“Defund the Police!” = Defund Land, Capital & Labor
George Floyd’s murder triggered a worldwide call to end systemic white privilege. The popular slogan “Defund the Police” re-emerged in the civil unrest that ensued as a means to that end. It hints that an outstanding economic debt might be at the root of the problem, a point that author Kimberly Jones eloquently strengthened in her impromptu “How Can We Win” interview given in the aftermath of violent riots in Atlanta. Her message inspired this article and the use of the term Monopoly in it to further highlight the economic undertones of the dystopia we find ourselves in. For the sake of finding a long overdue solution to this social dilemma, a review of the origins of privilege and its link to the economic history of The United States of America is pressing.
Privilege comes in all shapes and colors, it is the direct repercussion of exclusively leaving the access to essential necessities up to ruthless economic competition; whether by warring nations, corporations or individuals swindling each other in open markets. Privilege is gained by those who compete egotistically to win over the concentration of power, which then enables them to create monopolies over these essential necessities, and to manipulate the no-longer-free markets or conquered nations in their favor. This is not a design flaw but the basis of an unrestrained Utopia of economic competition. Its basic features include: establishing social classes of monopoly holders and their subjects; the quintessential abuse of privilege by the monopoly class to ordain whatever social order it deems necessary to guarantee the preservation of their monopolies; and indoctrinating the competitive model. Unrestrained competition divides their subjects and conquers them by motivating them to spar against themselves for the illusion of winning the rigged game over fear of losing out on entering the game itself. A dreadful backlash of this model is that the modern National State was born to mediate the model to its subjects. Without properly incorporating the morality and intelligence of all its citizens, the State is by definition designed to perpetuate the monopoly model. Above all, the model enshrines the institutionalized trading of Land, Capital and Labor and ensures that the State and its citizens become completely financially dependent on this scheme.
The origin of the economic history of the USA is riddled with evidence of white privilege indicating that it is deeply rooted in the misappropriation and exploitation of Land, Capital and Labor from Natives, Monarchs and Africans to establish public monopolies in the USA. It is questionable whether the rebellious British Colonies sought freedom for their inhabitants, or if they simply wanted to push their tyrannical Monarch out of the new Land and Capital monopoly deals — which they had jointly stolen from the Native Americans — and grant them to the colonial white civilian elites to further exploit with the free Labor¹ poached from Africa.
Seen this way, the rebellion was primarily economically motivated, a mere ownership transfer of monopolies from the King to a more perfect “junta” of white privileged colonial monopoly managers. Furthermore, it is also likely that the American Civil War was motivated not only by the noble abolitionist ideals, sweeping through Northern States and the world at that time, but was also triggered by the unfair economic advantage that the Southern States had over the rest of the Union due to their continued access to free Labor. This point is strengthened because, regardless of settling the free Labor issue with the Union’s victory, it took another 100 years of racial abuse to fully realize both, the grandiose abolitionist ideals, and the self-evident truths proclaimed for independence into the Civil Rights Act of 1964 — the enforcement of which still appears to be optional outside of the public eye.
Thus a privileged monopoly class, socioeconomic inequalities, and the marginalization of minorities are all ubiquitous to opting for an economically unrestrained competitive model in which the monopoly class, by design, has to deprive the rest from fair access to Land, Capital and Labor — in other words, access to prosperity.
Our collective consciousness has held these as long standing self-evident truths:–That all people might be created equal but are born into diverse circumstances and endowed with very diverse egos. –That those who nurture their egos self-centeredly presume to have an unalienable right to unrestrictedly pursue their individual economic happiness by exhausting every possible, real, or apparent source of economic value.–That to secure these rights, these self-centered individuals are to institute Governments among Men, deriving their powers from the monopolies they hold over the governed. All these having the direct objective of sustaining their monopolies by enslaving all other individuals, and commandeering Land, Capital and Labor away from their real economic purpose.
While these injustices might inspire agitation, vengeance and retribution, they cannot possibly be reconciled. If they were to be compensated retroactively, arbitrarily starting with the USA, then not only the descendants of African and Native Americans would be entitled to compensation, but also all the other Nations that have since suffered abuses by the USA, simply because of its unfair head start, granted by misappropriating untapped Land, Capital and Labor. Then, it would only be fair to continue backwards, with British retribution for their colonial atrocities… then the Spaniards, the Portuguese, Dutch, further back to the Romans, Egyptians, Persians, etc. Going down history lane to heal these sentiments leads nowhere as most individuals and societies are guilty of having perpetrated this exploitative model at one point in history or another; some are carrying it out now; and those who have not would certainly be tempted to do so if the opportunity arose.
To get past this hurdle we will need to gather unanimous social courage to write off these vivid injustices and emotions as the collateral damage caused by having evolved through an unrestricted competitive Utopia. Only then it would be possible to solely focus, without agitation, on the systemic flaws that such a Utopia feeds on so that its vicious cycle can be halted.
To reiterate, monopolies thrive on appropriating, commodifying and then restricting access to Land, Capital and Labor and enshrining the egotistical competition for these as the defacto social order. This model has institutionalized privilege and the marginalization of minorities over race, financial standing, and now, with the rise of technocracy in the present fourth Industrial Revolution, even digital literacy. These abused minorities act as a deterrent to keep the majority in line with the imposed social order, even if it results in the erosion of their personal rights or environmental degradation anonymously perpetrated by the collective.
Back to Policing, the Police’s own slogan “To Serve and Protect” hints at a conflict of interest, for in the context of ongoing 2020 BLM protests the Police force is bound to Serve as a facilitator for the citizen’s constitutional power to safely and freely exercise their First Amendment rights. This has been corroborated by the many peaceful protests the Police have guarded, with even a few cops joining in solidarity by taking a knee for Mr. Floyd. Nevertheless, the Police is also bound to Protect whatever social order the monopoly class sets as the law of the land, be it legislated or simply implied. The disproportionately large number of cruel and unjustified instances of repression towards peaceful protesters validate the Police’s conflicted condition. Yet the Police are not to blame, since also by design they are ordained and funded by the monopoly class through the State, as its self-preserving instrument, so inevitably the Police will always be biased To Serve and Protect the rigged social order.
Rather than taking the outcry to Defund The Police literally, in the sense of punishing the Police for getting caught in the dystopia of Serving citizens and Protecting monopolies, the slogan is to be recognized as having touched a critical nerve of the Monopoly’s social order. It ought to be interpreted as a veiled outcry to Defund Land, Capital and Labor, precisely because the social programs, called into creation out of the diverted funds to dissolve privilege, target symptoms overwhelmingly caused by the commodification and monopolization of Land, Capital and Labor — in short the slogan Defund The Police shakes the very foundations of the Monopoly class. Homelessness, discrimination, unemployment, poverty, poor education, substance abuse, and domestic violence are among the main social grievances credited to the abuse of white privilege, albeit these are symptoms rather than causes of privilege. The idea that a portion of the Police funding could suffice or even alleviate these grievances is illusory because treating the symptoms would never put an end to the privileged access to Land, Capital and Labor. It would also be contra-indicative because such programs would be mandated and funded by a biased State.
Instead, dissolving the monopoly’s choke-hold on Land, Capital and Labor over its subjects would directly target the root cause of privilege and immediately put an end to this quagmire.
Although this might sound like a Marxist revival and a call to abolish Capitalism, it is neither. Marxism has also proven to create a different kind of quagmire along with its own privileged social class. Therefore a new socioeconomic model is needed to dissolve privilege while salvaging the valuable aspects of Capitalism and Marxism. One that acknowledges that a healthy amount of free competition is required in economic life — represented by Capitalism — and that workers need a dignified participation in the process — represented by Marxism — both standing as valid partial truths. Nevertheless, both models are incomplete. While Capitalism puts capitalists as the single agents of the economy, and Marxism puts the working class as its primary agent, both models not only exclude each other but also the rest of society from the process. The infinite blend of these two models provides us with the endless bipartisan quagmire of our industrial epoch.
Out of phenomenological observation, Rudolf Steiner unveiled the innate threefold nature of the social organism² which, now more than ever, stands as a viable answer to our bipolar deadlock. This holistic social trinity model reveals the Economy, Culture, and Politics as the three vital organs that form a single social organism. It arranges them to equally overlap in the formation of a unified governance in the image of the trinity found in all conscious lifeforms. A social trinity would include the free competitive ground required by the Capitalist and the dignified work sought by the Marxist, but most importantly it would include the rest of society. For instance, pure consumers and cultural workers, who as representatives of the Cultural organ are traditionally excluded from economic matters, would be recognized as essential contributors to the economy and share equal say with the worker and the capitalist in jointly commandeering the economy. Steiner’s social trinity would not only dissolve monopolistic privilege but also safeguard against bipartisan stalemates and Utopias built on partial truths.
Defund The Police is a timely metaphorical plea to overhaul the underlying social order with something new. We have exhausted the singular social model of totalitarian rule and the binary social models of Left vs Right. Are we ready for a social trinity? If so, it will be absolutely necessary to de-commodify Land, Capital and Labor, by calling on the better angels of our nature to endow us with the moral ingenuity and courage to appease the prevailing conditioning of economic life with monopolistic privilege. Prices will be the impartial witnesses to this. They will indicate the degree by which we falsify life with the speculative exploitation of real estate, money and labor in our prices. The day we find none of these sources of privilege in our prices, we will have birthed a living threefold social organism and closed this dreadful chapter of our history.
[1] : “free Labor”. In the mid 1800s, the cost of a slave ($8,000 to $20,000 in 2020-USDs) would pay for him/herself in 2 to 4 years of labor and their offspring were free of charge. In average, they outperformed a salaried laborer in both output and as a cost of business. (https://www.measuringworth.com/slavery.php)
[2] : “threefold nature of the social organism”. Rudolf Steiner, 1919 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_threefolding)
