s and since, the one no political tendency is able to harness, the one identified in HEWs report Work in America , the one which cannot be exploited and so is ignored. It does not figure in any text by any laissez-faire economist Milton Friedman, Murray Rothbard, Richard Posner because, in their terms, as they used to say on Star Trek, it does not compute.

If these objections, informed by the love of liberty, fail to persuade humanists of a utilitarian or even paternalist turn, there are others which they cannot disregard. Work is hazardous to your health, to borrow a book title. In fact, work is mass murder or genocide. Directly or indirectly, work will kill most of the people who read these words. Between 14,000 and 25,000 workers are killed annually in this country on the job. Over two million are disabled. Twenty to 25 million are injured every year. And these figures are based on a very conservative estimation of what constitutes a work-related injury. Thus they dont count the half-million cases of occupational disease every year. I looked at one medical textbook on occupational diseases which was 1,200 pages long. Even this barely scratches the surface. The available statistics count the obvious cases like the 100,000 miners who have black lung disease, of whom 4,000 die every year. What the statistics dont show is that tens of millions of people have their lifespans shortened by work which is all that homicide means, after all. Consider the doctors who work themselves to death in their late 50s. Consider all the other workaholics.

Even if you arent killed or crippled while actually working, you very well might be while going to work, coming from work, looking for work, or trying to forget about work. The vast majority of victims of the automobile are either doing one of these work-obligatory activities or else fall afoul of those who do them. To this augmented body-count must be added the victims of auto- industrial pollution and work-induced alcoholism and drug addiction. Both cancer and heart disease are modern afflictions normally traceable, directly or indirectly, to work.

Work, then, institutionalizes homicide as a way of life. People think the Cambodians were crazy for exterminating themselves, but are we any different? The Pol Pot regime at least had a vision, however blurred, of an egalitarian society. We kill people in the six-figure range (at least) in order to sell Big Macs and Cadillacs to the survivors. Our forty or fifty thousand annual highway fatalities are victims, not martyrs. They died for nothing or rather, they died for work. But work is nothing to die for.

State control of the economy is no solution. Work is, if anything, more dangerous in the state-socialist countries than it is here. Thousands of Russian workers were killed or injured building the Moscow subway. Stories reverberate about covered-up Soviet nuclear disasters which make Times Beach and Three Mile Island look like elementary-school air-raid drills. On the other hand, deregulation, currently fashionable, wont help and will probably hurt. From a health and safety standpoint, among others, work was at its worst in the days when the economy most closely approximated laissez-faire. Historians like Eugene Genovese have argues persuasively that as antebellum slavery apologists insisted factory wage-workers in the North American states and in Europe were worse off than Southern plantation slaves. No rearrangement of relations among bureaucrats seems to make much difference at the point of production. Serious enforcement of even the rather vague standards enforceable in theory by OSHA would probably bring the economy to a standstill. The enforcers apparently appreciate this, since they dont even try to crack down on most malefactors.

What Ive said so far ought not to be controversial. Many workers are fed up with work. There are high and rising rates of absenteeism, turnover, employee theft and sabotage, wildcat strikes, and overall goldbricking on the job. There may be some movement toward a conscious and not just visceral rejection of work. And yet the prevalent feeling, universal among bosses and their agents and also widespread among workers themselves, is that work itself is inevitable and necessary.

I disagree. It is now possible to abolish work and replace it, insofar as it serves useful purposes, with a multitude of new kinds of free activities. To abolish work requires going at it from two directions, quantitative and qualitative. On the one hand, on the quantitative side, we have to cut down massively on the amount of work being done. AT present most work is useless or worse and we should simply get rid of it. On the other hand and I think this is the crux of the matter and the revolutionary new departure we have to take what useful work remains and transform it into a pleasing variety of game-like and craft-like pastimes, indistinguishable from other pleasurable pastimes except that they happen to yield useful end-products. Surely that wouldnt make them less enticing to do. Then all the artificial barriers of power and property could come down. Creation could become recreation. And we could all stop being afraid of each other.

I dont suggest that most work is salvageable in this way. But then most work isnt worth trying to save. Only a small and diminishing fraction of work serves any useful purpose independent of the defense and reproduction of the work-system and its political and legal appendages. Twenty years ago, Paul and Percival Goodman estimated that just five percent of the work then being done presumably the figure, if accurate, is lower now would satisfy our minimal needs for food, clothing and shelter. Theirs was only an educated guess but the main point is quite clear: directly or indirectly, most work serves the unproductive purposes of commerce or social control. Right off the bat we can liberate tens of millions of salesmen, soldiers, managers, cops, stockbrokers, clergymen, bankers, lawyers, teachers, landlords, security guards, ad-men and everyone who works for them. There is a snowball effect since every time you idle some bigshot you liberate his flunkies and underlings also. Thus the economy implodes.

Forty percent of the workforce are white-collar workers, most of whom have some of the most tedious and idiotic jobs ever concocted. Entire industries, insurance and banking and real estate for instance, consist of nothing but useless paper-shuffling. It is no accident that the tertiary sector, the service sector, is growing while the secondary sector (industry) stagnates and the primary sector (agriculture) nearly disappears. Because work is unnecessary except to those whose power it secures, workers are shifted from relatively useful to relatively useless occupations as a measure to ensure public order. Anything is better than nothing. Thats why you cant go home just because you finish early. They want your time, enough of it to make you theirs, even if they have no use for most of it. Otherwise why hasnt the average work week gone down by more than a few minutes in the last fifty years?

Next we can take a meat-cleaver to production work itself. No more war production, nuclear power, junk food, feminine hygiene deodorant and above all, no more auto industry to speak of. An occasional Stanley Steamer or Model T might be all right, but the auto-eroticism on which such pestholes as Detroit and Los Angeles depend is out of the question. Already, without even trying, weve virtually solved the energy crisis, the environmental crisis and assorted other insoluble social problems.

Finally, we must do away with far and away the largest occupation, the one with the longest hours, the lowest pay and some of the most tedious tasks. I refer to housewives doing housework and child-rearing. By abolishing wage- labor and achieving full unemployment we undermine the sexual division of labor. The nuclear family as we know it is an inevitable adaptation to the division of labor imposed by modern wage-work. Like it or not, as things have been for the last century or two, it is economically rational for the man to bring home the bacon, for the woman to do the shitwork and provide him with a haven in a heartless world, and for the children to be marched off to youth concentration camps called schools, primarily to keep them out of Moms hair but still under control, and incidentally to acquire the habits of obedience and punctuality so necessary for workers. If you would be rid of patriarchy, get rid of the nuclear family whose unpaid shadow work, as Ivan Illich says, makes possible the work-system that makes it necessary. Bound up with this no-nukes strategy is the abolition of childhood and the closing of the schools. There are more full-time students than full-time workers in this country. We need children as teachers, not students. They have a lot to contribute to the ludic revolution because theyre better at playing than grown-ups are. Adults and children are not identical but they will become equal through interdependence. Only play can bridge the generation gap.

I havent as yet even mentioned the possibility of cutting way down on the little work that remains by automating and cybernizing it. All the scientists and engineers and technicians freed from bothering with war research and planned obsolescence should have a good time devising means to eliminate fatigue and tedium and danger from activities like mining. Undoubtedly theyll find other projects to amuse themselves with. Perhaps theyll set up world-wide all-inclusive multi-media communications systems or found space colonies. Perhaps. I myself am no gadget freak. I wouldnt care to live in a push button paradise. I dont want robot slaves to do everything; I want to do things myself. There is, I think, a place for labor-saving technology, but a modest place. The historical and pre-historical record is not encouraging. When productive technology went from hunting-gathering to agriculture and on to industry, work increased while skills and self-determination diminished. The further evolution of industrialism has accentuated what Harry Braverman called the degradation of work. Intelligent observers have always been aware of this. John Stuart Mill wrote that all the labor-saving inventions ever devised havent saved a moments labor. The enthusiastic technophiles Saint-Simon, Comte, Lenin, B.F. Skinner have always been unabashed authoritarians also; which is to say, technocrats. We should be more than sceptical about the promises of the computer mystics. They work like dogs; chances are, if they have their way, so will the rest of us. But if they have any particularized contributions more readily subordinated to human purposes than the run of high tech, lets give them a hearing.

What I really want to see is work turned into play. A first step is to discard the notions of a job and an occupation. Even activities that already have some ludic content lose most of it by being reduced to jobs which certain people, and only those people, are forced to do to the exclusion of all else. Is it not odd that farm workers toil painfully in the fields while their air-conditioned masters go home every weekend and putter about in their gardens? Under a system of permanent revelry, we will witness the Golden Age of the dilettante which will put the Renaissance to shame. There wont be any more jobs, just things to do and people to do them.

The secret of turning work into play, as Charles Fourier demonstrated, is to arrange useful activities to take advantage of whatever it is that various people at various times in fact enjoy doing. To make it possible for some people to do the things they could enjoy, it will be enough just to eradicate the irrationalities and distortions which afflict these activities when they are reduced to work. I, for instance, would enjoy doing some (not too much) teaching, but I dont want coerced students and I dont care to suck up to pathetic pedants for tenure.

Second, there are some things that people like to do from time to time, but not for too long, and certainly not all the time. You might enjoy baby-sitting for a few hours in order to share the company of kids, but not as much as their parents do. The parents meanwhile profoundly appreciate the time to themselves that you free up for them, although theyd get fretful if parted from their progeny for too long. These differences among individuals are what make a life of free play possible. The same principle applies to many other areas of activity, especially the primal ones. Thus many people enjoy cooking when they can practice it seriously at their leisure, but not when theyre just fuelling up human bodies for work.

Third, other things being equal, some things that are unsatisfying if done by yourself or in unpleasant surroundings or at the orders of an overlord are enjoyable, at least for a while, if these circumstances are changed. This is probably true, to some extent, of all work. People deploy their otherwise wasted ingenuity to make a game of the least inviting drudge-jobs as best they can. Activities that appeal to some people dont always appeal to all others, but everyone at least potentially has a variety of interests and an interest in variety. As the saying goes, anything once. Fourier was the master at speculating about how aberrant and perverse penchants could be put to use in post- civilized society, what he called Harmony. He thought the Emperor Nero would have turned out all right if as a child he could have indulged his taste for bloodshed by working in a slaughterhouse. Small children who notoriously relish wallowing in filth could be organized in Little Hordes to clean toilets and empty the garbage, with medals awarded to the outstanding. I am not arguing for these precise examples but for the underlying principle, which I think makes perfect sense as one dimension of an overall revolutionary transformation. Bear in mind that we dont have to take todays work just as we find it and match it up with the proper people, some of whom would have to be perverse indeed.

If technology has a role in all this, it is less to automate work out of existence than to open up new realms for re/creation. To some extent we may want to return to handicrafts, which William Morris considered a probable and desirable upshot of communist revolution. Art would be taken back from the snobs and collectors, abolished as a specialized department catering to an elite audience, and its qualities of beauty and creation restored to integral life from which they were stolen by work. Its a sobering thought that the Grecian urns we write odes about and showcase in museums were used in their own time to store olive oil. I doubt our everyday artifacts will fare as well in the future, if there is one. The point is that theres no such thing as progress in the world of work; if anything, its just the opposite. We shouldnt hesitate to pilfer the past for what it has to offer, the ancients lose nothing yet we are enriched.

The reinvention of daily life means marching off the edge of our maps. There is, it is true, more suggestive speculation than most people suspect. Besides Fourier and Morris and even a hint, here and there, in Marx there are the writings of Kropotkin, the syndicalists Pataud and Pouget, anarcho-communists old (Berkman) and new (Bookchin). The Goodman brothers Communitas is exemplary for illustrating what forms follow from given functions (purposes), and there is something to be gleaned form the often hazy heralds of alternative/ appropriate/intermediate/convivial technology, like Schumacher and especially Illich, once you disconnect their fog machines. The situationists as represented by Vaneigems Revolution of Everyday Life and in the Situationist International Anthology are so ruthlessly lucid as to be exhilarating, even if they never did quite square the endorsement of the rule of the workers councils with the abolition of work. Better their incongruity, though, than any extant version of leftism, whose devotees look to be the last champions of work, for if there were no work there would be no workers, and without workers, who would the left have to organize?

So the abolitionists will be largely on their own. No one can say what would result from unleashing the creative power stultified by work. Anything can happen. The tiresome debaters problem of freedom vs. necessity, with its theological overtones, resolves itself practically once the production of use-values is coextensive with the consumption of delightful play-activity.

Life will become a game,or rather many games, but not as it is now a zero/sum game. An optimal sexual encounter is the paradigm of productive play. The participants potentiate each others pleasures, nobody keeps score, and everybody wins. The more you give, the more you get. In the ludic life, the best of sex will diffuse into the better part of daily life. Generalized play leads to the libidinization of life. Sex, in turn, can become less urgent and desperate, more playful. If we play our cards right, we can all get more out of life than we put into it; but only if we play for keeps.

Workers of the world RELAX!

This essay as written by Bob Black in 1985 and is in the public domain. It may be distributed, translated or excerpted freely. It appeared in his anthology of essays, The Abolition of Work and Other Essays, published by Loompanics Unlimited, Port Townsend WA 98368 [ISBN 0-915179-41-5].

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The Abolition of Work | Mindality

In the beginning of Bob Blacks The Abolition of Work, he calls work an ideology. This use of the word ideology in relation to work is one that has never been previously used. This semantic misuse by traditional standards is a reflection of what is to come in the rest of the pamphlet. For Marxists, ideologies are the dominate belief systems in a culture. Work however in the myriad of ways the term is used is in many of its usages independent of the way Black defines it. Black says work is forced labor, which is compulsory production. We do use the word for compulsory production but we also use it to represent the fulfilling acts in our lives we put energy into and we also use it for an act that is simply a thing you do that you can do without having any belief tied to it whatsoever.

Black denies he is playing a semantic game saying I am not playing a definitional game with anybody. Black may not think he is making a semantic argument and what this reveals is not that Black is being manipulative it shows there is an ambiguity within our language when we use the word work. When we say work we may mean what Black means, forced labor that is compulsory or we might mean painting our greatest masterpiece, writing our best song, writing a dissertation on a subject we love. Black makes a similar point later on but confuses the reader with the language he chooses. He calls for a society where we only play but then his definition of play looks a lot like fulfilling work. He goes on to list some of these activities such as babysitting for a few hours or even cleaning. He says some people even enjoy cleaning, all this just looks like the old socialist, and by extension, anarchist attempt to have human beings only do the work they find fulfilling.

Curiously, it isn't evident that Black has read Marx enough to know that Marx already has a term for this. Marxs term is alienation which is his word for when we are abstracted from the products we create, or even more generally it means how we are disconnected from the work we do through the wage system. Marxs analysis connects this to the actual products made demarcating the difference between use value and a commodity. Use values are things we make because we need to use them but as Marx points out commodities have a specific value independent of their use value which is there exchange value. Marx believes peoples separation from the work they do makes them less human and he is out to do away with this. Marx shows us the difference between work that we do find fulfilling and work that is forced compulsory production. Perhaps this is why some say Black lets capitalism 'off the hook because he ignores the specific exploitative nature of capitalism. By saying just work and not distinguishing between work that is capitalist wage work, which is the majority of the work done in a capitalist society and less forced activists that we also call work.

It should be said Black shares a virtue with anarchist theorists that socialist's Marx included are less concerned about his acknowledgment that coercion and domination are not unique to capitalism, Black points specifically to work in the Soviet Union saying that the dynamic of domination becomes more elaborate over time all industrial societies whether capitalist or 'communist' work inevitably acquires other attributes which accentuate its obnoxiousness usually and this is even more true in 'communist' than in capitalist countries where the state is the sole employer. One reaction could be to extenuate what Black has nicely pointed out with his scare quotes that the Soviet Union wasn't really Communist. I think a more important reaction would be to realize what Marxs analysis of Alienation doesnt cover. How work itself can be obnoxious outside of a system where you sell your labor power, that work that is non-capitalist or not linked to capitalism still has the potential to be a burden.

I am brought back to the semantics that are central to Blacks argument. The problem with Blacks argument is that we tend to call many different acts work but these acts are really quite different. The most important distinction being fulfilling work we enjoy doing and exploitative obnoxious work we do to survive usually for a wage, we just dont use two different words for these two different kinds of work. Since we are lacking in terminology I propose a supra term to go beyond Marx's terms: we could use a little w for the fulfilling type of work and big W for the kinds of work anarchists and socialists strive to get rid of. We can also use the word drudgery. Our fulfilling work is the same thing as Black's Play. We can also however make a three point distinction between the two we just mentioned work that is fulfilling and work that is forced but finally work that isn't forced but is needed for survival and not necessarily fulfilling, this work is pre- capitalist or non-capitalist. Before I started working at a new job, I had asked a friend of mine who lives on a farm in upstate New York If I could come visit before I had to be working to get some rest and she said yes but everyone who does gets up at 6am to farm. This 3rd kind goes back to Marx's distinction between a use value and a commodity; farm work is use value work.

Black poses two separate challenges that much of the left might find superfluous but I want to address. Black says that many leftist and anarchists are so obsessed with work they talk about little else. He also makes the separate and more damning claim that in a work place run by the workers the people become the new tyrant and what the fuck is the point. We will first focus on why the left and a good portion of anarchists do talk about work so much, me included. Its for multiple reasons but for purposes of brevity let me break it down into two categories; the first I would call the classic union reason, which is to make peoples lives immediately better in a capitalist system. The relation of a wage earner who sells their labor power is a miserable one because they are in a totalitarian relation to their boss. This is the same goal Black is striving towards to at the ground level -make the world less toilsome.

The other category I would call the Socialist Reason. This one has to do with power in the meta-societal sense, the left sees work as important because it is a place where the totalitarian nature of capitalism is vulnerable to the democratic mass, to put it simply the 1% needs the people, the people don't need the 1%. So work quite rightly is seen as a place of battle against the 1% and a piece of the struggle against Capitalism. So Black is quite right when he says, Without work who would the left organize? But for the wrong reasons, work is a point of weakness within the unfair system of capitalism. These two tendencies, the socialist and the union werent always the same as well chronicled in Rudolph Rockers Anarcho- Syndicalism.

As far as Blacks critique that in a collectively owned factory the people become the new tyrant. Its hard to know what Black means by this does he mean that some people will eventually rule over others no matter what or does he mean that every one ruling together is somehow tyrannical? If either is true, then democracy as well as anarchist models of representation or any form of egalitarianism is impossible. Fortunately most radicals of all stripes believe that when people get together and decide to make decisions its better than being told or controlled by one or a few. What if perhaps Blacks critique is a critique of democratic decision making in the work place specifically? Black does not say this however and past his one sentence his point is unclear. If we wanted to start this conversation we would have to discuss the difference between democratically controlled workplaces under capitalism and ones after capitalism.

I think if anarchists and socialists write Black off as being privileged and don't take his call for a society without work seriously that something will be missed. There is something poetic and refreshing about this pamphlet, reading it at work I specifically recommend. Anarchists and Socialists need to remember what differentiates their beliefs from the Protestant work ethic which is that we are for a life that is more fulfilling and more democratic and not for fetishizing the act of work. Black is right; we on the left do tend to talk about work a lot and worse without saying why, worse still possible without thinking why? Anyone who has been a Salt, which is someone who gets a job in order to organize it, knows how much even work for a noble cause can suck; it can be like having two jobs -one for the company and one in opposition to the companies practices. The second part the one going against the grain of the company can be just as grueling. The IWW has an old phrase that shares the same sentiment as Blacks pamphlet name but is more useful -Free the Wage Slaves. It tells us more than Blacks title and therefore has more utility. Likewise I think the best thing written on work and how we all relate to it is Hallelujah, I'm a Bum the old Wobblie tune. Some of the lyrics are, O why do you work till youre ready to fall? If you slowed down a bit there be work for us all.

So there is importance in taking what Black is saying seriously. The problem is because of Blacks awkward terminology we can't take him on his own terms. What we can get from Black is like the IWW's slogan we can turn away from a toilsome world, one where we Free the Wage Slaves. With the later Wittgenstein, to understand what a word means we look at how it is used. With Heidegger we understand some work is dasein and so we know that no thought or ideology goes into it at all. We also know we have fulfilling work and we have drudgery, we just happen to use the same word. I like Blacks essay as a mint that flushes out in order to gain a new perspective. To strive towards a Left and Anarchist movement that doesnt forget what were after is more joy, more play and more fulfillment. Hallelujah, I'm a Bum!

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What do we mean by work?: A response to Bob Black's "The ...

As protests have swept the nation in response to the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, the call to defund and abolish the police has also swept social media and marched its way into the national dialogue. The conversationcentered around reducing the number of police and shifting resources to investments in education, housing, mental health care, and other community investments that address social problems without the involvement of law enforcementrepresents a marked shift from the call for more body cameras, better training, and other reforms that dominated the national dialogue after the police killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson in2014.

Officials in multiple cities, including Los Angeles, New York City, and San Francisco, have announced that they intend to reduce the police department budget and reinvestment those resources in Black communities. In Minneapolis, members of the City Council announced last week they intended to entirely disband the police department. California contributor Brandon Patterson talked to Nikki Jones, a UC Berkeley professor of African American Studies whose research focuses on policing and incarceration in Black communities, about how the conversation around addressing police abuse has evolved, what defunding the police and reinvesting resources could look like, and why she thinks nowduring the COVID-19 pandemicis the time to doit.

After Ferguson, police reform was identified as the fix for police violence. There have always been abolitionists within the Black Lives Matter movement, but in the wake of George Floyds murder, the idea of abolishing or at least seriously divesting from the police seems to be drawing more serious consideration. Why do you think thatis?

Nikki Jones: During the rise of broken windows policing, there were scholars who said we should be investing in non-police resources. People have long critiqued the erosion of the social safety net and the shift of those resources to police. But those ideas have coalesced over the past five years in a way that people identify as abolitionist. There has also been a lot of work led by Critical Resistance [the prison abolitionist group founded at UC Berkeley in 1998] that has been picked up by police abolitionists.

My personal evolution [on this issue] has been through my research. Ten years ago I would have been one of the folks who was pushing for progressive reform in the criminal justice system and policing. But Ive come to understand the limits of reform. It doesnt mean that reforms not important, because there are checks and accountability that need to be in place because they may help someone on the street who comes into contact with the police regularly. But I have come to understand that there are always going to be limits to any kind of reform within a law enforcement paradigm because of the structure of theparadigm.

Why does reform not go farenough?

NJ: Paul Butler makes a point in an article about the limits of criminal justice reform where he writes that police have superpowers: to stop, search, arrest, incarcerate, and kill. A lot of what we identify as a problem with policing is not something that would be addressed by reform. Law enforcement reform always exists in a law enforcement paradigm. When we think about divesting and investing, what were thinking about is eliminating the conditions under which people call on the police to manage [problems]. One of the ways to eliminate killings by the police is to have the police not interact with peoplecertainly not as frequently as they do right now. So divesting and investing acknowledges the need to shift our priorities: to shift funding and support from an institution that puts lives in jeopardy to institutions that are organized around well-being. Certainly there can be limits as well in those institutions. But what distinguishes the police from any other social institution is that the police are sanctioned to use violence by the state, and that violence is always central to any encounter. So we have to ask ourselves: Why are we using this institution to respond to the problem of homelessness? Why are we asking this institution to ensure discipline and control in schools? Why are we asking this institution to respond to people who are having mental health crises? Divestment and abolition begin with questioning the polices monopoly on violence and asking questions about the institutions relationship to thepublic.

What does the research show about the impact that policing and incarceration have on crimerates?

NJ: I try to not even talk about crime because we are at historic lows when it comes to crime. Its been mostly on a downward trend over the last 20-plus years. Mass incarceration explains very little of that drop. But we also know that policing is bad for young people. Experiencing contact with the police is not good for young people. Witnessing aggressive encounters is not good for young people. Aggressive policing has a negative impact on the mental and physical health of people in the neighborhoodeven those who arent the target of the encounter. It has an impact on schooling. There are a number of ways to stomp out crime, but if theyre doing this degree of harm to young people, should that be the approach we take anyway? We should be thinking less about a public safety approach and more about what it looks like to build the capacity of young people. What does it mean to have a healthy neighborhood and healthy communities? What institutions do we invest in for our youngpeople?

So what are thoseinstitutions?

NJ: If we think about K-12 schools and whats happening in school districts across the country, they are saying, We dont want police in schools. The second step is to invest in resources to serve students in these schools. That means many more counselors. That means providing family support. You can extend resources that are available in schools to improve the conditions of families as well. That means a whole host of resources and extracurriculars that are oriented around building the capacity of students. It really means aninvestment.

Writer Josie Duffy Rice of The Appeal noted on Twitter recently that many white people live in communities where there is safety and security without rampant police violence and mass incarceration because they have access to good jobs, housing, and otherresources.

NJ: What they also have is that theyre white. And in those neighborhoods, police arent as physically present in their lives. But the police also serve them differently. They understand that they can always rely on the police if they need to and that the police are doing the work of keeping people who shouldnt be in their neighborhood out. It is a fundamentally different way of having the police in yourneighborhood.

Some people worry that divestment from and abolition of policing would result in increased violence and public safety concerns. How would you respond tothat?

Law enforcement does not need our protection. People do. Law enforcement is a distributor of violence in the lives of young people and Blackpeople.

NJ: People will say, There are people who do real harm. What do we do with them? Thats a question to be askedbut its a question that deserves a serious line of inquiry. You have seen Black feminist activists think seriously about this question. Aishah Simmons, for example, has done a lot of work around what you do in cases of incest in Black families and how you address that harm outside of the criminal justice system. Whats great about this moment is that we have people not just using that question as a barrier to progress, but really thinking through, What does it mean for someone to be separated from society for a time? People can be separated from society and not be systematically degraded and dehumanized in harsh conditions. There are other ways to separate if necessary and address whatever the issue is. But we have many more people in our system than actually need that kind of intervention. There are people on the ground who are already figuring out what we do insteadfor example, the restorative justice movement. So that question is actually a beginning. Its not a reason not to engage with the kinds of questions that abolitionists are asking us to engage in this moment. Its an opportunity to open up our imagination. What we have now is a complete failure of imagination when it comes to addressing theseissues.

Cities around the country are reducing their police budgets. The Minneapolis City Council plans to completely disband the citys police department. Public officials are talking about the need to reimagine public safety which was unheard of on this scale a monthago.

NJ: That is groundbreaking. Institutions have not been taking responsibility for thinking about what community safety means. Now, they will have to have the kinds of conversations that they hadnt had the space to have previously. I hope it cascades across thecountry.

The moment belongs to abolition. What I would say to other people is to be open to this moment and the possibilities that can emerge if people are not afraid and fearful of the words defund and abolition. Leaders are also saying, We want the police out of schools. People are saying, Were going to challenge union contracts. What this moment requires is for people to realign themselves. Many people are de-facto aligned with law enforcement. They believe the police to be protectorsand, in fact, they may protect them. But if you align yourself with the people who are the most frequent targets of policing and then ask yourself the question, What kind of world would emerge from this perspective where this persons well-being is at the center? then the role of police diminishes because the police dont providethat.

Some major cities spend half of their budgets on the police. What has to happen to changethat?

NJ: The challenge is disrupting this presumption that the way policing is structured in cities is the way it needs to be because its the way it has always been and there is no other way for it to be. We should also ask the question: Should we be spending more on law enforcement than education? Lets make that budget transparent and then ask, should that be our priority as a city or astate?

Some have argued that nowduring the COVID-19 pandemic when state and local governments are strapped for cash and looking at rebuilding their economiesis the perfect time to make these major changes in resource allocation. What do youthink?

NJ: Thats absolutely right. Where do we need the money? You cant have both things. There are neighborhoods that are most impacted by COVID-19 and need the most resources when it comes to health and economics. Whats going to help those communities the most: more policing or better health care and economic stability? Its the last two. We have to shift our budget in a way that reflects what ought to be ourpriorities.

Finalthoughts?

NJ: The system does not need our help. Law enforcement does not need our protection. People do. Law enforcement is a distributor of violence in the lives of young people and Black people. So whose side are you going to stand on? Were in a moment where more people can ask themselves that question and readjust where they position themselves. Once you do that, the sort of actions that you take flow fromthat.

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Here's What It Could Look Like to Defund the Police - CALIFORNIA

Boris Johnson today confirmed many in the aid sectors worst fear: the Department for International Development will be scrapped, and merged with the FCO to create a new Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office.

Speaking in the House of Commons today, the Prime Minister insisted this will unite our aid with our diplomacy and bring together our international effort. I fear that rather, the abolition of DFID is shocking evidence of the UK putting its own economic interests above saving lives.

For all the Governments heralding of Global Britain, years of an anti-aid agenda taking root among those in power has meant that Britain is closing its doors to the wider world. The primary purpose of aid is and always has been to alleviate poverty, and meet the needs of the worlds poorest and most vulnerable communities. To make this announcement in the middle of a global pandemic when its been estimated that COVID-19 could set back global poverty levels by 30 years is beyond comprehension. Make no mistake, the end of an independent DFID will drive us even further backwards in our quest to make poverty history.

One of Johnsons most concerning proclamations is that the Foreign Secretary will be empowered to decide which countries receive or cease to receive British aid. Framing examples of where more or less funding is going based on political vulnerabilities belies the statement that ending poverty will remain the cornerstone of our aid programming. Its a thinly veiled, deeply worrying indication of the future of the assistance we give to communities living in entrenched poverty overseas.

DFID is world-renowned for its proven track record of transparent, accountable aid spending and delivering quality programmes that save lives. Giving oversight of aid to the Foreign Secretary risks money being diverted to address UK foreign policy interests, undermining the principle that aid should be used to meet the most immediate and pressing humanitarian needs. Not to pander to governments which could help strengthen Britains own power. And its important to note the FCO remains under close scrutiny by the International Development Committee over its transparency in aid spending.

Johnson reaffirmed his commitment to the 0.7% aid budget, but what will constitute aid under this new department? Many in the sector fear that the definition of aid will be diluted as Britain seeks to shore up its economic and overseas interests using cash earmarked for DFID. But aid must not become a weapon of foreign policy.

The coronavirus pandemic has taught us that global solidarity is more important than ever, and that only by working together can we create a safer and more prosperous world for everyone. We urge the Government to work with aid agencies to help ensure UK Aid continues to be a beacon of hope for the worlds poorest and most vulnerable communities.

The people UK Aid serves are often suffering crises on top of crises poverty, hunger, conflict, climate change and natural disasters. The worlds poorest are on the frontlines. To turn our backs on them now, for our own political gain, would be reprehensible, and a dereliction of our responsibility as a nation.

By Mark Sheard, CEO of World Vision UK

Related Tactics of pure distraction Starmer slams scrapping International Dev Dept

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With the abolition of DFID, Global Britain has shrunk - The London Economic

Bret Stephens: Hi, Gail. A question I never thought Id ask: Should we abolish the police?

Gail Collins: Bret, I kinda think thats stacking the deck. Should we reform the police? Set new standards? Totally rethink their role? Im good to go anywhere except the a-word.

Bret: I was struck by an Op-Ed by Mariame Kaba we ran this weekend that went all the way with the a-word: It was called, Yes, We Mean Literally Abolish the Police. Personally, I think the idea is nuts: The world is filled with a lot of terrible people who do terrible things and wouldnt be better people if only they met with a social worker twice a week. And Im not just talking about the president.

But what I mainly found interesting about the piece is that it represents a growing constituency of activists and voters who think that reform isnt enough, that another recommendation-making blue-ribbon commission on police violence wont accomplish anything, and that policing in America is so rotten and racist that it needs to be gotten rid of, root and branch.

Gail: Well, one could argue that the chances of getting very serious, major league, radical reform are a whole lot better if the other side thinks the alternative is abolition.

Bret: I guess radicalism might induce the police to make some long-resisted changes, especially when it comes to police unions protecting bad cops from discipline and dismissal. The other possibility is that abolish-the-police radicalism gives Donald Trump a terrific foil to run against in the fall.

Gail: Well, Joe Biden has already said he isnt in favor of defunding or abolishing the police. Trump may try to pin it on him anyway, but one advantage of having Biden at the top of the ticket is that almost nobody imagines him doing anything dramatic.

Bret: To adapt a line from George W. Bush, its the soft benefit of low expectations.

Gail: Nevertheless, theres a lot that needs doing. Particularly when it comes to the blue wall that shields officers who behave badly. Cops almost always stick up for other cops, no matter how bad things get. Making citizen complaint records public would be a good first step toward attacking that.

Bret: Good idea.

Gail: And its true that there are a lot of jobs cops do that could be performed by others. For instance, people are wondering whether policing the schools couldnt be done better by specially trained civilians.

How about you? What would your reform agenda be?

Bret: Id definitely get the police out of social work. And the police shouldnt need to be called when your neighbors Halloween party gets too loud. As for getting the police out of schools, fine by me, provided the specially trained civilians you mention are competent to deal with an emergency like a school shooting.

Gail: Youve just given me a little opening to point out that the best thing we can do for public safety on all fronts is a nationwide gun law that keeps weapons out of the hands of anyone who hasnt passed a shooting skills test and government vetting.

Bret: Sure, except that the more people there are who call to abolish the police, the likelier many others are to go and buy a gun. A few years ago, I wrote a column calling for the repeal of the Second Amendment. The whole idea is predicated on a robust police force that keeps our streets safe. Now Im having second thoughts about that column.

Gail: Stick with us!

Bret: More broadly, while I recognize theres a serious problem with heavy-handed and trigger-happy police as we horrifically saw yet again in Atlanta over the weekend Im just not onboard with the idea that the police are some kind of urban scourge. Im grateful to live in a city where the murder rate is down by about 90 percent from 30 years ago, thanks in large part to the work of great cops like Ray Kelly. Im grateful that the N.Y.P.D. has helped make the city an almost impossibly hard target for terrorists. The great majority of police officers are hard-working, brave, public-spirited, working-class men and women of every race and ethnicity tasked with some very unpleasant but essential jobs. And while the police obviously need to reform not least so that they are not viewed with fear and distrust by communities theyre meant to serve nobodys going to be well served if their budgets are slashed and reputations smeared just because they are in blue.

Gail: There are a lot of reasons for New Yorks murder rate plummeting. One very big one is the aging of the population. Another is the end of the crack epidemic.

But a great commissioner can make a huge difference. I knew one, a good friend, who used to say that the most important job of a police force is keeping apart people who hate each other.

Bret: You mean, like Melania and Donald? Sorry, go on.

Gail: Meanwhile, its interesting to see how this latest crisis has got the sports community embracing the idea of taking a knee. I think thats great something that was so wildly controversial is now looking like a useful nonviolent protest.

Bret: Ive always defended the right of athletes or anyone else to take a knee. Its a free country, and I generally admire anyone who takes an unpopular stand (or knee) out of a deeply held belief. The question is whether the knee-taking is truly sincere. There seems to me something forced or gestural about it now; more about social posturing than personal conviction. And I wonder what it will mean for our politics as a whole. If Isaac Newton were a pundit today, he might say that every action in American politics has an equal and opposite overreaction.

Gail: Well, its sort of the way things are supposed to work, right? Some people take an unpopular public stance to call attention to a terrible social problem. They suffer the consequences for a while, but they eventually convince many, many others of the righteousness of their cause. Then their colleagues feel compelled to join in, because otherwise they might lose popularity.

Bret: Fair point. In the meantime, Gail, coronavirus cases seem to be rising in Sunbelt states. Do you think the country is ready for a second lockdown?

Gail: Lord, that would be awful. Shocking that so many governors are afraid of telling their people to put on masks and make some sacrifices now for the long-term common good. Of course, its all about Donald Trump. Cant believe hes holding a mass rally he clearly cares less about the health of his supporters than getting his adulation fix.

Bret: Im tempted to say that if Trumps rally-goers want to take those risks, out of moral conviction or epidemiological ignorance, theyre welcome to do so. Of course, theres this little matter of them spreading it to those who share neither their beliefs nor their level of ignorance.

Gail: The president actually wasnt looking too good at his West Point appearance. If he came down with the virus, would you be quietly gleeful, or are you a better person than that?

Bret: The thought that these stoical cadets had to quarantine for two weeks for the honor of hearing their commander in chief praise himself and exaggerate his accomplishments is, in its small way, all you ever need to know about Trump. But really, Gail, I dont wish the coronavirus on anyone, even this president. Maybe just a really painful bone spur.

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What Should Be Done About the Police? - The New York Times

In the past weeks, Ive watched the news about the explosion of protests against police brutality and racism in the United States and around the world, and the resulting conversations on police defunding, reform or abolition. As I scrolled through social media and obsessively scanned and rescanned the headlines, a small thought tugged at me.

It was the story of how one of my heroes, Elinor Ostrom, who won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 2009, had arrived at the research that made her famous. Ostrom has become celebrated as the person who introduced the world to the commons that is, how people can, and do, manage the resources in their community through participation and sharing, instead of violence and competition. Her work was revolutionary and has changed the fields of economics, planning, public policy and environmental science.

But, not a lot of people know the story of how she started thinking about these issues. In fact, Ostrom cut her teeth on researching policing specifically, police funding and size. In fact, her research on policing offers robust empirical evidence that can be pretty useful for the reform vs. defunding vs. abolishing debate going on today.

In 1970, Ostrom was a young professor at Indiana University. At the time, city governments were complaining about the fragmentation of urban services and were pushing to centralize them, including police forces. They assumed that the more centralized the police force and the more funding they got the less crime there would be.

To test this, Ostrom worked with the Indianapolis government and her students to measure the quality of police forces. Surprisingly against common assumptions they found that the smaller the police force, the higher the quality of policing, and the more positively residents evaluated the police. Amazingly, they did this research without any funding as a woman in academia, she faced an uphill battle to get access to the same resources here male colleagues had.

But she didnt stop there. Ostrom was approached by some of her Black students, who asked her why she was studying White neighborhoods, when the issue of policing was so important to Black communities.

Ostrom listened, and wrote her first grant application to use the methods shed developed earlier to study the role of police force size on the quality of policing in Black neighborhoods. She got the grant.

Now working with her Black students, she compared Black neighborhoods in Chicago and small cities. The police in Chicago received 14 times as much funding as those they studied in small cities. What they found was pretty interesting: despite the huge difference in spending, we found that, in general, the citizens living in the small cities received the same or higher levels of services compared to the residents in Chicago.

Ostrom knew there was more to learn and wanted to build the most rigorous case for supporting her initial findings beyond small towns vs. inner cities and beyond Black vs. White neighborhoods. Her team decided to expand their research once again and evaluated the data from a 1966 survey of 2,000 residents in 109 cities across the U.S. We found a consistently positive relationship between city size and expenditure levels, but expenditure levels were not related to better citizens evaluations of the services provided, the research revealed.

Still not content, they replicated the initial study of Indianapolis once again and applied it to the quality of policing in St. Louis. They found the same: The bigger the police department, and the more the costs, the lower the quality of policing as perceived by residents.

As she concluded in her autobiographical reflections published two years before she died in 2012, For policing, increasing the size of governmental units consistently had a negative impact on the level of output generated as well as on efficiency of service provision smaller police departments consistently outperformed their better trained and better financed larger neighbors.

But why did this happen? To explain this, Ostrom showed how, in small communities with small police forces, citizens are more active in monitoring their neighborhoods. Officers in smaller police forces also have more knowledge of the local area and better connections with the community.

She also found that larger, more centralized police forces also have a negative effect on other public services. With a larger police bureaucracy, other local frontline professionals with less funding social workers, mental health support centers, clinics, youth support services have less of a say in how to respond to a communitys issues such as drug use or domestic violence. The bigger the police department, the less citizens especially those that are already marginalized, like migrants or Black communities have a say in how policing should be conducted.

This finding became a crucial step in Ostroms groundbreaking work on how communities manage their resources sustainably without outside help through deliberation, resolving conflict and setting clear community agreements. This is what she ended up becoming famous for, and what won her the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, placing her next to some of the foremost economists in the world.

But her research on policing shouldnt be forgotten: It shows that, when it comes to safer communities, having more funding or larger services is not important. Whats important is the connections and trust between the community and the service provider.

Her research doesnt tell us whether it would be possible or desirable to abolish the police altogether. But it does provide clear evidence that police forces, especially in Black neighborhoods, dont need to be as large as they are, and dont need as much funding as they currently receive.

What would she say about the demand to abolish the police? She would have begun by looking at the evidence: Are there communities that dont have police? There are plenty of examples out there.

Indigenous Peoples continue to practice safety without the police, such as a community in Whitehorse, Canada. Indigenous citizens of Chran, Mexico threw out the police and took safety into their own hands. There is now little crime that was otherwise common in this part of Mexico.

In Rojava, Syria, each neighborhood has its own civil protection volunteers, which have to be 40 percent women. This group is separate from civilian peacekeepers, who are tasked with guarding government buildings and checkpoints since Syria is still a war zone. Almost all inter-personal conflict (e.g. domestic abuse, fights between neighbors) is resolved through yet another separate system of community mediation.

These are just three examples of what police abolition could look like, but there are many more. What these examples show is that its possible to do away with the police and still have safe streets. Yes, each of these communities still organize some form of community safety, but though they fulfill similar roles these look nothing like the institution of policing, as they share the balance of power with other services like mediation, healthcare and social services.

Most importantly in these communities, citizens can themselves take part in community safety, and suggest changes to how it works. Ostrom would probably not have been surprised if she was told about such examples, because this fits with her own later research on how communities can manage services together.

Ostroms research on policing, while not as well known as her other work, is a small piece of the puzzle in the debate on defunding, abolishing or reforming the police. Her early empirical research quite conclusively showed that defunding would very likely have positive results, and her later research gave us the tools to start thinking about how we could shrink, if not replace, the police, and what could take its place.

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What Elinor Ostrom can tell us on defunding the police - Shareable