Peter Linebaugh, CounterPunch
In December 2014 the discussion of “police” began to look at
the roots of the institution. Peter Gelderloos concluded a three part study in
CounterPunch flatly stating, “The police are a racist, authoritarian
institution that exists to protect the powerful in an unequal system.”[1] Sam
Mitrani, a scholar of the Chicago police, concluded similarly, “The police were
not created to protect and serve the population. They were not created to stop
crime, at least not as most people understand it.” [2] Yet a physician in Ann
Arbor, Catherine Wilkerson, caused a local stir when she stated “that neither
racism nor racist police violence can be abolished under this economic system,
i.e. under capitalism”.
On 21 January 2015 Ta-Nehisi Coates in a speech in Ann Arbor
argued persuasively that plunder is the leading social activity at the base of
racist violence beginning with slavery days and continuing to now. Capitalism
is such a social activity! It is relatively new in human history. It depends on
the exploitation of those who don’t own the means of subsistence and production
by those who do. It creates racist oppression in order to divide the exploited
so that the Few may rule the Many.
Two sources of knowledge are especially pertinent. The first
is the report called Lynching in America issued last week by the Equal Justice
Initiative. It describes 3,959 lynchings in the American South between 1877 and
1950. The second is Stolen Lives which documents more than 2,000 people killed
by law enforcement in the decade of the 1990s.[3] If we add the data of capital
punishment to these data we can begin to understand that the resulting
murderous pattern of terror is the punishment of capital.
Investigation into the history of police soon finds it to be
inseparable from conquest, slavery, debt, industrial discipline, and social
hierarchies. Armed settlers, “pioneers,” militia, army units, slave patrollers,
Texas rangers, posse comitatus, slave catchers, factory guards, troopers,
private security forces, vigilante groups, MPs, lynch mobs, Ford’s “service
department,” death squads, night riders, and the KKK have all served police
functions.
It may help to define police as armed, uniformed, salaried
agents of government, part of the civil service, but it was not thus clear at
the
stopthiefbeginning.
Etymologically the word is related to “policy” and to the
Greek polis, or city. “Police” was a new word in English gaining usage in the
18th century at the time of the sugar plantation, textile factories, racism,
and mechanization. The thing itself was integral to city forces of merchant,
manufacturer, banker, shipper, factor, and insurer, as well as to planter and
landlord. It developed on the one hand in opposition to parochial forces of the
civil power – the constables and the watch – and on the other hand it developed
separately from the military – the army and navy.
As for capitalism let us go back to Adam Smith’s The Wealth
of Nations of 1776, because it connected the actual details of the labor
process (exploitation) to the world market of commodities (globalization). He
said “civil government, so far as it is instituted for the sanctity of
property, is in reality instituted for the defense of the rich against the poor.” His student, Adam Ferguson, said plainly
“wealth comes from inequality.” The “poor” created wealth, i.e. worked,
labored.
These ideas first appeared as “police” as reported in Adam
Smith’s Lectures on Police (c.1763) delivered in Glasgow, a new hub in the
Atlantic economy for banking and commerce of tobacco plantations. He defined police as “cleanliness, security,
cheapness and plenty.” At first, then, “police” encompassed health, commodity,
market, privatization, labor, and force. Already policy makers and profiteers
were studying the intricate political relationship between low wages and high
food prices. Although political economy and police violence were soon to
separate as different limbs within the ruler’s body politics, they never lost
their actual association with its heart. The goal was to make people work
longer and harder.
Adam Smith’s contemporary wrote An Essay on Trade and
Commerce (1770). “A multitude of people being drawn together in a small
territory will raise the price of provisions; but, at the same time, if the
police be good, it must keep down the price of labor.” The poor house must
become “a house of terror.” The workers are “a many-headed monster which every
one should oppose.” To establish the six-day working week, “a good police must
be established.”
Divisions within this class were formalized by wage,
geographic, gender, and racial differences, producing apparently permanent
segments of that class of people without much of anything to call their own. So
it comes as no surprise to learn that parallel to these “economic” developments
was the development of racism. Carl Linneas, the Swedish biologist and deviser
of binomial nomenclature in his Systema naturae (1758) created the term homo
sapiens in a hierarchy of skin color. With spurious pretensions to science he
identified four “races” describing white people as gentle, acute, quick, and
governed by fixed laws and describing black people as crafty, indolent,
careless, and capricious. These are not biological attributes but ones concerning
obedience of interest to HR, bosses, foremen, overseers, in short, slavers!
Global commodity production entailed the enclosure of the
commons, the fractionation of human beings, and the enslavement of women,
children, and men, The social formation of Atlantic capitalism consisted of
massive labor camps in America and the “Satanic mills” or factories of
Britain. The international political
order had to change and did so creating new entities of power, the U.S.A.
(1789) and the U.K. (1801).
Plantation (sugar, cotton) met factory (textiles) at the port
(London, Liverpool). The proletarian
woman, the slave, the factory hand, the urban artisan, and the maritime worker,
sailors, dockers. The port was where the first police were introduced. A new
era of history commenced. If you call it
“industrialization,” or “modernization,” or even the “anthropocene” you are in
danger of overlooking the demons at the center of it, Moloch and Mammon.
By the time of the Haitian slave revolt (1791) which brought
the sugar system into crisis and at the time of the invention of the cotton
‘gin (1793) which brought the cotton system into expansion, the
“pushing-system” began the transition of the most dynamic world commodity from
sugar to cotton. Edward Baptist in the latest historical study of slavery and
capitalism notes that the increased productivity of “the pushing system”
depended on a decisive technology, “the whipping machine.”[4] The whip
intensified labor to the limit of human endurance. It accompanied the expansion
of slavery to new territories and the expansion of the internal slave trade
from the Chesapeake to the Mississippi.
Economically speaking sugar began in the realm of production
(slave plantation) and in Europe entered the realm of consumption (the tea cup,
the rum bottle). In contrast, cotton began in the slave labor camp or
plantation like sugar, but unlike sugar it became a means of exploitation on
the other side of the Atlantic. Private property may belong to an individual
for consumption, or it may be used as capital as an input of production. Police
protect and serve the owners of these forms of property.
Capital exists in three modes or forms, as money (bank), as
production (factory, plantation), as commodity (commerce, inventory). Capital
as commodity sits in dockside warehouses. Capital as money sits in banks,
insurance offices, and other counting houses. Capital as production will be in
the field, the factory, and the ship. Thus the plantation, the docks, and the
factory became three sites of a single economic system on either side of the
Atlantic.
Glasgow (Scotland) was the city of Patrick Colquhoun
(1745-1821). As a youth between 1760 and 1766 he lived on the eastern shore of
the Chesapeake Bay. He was a planner of the trans-Atlantic cotton economy
compiling stats of the workers, wages, factories, and imports in order to
assist the prime minister and cabinet of England maximize profits from the
cycle of capital in England, India, America, Ireland, Africa. That work was
interrupted by the revolutions in France and Haiti.
In the 1790s he criminalized custom. [5] He led the hanging
of those committing money crimes. He led the apprehension of those in textile
labor who re-cycled waste products to their own use. He organized political
surveillance by spies and snitches of those opposing slavery. In addition to
his Virginia cotton interests he owned shares in Jamaican sugar plantations.
Financed by West India merchants and planters in 1798 Colquhoun established the
Police Office. In 1800 Parliament passes the Marine Police Bill expanding and
making official the police as a centralized, armed, and uniformed cadre of the
state. His treatises on police inspired the foundation of police in Dublin
(Ireland), Sydney (Australia), and New York (USA).
To summarize, then, in two points. First, at the time of the
independence of America (1776) “police” (intellectually, theoretically, and
politically) meant the social and economic relations between the rich and the
poor in the governance and planning of world-wide empire. Second, at the time
of the creation of the U.S.A. (1787-1791) the actual institution of police
simultaneously criminalized the urban commons and efficiently linked plantation
and factory, the U.S.A. and the U.K., into a temporary Atlantic system, call it
capitalism.
Finally, there is no ‘moving forward’ without reckoning with
this past. If it took more than a century (a blink in history’s eye) to produce
this unsustainable amalgam of production and police, work and violence, wealth
and terror, we must expect that our efforts to eliminate effectively the one
must be accompanied by the restoration or reparation of the other. There is no
reason, historically-speaking, why this can’t be done in a hurry. The ideal of
justice is indefeasible and undivided; it is a unity and does not wait.
Peter Linebaugh teaches history at the University of Toledo.
His books included: The London Hanged,(with Marcus Rediker) The Many-Headed
Hydra: the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic and Magna Carta
Manifesto. His essay on the history of May Day is included in Serpents in the
Garden. His latest book is Stop Thief! The Commons, Enclosures and
Resistance. He can be reached
at:plineba@yahoo.com
Notes
[1] “Learning from Ferguson: A World Without Police,”
CounterPunch, 29 Dec. 2014.
[2] Sam Mitrani, “The Police Were Created to Control Poor and
Working Class People,” CounterPunch, 31 Dec. 2014. See his book, The Rise of
the Chicago Police Department: Class and Conflict, 1850-1894 (University of
Illinois Press).
[3] Equal Justice Initiative, Lynching in America: Confronting
the Legacy of Racial Terror (Mongomery, Alabama, 2015), and Stolen Lives
Project, Stolen Lives Killed by Law Enforcement (New York, 1999)
[4] The Half has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of
American Capitalism (New York: Basic Books, 2014)
[5] Patrick Colquhoun, A Treatise on the Police of the
Metropolis (1796) and A Treatise on the Commerce and Police of the River Thames
(1798)
