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Their End Is Our Beginning: Cops, Capitalism, and Abolition
A deeply reported analysis of the connections between policing and capitalism, centering global lessons of revolt and resistance
Where do cops come from and what do they do? How did “modern policing” as we know it today come to be? What about the capitalist state necessitates policing? In this clear and comprehensive account of why and how the police—the linchpin of capitalism—function and exist, organizer and author brian bean presents a clear case for the abolition of policing and capitalism.
Their End Is Our Beginning traces the roots and development of policing in global capitalism through colonial rule, racist enslavement, and class oppression, along the way arguing how police power can be challenged and, ultimately, abolished. bean draws from extensive interviews with activists from Mexico to Ireland to Egypt, all of whom share compelling and knowledgeable perspectives on what it takes to—even if temporarily—take down the cops and build a thriving community-organized society, free from the police. The lessons they offer bring nuance to the meaning of “solidarity” and clarity to what “abolition” and “revolution” look like in practice.
Featuring illustrations by Chicago-based artist Charlie Aleck, Their End Is Our Beginning is an incendiary book that offers a socialist analysis of policing and the capitalist state, a vital discussion of the contours of abolition at large, and the revolutionary logic needed for liberation.
Where do cops come from and what do they do? How did “modern policing” as we know it today come to be? What about the capitalist state necessitates policing? In this clear and comprehensive account of why and how the police—the linchpin of capitalism—function and exist, organizer and author brian bean presents a clear case for the abolition of policing and capitalism.
Their End Is Our Beginning traces the roots and development of policing in global capitalism through colonial rule, racist enslavement, and class oppression, along the way arguing how police power can be challenged and, ultimately, abolished. bean draws from extensive interviews with activists from Mexico to Ireland to Egypt, all of whom share compelling and knowledgeable perspectives on what it takes to—even if temporarily—take down the cops and build a thriving community-organized society, free from the police. The lessons they offer bring nuance to the meaning of “solidarity” and clarity to what “abolition” and “revolution” look like in practice.
Featuring illustrations by Chicago-based artist Charlie Aleck, Their End Is Our Beginning is an incendiary book that offers a socialist analysis of policing and the capitalist state, a vital discussion of the contours of abolition at large, and the revolutionary logic needed for liberation.
297 pages, Kindle Edition
Published July 29, 2025
36 people are currently reading
1312 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
June 6, 2025
This is a must read for abolitionists, revolutionaries, and really anyone horrified by the constant, unrelenting violence of cops.
bean gives a strong case for abolition but also goes much deeper, addressing crucial strategic questions I haven't seen addressed anywhere else in abolitionist lit.
Many have rightly (!!!) argued that the cops are unreformable. bean engages with a rich canon of abolitionist thinkers, historians, and Marxist theorists to break down the social role of cops in capitalism. This examination of their social role helps illuminate not only why cops are unreformable but why they must be seen as antagonists to any and all movements for justice for the global majority.
Crucially, this book looks at abolition as a global struggle rather than a US-centric one, something often missed. bean compellingly argues that looking outside the US frame provides the abolitionist movement with examples of struggles that have reached heights beyond what we’ve seen here. (This includes experiments in getting rid of the cops/expelling them from neighborhoods and creating alternative safety paradigms for some period of time.)
Finally, there is an important discussion of strategy in the final chapter that is much needed today, with cop cities sprouting up, ICE raids intensifying, and a general rise in state repression confronting all of our movements for justice. Once we have recognized that reform is not viable, what is our strategy for moving toward the world we want to see? Again, the examples provided of international struggles that have taken on the cops provide crucial (and sobering) lessons.
The book also includes gorgeous images by Charlie Aleck throughout that complement the text.
To quote Tortuguita (in one of the book's epigraphs): "The abolitionist mission isn't done until every prison is empty, when there are no more cops, when the land has been given back, that's when it's over."
bean gives a strong case for abolition but also goes much deeper, addressing crucial strategic questions I haven't seen addressed anywhere else in abolitionist lit.
Many have rightly (!!!) argued that the cops are unreformable. bean engages with a rich canon of abolitionist thinkers, historians, and Marxist theorists to break down the social role of cops in capitalism. This examination of their social role helps illuminate not only why cops are unreformable but why they must be seen as antagonists to any and all movements for justice for the global majority.
Crucially, this book looks at abolition as a global struggle rather than a US-centric one, something often missed. bean compellingly argues that looking outside the US frame provides the abolitionist movement with examples of struggles that have reached heights beyond what we’ve seen here. (This includes experiments in getting rid of the cops/expelling them from neighborhoods and creating alternative safety paradigms for some period of time.)
Finally, there is an important discussion of strategy in the final chapter that is much needed today, with cop cities sprouting up, ICE raids intensifying, and a general rise in state repression confronting all of our movements for justice. Once we have recognized that reform is not viable, what is our strategy for moving toward the world we want to see? Again, the examples provided of international struggles that have taken on the cops provide crucial (and sobering) lessons.
The book also includes gorgeous images by Charlie Aleck throughout that complement the text.
To quote Tortuguita (in one of the book's epigraphs): "The abolitionist mission isn't done until every prison is empty, when there are no more cops, when the land has been given back, that's when it's over."
August 23, 2025
The argument draws from and deepens local and more narrowly focused historical accounts by emphasizing the relational, experimental, and global emergence of "the cops" as a specialized weapon of racial capitalist state power.
For the abolitionist, worker-activist, organizer, the people--the end of capitalism demands abolition --our struggle and possible futures begins with the struggles for the end of capitalism and cops.
For the abolitionist, worker-activist, organizer, the people--the end of capitalism demands abolition --our struggle and possible futures begins with the struggles for the end of capitalism and cops.
November 14, 2025
Concise, clearly argued, easy to read.
P3 Effectively curtailing the violence of police power requires limiting their number, tools, weapons, and ability to act. Reforms that fail to do so can create what Mariame Kaba calls a dangerous “new common sense,” and – as many have pointed out – end up extending police powers.
P5 The object of abolition is not just the cops and the cages but the society that produces the social problems to which cops and cages serve as barbaric, false solutions.
P28 The main method for catching perpetrators was what was called “hue and cry,” whereby if an individual saw someone in the act of carrying out a crime, they would basically yell, “Stop thief!” and put responsibility on onlookers for detaining the suspect.
[….] To give a sense of scale, on the eve of the French Revolution of 1789 there was a total of only forty-eight commissaires in Paris, a city of almost 700,000.
P38 […] the existing precursors to the police were attempts by the ruling class to organize and manage the urban environment. The emergence of the mob and the restive crowd posed a massive challenge to the urban order and thus required new solutions.
P50 These two components – regular patrol and crowd control – continue to be the main functions of the police to this day. […]
By 1822, Peel’s efforts had led to the creation of the Royal Irish Constabulary as a more effective body for colonial domination. The task was to create a foreign military occupation that didn’t look too much like a foreign military occupation. Soon, the ideas Peel developed while managing colonization would inform the invention of the new London Metropolitan Police in 1829.
P56 In 1823, one of the prominent slaver-colonists, Stephen F. Austin formed a privately funded militia called the Texas Rangers in order to “extinguish Native presence in Texas” and to serve as a slave patrol. <>
P65 […] cops are uniquely ineffective at dealing with the actual social phenomenon of crime. For the majority of working people, therefore, what the cops do is socially useless. The police as they exist involves – to quote historian Micol Seigel – “The translation of state violence into human form.”
P67 […] all significant changes in the institution serve to increase the cops’ capacity for violence and the scope of their operations.
P74 The most violent and socially harmful acts in the history of the US have been carried out by the government and wealthy corporations, even if those acts aren’t formally considered crimes per legal statute.
P76 However, while corporations are given free rein to pollute and poison, vandalism and littering are heavily policed. […] decried retail theft and looting as a social ill at “crisis levels.” The actual amount of loss from organized retail theft was estimated by the National Retail Federation at $2.1 billion in 2020 nationwide. Compare that with the fact that these same corporations carry out an estimated $15 billion a year in wage theft from their own employees.
P80 A laboring poor was required for capitalism, but such a “general army of Delinquents” needed to be disciplined. This new preventative science was, as Neocleous astutely puts it, “explicitly designed to end the appropriation of any means of subsistence other than the wage.” What was actually “prevented” by policing was alternative means of survival outside the formal market, a remint that can be traced all the way up to contemporary policing’s focus on the unregulated drug trade, sex work, and other informal economies. […] Crime “prevention” is primarily about disciplining people to rely solely on the market for survival.
P82 Sociologist Egon Brittner, whose work is widely taught and considered definitional in police education, clearly states that “the police role is far better understood by saying that their ability to arrest offenders is incidental to their authority to use force.” […] From their origin two hundred years ago to the present, the main way that police catch those who commit crimes is by someone who has seen the crime telling the police what happened.
P83 Solving crime in this way does not require a large body of swaggering armed guards. One older study found that the majority of cops make one felony arrest per year and spend less than 2 percent of their time responding to crimes in progress. […] Rather than “solving” crime, most of the time cops are on patrol, suspiciously scrutinizing those who’ve done nothing wrong.
P84 Broken Windows Theory […] Kelling and Wilson’s theory comes from their short, nine-page 1982 article published in a cultural magazine with scant empirical research. Broken windows is less a theory with any rigor than an ideological position that was deployed as the justification for ramping up police presence and aggression in the late 1980s and 1990s.
P85 There is no correlation between the per capita size of the police force and reduction of crime rate. Indeed, it is often the case that the places with higher per capita police forces have higher rates of crime. <>
P100 <>
P105 More than three-quarters of all homicides are committed by someone the victim knows. But, of all killings by strangers in the US, more than a third are carried out by the police.
P121 While the former – the standing army – is a feature of the earliest, pre-capitalist states, the police are an institution the developed along with, and as a constitutive part of, the capitalist state, Police, and the entire carceral apparatus of which they are a crucial part, create and recreate capitalist order through immense violence.
P122 <>
P136 Increased demographic “representation” in police forces does not reduce the violence; it only serves to legitimize it.
P137 Alex Kueng […] witnessed the police abuser of a sibling and decided to be a cop, as he thought it the best way to change a broken system and told his mother he wanted to change it from the inside. According to his mother, he thought improved diversity of the police would fix the institution and repair the relationship between the police and the Black community. Then, on May 25, 2020, Kueng held down George Floyd to the pavement while Derek Chauvin murdered him.
P143 The police, as an institution, are unreformable, and we cannot expect to shift the institution in any positive direction. No appeals should be made for them to change themselves or come to our side. Our appeal, our demand, is for them to be defunded, disarmed, disbanded, smashed, abolished.
P148 If “we are demanding that a carceral, racial capitalist state disarm itself,” write abolitionists Mariame Kaba and Andrea Ritchie, “we are demanding that it stop preforming its central functions.”
P183 The security of capitalist social order is dependent upon this monopoly of violence, this limitless, constant power without boundary or intermission, translated into human form as the cop. The police will never be obsolete for the ruling class. In organizing for abolition, we can’t get around the fact that we are talking about depriving the state of its authority.
P191 Perhaps the most substantial change from police reform efforts has been to increase the legitimacy and normalcy of the fundamentally violent institution in the eyes of the public.
P192 Some advocates of police reform would argue that many good recommendations that resulted from these committees were not enacted, or that the right reforms have not yet been attempted. There is something to this: historians have outlined how many of the recommendations to address structural inequality were abandoned, while all the recommendations to increase policing were enacted. <>
P194 The police role […] as a uniquely repressive hyper-disciplinary avatar of the state, trumps whatever training they receive.
P198 A movement for abolition recognizes police themselves as the problem and, as a start, seeks changes to limit their size, funding, and power. Generally speaking, abolitionist demands address the underlying purpose of policing head on […] These demands can blunt the violence and have real benefits for the populations most targeted by policing.
P200 What could it look like to abolish the conditions that give rise to cops and cages?
P204 As Geo Maher argues, “The only antidote to the police is community, community, and more community.” […] the police become obsolete for our communities because we can take care of ourselves. […] The procedural and autonomist abolition approaches converge in a strategy of attrition: we abolish the police by stifling the institution’s growth and chipping away at its foundations so that it crumbles over time.
P206 Democratic norms are tossed to the side when they don’t serve the interest of states and capital. We saw that in 2020, when unelected state bureaucrats blocked the Minneapolis City Council’s vote to disband the police.
P212 The weakness of the procedural and autonomist paths is that they both leave open the question of what to do about the “principal object of the crisis” –the state—and are thus unable to push beyond the crisis and transition to a different kind of world.
There is a third path to abolition: social revolution. Abolishing the police requires the overthrow of the state. […] The state’s primary agent of coercive force and violence is the police. Because of their nature within the capitalist state, the real alternative to the police is democratic control over all of society from below.
P216 The possibility for a liberated future will only be built in a world free of police and free from the rubble of capitalist states. Their end is our beginning.
P3 Effectively curtailing the violence of police power requires limiting their number, tools, weapons, and ability to act. Reforms that fail to do so can create what Mariame Kaba calls a dangerous “new common sense,” and – as many have pointed out – end up extending police powers.
P5 The object of abolition is not just the cops and the cages but the society that produces the social problems to which cops and cages serve as barbaric, false solutions.
P28 The main method for catching perpetrators was what was called “hue and cry,” whereby if an individual saw someone in the act of carrying out a crime, they would basically yell, “Stop thief!” and put responsibility on onlookers for detaining the suspect.
[….] To give a sense of scale, on the eve of the French Revolution of 1789 there was a total of only forty-eight commissaires in Paris, a city of almost 700,000.
P38 […] the existing precursors to the police were attempts by the ruling class to organize and manage the urban environment. The emergence of the mob and the restive crowd posed a massive challenge to the urban order and thus required new solutions.
P50 These two components – regular patrol and crowd control – continue to be the main functions of the police to this day. […]
By 1822, Peel’s efforts had led to the creation of the Royal Irish Constabulary as a more effective body for colonial domination. The task was to create a foreign military occupation that didn’t look too much like a foreign military occupation. Soon, the ideas Peel developed while managing colonization would inform the invention of the new London Metropolitan Police in 1829.
P56 In 1823, one of the prominent slaver-colonists, Stephen F. Austin formed a privately funded militia called the Texas Rangers in order to “extinguish Native presence in Texas” and to serve as a slave patrol. <>
P65 […] cops are uniquely ineffective at dealing with the actual social phenomenon of crime. For the majority of working people, therefore, what the cops do is socially useless. The police as they exist involves – to quote historian Micol Seigel – “The translation of state violence into human form.”
P67 […] all significant changes in the institution serve to increase the cops’ capacity for violence and the scope of their operations.
P74 The most violent and socially harmful acts in the history of the US have been carried out by the government and wealthy corporations, even if those acts aren’t formally considered crimes per legal statute.
P76 However, while corporations are given free rein to pollute and poison, vandalism and littering are heavily policed. […] decried retail theft and looting as a social ill at “crisis levels.” The actual amount of loss from organized retail theft was estimated by the National Retail Federation at $2.1 billion in 2020 nationwide. Compare that with the fact that these same corporations carry out an estimated $15 billion a year in wage theft from their own employees.
P80 A laboring poor was required for capitalism, but such a “general army of Delinquents” needed to be disciplined. This new preventative science was, as Neocleous astutely puts it, “explicitly designed to end the appropriation of any means of subsistence other than the wage.” What was actually “prevented” by policing was alternative means of survival outside the formal market, a remint that can be traced all the way up to contemporary policing’s focus on the unregulated drug trade, sex work, and other informal economies. […] Crime “prevention” is primarily about disciplining people to rely solely on the market for survival.
P82 Sociologist Egon Brittner, whose work is widely taught and considered definitional in police education, clearly states that “the police role is far better understood by saying that their ability to arrest offenders is incidental to their authority to use force.” […] From their origin two hundred years ago to the present, the main way that police catch those who commit crimes is by someone who has seen the crime telling the police what happened.
P83 Solving crime in this way does not require a large body of swaggering armed guards. One older study found that the majority of cops make one felony arrest per year and spend less than 2 percent of their time responding to crimes in progress. […] Rather than “solving” crime, most of the time cops are on patrol, suspiciously scrutinizing those who’ve done nothing wrong.
P84 Broken Windows Theory […] Kelling and Wilson’s theory comes from their short, nine-page 1982 article published in a cultural magazine with scant empirical research. Broken windows is less a theory with any rigor than an ideological position that was deployed as the justification for ramping up police presence and aggression in the late 1980s and 1990s.
P85 There is no correlation between the per capita size of the police force and reduction of crime rate. Indeed, it is often the case that the places with higher per capita police forces have higher rates of crime. <>
P100 <>
P105 More than three-quarters of all homicides are committed by someone the victim knows. But, of all killings by strangers in the US, more than a third are carried out by the police.
P121 While the former – the standing army – is a feature of the earliest, pre-capitalist states, the police are an institution the developed along with, and as a constitutive part of, the capitalist state, Police, and the entire carceral apparatus of which they are a crucial part, create and recreate capitalist order through immense violence.
P122 <>
P136 Increased demographic “representation” in police forces does not reduce the violence; it only serves to legitimize it.
P137 Alex Kueng […] witnessed the police abuser of a sibling and decided to be a cop, as he thought it the best way to change a broken system and told his mother he wanted to change it from the inside. According to his mother, he thought improved diversity of the police would fix the institution and repair the relationship between the police and the Black community. Then, on May 25, 2020, Kueng held down George Floyd to the pavement while Derek Chauvin murdered him.
P143 The police, as an institution, are unreformable, and we cannot expect to shift the institution in any positive direction. No appeals should be made for them to change themselves or come to our side. Our appeal, our demand, is for them to be defunded, disarmed, disbanded, smashed, abolished.
P148 If “we are demanding that a carceral, racial capitalist state disarm itself,” write abolitionists Mariame Kaba and Andrea Ritchie, “we are demanding that it stop preforming its central functions.”
P183 The security of capitalist social order is dependent upon this monopoly of violence, this limitless, constant power without boundary or intermission, translated into human form as the cop. The police will never be obsolete for the ruling class. In organizing for abolition, we can’t get around the fact that we are talking about depriving the state of its authority.
P191 Perhaps the most substantial change from police reform efforts has been to increase the legitimacy and normalcy of the fundamentally violent institution in the eyes of the public.
P192 Some advocates of police reform would argue that many good recommendations that resulted from these committees were not enacted, or that the right reforms have not yet been attempted. There is something to this: historians have outlined how many of the recommendations to address structural inequality were abandoned, while all the recommendations to increase policing were enacted. <>
P194 The police role […] as a uniquely repressive hyper-disciplinary avatar of the state, trumps whatever training they receive.
P198 A movement for abolition recognizes police themselves as the problem and, as a start, seeks changes to limit their size, funding, and power. Generally speaking, abolitionist demands address the underlying purpose of policing head on […] These demands can blunt the violence and have real benefits for the populations most targeted by policing.
P200 What could it look like to abolish the conditions that give rise to cops and cages?
P204 As Geo Maher argues, “The only antidote to the police is community, community, and more community.” […] the police become obsolete for our communities because we can take care of ourselves. […] The procedural and autonomist abolition approaches converge in a strategy of attrition: we abolish the police by stifling the institution’s growth and chipping away at its foundations so that it crumbles over time.
P206 Democratic norms are tossed to the side when they don’t serve the interest of states and capital. We saw that in 2020, when unelected state bureaucrats blocked the Minneapolis City Council’s vote to disband the police.
P212 The weakness of the procedural and autonomist paths is that they both leave open the question of what to do about the “principal object of the crisis” –the state—and are thus unable to push beyond the crisis and transition to a different kind of world.
There is a third path to abolition: social revolution. Abolishing the police requires the overthrow of the state. […] The state’s primary agent of coercive force and violence is the police. Because of their nature within the capitalist state, the real alternative to the police is democratic control over all of society from below.
P216 The possibility for a liberated future will only be built in a world free of police and free from the rubble of capitalist states. Their end is our beginning.
July 8, 2025
Do we really need another book about how cops fucking SUUUUUCK?
Yes. Here's why.
brian has written here a very thorough and well-researched account of where policing came from, how it is fundamental to statecraft and capitalism, and how every movement struggling for justice will ultimately find itself at odds with the police. Alongside this, we also see how the perceived necessity of policing is a direct product of capitalist social relations and how it ruins all of our lives. You put all this together - there is no movement combatting capitalism without a movement combatting policing, and vice versa.
There are a lot of interesting nuggets here that I found very useful, even as someone who has read a fair share of abolitionist scholarship. I never knew where the word police came from, for instance, nor have I ever seen such a precise articulation of how the development of capitalism was specifically interwoven with the development of policing. brian also does a wonderful job internationalizing this struggle, showing how folks have been forced to confront police power all over the world and developed alternatives all over the world (even if at times the book does a little too much Chicago focus for such a broad topic imo, but given that is where the author resides I'll let it slide).
My main critique is I wish the book dealt a little bit more with the copaganda that helps reinforce cultural hegemony around policing - I don't think most abolitionists would contest the material power of police, but I think we all struggle with how to deal with copaganda from our peers and social circles. Maybe that would be best be its own book, though.
Overall, a very useful text that helps interweave the Marxist and abolitionist scholarship, and should hopefully be a valuable text to many activists and organizers in the coming years!
Yes. Here's why.
brian has written here a very thorough and well-researched account of where policing came from, how it is fundamental to statecraft and capitalism, and how every movement struggling for justice will ultimately find itself at odds with the police. Alongside this, we also see how the perceived necessity of policing is a direct product of capitalist social relations and how it ruins all of our lives. You put all this together - there is no movement combatting capitalism without a movement combatting policing, and vice versa.
There are a lot of interesting nuggets here that I found very useful, even as someone who has read a fair share of abolitionist scholarship. I never knew where the word police came from, for instance, nor have I ever seen such a precise articulation of how the development of capitalism was specifically interwoven with the development of policing. brian also does a wonderful job internationalizing this struggle, showing how folks have been forced to confront police power all over the world and developed alternatives all over the world (even if at times the book does a little too much Chicago focus for such a broad topic imo, but given that is where the author resides I'll let it slide).
My main critique is I wish the book dealt a little bit more with the copaganda that helps reinforce cultural hegemony around policing - I don't think most abolitionists would contest the material power of police, but I think we all struggle with how to deal with copaganda from our peers and social circles. Maybe that would be best be its own book, though.
Overall, a very useful text that helps interweave the Marxist and abolitionist scholarship, and should hopefully be a valuable text to many activists and organizers in the coming years!
November 23, 2025
A phenomenal and accessible history of the inevitable rise of the police alongside capitalist and imperialist development, analysis of the process of the militarisation of cops and case studies of their violence, and a determined look at a possible future in which both capitalism and the naturally entwined police state are abolished in favor of a socialist possibility in which community takes care of community and the violence and imbalanced power structure at play in current societies around the world are overtaken by more equality and care for one another. This should become required reading for anyone who doesn't understand what our cries for abolition truly mean.
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