The Murder of Renee Good: A Case Study in the Inhumanity of State Power

The state is synonymous with sovereign political power; that is the state is the institution which claims the exclusive legal right to control over violence within a delaminated territory. States are a fairly new institution given that for most of the time human beings have existed they have lived in stateless indigenous societies. States came about with the development of social stratification in which social resources and influence became monopolized by certain elite sections of the population. Thus, the historical function of the state as an institution is the establishment and reproduction of the power of ruling classes; those who monopolize control over society's productive resources and processes.

The state thus must be a hierarchical, coercive, and bureaucratic institution which maintains social control via courts, jails, police, and military. In the modern period liberal and conservative political ideologies have justified the existence of the state on the basis of the protection of core values such as tradition, common liberty, and/or equal protection. While social movements and administrations have tried to transform modern states in line with these values, the social function of the state has always remained the same because the state is defined by the social function of the coercive establishment and reproduction of ruling class power. Struggles by the non-ruling classes have managed historically to restrain state power in the modern period culminating in the establishment of liberal democratic nation-states which feature civil rights, often some sort of social safety net, separation of powers, and constitutional limitations on state power.

However, like all modern states, their historical function is to prop up the power of regional sections of the modern ruling class, i.e. owners of productive capital, or capitalists. As such liberal democracies in the new millennium have been plagued by illiberal populist movements trying to remove civil rights and separation of powers from constitutional democratic states. In the United States, as part of such a program, Donald Trump, in his second term, has unleashed ICE agents across the country to catch minorities in sweeping immigration enforcement nets with little judicial oversight. The result has been disquieting ICE penetrations of local communities that have faced opposition from residents primarily interested in communal safety.

Recently Minneapolis resident and mother Renee Good was shot to death point blank in her car when trying to drive away from ICE agents approaching her vehicle, not very far from where George Floyd was murdered by police in 2020. The Trump administration has spun the killing as an act of self-defense in falsely stating that Good was weaponizing her car against the agents which is simply refuted by the video footage. Many people are already asking themselves how this could happen in a liberal democracy like the United States and the answer is simple. Humanistic values were defined by the enlightenment and renaissance as those values consistent with human autonomy and universal common human feeling and recognition.

The liberal democratic tradition was inspired by these values but combined them with elitist principles that were antithetical to such values which held that the masses could not cultivate such values on their own. Such values would have to be protected by morally and intellectually qualified elites running hierarchical political and economic institutions. Thus, liberal democracy combined the coercive, elitist structure of the state, itself in contradiction to humanistic universalism, with civil rights and procedural limitations designed in some way to ensure that this structure nevertheless respected those values. This combination of humanism and elitism was necessitated by the commercial imperatives of the capitalist world-economy which are premised on meritocratic social advancement according to financial means.

Thus like all forms of state liberal democracy could never live up to the values of humanism, it would always be inhumane. This truth of the state is exemplified in the fact that once commercial fluctuations in the world-economy and social movements made a blow to the social status of middle strata groups (for instance western white working class cishet men) populist movements like MAGA successfully began wielding state power to dismantle humanistic limitations on that power which defined the liberal democratic order. The liberal democratic state has dialectically undermined itself in the murder of Renee Good. The only way to make good on humanistic values and establish a truly humane society is to demolish all forms of state power, to end the state once and for all in a free community of producers without coercive political mechanisms.

Sources
Global Trumpism, Hopkin and Blyth
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3144271
Populism, Mudde and Kaltwasser
The State, Barclay
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N5j0lkQiVEw
Traditional and Critical Theory, Horkheimer
History of Philosophy, Grayling
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B-bhdv3OQ4M&t=162s