If every police officer in Ferguson were African-American, it probably wouldn’t change much of anything.

Apart from a brief shining moment directly following Emancipation, when former slaves began to gain a political foothold in the country, the postbellum history of race in America, from Jim Crow to George Zimmerman, has been about pre-criminalizing African-Americans, painting them as a class of predators not to be trusted. It’s never been about keeping the peace but about maintaining the power.

There are racist police officers, of course, but even a race-blind force in every U.S. town and city wouldn’t have made things fair because fair was never on the docket. An example: Studies have shown that white and black Americans smoke marijuana at similar levels yet the latter are arrested three times more often. That enters a large group of people into a system they never should have been a part of. In this way, we endeavor to create a criminal class.

The Broken Windows Theory allowed for petty offenses (or alleged ones) to be amplified into breaches of great importance–these measures will stop violent crime!–with the police reimagined as hectoring (if heavily armed) meter maids, the citizens serving as beleaguered piggy banks. Add in profiling and you have an endlessly harassed race of people, and sooner or later these confrontations lead to tragedy.

The micromanaging of civil life has turned us all into potential suspects and African-Americans into arrests waiting to happen. The difference between a stroll and a perp walk has never been narrower.

The opening of David Graeber’s Gawker essay “Ferguson and the Criminalization of American Life“:

The Department of Justice’s investigation of the Ferguson Police Department has scandalized the nation, and justly so. But the department’s institutional racism, while shocking, isn’t the report’s most striking revelation.

More damning is this: in a major American city, the criminal justice system perceives a large part of that city’s population not as citizens to be protected, but as potential targets for what can only be described as a shake-down operation designed to wring money out of the poorest and most vulnerable by any means they could, and that as a result, the overwhelming majority of Ferguson’s citizens had outstanding warrants.

Many will try to write off this pattern of economic exploitation as some kind of strange anomaly. In fact, it’s anything but. What the racism of Ferguson’s criminal justice system produced is simply a nightmarish caricature of something that is beginning to happen on every level of American life; something which is beginning to transform our most basic sense of who we are, and how we—or most of us, anyway—relate to the central institutions of our society, in ways that are genuinely disastrous.

The DOJ’s report has made us all familiar with the details: the constant pressure on police to issue as many citations as possible for minor infractions (such as parking or seat-belt violations) and the equal pressure on the courts to make the fines as high as possible; the arcane court rules apparently designed to be almost impossible to follow (the court’s own web page contained incorrect information); the way citizens who had never been found guilty—indeed, never even been accused—of an actual crime were rounded up, jailed, threatened with “indefinite” incarceration in fetid cells, risking disease and serious injury, until their destitute families could assemble hundreds if not thousands of dollars in fines, fees, and penalties to pay their jailers.

As a result of such practices, over three quarters of the population had warrants out for the arrest at any given time. The entire population was criminalized.•

We’re better and worse than ever in America. We’re haves, but we’re have-nots. Technology has gleefully led to a decentralization of media power, and science is accomplishing what was once sci-fi. Hollywood can barely keep up with the world, let alone predict it, as the Dream Factory has been outpaced by reality, However, we’re also deeply narcissistic, most often using our amazing technology merely like mirrors, distracted by our distorted sense of self, so much so that we seem unable to address a political and economic system that has run aground. And the mainstream culture is irredeemably stupid, all “housewives” and halfwits. If you want to see how much we’ve slipped in that regard, just have a look at an issue of People magazine from the 1970s, when pop singers and public intellectuals shared the pages. You can’t blame the People people for a culture that has become saturated with stupidity. They’re just taking the pulse.

But could a revolution of some sort wipe all the inequity away? I doubt it, because we love being entertained by clever toys and reflecting pools. Of course, if personal power and narrowcasting become political and writ large, that could change. Occupy Wall Street, despite being derided as a short-lived, fashionable failure, actually framed a Presidential election. But can such a movement do more than frame? Can it break the glass?

From “A Practical Utopian’s Guide to the Coming Collapse,” David Graeber’s new Baffler article:

“Normally, when you challenge the conventional wisdom—that the current economic and political system is the only possible one—the first reaction you are likely to get is a demand for a detailed architectural blueprint of how an alternative system would work, down to the nature of its financial instruments, energy supplies, and policies of sewer maintenance. Next, you are likely to be asked for a detailed program of how this system will be brought into existence. Historically, this is ridiculous. When has social change ever happened according to someone’s blueprint? It’s not as if a small circle of visionaries in Renaissance Florence conceived of something they called “capitalism,” figured out the details of how the stock exchange and factories would someday work, and then put in place a program to bring their visions into reality. In fact, the idea is so absurd we might well ask ourselves how it ever occurred to us to imagine this is how change happens to begin.

This is not to say there’s anything wrong with utopian visions. Or even blueprints. They just need to be kept in their place. The theorist Michael Albert has worked out a detailed plan for how a modern economy could run without money on a democratic, participatory basis. I think this is an important achievement—not because I think that exact model could ever be instituted, in exactly the form in which he describes it, but because it makes it impossible to say that such a thing is inconceivable. Still, such models can be only thought experiments. We cannot really conceive of the problems that will arise when we start trying to build a free society. What now seem likely to be the thorniest problems might not be problems at all; others that never even occurred to us might prove devilishly difficult. There are innumerable X-factors.

The most obvious is technology. This is the reason it’s so absurd to imagine activists in Renaissance Italy coming up with a model for a stock exchange and factories—what happened was based on all sorts of technologies that they couldn’t have anticipated, but which in part only emerged because society began to move in the direction that it did. This might explain, for instance, why so many of the more compelling visions of an anarchist society have been produced by science fiction writers (Ursula K. Le Guin, Starhawk, Kim Stanley Robinson). In fiction, you are at least admitting the technological aspect is guesswork.”

America should have announced in January 1970, in the wake of our successful moon voyage, that we were visiting Mars in 1986, when that planet and ours were going to be in relatively close orbit. Just imagine how much further our science would have progressed if we had stayed on course. But failure of vision isn’t the only reason why our Space Age fantasies haven’t come to fruition. The opening of David Graeber’s Baffler essay, “Of Flying Cars and the Declining Rate of Profit“:

“A secret question hovers over us, a sense of disappointment, a broken promise we were given as children about what our adult world was supposed to be like. I am referring not to the standard false promises that children are always given (about how the world is fair, or how those who work hard shall be rewarded), but to a particular generational promise—given to those who were children in the fifties, sixties, seventies, or eighties—one that was never quite articulated as a promise but rather as a set of assumptions about what our adult world would be like. And since it was never quite promised, now that it has failed to come true, we’re left confused: indignant, but at the same time, embarrassed at our own indignation, ashamed we were ever so silly to believe our elders to begin with.

Where, in short, are the flying cars? Where are the force fields, tractor beams, teleportation pods, antigravity sleds, tricorders, immortality drugs, colonies on Mars, and all the other technological wonders any child growing up in the mid-to-late twentieth century assumed would exist by now? Even those inventions that seemed ready to emerge—like cloning or cryogenics—ended up betraying their lofty promises. What happened to them?

We are well informed of the wonders of computers, as if this is some sort of unanticipated compensation, but, in fact, we haven’t moved even computing to the point of progress that people in the fifties expected we’d have reached by now.”