The history of bourgeois modernity is a history in which security occupies centre stage. This is clear from both the long tradition of bourgeois political thought and the extensive reiteration of security by contemporary politicians: from Thomas Hobbes to David Cameron, so to speak. From Hobbes we get the idea that the only solution to the insecurity of the state of nature is a contract exchanging our obedience to the Leviathan for the security it is expected to offer; the state takes centre stage as the provider of the one thing all humans are said to desire. From Cameron we get the idea, delivered in his 2015 Christmas message to the nation, that ‘if there is one thing people want at Christmas, it’s the security of having their family around them and a home that is safe’. From Hobbes’s account of why we flee the state of nature through to Cameron’s account of what we all want for Christmas: security.
The extent to which security is the leitmotif of bourgeois modernity is evident in the fact that in a so-called ‘age of rights’, security is often presented to us as the most fundamental of all rights. According to the United Nations, the fundamental rights of all human beings are ‘life, liberty and security’. This claim repeats the revolutionary discourse of rights in the eighteenth century, and one thinker who noticed the implications of such a claim was Karl Marx. In his exchange with Bruno Bauer over ‘the Jewish question’ in 1843, Marx runs through the various declarations of the rights of man announced in the late eighteenth century, along with the constitutions which tended to follow such declarations. Marx points out that the rights in question, though revolutionary in some (liberal) ways, are still nonetheless the rights of a member of bourgeois society, ‘of egoistic man, of man separated from other men and from the community’. ‘Let us hear what the most radical Constitution, the Constitution of 1793, has to say’, he suggests, and then notes Article 2 of that Constitution: ‘These rights … are: equality, liberty, security, property’. Marx works through these ideas. Liberty, for example, is ‘the power which man has to do everything that does not harm the rights of others’, according to one Declaration, or ‘being able to do everything which does not harm others’, in another. J. S. Mill would later confirm this in his articulation of the ‘harm principle’ in On Liberty, but Marx treats it as nothing less than the ‘right of … separation, the right of the restricted individual, withdrawn into himself’. The practical application of this right to liberty is man’s right to private property, Marx notes, ‘the right to enjoy one’s property and to dispose of it at one’s discretion … without regard to other men, independently of society’. This ‘right of self-interest … makes every man see in other men not the realization of his own freedom, but the barrier to it’. Such observations essentially launch Marx’s well-known critique of rights discourse through the rest of his work, but note what he says about security at this moment. Citing Article 8 of the French Constitution of 1793 – ‘security consists in the protection afforded by society to each of its members for the preservation of his person, his rights, and his property’ – Marx makes the following comment: ‘Security is the highest social concept of civil society, the concept of police, expressing the fact that the whole of society exists only in order to guarantee to each of its members the preservation of his person, his rights, and his property’.1 Marx has put his finger on the core ideological concept of bourgeois modernity.
It is perhaps one of critical theory’s most significant failings to have not taken up Marx’s suggestive observation about security as the supreme concept of bourgeois society. Marx himself makes little of his own observation, and yet it would seem to offer the basis of a challenge to the whole problematic of ‘security’ within bourgeois order. On the one hand, his observation explodes the tedious debate that takes place within ‘traditional’ theory about any ‘balance’ between security and liberty: it is quite clear from any reading of the history of bourgeois thought that security overrides liberty every time, as evidenced by the fact that Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Adam Smith, Adam Ferguson, Jeremy Bentham, Montesquieu, David Hume, Thomas Paine and many other liberal thinkers ultimately hold the view that liberty ‘consists in security or in one’s opinion of one’s security’, as Montesquieu puts it.2 Liberty has been so bound up with security in the liberal mind that it is essentially subsumed under the idea of security. On the other hand, Marx’s observation allows us to see that the permanent disturbance of all social conditions and relations that attends the constant revolutionising of capitalist production3 means that capital is fundamentally an order of social insecurity, but one which simultaneously gives rise to a politics of security.
If we take seriously a comment Marx makes in his debate with Ruge, that the main task before us is not to change the world in the way envisaged by some socialists but, rather, the ruthless critique (or even, depending on translation, reckless critique) of all that exists, including and especially politics, law and religion,4 then we might say that for us right now the target of such a ruthless and reckless critique has to be that new hegemonic category – one might even call it a political religion – named ‘Security’. Such a critique of security requires understanding security not as a universal value but as a mechanism of domination deployed by state and capital, part and parcel of the wider politics of fear which underpins bourgeois modernity. Far from being something that could ever be genuinely achieved, security exists for the opportunities it offers to get things done in its name. Security is a mechanism to mobilise, discipline and punish. In other words, security is a power for the fabrication of social order, which is the very reason why security points always to the concept of police and why the critique of security folds into a critical theory of police power.5
Capital creates insecurity, and insecurity creates a demand and desire for security. To this demand and desire, capital responds with all its usual flair and creativity. Security is therefore highly productive for capital.
To be productive for capital, security must first be translated into the materiality of the commodity. Marx notes that as soon as something emerges as a commodity it changes into a thing which transcends sensuousness, in such a way that gives the commodity a mystical value. If this is so for the commodity in general, then commodities presented in security terms are at an added advantage as they appear to serve the satisfaction of a very basic, and yet also very indeterminate, human need. But Marx’s point is that commodity production per se is far from obvious and trivial. And tracing the contours of the production of security commodities takes us to the heart of the process whereby security becomes fetishistically inscribed in commodified social relations. This is the basis of the security industry. The expression ‘industry’ here refers not only to the connection between security and the commodity form but also to the rationalisation, distribution, production and consumption of security. It likewise incorporates that self-portrait of state power, the spectacle of security.6
The security industry does not engage in security because of an interest in actually eradicating insecurity. But neither does it do so because it is interested in ‘social control’ or ‘surveillance’. Rather, it has a far more mundane interest: making a profit. To make a profit the security industry must sell security. And to sell security it must play on fears and insecurities, must generate further fears and insecurities, and must pander to the idea that our fears and insecurities are very real and must be dealt with in some way. The security industry therefore interpellates consumers as both sovereign subjects (‘the customer is king’) and as fearful subjects (‘the customer is insecure’). And the customer must be reminded time and again of just how insecure they are, revealing more than anything the extent to which capital has found a way of dominating and terrorising human beings within their very hearts and souls. This is one reason why struggles against ‘security measures’ alone are always so limiting: without connecting security to capital, such struggles never address the basic antagonism of bourgeois society.
The security industry is thus where capital and security come to contemplate themselves in a world of their own making, playing a key role in the fabrication of the much wider culture of fear and insecurity that is used to shore up both state and capital. Where the security state uses fear and insecurity to sustain support for the national security project, the security industry turns fear and insecurity into the consumption of commodities. Where the security state thus perpetually offers more and more ‘solutions’ in the form of new security policies, the security industry offers ‘solutions’ in entirely commodified forms, as more and more commodities are simply marketed as solutions to one insecurity after another. The security industry thus mobilises, organises and exploits a purported human need to reinforce the logic of both security and the commodity form across the face of society.
To the extent that both capital and the state live off the production of fear and insecurity, they must also ensure that security is something never really achieved. Behind the slogan ‘Security now!’ lies the real double-sided message: on the one hand, ‘Security with the next security product’ (the message from capital); on the other hand, ‘Security with the next security measure’ (the message from the state). Yet both the security industry and the security state perpetually cheat us of what has been promised. The promissory note is endlessly prolonged, revealing that, ultimately, the promise is illusory: all that is confirmed is that the real target will never be reached. Security is revealed as an illusion. But it is an illusion that has forgotten that it is an illusion. In this sense, security is totalitarian, manipulating the idea of a fundamental need in such a way as to preclude effective opposition against the whole.7
Part of security’s power lies in its demand that we passively accept all the things done in security’s name and all the things state and capital want us to take most seriously as needing securing: property and propriety, capital and commodity, law and order. Security believes in itself and demands that the world should believe the same.8 Security wants us to believe that nothing other than that which is called security is good, or at least that whatever else might be considered good is nowhere nearly as good as security itself. Moreover, it wants us to believe that that which is good must be secure. Security thereby subjugates living humans to security itself. In so doing, it masks the real impoverishment of human life. Worse, it functions in such a way that this impoverishment is understood as the very thing that needs to be secured. If the main task of ideology is to get us to believe that ‘the bourgeois way of thinking is the normal way of thinking’,9 that the key bourgeois concepts are in fact ‘common sense’ and that this social order is somehow natural, then security is ideology par excellence, integral to the system of manipulation and domination which now encloses the world, one which relies more than anything on subjects becoming dependent on and then articulating for themselves a set of ideas that end up animating them as well as dominating them. This is a domination in which each individual trembles lest they be found guilty of transgressing the boundaries imposed by security and its demands, and despite the fact that they believe that their own need and desire for security is itself natural. This is why security is so demanding: it is nigh on impossible to unravel the demands that security imposes on us and the immense labour that security incessantly performs on us, a labour that in turn produces new demands on us as subjects, new norms by which we are measured, new targets towards which we should be striving, new mechanisms through which hopes and dreams are to be thwarted.
Much of this can be witnessed in the phenomenon that has been described as neoliberalism. A great deal can and has been made of the ways in which neoliberalism involves a transformation of the individual, seeking to realise capital’s ultimate goal ‘to confiscate the soul’.10 ‘Economics are the method; the object is to change the heart and soul’, as Margaret Thatcher once put it.11 Taking such a claim seriously means reading neoliberalism not simply in terms of its destructive power, for example in destroying certain kinds of rights and institutions, but also in terms of its productive power: in its ability to create new kinds of social relations, new ways of living and new political subjects. Now, the literature on the new neoliberal subject recognises more than anything that what is being produced is an entrepreneurial self and a productive subject: a monetised, atomised and calculating subject that is required and expected to endlessly perform as a neoliberal subject in the social realm as well as in the marketplace.12 But this production of new subjectivities is also very much an orientation of the subject around security. The obligation to work on oneself as a neoliberal subject includes an obligation to work on oneself as a subject of security; the entrepreneurial-subject is to also be a security-subject. Neoliberalism thus forges new political subjects through security, operating for security and organised around security. In other words, security-conscious neoliberal subjects.
Because the neoliberal subject is expected to be an active subject, this activity is also meant to respond to the demands of security as well as the demands of capital. As is well known, under neoliberalism it is no longer enough for us to simply work, earn our money, go home and spend it. Rather, we are meant to believe in the work we are doing and to actively show that we believe in it, identifying with the organisation and signing up to the company’s mission, vision and values. Neoliberalism manipulates and recasts our subjectivity such that we not only continue to interiorise the bourgeois norms of self-possession and self-management, but that we also increasingly feel obliged to show that we have interiorised them, to the extent that the neoliberal workplace increasingly comes to be regarded as a kind of ‘community of desire’, as Frédéric Lordon puts it. And yet this poses a problem for capital, which constantly questions the worker’s desire. In Lordon’s example: the employee-subject swears that they have no other passion than the manufacture of yoghurt, our company’s business, but can we really believe them?13 The answer has to be no, and so the desire must be constantly expressed, measured and assessed, since it is always in danger of fading. A similar point might be made about the neoliberal security state: the citizen-subject swears that they have no other interest than the security of the social order, but can we really believe them? The answer must again be no,14 and so the desire must also be constantly expressed, measured and assessed, since it is always in danger of fading. Herein lies the basis for all the actions we are now being trained to undertake as security-conscious neoliberal subjects, such as learning ‘resilience’ and being constantly ‘prepared for emergency’. And the more frantically entrepreneurial we become in terms of thinking of ourselves as subjects of security, the more passive and obedient we become towards security itself. The entrepreneurial-security subject is simultaneously the obedient-subject. As with so many aspects of neoliberalism, what is of most interest is its disciplinary moment, and at the heart of this lies the logic of security and its conjunction with capital. The explosion and expansion of security in the last two decades is conventionally connected to the problem of terrorism (the ‘war on terror’), but it might just as easily be connected to the attempt to engrain neoliberalism into the hearts and minds of political subjects. Security has become a neoliberal mobilisation regime.
Part of the illusion of security is that we are meant to bow down before it without even asking what it is or how it came to be granted such a status. To exist without reply, security seeks to nullify all dissent and suppress any rebellion even before such dissent and rebellion have begun. Any objections or resistance to any of the policies – not least the economic policies – being carried out by the powers which claim to exercise security on our behalf are met either with security measures of the most coercive kind or with the expectation that reason must abase itself before it, all our critical faculties set aside as security and its leading defenders tell us to shut up, listen and obey. Those arguing against austerity, for example, are treated first and foremost as a threat to national security. Thus far from security being emancipation, as some people working in the academic sector of the security industry like to claim and which is the very belief that security wants us to hold, the articulation of security as an overarching principle of politics – the idea, in other words, that security is the absolute foundation of all politics, or that security has to be the starting point for any political thought, or that security is the grounds on which we must accept the protection of the state, or that what all of us would most like for Christmas is security – is nothing less than the articulation of a demand for obedience. Security is in this sense central to the containment of social change, nothing less than the principle and process of pacification, if by ‘pacification’ we understand not simply the military crushing of resistance but, rather, the fabrication of social order.15 This is the heart of the police idea, to which I turn below, but it has been historically true of the whole project of security from its inception – the invention of ‘social security’ in the early 1930s and then ‘national security’ in the late 1940s evidence of the state’s recognition of the ability to get things done in the name of security, from reordering the social world to reordering the international world16 – and is proving to be equally true of security as it plays out in the current conjuncture.
What does this obedience in the name of security produce? The answer is not difficult: obedience itself. Obedience produces obedience, as Michel Foucault once commented about what he called ‘pastoral power’.17 It reproduces itself as a system of obedience. That is, one accepts the principle of security in order to become obedient and one reproduces this state of obedience in a striving for the mythical state of security. The ultimate goal is that one manages oneself in the way that a security operative would have us be managed. This is the very point to which Hobbes alludes in the final paragraph of Leviathan, it is the very same point ventriloquised by all contemporary politicians when they speak the language of security, and it is the point implicit in much of the discourse and policies surrounding terrorism, which is the very reason why so much anti-terror legislation concerns itself not so much with terrorists but rather with the obedience of the population in general.18 Obedience thereby becomes a permanent way of being, and we are encouraged to believe that obedience is essential to the security of the subject. Obedience becomes fundamental to the principle of raison d’état, demanded by the state for security reasons, and our training in obedience a training of and for political order. And, given the security–commodity nexus, what we are being made obedient for is nothing other than the domination of our lives by capital.
Security, then, demands that we bow down to security. It demands that we feel secure in our insecurity as bourgeois subjects but also insecure in our security as bourgeois subjects. It demands that we commit ourselves not to making history but, rather, to the eternal recurrence of the same: to securing capital and the state rather than anything against it or opposed to them. Like capital, security wants us to believe that it is our fate. In this regard we might refine a point made in the 1930s by Max Horkheimer when he commented that those who do not wish to talk about capitalism should keep quiet about fascism: those who do not wish to talk about capitalism should keep quiet about security.19 But might there not be another more telling point to make, about fascism itself, connected to the idea of a mobilisation in the name of security, and which requires us to refine Horkheimer’s point in another way? Namely that those who do not wish to talk about security should keep quiet about fascism.
First and foremost, any mobilisation in the name of security takes place through practices of information and suspicion. Witness here the ‘If You See Something, Say Something’ campaign in the US Homeland Security project. This campaign is in one sense intended to help the state move beyond the problem of ‘racial profiling’, but in so doing it expanded the problem exponentially: if threats to security can no longer be defined by a fact of racial otherness, they must nonetheless still come from somewhere or someone. Or, rather, they can come from anywhere and anyone. And so we must all keep watch. As articulated by State Secretary Janet Napolitano in 2011, the process is designed ‘to inform and empower a broader, more inclusive range of people and institutions to become a part of the homeland security architecture of our country’.20 If you see something, say something, because you are part of the security architecture and must therefore act accordingly.
The video on the ‘If you see something …’ website plays heavily on the idea that citizens should act on anything suspicious, even when they think it might not be anything of real concern. This is the police logic inherent in security: anything slightly ‘out of order’ is by definition suspicious and thus to be regarded as a security threat. This logic is played out elsewhere. In the UK, for example, virtually everyone is to now be a kind of security officer, often in the guise of immigration informant. For example, academics must report on international students so that Universities and Colleges can supply details about the students to the Home Office, while marriage registrars must notify the Home Office of any marriages which they think are ‘suspicious’. More generally, the UK Home Office encourages its citizens to report anything or anyone they think suspicious to the Home Office Intelligence Management System (in 2013 some 75,000 reports were sent in). The Home Office webpage states: ‘If you suspect that someone is working illegally, has no right to be in the UK or is involved in smuggling or other criminal activity, we want to hear from you’. It then assures people that they can submit information anonymously if they so wish but also that any information they give remains confidential. Security demands that citizens are to become the intelligence officers of the modern world.
At the same time, however, slogans and suggestions along the lines of ‘if you suspect someone’ and ‘if you see something, say something’ are also meant to be understood in a slightly revised form: ‘if you do something, someone will be watching you’. After all, if you are part of the security architecture, then so too is everyone else, and so you can expect your neighbours, colleagues, family, friends and lovers to be watching you, just as you are meant to be watching them. Hence you will be reported if you are a 14-year-old taking a home-made clock to school, a four-year-old trying to say the word ‘cucumber’ and being misunderstood as saying ‘cooker bomb’, or a traveller speaking Arabic on a plane, to give just three recent examples.21 Not only do we never know when we are being watched, but in the name of security we must also act as watchmen. This is the intensified culmination of a world in which security is the supreme concept: every human subject is a suspicious person. More to the point, every human being is a suspicious person in both senses of the term, for the phrase ‘suspicious person’ has a double-meaning. ‘I am a suspicious person’ connotes being inclined to suspect: I am a person who has suspicions. But ‘I am a suspicious person’ also connotes giving grounds for suspicion: I am a person who is suspected by others. The suspicious mind is policed by the person with a suspicious mind, and we are all in both categories. Security now demands that we play this doubly suspicious role, as security operative and potential terrorist, amateur detective and budding conspirator. The outcome is the debasing of any attempt at human solidarity, as every citizen is now also meant to be a collaborator with the security regime.
Such debasing is central to any political movement which places security at its core, for it allows such a movement to step easily from security to exclusion, from exclusion to expulsion, and from expulsion to extermination. Despite all the talk about security being a human right, security being a fundamental need, security being emancipation, one thing is clear: security politics is first and foremost a politics of exclusion. Security is cultivated and mobilised by enacting a set of exclusionary practices. Conversely, exclusion is cultivated and realised on security grounds. This is why texts on security are always texts about exclusion, implicitly if not explicitly. The mutual presupposition of exclusion through security measures and security through exclusion practices has a long history, underpinning as it does all the historic practices through which civil society and borders – both internal as well as external – have been policed, of how the working class was originally excluded from the body politic, and of how this class along with the dangerous classes, the urban poor, the racially inferior, the threatening immigrant, the sexually deviant, the politically oppositional and the colonial subject have been administered in ways excluding them from certain spheres of civil society and the state, certain occupations and careers, certain powers and pleasures.
All of which is to say that political mobilisation in the name of security will always be a mobilisation of a deeply authoritarian kind. This is the very reason that security is a fundamental feature of fascist discourse and practice: it is no accident that fascism calls its operations ‘security measures’, enacts mass ‘security confinement’ in ‘security camps’ and exercises its power through ‘security police’. The kind of work carried out in the name of security has a kind of elective affinity with fascism, enabling a series of quick and easy moves made from security to exclusion to expulsion to extermination.22 If we take the mass murder of six million as the culmination of fascism, then we can follow one eminent historian in thinking of the Holocaust as the fusion of anti-Semitism with security issues.23 It is therefore no exaggeration to say that any revival of fascism will come through a political mobilisation in the name of security, and that any such mobilisation will start (has started?) with the exclusion of marginal and minority groups.
Yet maybe there is an even more telling point to make: that any such revival of fascism would hardly be necessary given all the things that can be done for ‘security reasons’ in the name of liberalism and the capitalist state. Security confinement, imprisonment without trial, torture, rendition, summary execution, suspension of liberties and rights that are never then reinstated, the introduction of new emergency powers that are never then lifted, war declared but never ended: it is now clear that all these things and many more are made possible in the name of security, without needing to institute a fascist regime. And if the response to this is that nothing close to the Holocaust would ever be perpetrated by liberalism, note the following story told by one ex-security operative who had spent many years working for one of world’s largest ‘security agencies’. In 1991, John Stockwell worked out that the CIA project in Angola which he had helped to engineer had resulted in the deaths of over 20,000 people. He then decided to do some maths.
Coming to grips with these US/CIA activities in broad numbers and figuring out how many people have been killed in the jungles of Laos or the hills of Nicaragua is very difficult. But, adding them up as best we can, we come up with a figure of six million people killed – and this is a minimum figure. Included are: one million killed in the Korean War, two million killed in the Vietnam War, 800,000 killed in Indonesia, one million in Cambodia, 20,000 killed in Angola – the operation I was part of – and 22,000 killed in Nicaragua.24
Six million dead at a minimum estimate and not counting either those killed in the name of security by other regimes in the same period or those killed in the quarter of a century since. Not ‘The Six Million’, as those murdered in ‘security camps’ in the name of the Aryan race are known, but another six million murdered in ‘security operations’ by liberal states. This is security as the slaughter bench of history.
Marx’s astute observation that security is the supreme concept of bourgeois society is followed by him with an equally astute follow-up connecting security with the concept of police. His comment is a reminder of the extent to which we are told that the police power is exercised in the name of security. But it is also a reminder of the fact that we need a far more expansive concept of police than that found in police studies, criminology and mainstream theory, all of which fall back on the same old tired assumptions and clichés: that ‘police’ refers straightforwardly to the organ of state charged with enforcing law and order and that the main arguments to be made about this institution concern how to make it more democratic, less discriminatory or less militarised.
What was once known as police science was nothing less than a central means of understanding and sustaining the exercise of state power; this is one reason why Hegel, who also grasps the fundamentally antagonistic nature of bourgeois society, places the police power at the heart of his philosophy of right. Such a science picks up on the fact that ‘police’ refers to the legislative and administrative regulation of the internal life of a community to promote general welfare and the condition of good order, encapsulated in phrases such as ‘police and good order’ or ‘good police and order’, the contemporary versions of which are ‘law and order’ or ‘public order’. In its concern with order, police holds an incredibly broad compass, overseeing and administering a necessarily large and heterogeneous range of affairs, to the extent that police is in some sense without parameters. The police power sees to everything that might be necessary to maintain order within a community. This is why in its origins the police mandate extended to the minutiae of social life, including the means of comfort; public health; food and wine adulteration; expenses at christenings, weddings and funerals; sumptuary law; Sunday observance and the behaviour of citizens at church or during festivities; the maintenance of roads, bridges and town buildings; the regulation of the provision of goods and services; the performance of trades and occupations; religion, morals and manners; the behaviour of servants towards their masters; and, of course, security. The point already made about contemporary security measures – that anything slightly ‘out of order’ is by definition suspicious and thus a security threat – is thus at the heart of the police power and traceable to its very origins.
In the fourth volume of his Commentaries on the Laws of England, published in 1769, William Blackstone deals with a ‘species of offences which especially affect the commonwealth’, which he calls offences ‘against the police and oeconomy’.
By the public police and oeconomy I mean the due regulation and domestic order of the kingdom: whereby the individuals of the state, like members of a well-governed family, are bound to conform their general behaviour to the rules of propriety, good neighbourhood, and good manners; and to be decent, industrious, and inoffensive in their respective stations.25
Note that the issue is not crime, but order, in the sense that the police ensures that manners, behaviour, propriety and industry are conducted properly; the police oversees the proper. Lest one think that Blackstone’s comment is archaic and out of date, his general claim still rings true despite the liberal revolution of the late eighteenth century which broke the police power into various components of state power in general (‘medical police’ became ‘social health’ and then ‘the health service’, for example; the police of poverty became ‘welfare’ and, more tellingly, ‘social security’; questions of food adulteration are handed over to organs with names such as the ‘Food Standards Agency’). Thus a police treatise supposedly far more ‘modern’ than Blackstone’s and written well after the functional differentiation of police powers, Ernst Freund’s Police Power (1904), opens by noting that of all the state powers, ‘the police power is the most comprehensive, and therefore necessarily the vaguest’. He continues: ‘The term police has never been clearly circumscribed. It means at the same time a power and function of government, a system of rules, and an administrative organisation and force’.26 It is for this reason that all of the key concepts of the police power – ‘security’, ‘safety’, ‘law and order’, ‘public morals’, ‘keeping the peace’ – are necessarily broad and ambiguous, because the mandate of good order requires that police powers are necessarily so.
The police power in this sense has its own special standing, as the chapter on ‘Police Affairs’ in Peter the Great’s ‘Regulation of the Main Municipal Administration’, 1724, put it.
The police has its own special standing, namely: it facilitates rights and justice, begets good order and morality, gives everyone security from brigands, thieves, ravishers, deceivers and the like, drives out disorderly and useless modes of life, compels each to labor and to honest industry, makes a good inspector, a careful and kind servant, lays out towns and the streets in them, hinders inflation and delivers sufficiency in everything required for human life, guards against all illnesses that occur, brings about cleanliness on the streets and in houses, prohibits excess in domestic expenditures and all public vices, cares for beggars, the poor, the sick, the crippled and other needy, defends widows, orphans, and strangers according to God’s commandments, trains the young in sensible cleanliness and honest knowledge; in short over all these the police is the soul of the citizenry in all good order and the fundamental support of human security and comfort.27
The special standing of the police power is partly the basis for its claim to be the soul of the citizenry in good order, and in this role the police power lays claim to be the very foundation of human security. This is how the police power comes to intervene at any moment anywhere, ‘for security reasons’, even when those ‘security reasons’ are far from apparent to the rest of us. It is also how the police power comes to act when something has been declared ‘disorderly’. It is not enforcing the law that drives the police power, but enforcing order; not the eradication of crime, but the eradication of disorder. Slogans such as ‘crime prevention’ and ‘law enforcement’ are little more than rhetorical legitimations for the exercise of the state’s political administration of civil society through police power. It is this that renders police power a ‘formless … nowhere tangible, all-pervasive, ghostly presence in the life of civilized states’.28
Police is therefore best understood as an activity rather than an institution, a process rather than an organisation. At the same time, however, the activity of keeping order and the process of ensuring security is underpinned by a far more specific concern: to ‘compel each to labour and honest industry’, as Peter the Great’s 1724 reform has it. In other words: work. The police power involves a set of apparatuses and technologies not only constituting political order in general, but constituting the law of labour in particular.29 This much is clear from the very first police science, as Foucault notes when he writes that the question Colbert asked in the seventeenth century remains pertinent today: ‘Since you have established yourselves as a people, have you not yet discovered the secret of forcing all the rich to make all the poor work? Are you still ignorant of the first principles of the police?’30 Thus when Blackstone defines police as the regulation and order of the kingdom whereby the citizen-subjects are made to conform to the rules of industry as well as propriety and decency, the implication is clear: the police exists to make people work. The police power constitutes wage labour. There is no market without police power. Police power is at the heart of the making and remaking of the working class.
Recognising this fact goes some way to explaining why it is that the state spends far more time and energy policing the proletariat than the bourgeoisie.31 It equally explains why it is that prisons are disproportionately peopled by members of the working class. But more than anything it goes some way to explaining why ‘offences against the public order’ (as Blackstone calls them) such as ‘vagabondage’ and ‘vagrancy’ are so central to police treatises and legislation.
‘The Vagrant Act is specially intended to reach [the] class of idlers’. So said Christopher Tiedeman in his 1886 Treatise on the Limitations of the Police Power, one of the leading law texts in the field for many years. ‘A wanderer through the land, without home ties, idle, and without apparent means of support, what but criminality is to be expected from such a person?’ And yet it is not so much the potential crime committed by actual vagrants that is important but, rather, the opportunities afforded to the police power by the category ‘vagrancy’ itself. People can be arrested under vagrancy laws ‘on mere suspicion’ and ‘the whole method of proceeding is in direct contradiction of the constitutional provisions that a man shall be convicted [only] after proof of the commission of a crime’. In contrast, the vagrant ‘may never have committed a crime, but he is arrested on the charge of vagrancy, and … the burden is thrown upon the defendant to disprove the accusation’. The important point being registered by Tiedeman, one reiterated in more or less every legal text on the police power, is that vagrancy law allows the prosecution and persecution of people simply on the basis of ‘a status or condition’ and largely on the grounds of suspicion. ‘In connection with the punishment of vagrancy, provision is made for the punishment of … any suspicious person who cannot give a reasonable account of himself ’.32 The UK’s Vagrancy Act of 1824, for example, was the ultimate catch-all legislation, with its centrepiece being Section 4, still in operation, which enables people to be arrested and punished for being ‘a rogue and vagabond’, for being ‘idle and disorderly’, for ‘wandering abroad’, living in a tent, lodging in a barn or in the open air, or for just plain ‘not giving a good account of himself or herself’. Vagrancy legislation is the ultimate form of police legislation: it criminalises a status rather than an act (the offence of vagrancy consists of being a vagrant); it serves to justify an arrest made when no other grounds for arrest exist; it gives utmost power to the discretion of the police officer; and it seeks not to punish a crime as such but, rather, to eliminate what are regarded as threats to social order. Most importantly, it is vagrancy law that has been instrumental in creating a class of labour.
Vagrancy law was of course central to the process of ‘primitive accumulation’ and the violent separation of labourers from any means of subsistence other than the wage. This is why Marx spends so much of Volume 1 of Capital dissecting 500 years of vagrancy law. It is also why vagrancy is regarded by the ruling class as a crime against capitalist order; a kind of urcrime, from which all other crime stems. (‘The vagrant has been very appropriately described as the chrysalis of every species of criminal’, notes Tiedeman; ‘the comprehensive definition [of vagrancy] affords the means of dealing with the criminal elements of the population and keeping them … under restraint’, notes Freund.)33 Suppress vagrancy to get people to engage in some kind of ‘lawful calling’. Suppress vagrancy and people will be put to work.
In this light we might re-read the section on ‘primitive accumulation’ in Volume 1 of Capital as an extended discourse on the police power. It realises, in a roundabout way, Marx’s observation in 1844 that the concept of police nestles alongside security as the supreme concept of bourgeois society. I suggest that it also provides the basis for what should be one of critical theory’s foundational claims about police power: not only is there no market without police power, but that very power turns out to be central to the constitution of wage labour. Just as security needs to be understood through its integral links with capital, so police power needs to be understood through its integral links with labour. In the name of bourgeois security, police power is class war from above. The fact that police discourse is replete with the language of war and bourgeois ideology obsessed with the permanent police wars being fought against crime, drugs and disorder reminds us that the fabrication of bourgeois order is war: a police war and the class war, one and the same.34
The more total a concept becomes, the more unimaginable the means by which those living under its spell might break that domination. Such is the nature of security. The more total an activity becomes, the more unimaginable becomes the means by which those living under its spell might break that domination. Such is the nature of police. We are meant to obey the demand for security in the way that we are meant to obey the police power: as if there is no alternative. But to imagine a world without police is to imagine a world without capital, which is in turn to imagine a world not organised around the logic of security. The immense difficulty of such imagining is indicative of the extent to which security monopolises the terms of political debate, reinforcing the police power; it is indicative of the extent to which police power saturates the social world, reinforcing our submission to security; and it is indicative of the extent to which security and police reinforce our submission to capital.
1. Karl Marx, ‘On the Jewish Question’ (1844), in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Collected Works, Vol. 3 (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1975), pp. 162–4.
2. Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws (1748), trans. Anne Cohler, Basia Miller and Harold Stone (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), Pt. 2, Bk. 12, Chap. 1.
3. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848), in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Collected Works, Vol. 6 (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1984), p. 487.
4. Karl Marx, ‘Letters from Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher’ (1843), in Marx and Engels, Collected Works, Vol. 3, p. 142.
5. Mark Neocleous, The Fabrication of Social Order: A Critical Theory of Police Power (London: Pluto, 2000); Critique of Security (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2008); War Power, Police Power (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014). Also Mark Neocleous and George S. Rigakos (eds), Anti-Security (Ottawa: Red Quill Press, 2011).
6. The spectacle of terrorism is one part of the spectacle of security, just as the terrorism industry is in fact one part of the much larger and older security industry. See Mark Neocleous, The Universal Adversary: Security, Capital and ‘The Enemies of All Mankind’ (Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2016).
7. Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society (Boston: Beacon Press, 1964), p. 3.
8. I am playing on Marx’s comment on the German regime in 1843, in his ‘Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law. Introduction’ (1844), in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Collected Works, Vol. 3, p. 179.
9. Karl Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859), in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Collected Works, Vol. 29 (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1987), p. 315.
10. Siegfried Kracauer, The Salaried Masses: Duty and Distraction in Weimar Germany (1930), trans. Quintin Hoare (London: Verso, 1998), p. 75.
11. Margaret Thatcher in Interview with Ronald Butt, ‘Mrs Thatcher: The First Two Years’, The Sunday Times, 3 May, 1981.
12. Pierre Dardot and Christian Laval, The New Way of the World: On Neo-liberal Society (2009), trans. Gregory Elliott (London: Verso, 2013), p. 3.
13. Frédéric Lordon, Willing Slaves of Capital: Spinoza and Marx on Desire (2010), trans. Gabriel Ash (London: Verso, 2015), p. 84.
14. The answer has to be ‘no’ because to unreservedly believe anyone is committed to the security of the social order would be to rest assured that this person is not and never could be a security threat. But no-one can ever genuinely occupy that position. This is why even the politicians who run the system are placed under surveillance. This fact is true of all states, but in 2012 the Hungarian state took it one step further with a new national security law that required government officials to ‘consent’ to being placed under surveillance. The officials were told that their phones would be tapped, their homes bugged and their emails read, but that this would happen only for 60 days each year. The beauty of the move was that they were not to know which 60 days. Hence they would have to behave as though they were always being watched. In other words, they would have to behave in such a way as to avoid being considered a threat to security.
15. Mark Neocleous, ‘Security as Pacification’, in Mark Neocleous and George S. Rigakos (eds), Anti-Security (Ottawa: Red Quill Books, 2011), pp. 23–56; Mark Neocleous, ‘Fundamentals of Pacification Theory: Twenty-six Articles’, Tyler Wall et. al. (eds), Destroy, Build, Secure: Readings on Pacification (Ottawa: Red Quill Books, 2017), pp. 14–27.
16. See Mark Neocleous, ‘From Social to National Security: On the Fabrication of Economic Order’, Security Dialogue, Vol. 37, No. 3, 2006, pp. 363–84; Neocleous, Critique of Security, chapter 3.
17. Michel Foucault, On the Government of the Living: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1979–1980, trans. Graham Burchell (Houndmills, Basingstoke, 2014), p. 270.
18. It is now clear that whatever complicated history ‘terrorism’ has had, one of its main functions now is to reinforce the logic of security. This is why those criticisms of the terrorism industry which point to its irrationality, along the lines that more people in the US are killed by bee stings or in bathtub accidents than they are by terrorism, and which therefore suggest that a more rational security policy would focus on, say, teaching people how to avoid bee stings or bathtub accidents, miss the point entirely: the point of the terrorism industry is not to make us more secure but, rather, to turn us over to the logic of security in its entirety. The point of the terrorism industry is to make security unanswerable. This is why the terrorism industry must be seen as part of the security industry, as we noted above.
19. Max Horkheimer, ‘The Jews and Europe’ (1939), trans. Mark Ritter, in Stephen Eric Bronner and Douglas MacKay Kellner (eds), Critical Theory and Society: A Reader (New York: Routledge, 1989), p. 78.
20. Remarks by Secretary Napolitano at the NYU School of Law and the Brennan Center for Justice, ‘Strength, Security, and Shared Responsibility: Preventing Terrorist Attacks a Decade after 9/11’, 7 June, 2011.
21. Alex Hern, ‘Texas schoolboy handcuffed for bringing homemade clock to school’, The Guardian, 16 September, 2015; Ben Quinn, ‘Nursery “raised fears of radicalisation over boy’s cucumber drawing”’, The Guardian, 4 March, 2016; Liam Stack, ‘College Student Is Removed From Flight After Speaking Arabic on Plane’, New York Times, 17 April, 2016.
22. See Mark Neocleous, ‘The Fascist Moment: Security, Exclusion, Extermination’, Studies in Social Justice, Vol. 3, No.1, 2009, pp. 23–37.
23. Michael Burleigh, The Third Reich: A New History (London: Pan Macmillan, 2001), p. 645.
24. John Stockwell, The Praetorian Guard: The U.S. Role in the New World Order (Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 1991), p. 81.
25. William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England, Vol. 4: Of Public Wrongs (1769), (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), p. 163.
26. Ernst Freund, The Police Power: Public Policy and Constitutional Rights (Chicago: Callaghan and Co., 1904), pp. 2, 3, 89, 220.
27. ‘Regulation of the Main Municipal Administration’, 1724, cited in Evgenii V. Anisimov, The Reforms of Peter the Great: Progress Through Coercion in Russia (1989), trans. John T. Alexander (New York: M. E. Sharpe, 1993), pp. 217–8.
28. Walter Benjamin, ‘Critique of Violence’ (1920–21), trans. Edmund Jephcott, in Selected Writings, Vol. 1: 1913–1926, ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Belknap/Harvard, 1996), p. 243.
29. Geoffrey Kay and James Mott, Political Order and the Law of Labour (London: Macmillan, 1982).
30. Michel Foucault, History of Madness (1961), trans. Jonathan Murphy and Jean Khalfa (Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2006), p. 62.
31. Note, for example, that in the UK the state employs 3,700 people to chase benefit fraud, but only 700 people to chase tax evasion, despite the fact that the cost of benefit fraud is estimated at £1.3 billion a year while tax evasion costs somewhere between £34 billion and £120 billion a year. (Figures are for 2016, cited in Juliette Garside, ‘Benefit Fraud or Tax Evasion?’, The Guardian, 13 April, 2016.)
32. Christopher Tiedeman, A Treatise on the Limitations of the Police Power in the United States (F.H. Thomas Law Book Co., 1886), pp. 116–26, emphasis added.
33. Tiedeman, Treatise on the Limitations of the Police Power, p. 117; Freund, The Police Power, p. 100.
34. Because it is fought in the name of security, this is a war that goes by the name of ‘peace’, a peace violently constituted and forcefully maintained, but masked by the repertoire of police ideology (‘community policing’, ‘serving the people’, ‘keeping us safe’, and on it goes).