Thoughts on the Police Riots
Are the police riots spreading all across America accelerating the contradiction between the ideological smokescreen of what the police stand for and the actual function of the police? In other words, are they revealing the contradiction between an ideology which claims the police exist to protect and serve the people, and a function which mandates that the police exercise violence against the people in order to clear the way for the flows of capital?
I’ve been seeing a lot of people, on Twitter and other social media, referencing the failures of the police to protect their lives, or even their property (giving the lie to the pseudo-radical claim “the police only exist to protect property”) while contrasting these failures with the seemingly infinite ability of the police to assault, maim, and arrest protesters across America.
These claims seem to illustrate that the police do not exist to protect people, or even property. They exist to protect Capital, as a social relation, a socially constituted flow. Hence the escalated police response in the aftermath of the total wreckage of the Target and Cub foods in South Minneapolis. What mattered less was that solid items were stolen from Target (things get stolen all the time.) What mattered was that Target could no longer sell things, that the items in the Target were removed from the flow of capital/money and instead entered into another flow, a flow of largely decoded desire.
This is the function of the police: not the protection of property, envisioned as a solid, unchanging, presence; but instead the maintenance and channeling of Capital, as a flow/flux, preventing the increasingly decoded (neoliberalized, in the aftermath of cuts in funding to social programs, schools, homeless shelters, hospitals, factories, etc. that once defined “ghettoized” neighborhoods) flows of capital from being blocked off by the proletarians, forced to leap outside their bounds and become something altogether different: rather than Capital and its logic of scarcity, bounty and a logic of plenitude.
Is the present police riot revealing this contradiction to more and more people around the world? One can only hope, but police ideology has shown an amazing ability to regenerate itself. Thousands of microfascists across Minneapolis are already taking it upon themselves to police the protesters, despite the fact that this sometimes results in their own arrest for violating the curfew put in place to protect Capital (the police do not care about your property, about your neighborhood, but only the continued circulation of capital.) Will these arrests be a rude awakening for some?
What happens when the protection of the circulation of Capital becomes truly and clearly distinct from the protection of the people and individual fixed property? Is this the definition of fascism? Is the acceleration of this contradiction even a good thing? After all, as D&G are found of saying, “nobody has died from their contradictions.” At the very least, it may lead some individuals to disinvest from the present social order upon realizing it does not have their best interests in mind; it only protects them so long as that protection serves capital.
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