THE THIN BLUE CORD IS A BURNING FIGON CORD

It came as no surprise that the grand jury in St. Louis yesterday declined to indict Darren Wilson, the police officer who killed Michael Brown in Ferguson last August. Various politicians and media outlets had been working for months to prepare the public for this decision. They know what sincere liberals and community leaders have yet to realize: that the only way to maintain the prevailing social order is to give police officers carte blanche to kill black men at will. Otherwise it would be impossible to maintain the racial and economic inequalities that are so fundamental to this form of society. Despite the widespread outrage, even at the risk of looting and arson, the justice system will always protect police officers from the consequences of their actions - because without them the justice system itself could not exist.

The grand jury's decision in St. Louis is not a flaw in the legal system, but a lesson in what this is all about. Likewise, the unrest in Ferguson is not a testament to the failure of attempts to channel protests into productive avenues, but rather an indication of what all future social movements must endure if they are to have any chance of addressing the problems that gave rise to them.

An economic system driven by the profit motive creates an ever-growing gap between the rich and the poor. Since the invention of slavery, this situation has been ensured by the introduction of social privileges for white people - a means of preventing poor white people from developing common interests with poor people of color. But the more inequalities there are in a society - racial, economic and other - the more violence is necessary to maintain them.

This explains the increasing militarization of the police. This is not just a way to ensure the profitability of the military-industrial sector after the end of the Cold War. Just as it was necessary to deploy troops around the world to secure the supply of raw materials that keep our economy running, it now becomes necessary to deploy troops in the United States to maintain the unequal distribution of resources at home. Just as the austerity measures previously applied by the IMF in Africa, Asia, and Latin America are now being used in the world's wealthiest countries, the security and counterinsurgency measures that were originally used against people in Palestine, Afghanistan, and Iraq are now being used against the populations of the countries that previously invaded those countries.

Private security and military contractors deployed in Peshawar are now operating in Ferguson, with tanks rolling through Baghdad. So far this has been limited to the poorest black neighborhoods, but what seems like an exception in Ferguson today will soon become commonplace across the country.

This also explains why struggles against the police have become the focus of public attention in the last decade. The police are the front line of capitalism and racism in every battle. We will probably never see CEOs making profits from fracking or privatized water supplies, but we will see the police crushing our protests against them. We will probably never see the bank manager or property owner evicting us from our homes, but we will see the police officers coming to enforce the evictions. As Black people, we will never enter gated communities to meet those who benefit most from white privilege, but we will encounter the blatantly racist security guards who categorize, harass, and arrest us based on our physical appearance.

The civil rights protests that took place two generations ago have become battles against the police: today a black man can become president, but he is much more likely to be killed by a police officer. The workers' struggles that took place a generation ago also became struggles against the police: instead of secure work, there is now a population that, in view of globalization and automation of production processes, can only be integrated into a functioning economy with the help of armed force. What the bosses once were for the workers are now the police for those living in precarious conditions and the unemployed.

Given this background, it is not surprising that police violence has become the catalyst for most of the major movements, uprisings and revolts of recent years:

The unrest that rocked Greece in December 2008, ushering in an era of global resistance to austerity measures, was sparked by the murder of 15-year-old Alexandros Grigoropoulos by a police officer.

In Oakland, riots in response to the assassination of Oscar Grant in early 2009 set the stage for the Bay Area to become the culmination of Occupy and other movements.

The day of protest that sparked the Egyptian revolution in 2011 was set for National Police Day, January 25, by the Facebook page We Are All Khaled Said, which commemorates another young person murdered by police.

Occupy Wall Street only gained traction when footage of police attacks began circulating in late September 2011.

The Occupy Oakland eviction, in which police forces fractured the skull of Iraq War veteran Scott Olse, brought the Occupy movement to its peak and provoked the blockade of the Port of Oakland.

The evolution of protests against fare hikes in Brazil and the development of Gezi Park in Turkey in 2013 - from small, isolated protests to massive uprisings - were both the result of police repression.

The same thing happened in Eastern Europe, triggering the Ukrainian Revolution at the end of 2013 and the uprisings in Bosnia in February 2014.

Other cities across the US have experienced a series of massive riots following police killings, culminating in the revolt in Ferguson following the death of Michael Brown.

It is not just that the police intervene to suppress any movement as soon as it poses a threat to the current distribution of power, but repression itself has now become the trigger for the revolts.

The police cannot rely solely on the use of brute force. It cannot be everywhere at the same time - and it recruits itself from the same population that it is trying to oppress. Therefore, it cannot rely solely on purely military means. Rather than this, it depends on public legitimacy and the appearance of its invincibility. Where she finds it difficult to rely on these two elements, she does her best to exaggerate the other. When it loses control of both, as happened in all the cases described above, a window of opportunity opens for alternatives - a Tahrir or Taksim Square, an Occupy camp or an occupied building, the occupied QT in Ferguson last August - in which a world without all the borders and power imbalances that the police enforce becomes conceivable. This window remains open until the police manage to restore the facade of their invincibility and either strip the forces that have successfully held them back of their respective legitimacy, à la Chris Hedges, or manage to legitimize their own exercise of power again.

This re-legitimization can take many forms. In the Occupy protests, this was accomplished rhetorically by designating the police as part of the 99% (which can easily be done with the Ku Klux Klan). In Egypt, the protesters supported several governments one after the other, only to see how the police and military subsequently took on the same function again and again, each time legitimizing themselves through regime change. In the end, it turned out that the problem lies in the function and characteristics of the police themselves and not in a specific, higher-level administration that can be easily replaced. During the revolution in Ukraine, the very self-defense units of the protesters who successfully crushed the police took over their role and carried it out in the same way. Calls for “community self-policing” may sound harmless, but we should remember the white vigilantes who dominated New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. Policing, in virtually every form imaginable, perpetuates racism and inequality. It would probably be better to think about how we can eliminate the factors that lead to our alleged dependence on the police.

In the case of the protests against the murder of Michael Brown, the police were re-legitimized through demands for police responsibility, for assessment procedures by citizens, and for the police to carry cameras - as if more surveillance could be a good thing for those who are unable to survive within the legal order. It is naive to make demands on supposed authorities who see the police as essential and us as dispensable. This can only lead to their legitimacy and our passivity being restored and at the same time a group of border crossers emerging who gain personal power by putting down their previous opposition to the ruling system. We should be grateful to the protesters in Ferguson who refused to be passive over the last few nights, who refused representation and false dialogue at the cost of great personal sacrifice, and who refused to swallow their anger.

The only way out of this calamity is to expand our ability to exercise power horizontally and autonomously, to strip the police of their legitimacy and to break the myth of their invincibility. This was the common danger that virtually all of the major movements of recent years posed to the prevailing order. If we learn how to do this, we can impose our own agenda, make those in authority shy away from taking young men like Michael Brown's life, and create a space in which they are no longer able to enforce the structural inequalities of their racist society. Until we achieve this, we can be sure that police will continue to kill - and no commission of inquiry or grand jury will stop them.

Any action that dispels the illusion of order and resignation is a spell for more of the same.

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