No More Police: A Case for Abolition

by Mariame Kaba

Neoliberalism is a continuation of the long history of structural racial oppression in the U.S. and abroad. It simply represents a current manifestation of racial capitalism, a term initially used to describe apartheid South Africa and universalized by Black Marxist scholar Cedric Robinson as an economic system premised on exploitation of a racialized other.127 As historian and UCLA professor Robin D.G. Kelley describes, capitalism, racism, and colonialism are co-constitutive, evolving together “to produce a modern world system of ‘racial capitalism’ dependent on slavery, violence, imperialism, and genocide.”128 Police fabricate and maintain the social order required to sustain this system,129 serving as the “muscle of racial capitalism,” in the words of Alyxandra Goodwin of the Action Center on Race and the Economy (ACRE). The cops, and the prison industrial complex they are part of, are thus essential to what has evolved under neoliberalism into the “carceral state,” serving as a vehicle for an iteration of racial capitalism scholar-activist Jackie Wang calls “carceral capitalism.”