capital needs a police force to terrorize people.
 
part of defunding the police is a recognition that the police, as constituted, make life more dangerous for vulnerable populations even as it creates a false sense of safety for white people. 

we are living through a third reconstruction and the great rebellion of the summer of 2020 marks a moment of reckoning between real freedom and fascism.

the presumption was the constitutional basis of our system was sound, we just had to fix it to include everyone. this generation is saying it’s not sound and it never has been sound. it’s been based on dispossession, white supremacy, and gender violence. and so this vision of abolition is not: better jails, better police, better training. it’s no police. it’s no jails. it’s no prisons. it’s creating a new means of justice that’s not based on criminalization but based on affirmation and reparation, and by reparation that is trying to repair relationships that have been damaged and destroyed as a result of five centuries of warfare against Indigenous peoples, africans, poor white people, asian-pacific americans, and latinx populations. so here is an opportunity to actually transform not just the nation, but the entire world.

as long as we continue to have a foreign policy that is built on war, built on drone strikes, the same kind of violence that is replicated in the cities of the united states is replicated in the arab world, is replicated elsewhere. this vision of abolition is one that’s trying to end forms of state violence in american expansion throughout the globe.

i don’t know what’s going to happen. i don’t know the outcome. but i do know that if there’s ever a time when a reconstruction might actually lead to democratization of the united states and the end of american imperialism, this is the opportunity we have. and there’s no possible way that a joe biden is going to lead that. if anything, he and his folks are part of the problem.

capitalism was created on the grounds of a theory of inequality. inequality was foundational to capitalism and as long as we hold onto those ideas and as long as capitalism exists as a means of accumulating wealth through exploitation, then those ideas are not going to go away. you can’t get rid of them. to me, this is not a matter of a kind of slight redistribution, like let’s give more crumbs to the poor. nor is it about just ending poverty as we know it. it is really about creating a structure of caring and repair in which we all can benefit from our labor and our kind of collective generosity and create a whole new ethos, not just for the united states but for the world.

i had to quote liberally from this intercepted interview with robin d.g. kelley but there's more, and there is a longer transcript coming on the intercepted site.