The police are often perceived as guarantors of public safety. We are frightened by crime stories about criminals whose unbridled thirst for destruction can only be curbed by more violence, albeit "pure" violence because it's legal, state-sponsored. Therefore, we accept enormous expenditures on law enforcement agencies, which are ultimately supposed to "ensure security" and protect against disintegration. The repressive apparatus grows with each passing year, from investments in the military, police, and border guards.
No amount of state law enforcement can guarantee our safety. No matter how many police cars, water cannons, and blue-uniformed personnel are purchased, the problem of crime will remain unsolved. Errico Malatesta pointed out this paradox long ago: "where the police have no crimes to detect or criminals to arrest, they will either create or invent crime and criminals, or they will cease to exist."1 The police as an institution do not work to eliminate the sources of crime from society: poverty and domination. From the police perspective, eliminating crime through the redistribution of goods and meeting basic needs is not an option. Malatesta's comment brilliantly anticipates the war on drugs and other brutal, systemic, and often seemingly absurd contemporary aspects of police action. It is important to realize that uniformed services do not defend the wronged, but defend vacant buildings, forests on the border, or park benches from those who would like to fall asleep on them. When the police intervene, in many cases no one is harmed a victimless crime occurs.
Law enforcement plays a key role in enclosing resources, creating scarcity, and controlling "conduct." The mainstream view of the police as a force fighting crime is misleading. This is a false perception. Modern disciplinary institutions create crime. There is no criminal without criminology. There is no misdemeanor without law. The simplest way to increase the labor supply is to directly or indirectly criminalize all forms of refusal to work. The police, along with the prison system, are also a potential tool for maintaining all forms of domination, for example, political, racial, or class.
In extreme cases, as in the United States, the prison system can grow to absurd proportions (in 2020, the US prison population exceeded 1.6 million, or 505 prisoners per 100,000 inhabitants; for comparison, in Finland, in the same year, the prison population was 2,800, or 51 prisoners per 100,000 inhabitants2), become a new incarnation of slavery3, and at the same time another "attractive investment opportunity for private enterprise," i.e., an area of privatization. Law and the broadly understood political system are intertwined with the social division of labor "each new economic form corresponds to a quite specific form of legal and political relations.[...]Serfdom and absolutism have always gone hand in hand throughout history. One was the condition for the other. The rule of capitalism also created its own, specific political form"4.
Everything will become clear when we see that the police and the law associated with them are not meant to ensure our safety, but to uphold the class order. The classics of both Marxism and anarchism agreed that "The state[...]is usually the state of the strongest, economically dominant class, which, through its help, also becomes the politically dominant class and thus acquires new means for[...]exploiting the
oppressed classes."5 "The state[...]is the product of a long and bitter struggle in which the class occupying what is at a given time a key position in the production process gains advantage over its rivals and shapes a state that imposes by force a system of property relations that suits the interests of that class.[...]Every state is the child of a social class or classes that benefit from this particular system of property relations, the forcible maintenance of which is the state's task."6 This perspective allows us to understand the role of uniformed services. The police are an extremely effective tool for maintaining the status quo, useful both to politicians and to the owners of the means of production. In other words, when there is a solidarity protest for Palestine, a vacant building is occupied, or a strike disrupts the existing order, police cars appear.
Due to their hierarchical structure and the violence they inflicted, many anarchists criticized participation in security services. Instead of attempting to reform these institutions, Henry David Thoreau and Leo Tolstoy proposed refusal: "anyone may not voluntarily enter military, police, judicial, or tax service."7 Tolstoy particularly emphasized that government forces were primarily intended to round up draft dodgers and secure private property. Thoreau, in the context of slavery in the United States, argued how law can perpetuate domination; in the poet's thought, challenging the legal order through civil disobedience was crucial. Both thinkers demonstrated how functioning within
institutions based on top-down management and receiving orders has a destructive impact on individual autonomy. When subordination, quick response to commands, and discipline are considered fundamental virtues, people are reduced to "lowly, automatic instruments of scum in the hands of their superiors."8 The anarchists' critique remains relevant today. Unbounded trust in law and superiors is a recurring theme in the greatest tragedies of the 20th century; suffice it to mention Eichmann. In his famous essay "On Civil Disobedience," Thoreau wrote: "Should a citizen[...]submit his conscience to the legislator? Why, then, does every man have a conscience?[...]Respect for justice, not for the law, must be cultivated.[...]Law has never in the slightest degree influenced men to become more just. On the contrary, the respect which men have for it causes even the just to become unjust on a daily basis. The direct and natural result of an excessive respect for law is the situation of soldiers[...]. Many citizens, therefore, by offering their bodies to the state, serve it primarily as machines, not as human beings. I mean the standing army, the militia, prison guards, constables, posse comitatus, and the like."9
Designating a special group authorized to brutally treat everyone else the police is a recipe for abuse. As Bakunin predicted,10 under the influence of systemic power, even the most diligent worker can become a tyrant. Anarchists were exceptionally quick to diagnose many of the problems plaguing modern disciplinary institutions. Marxists, in the economic dimension, demonstrated that regardless of self-perception, capitalists must appropriate surplus value to remain capitalists "It is not the consciousness of men that determines the forms of their existence, but, on the contrary, their social existence determines the forms of consciousness."11 Similarly, anarchists recognized that within state institutions, the very manner of organization determines individual behavior. In the case of gangs trained in an authoritarian spirit and possessing a "monopoly on violence," abuse ceases to be the exception and becomes the rule. The very hierarchical social structure enables the escalation of violence. Moreover, domination is a tempting career option for losers in capitalist reality. "Before the 1933 revolution, Hitlerism primarily organized unemployed youth with no hope of finding any employment.[...]They were young men who were fed up with the excuses they heard at home, that they were a burden, and who had lost hope that it would be worth trying to find work. The assault unit offered these young men special attractions. First, a warm place in a separate room near the tavern, almost daily refreshments[...]. Finally and above all in addition to several dozen pfennigs of "pay" from the organization, there was the feeling of being a participant in important matters, an atmosphere of collective self-praise, boasting about the advantages achieved over the "communists" and[...]the excitement of anticipating a collective "action""12.
To ensure genuine social security, we must focus on structural solutions. Reducing inequality, expanding the pool of common goods, and networks of mutual aid are essential to reducing violence. From time to time, we hear about police officers abusing their authority. Similar cases of violence, harassment, and other forms of abuse are regularly exposed in the film industry, large corporations, and so on. We will understand these cases only by analyzing them not individually, like bad apples, but by considering structural power relations and the economic context. Abuse is enabled by inequality. Disciplinary dismissals of individual lecturers, principals, or police officers are ineffective unless the conditions that enabled them to commit violence against the vulnerable in the first place are changed. Silvia Federici described this brilliantly: "We see a similar dynamic in the #metoo movement many women fail to recognize that sexual violence is a structural problem[...]. To say it is a structural problem implies that women are vulnerable to sexual harassment because of the economic conditions in which most of them live. If women earned more, if waitresses didn't have to rely on tips, if directors and producers didn't decide the future of young women who turned to them for work, if women could leave an abusive partner or leave a job where they are harassed change would indeed occur."13
Guy Standing, in his book "Precariat: The New Dangerous Class," also noted that meeting basic needs and economic stability positively impact a sense of security. If our livelihood depends entirely on a superior, we are completely subordinate. In most cases, employment is linked to access to numerous benefits, including healthcare. This is a recipe for dependence on employers. "Migration policies" are also exploited in a similar manner. Immigrants living in fear of deportation (by disguised agencies like ICE) often accept worse working conditions. Mikhail Bakunin was right when he wrote that "political equality is impossible without economic equality."14
Ultimately, one crucial aspect of security is being ignored: who should a person turn to when the threat comes from the officers themselves? Deadly pushbacks at the border and distrust of doctors in the context of the (lack of) availability of abortion reveal the crux of the problem and the importance of mutual aid. It's not the police, nor the border guard, nor "strong law" that guarantee our safety, but the fight often in defiance of them to reduce inequality and hierarchy.
Jan Szyszkowski
A-YES No. 20
Footnotes:
1 Errico Malatesta, Anarchy.
2 Prison Studies Statistics.
https://www.prisonstudies.org/highest-to-lowest/prison-population-total?field_region_taxonomy_tid=All,
https://www.prisonstudies.org/country/finland and
https://www.prisonstudies.org/country/united-states-america[accessed: 04.01.2026]
3 See Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, New York
2020.
4 Peter Kropotkin, Modern Science and Anarchism, Lviv 1920, p. 77.
5 Friedrich Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, Warsaw 1979, p. 223.
6 Paul Sweezy, The Theory of Capitalist Development: Principles of Marxist Political Economy, Warsaw 1965, p.
376.
7 Leo Tolstoy, Slavery in Our Time, London 1903, 39.
8 Leo Tolstoy, Slavery in Our Time, London 1903, 33.
9 Henry David Thoreau, Civil Disobedience.
https://pl.anarchistlibraries.net/library/henry-david-thoreau-obywatelskie-nieposluszenstwo
[accessed: 11/12/2025].
10 Mikhail Bakunin, Power Corrupts the Best.
https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/bakunin/works/1867/power-corrupts.htm[accessed: 29/10/2025].
11 Karl Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy[in:]Minor Writings, Paris 1907, p. 5.
12 Stefan Czarnowski, People unnecessary in the service of violence.
https://crispa.uw.edu.pl/object/files/621646/display/Default[accessed: 04.01.2026]
13 Silvia Federici, Beyond the Limits of the Skin, Warsaw 2022, pp. 57-58.
14 Mikhail Bakunin, Revolutionary Catechism.
https://federacja-anarchistyczna.pl/2026/04/22/bezpieczenstwo-a-nierownosci-czyli-szkic-o-policji/
_________________________________________
Source: A-infos-en@ainfos.ca
Geen opmerkingen:
Een reactie posten