Ends and Beginnings: An Abolitionist Manifesto

Bridget Saunders Vial

Their End is Our Beginning:
Cops, Capitalism, and Abolition
By brian bean
Haymarket Books, 2025, 280 pages, $19.95 paper.

IN MAY 2006 in Oaxaca, Mexico, teachers and their families assembled for a “festive but militant protest occupation” of the city’s central square, which had become an annual fixture of contract negotiations. When the governor sent police to clear the encampment with tear gas, it ignited popular outrage at economic conditions and neoliberal policies:

Over 350 organizations joined the teachers’ union; the encampment was rebuilt, barricades erected, and popular assemblies convened to organize a mobilization. For four months, residents lived in an alternative world.

The police disbanded and the governor fled. Uncooperative TV stations were seized and handed to university communications students, who broadcast information about the mobilization and interviews with its participants.

Unarmed street patrols formed to watch for government and right-wing attacks. One activist noted that while petty crime didn’t vanish, it didn’t go up — and what did disappear was violence inflicted by police officers.

Chicago-based writer and organizer brian bean recounts the Oaxaca mobilization in Their End is Our Beginning, in part to illustrate the deeply intertwined nature of capitalist states and their police. Protests over political conditions inevitably confront, and sometimes dissolve, the police. Likewise, protests over police violence tend to detonate political explosions, sometimes dissolving governments.

Facing State Violence

Their End is Our Beginning was published last year, as New York DSA and the Mamdani campaign helped catapult socialism to newfound popularity, and simultaneously as ratcheting repression and surveillance have raised national consciousness of the state’s capacity to deport, incarcerate and kill.

To this political moment, bean offers a analysis of capitalist states and their police, covering roughly 500 years of history, in three parts:

How did the institution of policing emerge?

What do police actually do?

Why do they do it?

What arrangement of political power conserves their central function, stymying efforts to reduce their violence and their ever-increasing portion of municipal budgets?

As bean concludes, “rather than capitalist states being sites of struggle that can be perhaps repurposed for our aims, states are the chief obstacle to achieving abolition.” To transform social, economic, and political conditions, movements for liberation will necessarily confront and have to overcome the police.

Movements to abolish police will have to transform the social, economic, and political conditions of capitalist relations, of which police are a linchpin. Socialists must be abolitionists, and abolitionists must be anti-capitalist.

Enclosing the Commons

The origins of police can only be contextualized with the rise of industrial capitalism, which proceeded through violent land seizures that transformed “the commons” (e.g. shared forests, farmland, and pasture) and their newly dispossessed inhabitants into land and labor inputs of a production machine.

“Once deprived of commons the laborers will work every day in the year, their children will be put to labor early,” touted a 1794 English report. This process accelerated in England in the first half the 1500s, producing a large population of destitute peasants who roamed the countryside and settled in towns looking for work.

By mid-century, England passed what Karl Marx termed “bloody legislation against the expropriated,” establishing new crimes like vagrancy, loitering, and refusal of wage work, for which criminals could be flogged, branded, hanged or imprisoned. (The UK repealed the Vagrancy Act on June 29, 2026.)

Capitalism’s rise proceeded with yet more brutality in the Western Hemisphere, where a ruling class instituted genocide and chattel slavery to drive the value of land and labor down to zero.

In Barbados in 1657, European enslavers deemed their ad hoc slave patrols insufficient to contain the resistance of enslaved Africans in the labor camps. They lobbied for passage of a series of slave codes which borrowed from England’s bloody laws of vagabondage, imbued them with anti-Black racism and new techniques of violence, and enforced racial division between Africans and poor and indentured whites: five years of slavery for whites deemed to be accomplices of the enslaved.

Barbados’ codes were imported to Virginia following a multi-racial rebellion in 1676, and soon to the rest of what became the U.S. South. This pattern continued for centuries: Near-constant uprisings drove experimentation in methods of repression, and in moments of crisis, ruling classes looked to each other for solutions.

The scale of unrest is difficult to fathom. The Gordon Riots, in 1789, broke open the gates of London’s prison, burned it to the ground, and nearly felled Parliament and the Bank of England.

Riots of a similar scale rocked Paris in 1775. New York saw multi-racial rebellions in 1712 and 1741, and monthly riots between 1825 and 1830.

Modernizing the Police

By the 1800s, the experimentations began to resemble modern police: uniformed, salaried, day-and-night patrollers with public funding and authority, who wielded the state’s monopoly on the legitimate use of violence to enforce racist, classist legal codes, with particular emphasis on crowd control.

Even amid roiling unrest, the proposals were hotly contested. Great Britain’s Parliamentary Committee, writing in 1818, objected to plans for a central police authority on grounds that it would make “all classes of society spies on each other.”

Over these concerns, the London Metropolitan Police donned suits with copper stars (“cops”) in 1829, trained in methods of colonial control developed by the Royal Irish Constabulary. Observers from the United States noted admiringly that the socialized force saved the wealthy money on private security, while offering the ideological benefit of appearing “public.”

New York established a similar force in 1844, and Chicago in 1855, following a riot that the city’s constables were unable to put down. “I believe we are strong enough to suppress any uprising,” wrote Chicago police inspector John Bonfield in 1886, as CPD murdered six workers ahead of the Haymarket Affair.

Popular myths about police imply that their function has changed substantially in the last 150-or-so years. Crime, the myths go, is harm done to society. Police exist to prevent and solve crime. More police prevent more crime and solve more crime. Without police, there would be chaos. Police keep us safe.

It is true that today’s police exist in a society with more democracy than their predecessors; concessions have been made to ensure the survival of the institution and its core functions, including to Black and working-class communities. This, in turn, reflects popular ambivalence about defunding the police.

Depending on your audience, you might find it helpful to frame bean’s systematic dismantling of these myths:

The definition of “crime” maps onto race and class at least as much as it maps onto harm. When Louisville, Kentucky police murdered Breonna Taylor, firing 32 bullets in her bedroom, they were pursuing an alleged drug dealer (a “criminal”) who had just been arrested ten miles away.

When the Sackler family hawked opioids through their multi-billion dollar family business, using false research and corruption to contribute to hundreds of thousands of American overdose deaths since 1999, they were pursued not on criminal but civil charges.

 “What cops did not do is break into the home of one of the Sacklers’ many mansions and execute random individuals who may have been associated with them,” bean writes. (74-75)

Research finds little evidence that police reduce crime, and surveil-and-patrol policing tactics empirically fail in their stated goal of preventing it.

The same tactics have been used for centuries; Patrick Colquhoun’s 1798 Treatise on Police of the Metropolis bears striking resemblance to the 1982 article proposing the broken windows theory, which begot “stop and frisk” in New York City.

Given their longevity, we might assume that these tactics succeed at unstated goals of cultivating fear and preemptive compliance in order to head off all manner of political and economic resistance, like turning a neighbor’s shut-off water back on or selling goods on the street without a permit.

Cops are a threat to public safety (committing one in three murders of strangers in the United States), and the only reforms which succeed in mitigating their violence do so by reducing their numbers, authority and weapons.

In 2016, the Chicago Police Accountability Task Force found that the department operated with “no regard for the sanctity of life.” After mandating 900 hours of training for new recruits to promote “a solid ethical foundation,” CPD stands as the number one police department in the country in the murder of children.

If you imagine that the purpose of a system is what it does, and look at the spectacular failure of police reform to reduce violence, you must conclude that violence is part of the purpose.

Threatening Our Safety

How have the core functions of police been conserved over time? Who and what compelled city council members across the country to increase police budgets 10 percent in the aftermath of the largest racial justice uprising in two generations? That uprising demanded the institution’s defunding.

Today’s ruling class is large, disunified, and rarely explicit about the role of cops in class politics. (You won’t find them crowing that “the people are kept in complete political subjection,” unlike their peers of earlier eras.)

Attempting to answer the above questions, bean argues that state managers are under explicit pressure to create an investment-friendly business climate, and independently, that an army of gun-toting state functionaries (comprising 40 to 50 percent of municipal employees in many cities) does just that.

Unfortunately, bean fails to draw a conscious and mechanistic link between these two points. While disappointing — understanding the mechanisms by which structural conditions reproduce themselves is strategically instructive — this gap does not weaken bean’s central argument.

Today’s police effect historically-rooted intents. They enable an exploitative economic order by embattling Black, Brown, and Indigenous communities and multiracial resistance, and all but eliminating once-common forms of resistance, like direct confrontation of landlords and bosses and what historian Eric Hobsbawm referred to as “collective bargaining by riot.”

Among animal species that establish dominance hierarchies, confrontations break into fights only when there is a reasonable question of who will win. More often, the would-be winner displays a dominant posture, the other responds by displaying a submissive posture.

Today’s police, armed with weapons, surveillance technology, and the threat of state imprisonment, face fewer uprisings and rebellions than their predecessors; they play a significant role in reproducing the capitalist order simply by broadcasting their credible threat.

Paired with the political concessions and potent mythology discussed above, this dynamic blurs the relationship between cops and capitalism in modern states. Their End is Our Beginning brings that relationship back into focus. This book carries lessons for our narrative strategies — how we talk about police and abolition with the broader public — and for the political strategies of abolitionist and socialist organization.

Toward the end of the book, bean surveys moments in history when powerful uprisings, as in Oaxaca, confronted the police and won, establishing autonomous zones that give us a glimpse of abolitionist realities: Paris in 1848 and 1871, Russia in 1917, Spain in 1936-37, Northern Ireland in 1969-1972, South Africa in 1984, Tunisia in 2010, and Egypt in 2011.

Widening the Perspective

A limitation of Their End Is Our Beginning is its boundaried focus on police as agents of state violence. Meanwhile, bean notes the trend toward “interoperability” of police with the military, ICE, and other agencies, which has been getting fine-tuned amid ICE and National Guard occupation of U.S. cities.

How should we understand this latest experiment in policing and repression? In bean’s survey of historical autonomous zones, several were retaken by military intervention. Widening our analytical lens to include the military, ICE, and other such institutions is necessary to apply the book’s implicit argument that movement strategy must account for the state’s capacity for violence.

Direct democracy is bean’s vision of the alternative to policing. The author also endorses a Gramscian approach to party-building, but largely leaves discernment of the book’s strategic implications to the reader. I wonder how bean views the party-building project of New York DSA and the challenge it confronted, upon Mamdani’s victory, of the mayor’s responsibility to appoint the police commissioner.

The centuries-old leftist debate about how to orient to state power — whether to seize or implode it, transform or end it, and through what kinds of institutions — is currently proliferating.

In 2024 Boston Review published a set of essays called “What IsThe State For?” which leads with Olufemi Taiwo’s argument that we must use the coercive power of the state to end fossil fuels before we can otherwise transform the world. Abolitionists Mariame Kaba and Andrea Ritchie are the most critical respondents, arguing we should seize power from the state rather than becoming the state itself.

A strength of bean’s analysis is the account of the iterative, dialectical development of today’s capitalist paradigm. How should we think about tacking, iteratively, toward a new and life-affirming system to replace the current one?

I often think of an interview with another Chicagoan, abolitionist organizer Asha Ransby-Sporn: “To get two and a half clinics reopened and a pilot of a non-police mental health crisis response,” Ransby-Sporn said, “it took 10 to 15 years of people protesting clinic closures in Chicago; it took a pandemic-context global uprising to revive that campaign; it took electing a bunch of people to city council, putting a referendum on the ballot, electing a mayor who made this a campaign promise, and then a ton of other work since then just to win this police alternative at a small scale.”

The immense resistance mounted against their campaign’s meaningful but modest goal underscores bean’s argument about intertwined nature of capitalist states and their police.

When our campaigns and organizational infrastructure become powerful enough, and aimed at the keystones of racial capitalism, we will meet massive resistance. Eventually, we will meet political moments of direct confrontation. May we be prepared to bring about a new beginning.

September-October 2026, ATC 244