Introduction

The urban rebellions of the 2010s and 2020s have revealed a rapidly destabilizing contradiction within American policing. Never before have the police as an institution concentrated so much power, becoming unaccountable to democratic input and municipal authority. Yet never have the police felt themselves so vulnerable. We find rank-and-file police in cities such as Minneapolis diverging from their more publicity-minded commanders, pleading with the federal government to take on some of the burden of local policing, feeling themselves assailed by the threats of protestors and activists.^[1] The question of policing has become more pressing as New York City’s Democratic Socialist mayor Zohran Mamdani opts for a cautious approach to the New York Police Department, preferring to retain Jessica Tisch as commissioner and avoiding a combative stance toward NYC’s five police unions.^[2] As confrontations between the working class and police become more volatile and increase in frequency, socialists are forced to reckon with the question of police abolition within a broader strategy of social and political emancipation.

Stuart Schrader’s “Blue Power” stands as a welcome account that reframes the rise of police power in the late 20th and early 21st century as the product of class struggle: not just from without but from within the institution. Within the police itself, Schrader is keen on centering the struggle between reform-minded chiefs and militant rank-and-file; municipally appointed policemen and democratically elected county sheriffs; and state and national unions claiming to represent the best interests of American policemen. Schrader’s account complicates the automatic expansion of policing in tandem with the proletariat, thereby revealing what other accounts have hitherto concealed: that for all its federal funding and incredible discretion, the institution of policing is riven with mounting crisis that risks the legitimacy of the imperial state as a mediator of social conflict.

It is tempting to read police abolition as a utopian demand, a question external to the socialist movement. Jacobin writer Ben Burgis characterizes demands for abolition as a product of “grandstanding and one-upsmanship,” opting for a more realistic socialist program less likely to alienate the average American.^[3] However, what Schrader’s analysis and the struggles of those on the ground indicate is the inextricability between policing and capitalist society. Capital is not external to the police, but constitutive of the police. Confronting the power of capital necessarily entails confronting the power of the police. It is with this observation that we further ground and expand upon Schrader’s analysis—that the crisis of policing is the crisis of late capitalist society. As churches, unions, fraternal associations, and industrial firms have increasingly lost their ability to territorially discipline labor, policing has emerged as the only institution adequately flexible to discipline social labor’s mobility. During the late twentieth century, the police progressively absorbed the responsibilities of social workers, healthcare providers, and administrators. Yet at the same time, the police recomposed into a quasi-autonomous political force that has increasingly dropped the pretext of community policing in favor of more counterinsurgent and nakedly aggressive forms of coercion. This counterinsurgent mentality and enthusiastic adoption of the Thin Blue Line on the part of a militant rank-and-file disembedded from the working class is symptomatic of the capitalist state’s own crisis of legitimacy. The state’s increasing dependence upon an openly reactionary political formation whose activity risks further delegitimating its own rule is driven by the ratcheting surge of street rebellions throughout the 2010s and 2020s. Read in this light, the George Floyd rebellion revealed the generalized dysfunction of policing precisely at the moment the institution appeared to reach the height of its power.

With Schrader, once we grasp how policing and capital have restructured in response to and upon the terrain of a working-class whose mobile character has forced the state to more tightly integrate police into capitalist social reproduction, it becomes much more difficult to paint police abolition as a utopian form of politics. To faithfully represent institutional policing’s journey to power as outlined by Schrader’s analysis, this essay aims to show how the class struggle within the police has been historically formed by the changing terrain of class antagonism throughout the postwar and neoliberal periods of capitalist accumulation. Crucially, we must ask the question beyond the scope of Schrader’s study: what processes drove the police to struggle for such concentration of power, and what conditions granted them the leverage to succeed? The increasing ungovernability of the working-class has forced the capitalist state to further erode the division between local police departments and federal agencies in order to better manage the expanding scope and increasing volatility of class antagonism. As the federal government pursues accelerating integration between federal agencies and local police departments, the question of only reforming the police becomes more remote as police autonomy escapes the narrow bounds of democratic accountability of municipal boards and congressional hearings. In light of this integration, street rebellions in Minneapolis, New York, and Los Angeles have intensified and have become the terrain through which organizers reformulate tactics and strategy. In reframing Schrader’s late twentieth-century history of policing, police abolition is revealed to be more than a moral demand, but one materially emergent out of struggles between the working class and the capitalist state over the decades. Labor’s recomposition via struggle has accentuated the crisis of the capitalist state so radically that one cannot meaningfully oppose capital without opposing the police. In a post-George Floyd world, socialists must center the question of police abolition if their aim is revolutionary transformation.

Policing, Political Machines, and the Postwar Transformation

American policing’s transformation since its late nineteenth-century origins has largely been driven by the transformation of labor’s composition through its struggle with capital. Schrader briefly touches on how police emerged within the political machine, “enforcing the color line, fashioning a gendered social hierarchy, maintaining a ready and docile labor force by suppressing organized labor, and keeping the party in power.”^[4] The early 20th-century Progressives, mid-20th-century New Dealers, and late 20th-century Neoliberals sought to “professionalize” policing, which “required disentangling police from politics, vanquishing the machines, and transforming governance into a more outwardly apolitical form of administration.” However, to get to the core contradiction that drove policing’s historical transformation requires inquiring into the force that drove the Progressives, New Deal, and Neoliberal state to prioritize this professionalization: labor’s recomposition into a political force that could challenge the capitalist state.

The mid- to late-nineteenth-century American city was characterized by fragmentation and heterogeneity, with social forms like churches, fraternal associations, and neighborhood organizations translating this fragmentation into governable legibility. Waves of Italians, Czechs, and Poles were absorbed by emergent industrial capital post-Civil War, which generated demands for forms of government adequate to managing an increasingly complex society. The political machine becomes a key site of regulating and integrating immigrant labor into urban industrial society. Yet the more organized and integrated labor became, the more white immigrant labor was able to articulate collective political opposition against industrial capital. Heightened labor antagonism drove the coalescence of militant trade unions capable of contesting power on the factory floor.

Warfare on the shop floor and in the streets drove the ascendency of the police as a key mediator of labor antagonism. As Eric Monkkonen argues, “the fragmenting, 'centrifugal' forces, both spatial and social, of the American city in the post-1850 era…could have only worked within the context of the modicum of order and stability provided by the police, centralized and uniformed, along with the fire departments, both formed far earlier than most of the city's services.”^[5] But the rise of the police as a solution to urban fragmentation generated new problems. On the one hand, the police were protectors of private property and upholders of the law, above the political fray; on the other hand, they could only derive their power through blatantly partisan urban patronage. Yet this reliance on blatant urban patronage is what allowed the police to assimilate older generations of white immigrants, such as the Irish, into “middle-class respectability,” while at once pressing harder on Black workers and leaning even further into patronage networks that left Progressive reformers ambivalent.^[6] As the political machine and its ward policemen structured urban society, this success only made the contradictions between labor intransigence and state governance all the more acute, generating the demand for the Progressive middle-class reformers to further centralize state governance and professionalize the police to more adequately mediate organized labor and concentrated capital.

This contradiction within policing would drive turn-of-the-century Progressives and later the New Dealers into centralizing state power. As the American working class achieved national consolidation and coordination through sympathy strikes, recognition strikes, and general strikes, the Progressives were pressured to forge a national state adequate for mediating between national labor and national capital. To this end, the Progressives sought to rationalize government and focus different functions into distinct agencies. Middle-class reformers thereby sought to professionalize police and narrow their focus from management of class antagonism to generic “crime control.” Progressives like Theodore Roosevelt strove to end police practices such as lodging the homeless or caring for lost children that risked infringing upon the jurisdiction of other government agencies and distracting them from their newfound role as crime fighters.^[7] However, police professionalization accentuated the crisis of urban governance by insulating the police from the working-class it was tasked with managing. Police rank-and-file struggled with Progressives over the adoption of methods that would narrow their discretion and weaken their relationship with urban political machines and their working-class constituencies.^[8] Not only would these attempts at professionalization place distance and accentuate conflict between the police and the working class, but they would also intensify antagonism between police chiefs tasked with imposing reform and rank-and-file determined to resist.

Yet late-19th and early-20th century labor's increasing mobility across state lines drove the pressure to professionalize police even as it accentuated class conflict both within and without police departments. Middle-class Progressive reformers saw state centralization as the only means of countering both militant labor and recalcitrant capital. Vice control and the passage of Prohibition afforded Progressives the opportunity to direct police towards centralizing state authority. But narrowing local police focus to policing only particular modes of behavior required national coordination across multiple levels of government. Via the Mann Act, the movement of so-called “white slaves” and liquor across interstate lines became a key means by which the police were forced to focus on crime control and management of the circulation of increasingly mobile labor. Though ridden with jurisdictional conflicts between municipal, state, and federal courts that left Prohibition unevenly practiced, the failures paradoxically generated further opportunities for state consolidation and police professionalization.^[9] Though by the 1930s the effects of professionalization were highly uneven, the police slowly took on the character of a professionalized labor force capable of disciplining nationalized labor.

Yet the more the Progressive reformers attempted to universalize the policing powers of the state to counter labor and capital, the more such efforts exposed the middle-class character of its reforms and destabilized its attempts at universal legitimation. Rank-and-file labor militancy nationwide destabilized the Progressive state in the wake of the Great Depression, forcing the New Dealers into power. The New Dealers sought to go beyond the Progressives and restructure state coercion in a manner that more radically universalized the category of criminality across class lines, formally subjecting not only laborers and capitalists, but even the middle-class reformers and white-collar bureaucrats heading the capitalist state apparatus to the same language of law and order.^[10] New Deal state formation would grant it the national legitimacy necessary to generate state and legal mechanisms whose scope was adequate to recapturing a nationally militant labor movement.

New Dealers restructured state coordination away from earlier Progressive aims of countering militant labor and recalcitrant capital and more towards the integration of class antagonism into the state, introducing a qualitative transformation to state formation for which the Progressive Era state unevenly laid the groundwork.^[11] Through the 1930s, the militancy and belligerence of American labor in the steel mills, anthracite mines, and auto assembly lines drove the New Deal state to consolidate and integrate state power.^[12] The failure of Prohibition to curb alcohol consumption and production, as well as the expansion of large criminal enterprises, introduced new demands for the national consolidation of law enforcement. The rise of the American liberal state was increasingly shaped by the need to re-integrate militant labor into the state through forms of vice control centered around the regulation of alcohol production and consumption. The circulation of alcohol across the country created the demand for nationally-coordinated local police departments that could manage this circulation and protect “dry” states from liquor importation.^[13] These conditions increasingly insulated police departments from the political machines and working-class populations that supplied them with their power, better preparing them to suppress wildcat and sympathy strikes. When the city of Detroit ended the spoils system and established a Police Merit Board, it also “prevented civilian influence more generally, as it kept the police from coming under the city’s civil service standards.”^[14] As the police fought and disciplined strikes by Black workers and aided white rioters, the police slowly attained the hiring insulation of a closed shop without gaining broader labor solidarity incumbent on other industrial and public unions.

Through the 1950s, the postwar national organization of labor drove the newly hegemonic capitalist state to achieve larger and more sophisticated scales of coordination that forced it into uneasy alliance with local police departments that jealously guarded their local discretion. In the sixties, the Johnson administration passed legislation to funnel millions of federal dollars to aid local policing. At first, the chiefs of the International Association of Chiefs of Police (IACP) would be reluctant to take money from the federal government, suspecting this would subject their departments to “new civil rights legislation” and impinge on “local prerogative.”^[15] However, the scale of the urban rebellions of the mid to late-1960s in Watts, Detroit, and Newark would push many chiefs to accept federal funding, with LAPD chief William Parker even identifying the rebels with the Viet Cong.^[16] Though local police departments prized their local discretion, the scope and militancy of the urban rebellions exposed their vulnerability as local police units tasked with managing a national labor force taking on increasingly international character, with many Black civil rights activists, labor organizers, and revolutionaries identifying their struggle with those throughout the Global South.^[17] Throughout the 1960s, the institution of policing returned to its pre-Progressive Era roots as managers of class antagonism, but on a far larger and more coordinated scale that pulled policing into local surveillance, management, and discipline of the racialized working-class with increasingly military-like arsenals provided by the federal government.^[18]

Yet the rank-and-file diverged from their public-facing department chiefs and commanders over the question of professionalization. Indeed, in cities like Baltimore, “graft remained a persistent problem” despite the struggles of liberals to professionalize local policing from the national level.^[19] Contributive to the problem was the fact that police wages increased at half the rate of unionized factory wages.^[20] Unlike many private labor industries and large strata of the public sector, police rank-and-file struggled to form national unions capable of wrestling over nationally-set wages and standards. Though this certainly did not stop rank-and-file officers from imitating the example of other workers and engaging in work slowdowns to force recognition of local unions and police discretion.^[21] Schrader’s account of rank-and-file struggle to force the state to recognize their privileged position within capitalist state reproduction, while themselves being resistant to building formal bonds of solidarity with other unions, reveals the multifaceted contradiction that formed policing from the late-19th to the mid-20th century. As labor consolidated in industry and drove the state to centralize power, the police both mediated this process by professionalizing and growing more distant from the urban political machines, while nevertheless remaining hostile towards forms of nationalization that threatened their local prerogative and discretion. Under neoliberal governance, this contradiction between rank-and-file militancy and reform-minded commanders would only accentuate and intensify as rank-and-file are increasingly tasked with managing decomposed labor populations while resisting national forms of coordination required to do so.

Labor Decomposition and the Rise of Neoliberal Policing

Under neoliberalism, the police came to fulfill a contradictory function: although the police’s technical scope continued narrowing to cover crime, the state’s expansion of what constituted crime created countervailing conditions that led the police to negatively absorb functions of social workers and administrators, thereby widening police jurisdiction. “Community policing” and broken windows policing grew popular through the earlier phase of neoliberalism as labor’s decomposition made embedded governance increasingly necessary. Beginning in the 1980s, neoliberal governance increasingly translated rank-and-file demands for discretion into formal mechanisms for managing the crisis generated by the decomposition of mass labor. Expanding the police’s powers of asset forfeiture would partially resolve the fiscal crisis plaguing municipalities across the country. It drove police departments and sheriff’s offices to arrest and detain more working-class people of color to fulfill the federal government’s War on Drugs, as well as contain the social crisis of growing surplus populations in the wake of deindustrialization. Yet, at the same time, asset forfeiture would further insulate the police from municipal accountability by granting them an independent (and substantial) source of revenue from which to draw funds. In this sense, the police emerged as a critical stopgap, managing structural unemployment and disciplining through mass incarceration a working class whose mobility rendered postwar forms of discipline increasingly inadequate. Yet these mechanisms used by the state to stabilize the crisis not only further fragmented labor and accelerated the crisis, but also generated conditions that rendered many rank-and-file police politically exposed even as they accumulated unprecedented discretion and insulation from democratic accountability.

The militarization of the police throughout the late twentieth century was a product and driver of the crisis of postwar Fordist accumulation, driven by an increasingly ungovernable working class that forced capital to restructure. The militant labor struggles and Black and Latino urban rebellions of the 1960s and 1970s would force the recomposition of capital and state discipline into more flexible and infrastructural forms adequate to disciplining labor’s mobility. Labor’s hard-won mobility from the territorially bounded firm, the decomposition of the southern Jim Crow legal regime, and the political recognition and integration of women into mobile wage labor would provoke an international crisis in capital accumulation and state formation. The civil institutions of mass society, like churches, fraternal associations, trade unions, and neighborhood organizations, withered and proved increasingly incapable of disciplining mobile laborers who left for the suburbs, moved across federally-constructed highways, and consumed mass media that broke them from their ethnically and geographically-demarcated social world. Non-governmental organizations and private contractors moved to fill the gaps left behind by mass society as neoliberal modes of governance emerged to legally, spatially, and racially fix social labor.

Policing grew to become an important means of reterritorializing labor during the earlier phases of neoliberal governance, taking on forms that parallel capital’s own restructuring. As labor grew increasingly disembedded from localized forms of social control, the state stepped in to revitalize civil institutions like the church to re-integrate social labor.^[22] But far from reasserting local control, the capitalist state would integrate civil institutions through a circuit of data-sharing and coordination to manage the structurally unemployed and monitored racialized populations. Because the state was losing its capacity to directly command labor, it was increasingly driven towards indirect forms of command, either through non-profit administration or the distribution of social services through formally distinct civil institutions like churches, schools, public libraries, and neighborhood associations. Yet at the same time, the decentralization of social administration across private actors and non-profit networks also concentrated coercive coordination across infrastructural lines.^[23] The subsumption of these civil institutions further projected police power, intensifying police presence throughout working-class racialized neighborhoods.

The narrative emergence of racialized neighborhoods as “crime-ridden” legitimated police occupation and intensified their carceral presence. The neoliberals’ universalization of “law and order” policing in everyday life radicalized the New Dealers’ earlier attempts to legitimate state policing through universalization, but under conditions of labor’s decomposition rather than recomposition managed by state integration. The emergence of racialized surplus populations forced neoliberals to thrust the police forward to absorb the responsibilities of crisis management. Beginning in the 1960s, the growing crisis of Black unemployment pressured the federal government to funnel federal dollars into local policing and embed police throughout the community, effectively occupying racialized ghettos to curb potential urban rebellions.^[24] The formal boundary between social services and crime control slowly eroded as the state’s attempts to recapture and discipline labor increasingly negated the distinction between the Johnson antipoverty and anticrime programs through the 1970s and 1980s.^[25] Neoliberalism sharpened the professionalizing contradiction of policing seen previously under the Progressive Era: the more policing specialized into crime control, the wider crime’s scope came to encompass the whole of social life. But where Progressive reformers sought to insulate the police from the work of emergent government agencies, neoliberal governance drove the police to subsume and embed itself infrastructurally throughout these agencies to better counter fragmented labor.

Although the neoliberal state moved to address the social crisis with strengthened policing, its attempts to slow labor’s decomposition through policing only accelerated the social crisis of fragmentation, forcing the state to depend even further upon policing while simultaneously giving rank-and-file officers additional leverage to extract further concessions. As Ruth Wilson Gilmore observed, states like California instituted waves of new laws to intensify the incapacitation of racialized workers, “prevent[ing] people from committing crimes by keeping them in cages for as long as possible.”^[26] Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, police rank-and-file sensed their political leverage and engaged in work slowdowns and strikes to accentuate the widespread crisis of municipal budgetary finance and redirect funding from social services to police departments. Yet as Schrader observes, “reducing social services…was itself criminogenic,” generating a spiral of criminalization and disintegration that the rank-and-file further capitalized on to secure funding.^[27] Thereby, the police were not merely passive recipients of federal funds, but actively leveraged the crisis of labor’s decomposition to secure their own prerogatives. And the police felt that it could accomplish this because of the state’s increasing dependence on it to contain the working-class as older mass civil institutions lost their capacity to discipline labor throughout the late-20th century.

It was in this counterrevolutionary context that state actors at the federal level moved to translate rank-and-file demands into policies like asset forfeiture that would at once radically expand police powers and insulate the police from democratic accountability. Though the police acted locally, their immediate contact with the racialized working class elevated them to a privileged place within the reconfiguration of the American empire that heightened their leverage against democratic reform. Reagan’s War on Drugs emerged as an imperial strategy that integrated an aggressive anticommunist offensive throughout Latin America—justified through the specter of migrant narco-trafficking—with the domestic goals of vastly expanding mass incarceration throughout Black American urban communities across the United States.^[28] However, the New Right Republicans were hesitant to funnel more dollars into the local policing necessary to accomplish this imperial strategy, owing not only to their own fiscal conservatism but also their own suspicions against public sector unions.^[29] Blue Power, thanks to a new generation of “tough on crime” northern Democrats like U.S. Senator Joe Biden, was able to leverage the Republicans’ contradictory pull between fiscal conservatism and expanded militarism to extend sheriff and police departments’ local powers of “asset forfeiture,” both giving police the capacity to fund themselves and securing the neoliberal prerogative as fiscal hawks.

These political developments that insulated the police from local accountability and elevated them into national importance drove the police to cohere as a political formation for-itself with its own interests. As Schrader pointedly observes, “Republicans had conjured a kind of alchemy: the administration could cut budgets while law enforcement agencies generated their own new revenue.”^[30] By giving the police a mechanism for self-funding, the capitalist state resolved its crisis of direct command of labor by giving the police expanded powers to fund themselves. But doing so further disembedded police reproduction from working-class reproduction, distancing the police from the constituencies they managed and generating conditions for heightened antagonism between the police and proletariat. While working-class decomposition happens around them, the police, buoyed by federal funds, further solidify as a self-conscious political formation that increasingly sees itself as over and against not only the working class it is tasked with policing, but also the elected officials whom the police increasingly attempts to politically subordinate to itself.

Nationwide, the police grew to cohere into being indispensable partners of crisis-ridden municipal governments, even as this process was socially uneven and politically fractured. The police actively embraced strategies that at once exacerbated municipal fiscal crises while also situating themselves as the only state actors that could address these fiscal deficits. Acting as state-sanctioned privateers, inner-city police and county sheriffs targeted working-class neighborhoods with fees and fines to make up for widening budgetary disparities. Capital flight and unmanageable budget deficits drove municipal governments to rely on police departments to extract funds from residents, in turn giving departments leverage to extort additional powers from city and county governments. This cycle insulated police departments and sheriffs' offices from democratic accountability, giving them a vastly more lucrative source of revenue outside municipal budgets that would disembed them from working-class reproduction, as well as structurally direct them to target Black and brown neighborhoods for financial gain on behalf of municipal and county governments.^[31]

Granted access to vastly more lucrative sources of revenue outside municipal budgets, the police moved to further dominate inner-city racialized communities as well as city councils. Many police departments sought to deepen the claws of carceralization to exploit their financial stake in the occupation of the inner-city neighborhood and suburb, accentuating the crisis of racialized labor’s ungovernability across America’s urban and increasingly deindustrializing suburban periphery. Arrests and convictions exacerbated the crisis of social reproduction within working-class racialized communities, making round-the-clock occupation all the more lucrative and necessary for the enforcement of “law and order.” Per Schrader, “this strategy [of source control] was a failure, yet each part benefited from the failures of the others and each failure became a justification for committing further resources, so that it might succeed even though others failed.”^[32] The militarization of the police fed the demand for the militarization of ghettos like Watts in Los Angeles, as automatic weapons circulated through heavily armed gangs protecting their turf from both police and rival gangs. The Black neighborhood became a site of struggle, which the police leveraged for more financial resources and widened discretion, their strength further immiserating Black communities. As Elizabeth Hinton recounts, “the higher probability of getting harmed or shot led parents in vulnerable areas to call their children home after school. The higher likelihood of getting robbed led grandparents to install additional dead bolts and chains on their doors. The prospect of retaliation led people to be careful about the clothing they wore and kept victims from talking openly with police.”^[33] The more it moved to fracture and decompose the working-class, the more the police could shore up its own material sovereignty as an emergent political formation for-itself.

But crucially, the success of the police was not the product of a "police-orchestrated conspiracy.”^[34] The struggle between rank-and-file discretion and police chief reform generated a centrifugal force in which the police accrued the bureaucrat’s insulation from democratic accountability, while retaining the patrolman’s discretion concerning what encounters with civilians called for. Schrader attributes the historical development of modern policing to “the high levels of discretion and cohesion” at the lower levels of the rank-and-file.^[35] Such cohesion is what permits wide discretion at the bottom while maintaining accountability at the higher managerial strata. The vertical tension fused with the horizontal rivalries between competing policing associations such as the International Union of Police Associations and the Fraternal Order of Police, whose fragmentary character allowed some police unions to capitalize on the defeats of other policing associations to win their own benefits. What was a significant vulnerability within the organized labor movement proved to be Blue Power’s greatest strength.

These very same conditions that secured the police’s ascendancy would subject it to the same conditions of labor decomposition it was tasked to police. Although the 1990s and 2000s were periods of accelerating insulation and power for the police, it was nevertheless subject to increasing demand to manage the consequences of labor fragmentation for which it was never trained. Consequently, the police grew to take on the function of general class management that its Progressive Era ascendents occupied. But it did so under the formal category of crime, which increasingly became the mechanism by which the capitalist state managed the consequences of labor’s fragmentation. Thus, social phenomena arising out of labor decomposition, such as homelessness, substance use, and precarious labor, were met with increasing harshness and naked coercion that served to only exacerbate the social crisis, further driving the police to embrace their increasingly counterinsurgent character. The crisis of police overencumbrance would only be exposed after the radical labor recomposition in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis and the 2020 George Floyd rebellion.

Working-Class Recomposition and Police Counterinsurgency

If the earlier phase of neoliberalism saw the police negatively absorb the functions of social workers, healthcare workers, and bureaucratic administrators, then the later phase of neoliberalism would see the police increasingly drop the pretense of social administration and assume a more counterinsurgent role. The police’s stranglehold upon civil society tightened as the Global War on Terror amplified police power in the 2000s, accelerated with labor’s decomposition after the 2008 financial crisis, and intensified through the Black Lives Matter rebellions throughout the 2010s and 2020s. Such struggles have forced the police to increasingly abandon their bipartisan political coalition of previous decades and ally themselves with far-right political formations like MAGA. Schrader’s analysis throws into sharp relief the increasingly contradictory position policing occupied and the acceleration of proletarian rebellion.

September 11 and the resulting Global War on Terror (GWOT) ushered in the acceleration of “continuous” labor processes within the military and policing that paralleled the sprawling logistical production chains throughout the globe.^[36] Since the 1980s, labor won mobility on a global scale that forced capital to fall back on contractors and lean logistics networks to temporarily recompose labor at the level of the firm.^[37] Beginning in the 1960s, but accelerating in subsequent decades, policing and the military had taken on more infrastructural and networked forms that better equipped them to more precisely penetrate occupied territory and policed populations, both domestically and internationally.^[38] As Adam Moore observes, before the Iraq War, the military had accepted and embraced the increasingly central importance of contractors to waging war across vastly expanding spatial and temporal horizons.^[39] For policing, mass supervision arose as a complement to mass incarceration with the emergence of intelligence fusion centers in the late-1990s in response to the exponential growth of America’s carceral population outpacing prison supervision, forcing the police to take a more networked and logistical approach than in previous decades.^[40] The GWOT accelerated and integrated the military’s war abroad and the police’s war at home that echoed Reagan’s War on Drugs, intertwining and fusing policing, military, and capital logistical networks into a carceral net whose scope grew to enmesh the whole of American society.

The 2008 financial crisis and the rapid platformization of American labor exposed the overbearing presence of policing in everyday life beyond the racialized neighborhood. Throughout the late-20th century, global finance emerged as a means of coordinating labor as labor increasingly escaped direct discipline within the factory and neighborhood. Finance’s role in coordinating everyday social reproduction hardened racial differences, as disproportionately Black and brown working-class Americans were targeted with predatory housing loans that concentrated risk throughout the real estate industry, which would in turn become ground zero for the global financial crisis.^[41] In the wake of the crisis, capital responded by channeling massive amounts of liquidity into the tech and financial sectors, generating the conditions for the rise of platforms like Uber, DoorDash, and other gig work digital platforms that could recompose and coordinate a fragmented working-class that could no longer access the capital to mortgage homes. Through platform labor, capital could coordinate labor fragmentation through gig work that eroded the boundaries between work and job. But this coordination further fragmented labor, increasingly subjecting it to rent-seeking subscriptions that limit its access to the means of social reproduction. The more post-2008 capital relied upon platforms to coordinate labor via flexible logistical systems mediated by digital applications, the more unstable and fragmented labor became.

The post-2008 recomposition of the racialized labor into rent-based platformized labor created conditions that made politically visible the generalized penetration of policing into everyday life, accelerated by the demands of the GWOT. The police’s mass enclosure of the Occupy Wall Street encampments in 2011 and 2012 sparked public outrage, but the general public found that there existed no outlets through which they could meaningfully enact police reform. As the police gained unprecedented insulation from democratic accountability via networked and decentralized policing, this very same insulation generalized public contact with policing through neighborhoods, public schools, churches, grocery stores, and public spaces, making the police vulnerable to mass antagonism in novel ways. As Schrader notes, the ubiquity of policing made the police a central target of political outrage in the wake of police murders of Michael Brown and Eric Garner, coalescing in the Black Lives Matter protests throughout the mid-2010s.^[42] What made these 2010s and 2020s rebellions new—from Ferguson to George Floyd—was the increasingly suburban and exurban character of the rebellions: counterinsurgent police found themselves increasingly outnumbered and outmaneuvered by droves of protestors arising from the sprawling post-industrial suburbs and exurbs whose physical architecture rendered literal the heavily-armed police’s heightened exposure on all sides by a restive and ungovernable working-class armed with molotov cocktails and pistols.^[43] The ubiquity of these protests revealed weakness where what once appeared to be institutional strength, urgently driving the police to embrace and accelerate their turn to counterinsurgency.

The capitalist state had delegated so many of the tasks of managing labor decomposition throughout the earlier phase of neoliberalism, that the police became one of the primary objects of mass struggle once class struggle erupted throughout the 2010s. One of Schrader’s most incisive observations is that “Blue Lives Matter” was less a backlash than a “frontlash” to the BLM movement.^[44] Rank-and-file rejection of public demand for police reform was not new throughout the late-20th and early-21st century. What was new, however, was the scale and intensity with which the police as an institution was heaped with scorn. The mass struggle against the police leading up to and following the George Floyd uprisings gave “the pretext to act on this opposition in new ways,” with rank-and-file officers urging for intensified federal intervention in Minneapolis, Ferguson, Detroit, and Los Angeles, in turn intensifying social crisis through the streets.

The political exposure experienced by police through the 2010s and 2020s has driven the police to build new political coalitions that further exacerbate their social delegitimization. During the earlier historical phases of neoliberalism, the struggles of the police forged a bipartisan consensus that endowed them with an aura of technocratic legitimacy, depoliticizing them as an institution. But now, amid the recomposition of labor post-2008 and the resulting mass struggles, police subjectivity has been transformed under conditions of political insularity and counterinsurgent restructuring. Police rank-and-file have been increasingly driven by an insurgent working class to more forcefully assert its political subjectivity as an autonomous counterinsurgent formation. At their most politically vulnerable, police rank-and-file have grown more willing to cast off their technocratic, bipartisan aura of previous decades and put their all-time heights of institutional power to the use of reactionary political formations like MAGA. As Schrader observes, during the 2020 presidential election, rank-and-file officers “clapped and chortled”^[45] as chiefs across the country hurriedly “denounced Trump’s remarks” about police brutality. Reform-minded and public relations-conscious chiefs are continually pulled between a militant rank-and-file aligned with the President on conducting more violent means of state repression and an American public increasingly critical of chiefs’ not doing enough to resolve the crisis of police violence. Through the 2020s and the second Trump administration, the rank-and-file have been driven by mass struggle to ally itself with the revanchist Republican party. “In the place of governing would be bullying, trolling, and tormenting,” Schrader writes, “hallmarks of Blue Power.”^[46]

Blue Power has employed its institutional power in ways that magnify the heights of its strength, but also its internal weaknesses. According to Schrader, since 2015, the police have launched an unofficial national strike “that would have been impossible in 1970” given labor’s previous composition.^[47] This “amorphous, disavowed, and haphazardly organized” strike has taken the form of slowdowns, arrest declines, and plummeting traffic enforcement. At once this is a show of significant force on the part of police in the face of “smartphone recordings of their activities, vaccine mandates and health risks, bail and sentencing reforms, investigations into civil rights violations, ‘progressive prosecutors,’ and the demand for defunding policing.”^[48] This show of strength has a double side, revealing at once deep-seated insecurity and weakness, with “officers quitting, retiring early, and seeking disability protections.” Police recruitment has fallen well-below target across the country and indifference has generalized across major police departments with “officers on duty play[ing] smartphone videogames in plain view of taxpayers.”^[49] The very policies and protections for which police struggled throughout the late-20th century that have insulated them from democratic accountability have come to make them the sin-eater of late capitalist society.

On this point, we recommend additional nuance to the point concerning the police’s growing indifference towards the civil aspects of their social function. Schrader’s point may be sharpened to assert that this indifference on the job does not reflect labor decomposition, but rather is symptomatic of the police’s recomposition into a counterinsurgent political force far more interested in violent forms of suppression against an increasingly mobilized and militant working-class than it is in the pretense of community-oriented policing. As neoliberal governance matured post-2008, institutional policing increasingly shed the generalized social management functions it had negatively absorbed in previous decades and instead exhibited a growing hunger for overt counterinsurgent activity. In this sense, the police increasingly abandoned the New Deal ideal of ‘law and order,’ returning instead to the nakedly partisan role of the late-nineteenth century political machine henchman. Yet this return emerged under radically transformed conditions: the accelerating fusion between military, policing, and logistical crisis management across local, national, and international planes of capitalist empire.

Conclusion

This historical genealogy, following Schrader's analysis, illustrates that it has been the crisis of command over labor that has driven the state to vest increasing powers in sheriffs' offices and police departments across the country over the past six decades. Generally speaking, liberal studies of the police tend to frame their ascendancy as a matter of elite victory; Marxist studies as the automatic workings of capital. What both kinds of studies tend to have in common is attributing an automatic nature to the police that casts labor as a secondary or passive force, depoliticizing the police as an institution, and thereby foreclosing the possibility of political struggle. The achievement of Stuart Schrader’s “Blue Power” is that it moves beyond the impasse of such studies and repoliticizes the police as not only a site of external but also internal class struggle. The police not only struggle against the racialized working-class but are themselves internally defined by the same contradictions of the labor-process that drive the development of the working-class they police. Characterized by starts and stops, dead ends, and pathways that expose the police’s vulnerabilities as well as its strengths, Schrader’s history of Blue Power stands as a welcome study of policing as mass struggle intensifies into the 2020s.

The police’s deepening insulation from democratic accountability means that formal electoral socialist power cannot adequately command them. The police effectively determine what constitutes “crime,” and such wide discretion means that any socialist movement that hopes to acquire political power to challenge capital must be prepared for confrontations with the police that cannot be solved through electoral means alone. As Schrader illustrates, the police are a proactive force for whom the implementation of the law remains at their discretion. Proletarian resistance will likely provoke rank-and-file officers to take violent and extra-judicial action if sufficiently pushed. Even with socialist politicians in power, it remains to be seen how effective accountability boards and defunding threats are against a heavily organized and independently funded nationwide counterinsurgent political formation. Asked why the NYPD was aiding ICE when Mayor Mamdani voiced his opposition, Captain James G. Wilson was reported to ask “Who’s Mamdani?”—calling the mayor “temporary”—a collective declaration on the part of the rank-and-file that Blue Power is more durable than electoral power.

Through the 2020s, growing skepticism has emerged on the progressive left towards police abolition as a programmatic demand. “Even if we abolish capital,” one may ask, “then we nevertheless will still require the police in socialist society.” Yet Schrader’s historicization of the police, and demonstration that its institutional ubiquity is historically novel, directs those on the left to struggle towards political horizons greater than the capitalist nation-state. More radically, as this review essay aimed to illustrate, centering class struggle against capital within our approach to policing unearths the unprecedented fusion between capital and police through the past century. For those leftists skeptical of police abolition, a concrete assessment of capitalist development shows policing increasingly fusing with and becoming indispensable to the infrastructural management of capitalist social reproduction, leading to mass struggles against capital and organized opposition to the police becoming increasingly inseparable. Through Schrader’s framing, abolition’s struggle against policing shifts from a rootless opposition to policing in the abstract towards a material struggle against an ascendant semi-autonomous coercive political bloc increasingly fused with capitalist crisis management, even as it attains increasing autonomy from working-class reproduction. Far from utopian wish-fulfillment or moral grandstanding, abolition organically follows from the historical development of the racialized working class’s decomposition, and emerges as a central demand within the renewed mass struggles through the 2010s and 2020s.

Most important of all, within Schrader’s history is its recasting of American policing’s strengths as having their own liabilities. The very same mechanisms by which the police depoliticized themselves now make democratic accountability and social legitimacy extraordinarily difficult. Local rank-and-file police’s sharp alignment with an extraordinarily unpopular fascist political formation gives them unprecedented access and power within the federal bureaucracy, but also further taints their image as indifferent guardians of private property and the rule of law. What Schrader’s study centers on that previous historical accounts have neglected is the contradiction where the police have attained unprecedented institutional insulation at precisely the historical moment they began losing their social legitimacy.

None of this is a guarantee that the labor decomposition of the police guarantees their downfall or political neutralization. If Schrader’s account is any indication, we may expect more volatile mass struggles to generate pressures that drive policemen to utilize more violent means of suppression against those whom they perceive to be their enemies. And with the generalization of police throughout an immiserating and decomposing American society, more opportunities emerge that at once expose police vulnerability while also risking deadlier encounters on the part of the police.^[50] Increasingly direct forms of coercion and suppression often follow from feelings of institutional weakness. But though Blue Power has never been better situated to terrorize the racialized working-class — especially with its growing fusion with federal policing agencies like ICE and CBP — such aggression only further contributes to police fragmentation and desperation, generating opportunities for working-class solidarity and organizing against encroachment by the capitalist state. No matter how powerful Blue Power becomes, it remains primarily reactive to the struggles of labor, on whose terms of mobility and antagonism the police must continually restructure and reshape itself if it is to continue the struggle.

1. Stuart Schrader. Authoritarianism from Below. The New York Review: https://www.nybooks.com/online/2026/02/14/authoritarianism-from-below-trump-city-takeovers-police/?utm_source=Twitter&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=2026-02-14_Schrader-policing-1

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2. Stuart Schrader. Opinion: Can Mamdani confront the NYPD’s ‘Blue Power’? City & State New York: https://www.cityandstateny.com/opinion/2026/05/opinion-can-mamdani-confront-nypds-blue-power/413527/

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3. Ben Burgis. The Point of Politics is to Convince People, Not Grandstand. Jacobin: https://jacobin.com/2025/08/left-politics-maximalism-socialism-reform

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4. Stuart Schrader. Blue Power. Basic Books. 12.

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5. Eric Monkkonen. Police in Urban America, 1860-1900. Cambridge University Press. 153.

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6. Anthony Gregory. New Deal Law and Order: How the War on Crime Built the Modern Liberal State. Harvard University Press. 29.

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7. Monkkonen. Police in Urban America. 86-128.

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8. Monkkonen. 150.

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9. Gregory. New Deal Law and Order. 37-38.

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10. Gregory. New Deal Law and Order. 213-216.

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11. Luciano Ferrari Bravo. The New Deal and the New Order of Capitalist Institutions. Viewpoint Magazine: https://viewpointmag.com/2014/10/02/the-new-deal-and-the-new-order-of-capitalist-institutions-1972/

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12. Mike Davis. Prisoners of the American Dream: Politics and Economy in the History of the US Working Class. Verso Press. 63-72.

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13. Gregory. 80-81.

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14. Schrader. 13.

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15. Schrader. 32.

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16. Elizabeth Hinton. From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime: The Making of Mass Incarceration in America. Harvard University Press. 69-70.

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17. Dan Georgakas and Marvin Surkin. Detroit: I Do Mind Dying: A Study in Urban Revolution. Haymarket Books. 17.

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18. Elizabeth Hinton. America on Fire: The Untold History of Police Violence and Black Rebellion Since the 1960s. W. W. Norton & Company. 19-21.

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19. Schrader. 39.

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20. Schrader. 45.

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21. Schrader. 51.

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22. Melinda Cooper. Family Values: Between Neoliberalism and the New Social Conservatism. Basic Books. 294-297.

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23. Antonio Negri. Labor of Dionysus: A Critique of the State-Form. University of Minnesota Press. 257-258.

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24. Elizabeth Hinton. From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime. 28-29.

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25. Hinton. War on Poverty. 116-118.

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26. Ruth Wilson Gilmore. Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California. The University of California Press. 107.

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27. Schrader. 195.

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28. Walia Harsha. Border and Rule: Global Migration, Capitalism, and the Rise of Racist Nationalism. Haymarket Books. 67-68.

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29. Schrader. 212.

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30. Schrader. 214.

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31. For more on the economy of municipal finance and policing, see Jackie Wang. Carceral Capitalism. Semiotext(e). 82-105.

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32. Schrader. 222.

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33. Elizabeth Hinton. America on Fire. 288.

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34. Schrader. 222.

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35. Schrader. 19.

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36. Quinn Slobodian and Ben Tarnoff. Muskism: A Guide for the Perplexed. HarperCollins Publisher. 32.

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37. Kim Moody. On New Terrain: How Capital Is Reshaping the Battleground of Class War. Haymarket Books. 71-74.

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38. Stuart Schrader. Badges without Borders: How Global Counterinsurgency Transformed American Policing. University of California Press. 266-270.

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39. Adam Moore. Empire’s Labor: The Global Army That Supports U.S. Wars. Cornell University Press. 41-44.

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40. Brendan McQuade. Pacifying the Homeland: Intelligence Fusion and Mass Supervision. University of California Press. 5

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41. Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor. Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership. The University of North Carolina Press Chapel Hill. 52-54.

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42. Schrader. 319.

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43. Phil Neel. Hinterland: America’s New Landscape of Class and Conflict. Reakton Books. 135-142.

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44. Schrader. 324-325.

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45. Schrader. 337.

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46. Schrader. 341.

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47. Schrader. 343.

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48. Schrader. 343-344.

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49. Schrader. 344.

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50. For a comprehensive Marxist analysis of policing through the 2020s, see Richard Hunsinger’s “Policing the Crisis, 2020-2025:” https://richardhunsinger.substack.com/p/policing-the-crisis-2020-2025

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