After Black Lives Matter

policing as we know it exists for the defense of property relations, for the protection of retail and touristic spaces of consumption and processes of metropolitan real estate valuation and development, and for the regulation of relative surplus populations who are deemed threats to this accumulation regime.

Even as it inspires popular mobilizations, racial justice discourse obscures the broader national dynamics of policing and imprisonment, which are widely experienced by the most submerged elements of the working class of all colors.

Policing continues to exist for the advancement of the interests of capital,

Hence, classes are not without their own internal social, political, sectoral and other divisions, and the situated-classexperiences of various historical protagonists—the urban poor, politicians, middle-class gentrifiers, beat cops, union bureaucrats, assembly-line workers, activists, real estate developers, combat veterans, etc.—are foregrounded

For many blacks, the racism towards Obama was symptomatic of the unresolved problem of the color line.

In a manner reminiscent of the televised coverage of civil rights demonstrations, which forced some white northerners to witness the brutality experienced by black southerners demanding basic rights, the viral videos of police killings created a similar dissonance between the much-vaunted progress symbolized in the election of Barack Obama and the

This is a deeper problem on the US left—the tendency to read protests as always prefigurative rather than contingent, and as a manifestation of real power rather than a reflection of potential.

Or, in the absence of effective counterpower, will we witness more reactionary changes that legitimate the daily violence of capital, or at least remove the most offensive aspects from plain sight?

Trump doubled down on the New Right strategy, but the political, economic and demographic ground has shifted in the half century since the reactionary “silent majority” was first conjured into being.