Editor’s Note: This article is a followup to a video we posted in March of 2022:
“Here’s Why Joe Biden Calling to Fund the Police is REAL BAD.”
Bourgeois Parties Won't Save Us
The clarion call was deafening in 2020: "Vote Blue No Matter Who!" We were told that electing Joe Biden, despite his conservative track record, was a necessary bulwark against fascism. The promise, endlessly repeated across social media, was that once Biden was in the White House, we could then "push him left."
Fast forward to today, with Donald Trump once again in the White House, and that promise rings hollow. Not only did the "pushing left" largely fail during Biden's term, but the Democratic establishment, including figures like then-Vice President Kamala Harris, consistently demonstrated their role in pulling political discourse further to the right. This isn't surprising; it's the historical function of the DNC as a bourgeois party within the capitalist political system to redirect the working class away from revolutionary class consciousness and to preserve the ruling class position of the bourgeoisie.
A History of Reaction: The Democratic Party's Role
From a Historical Materialist perspective, the Democratic Party, much like the Republican Party, functions as a fundamentally bourgeois party, meaning it primarily represents and upholds the interests of the capitalist class, even while occasionally adopting populist rhetoric or enacting minor reforms. This is not a moral judgment of individual politicians, but an analysis of the party's structural role within a capitalist society.
As Friedrich Engels observed in The Civil War in France: “The state is nothing but a machine for the oppression of one class by another, and indeed in the democratic republic no less than in the monarchy."
The Democratic Party, despite its progressive veneer and reliance on working-class votes, consistently prioritizes the stability of the capitalist system, ensuring the continued accumulation of capital for the bourgeoisie through policies that favor corporations, financial institutions, and wealthy donors.
In the words of Vladimir Lenin put it in The State and Revolution:
“To decide once every few years which members of the ruling class is to repress and crush the people through parliament--this is the real essence of bourgeois parliamentarism, not only in parliamentary- constitutional monarchies, but also in the most democratic republics.”
This leads to a politics of managing the unjust circumstances of the existing political economy rather than fundamentally challenging the exploitative nature of capitalist production, ensuring that even when some concessions are made to the working class, they are ultimately designed to preserve the overarching class structure.
Consider Joe Biden's selection as Barack Obama's Vice President in 2008. While Obama was, surprisingly, perceived as a "radical progressive" in popular media at the time (a testament to how far right US politics have become over the course of the last century), Biden was specifically chosen for his deeply conservative credentials. This was a deliberate move to reassure the "Blue Dog Democrat" wing - the centrist and right-leaning elements of the party - that Obama's administration wouldn't stray too far from established capitalist norms.
Biden's history as a rightwing anti-progressivist speaks volumes. He was instrumental in manufacturing consent for the invasion and occupation of Iraq in 2003. This pro-war stance, a hallmark of American imperialism, has remained a bipartisan constant, as we discussed in our most recent video essay.
Today, with Trump and his fascist coterie in the Whitehouse, understanding the nature of the bourgeois duoparty system is more pressing than ever. Children are still held in cages, and now even lawful American residents and citizens are being deported and detained in unspeakably inhumane foreign prisons. Now Trump is paving the way to remove birthright citizenship, and for all the lip service Democrats have given to immigrants, the DNC party apparatus has played a vital role in building, maintaining, and expanding America’s pogroms against immigrants.
This is hardly a deviation for a political figure like Biden, who, as Vice President, was a key architect of the very system that led to these concentration camps and the transformation of ICE into a gestapo agency. In 2014, as the humanitarian crisis at the U.S.-Mexico border intensified with thousands of unaccompanied children, Biden met with Central American leaders to discuss strategies, emphasizing that children apprehended would be immediately put into deportation proceedings. The stark reality of these holding cells – concrete walls, concrete floors, single toilets – persisted, as these border patrol stations remained ill-equipped for long-term detention, especially of children.
The violence which the USA participates in extends beyond our domestic conditions, and remains largely unchecked by the DNC. With full backing of DNC leadership, the U.S. military still engages in bombings and interventions in foreign countries. The recent situation in Iran was more publicly visible than usual - such imperialist interventions typically proceed with minimal public awareness. Critical issues which Biden failed to address in his term of office, such as the closure of Guantanamo Bay and the lifting of sanctions on Cuba, will continue to inflict suffering on the working class both at home and abroad for years to come and, indeed, are likely to worsen under the Trump administration.
Funding the Police, Funding Repression: A Materialist Analysis
One of the most stark betrayals of the "push left" fantasy came directly from Biden's mouth during a past State of the Union address: "The answer is not to defund the police. It's to fund the police." This call for increased police funding received a standing ovation from both Democrats and Republicans, a gut-wrenching sight for anyone who understands the historical role of policing in the USA.
This stance is no surprise given the backgrounds of figures like Kamala Harris, a former federal prosecutor, and Biden himself, who was instrumental in promoting the "super predator" narrative of the 1990s, directly contributing to the mass incarceration of countless black Americans. Biden championed the 1994 Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, often referred to as the "Biden-Hatch Crime Bill," boasting that it would end the notion of Democrats being "weak on crime." This bill authorized 60 new death penalties, 70 enhanced penalties, funded 100,000 new police officers, and allocated funds for 125,000 new state prison cells, contributing significantly to the era of mass incarceration.
Despite popular perception, there was never any meaningful "defunding" of the police in the U.S. In fact, the total amount of funding for U.S. police budgets continued to rise, reaching $135.6 billion in 2023, a figure higher than when George Floyd and Breonna Taylor were murdered in 2020. This clearly demonstrates that Biden's call for more funding wasn't to compensate for cuts, but to further enrich an already bloated, overfunded, and fundamentally oppressive institution.
The claim that police "solve problems" is a myth. Police collectively spend only about 4% of their time on what they themselves classify as "violent crime." Moreover, police steal significantly more property through civil forfeiture than all burglary crimes combined in the U.S. In 2019, federal and state law enforcement agencies seized over $3 billion in assets through civil forfeiture, while victims of burglary and larceny-theft lost an estimated $3.5 billion.
Even these figures pale in comparison to the theft committed by employers. Wage theft – which includes minimum wage violations, overtime violations, and off-the-clock work – costs workers in the U.S. an estimated $15 billion each year, far exceeding all other property crimes. Yet, employers are rarely arrested or prosecuted for this widespread criminal activity that severely damages the livelihoods of the working class. Similarly, banks make about as much money in fraudulent and illegal overdraft fees (estimated to be around $11 billion annually) as all combined property crime in the U.S. every year, yet bankers are not subject to mass incarceration.
The concept of "crime" itself, as defined by the ruling class, is a doctrinal propaganda tool used to oppress specific demographics while ignoring the immense harm caused by the capitalist class. Police even manipulate statistics and often fail to count violent and sexual crimes committed by their own officers. For instance, approximately 4% of prisoners and jail inmates report being sexually assaulted annually (of course… the unreported numbers are no doubt much higher). Between 2016 and 2018, adult correctional authorities reported 2,666 substantiated incidents of inmate sexual victimization by another inmate and 2,229 incidents by staff. Of these staff-on-inmate incidents, correctional officers perpetrated 64% of these horrific abuses. We also know that police officers are often caught committing sex crimes in their line of duty, often even in uniform, though these crimes are almost certainly highly under-reported, given the tendency for American cops to cover for each other. Indeed, 79% of law enforcement officers themselves, when asked, stated that a “Code of Silence” exists which prevents officers from reporting on each other.
Furthermore, there is no evidence of a widespread "crime surge" in the U.S. that would warrant increased police funding. The idea of a crime surge is largely a manufactured narrative used to justify increased repression and expand police power.
The pervasive narrative of "crime surges" in the U.S. is largely a political construct, often inflated by media sensationalism and selective data presentation, failing to reflect comprehensive crime trends. Crime rates have since declined significantly throughout this decade, with 2024 reports showing major drops across multiple categories including homicide (down 20.9%), motor vehicle thefts (down 18.6%), and larceny/theft (down 9.0%) compared to 2023.
Police departments frequently contribute to misleading perceptions by manipulating crime statistics, sometimes to demonstrate effectiveness, secure more funding, or simply due to inconsistent reporting practices. Investigations have uncovered instances of misclassification of serious crimes as minor offenses, discouragement of victims from reporting, and even "clean-record agreements" that conceal officers' misconduct, all of which distort the true picture of crime to serve institutional interests rather than public safety.
Social Murder: The Real Crime of Capitalism
As Friedrich Engels powerfully articulated in The Condition of the Working Class in England:
"When one individual inflicts bodily injury upon another, such that death results, we call the deed manslaughter; when the assailant knew in advance that the injury would be fatal, we call this deed murder. But when society places hundreds of proletarians in such a position that they inevitably meet a too early and unnatural death, one which is quite as much a death by violence as that by the sword or bullet; when it deprives thousands of the necessaries of life, places them under conditions in which they cannot live, forces them through the strong arm of the law to remain in such conditions until that death ensues which is the inevitable consequence; knows that these thousands of victims must perish, and yet permits these conditions to remain, its deed is murder just as surely as the deed of the single individual, disguised, malicious murder, murder against which none can defend himself, which does not seem what it is, because no man sees the murderer, because the death of the victim seems a natural one, since the offense is more one of omission than of commission. But murder it remains."
We call this kind of death by structural inequality social murder. In this sense, capitalists and politicians like Biden (and now Trump), the complicit federal government, and indeed the police-prison industrial complex are all guilty of social murder on a genocidal scale.
The media, controlled by capitalist interests, does not run alarmist stories about the countless deaths caused by pollution or poverty. For instance, air pollution contributes to an estimated tens of thousands of premature deaths annually in the U.S., and water pollution also leads to significant health issues and deaths. Fraudulent home foreclosures, which dispossess thousands, cause untold suffering but rarely lead to arrests or convictions. You are conditioned to see what the police call "crime" and ignore the suffering and death caused by the police themselves and the capitalist class they serve. This is a phenomenon known as “hegemonic framing,” which was well documented by Michael Parenti in his book Inventing Reality:
“The function of the media, on the whole, is to legitimize the existing social order and to demobilize opposition to it. This is done not so much by outright lying as by a selective filtering and weighting of information that serves to divert public attention away from the realities of power and class and toward the more superficial aspects of personality and lifestyle. The media do not simply reflect reality but play a crucial part in constructing it, creating a hegemonic culture that serves the interests of the powerful.”
The widespread perception of surging crime is deliberately exaggerated by capitalist media; in part to distract the population and to instill fear through spectacle, and in part to run cover for the much more pressing and damning phenomenon of social crime committed by the institutions and social phenomena of capitalism. Crime rates, even what we generally think of as "crime," are heavily exacerbated by economic inequality. Studies consistently show that drug use and homicide rates are heavily correlated with inequality in rich countries. Similarly, the prevalence of incarceration is higher in richer and more unequal countries, as well as in richer and more unequal states within the U.S.
Police use their massive budgets not for public safety, but to build invasive, fascistic surveillance programs and to crush social, economic, labor, and racial justice movements. This has been their function since the very beginning of policing, tracing its roots not to community protection, but to the violent enforcement of capitalist property relations and racial hierarchies. In the American South, the earliest forms of organized policing were slave patrols, established in the early 18th century to prevent slave rebellions, capture runaway enslaved people, and enforce the brutal system of chattel slavery. These patrols were explicitly designed to maintain the economic order of the planter class by controlling and terrorizing the enslaved population. Simultaneously, particularly in the West, early policing efforts were instrumental in the suppression and displacement of Native American populations, clearing land for white settlers and resource extraction, thereby facilitating the westward expansion of capitalism. As industrialization took hold, police forces in Northern cities emerged to control a burgeoning, often striking, working class and to manage the influx of immigrant labor, brutally suppressing labor organizing efforts and strikes throughout the late 19th and early 20th centuries. From the Lattimer Massacre to the Haymarket Affair, police have consistently acted as the armed wing of capital, protecting private property and quashing any collective challenge to the status quo. This foundational history reveals that the core purpose of policing in the USA has always been to maintain the power of the ruling class, violently enforcing racial and class hierarchies, rather than serving the broad public interest.
Real Solutions: Funding Communities, Not Cops
Public safety is paramount, but the bourgeois institution of policing does not contribute to it; in fact, as outlined above, American cops often make us less safe, especially people of black, queer, and other marginalized communities. The solutions are clear:
Invest in our communities: Instead of funneling money into the carceral state, we must prioritize providing people with housing, food, healthcare, clothing, and education.
Create safe spaces: Ensure clean and safe spaces for children and adults.
Accessible infrastructure: Provide access to robust public transportation, public utilities and equipment, and community resources.
Social support: Offer comprehensive mental healthcare and other forms of social support.
These are proven strategies to increase public safety, save lives, and reduce harm. They stand in stark contrast to the bourgeois pseudoscience of “policing” that have done nothing to stop the real perpetrators of harm: employers and capitalists who steal from their employees and destroy our planet with their negligence.
As workers, we must demand not just the defunding of the police, but the funding of our communities. We must listen to the science, understand the systemic problems, and do what it takes to actually reduce harm, rather than falling for dogmatic lines about police "protecting and serving" us when they cause so much harm and fail to protect us from the capitalist class.
None of this will be achieved by voting for bourgeois politicians and deluding ourselves into believing we can "push them left." These politicians will never serve our class interests, because they fundamentally serve the interests of the ruling class. This is a core lesson formulated by Marx and Engels and proven in practice by revolutionaries throughout history, from Lenin to Ho Chi Minh to the Black Panthers.
The only way to have our demands met is through direct action, community organizing, dual power building, and building class consciousness as we build power for the working class. These are the tools of liberation which we must forge through class struggle. Ultimately, the only lasting solution to the problems of public safety and harm-reduction is to end capitalism. So long as class society exists, workers will face inequality, suppression, and violence from the ruling class and the state it controls.