Once again, the police are back in the spotlight. It's that contentious subject of privatisation, which gets into every pore of the public services at the moment. We have now become familiar with Conservatives advocating competition and private investment, and citing the conditions of austerity and bureaucracy to free public services from the shackles of the state and promote the pseudo-natural logic that beholds that selling off things and leaving them to the market makes them work better.
Generally, we know where we stand when it comes to the sell-off. We point to the ideologies in the Tory armoury; we point out that bureaucracy isn't inherent to state institutions and the private sphere lacks the accountability that public ownership provides; we question the ethics of creaming profits from ill people or students, and the logic of replacing state targets with business targets. We generally fight every bit of privatisation. Education, last year, met huge opposition, and inevitably happened anyway; the NHS is undergoing the same treatment. But is the standpoint which posits state ownership as the problem-solving antithesis to private ownership conducive to substantial change?
Perhaps one of Žižek's jokes can help us here. Here he is in full swing in Violence:
Under socialism, Lenin's advice to young people, his answer to what they should do, was 'learn, learn, learn.' The joke goes: Marx, Engels, and Lenin are asked whether they would prefer to have a wife or a mistress. As expected, Marx, rather conservative in private matters, answers, 'A wife!' while Engels, more of a bon vivant, opts for a mistress. To everyone's surprise, Lenin says, 'I'd like to have both!' Why? Is there a hidden stripe of decadent jouisseur behind this austere revolutionary image? No - he explains: 'So I can tell my wife that I'm going to my mistress, and my mistress that I have to be with my wife...' 'And then, what do you do?' 'I go to a solitary place to learn, learn, learn!'
Aside from the old knowledge is power maxim, this tells us both to not be seduced by the existing opposition and to step back and look at the bigger picture. Perhaps our outrage is misdirected...
The privatisation of the police brings out a problem for the anti-private brigade, or, rather, it illuminates a peculiarity of the privatisation issue itself. Our impulse to condemn another privatisation initiative is put on hold when we acknowledge that the police are not the same as other institutions. The police are the ones standing before us, intimidating us, when we march and protest and shout slogans. While the teachers and nurses join us on the strike, the law prevents the police from doing so. They stand for the last line of civil defence for the state, put in place for us via the state, to preserve the state, and thus preserve us, civil society. For Walter Benjamin, the police, as an arm of the democratic state, are a 'nowhere-tangible, all-pervasive, ghostly presence' in our lives, operating with a form of violence which is both lawmaking and law-preserving. Police violence asserts the law when the state's legal system is insufficient in attaining the aims of the state, and in victory this violence preserves existing laws and establishes new ones. With the dispersed, self-governing power we have under the modern democracy, this self-affirming, creative violence is harder to locate than if it were wielded ruthlessly by an absolute monarchy, but this does not exonerate it from its position as guardians of existing institutions of power. We need only consider the tame justifications used for police tactics at protests, or the number of deaths in police custody and the lack of convictions for those deaths, to see how the police operate with a skewed and productive version of the law. And the suppressive force at the protest is legitimated (especially if we watch the news) due to the fear that the Hobbesian 'state of nature' ready to burst through as soon as we become complacent about our own security. While we watch the stand-off between 'thugs' and cops, we should be aware that it is the barricades around shops which show where the police's real priorities lie. And equally so at the (physically) non-violent end of the spectrum, where the media/police/state tripartite exposes to us the grease that keeps the power-machine working, capital.
So, the police is by no means safe from the two-headed monster of power and capital. It's increased privatisation exemplifies the complicity between the state and the private sphere in a manner of self-regulating security, not simply in the name of the state and its power, nor in the name of private capital and its continued accumulation, but for the neoliberal amalgamation of the two. Like the way CEOs take advisory positions in government (with the controversial appointments of A4e's Emma Harrison and Andy Coulson exposing the rule, not the exception, of the state's power/business interests) the state's privatisation of the police is a joint effort, not for or against the state or the private sphere as such, but for the continued protection of the newly defined ruling classes. This elite, increasingly indiscernible if we focus on categories of gender, race, private or public, and the traditional distinction between bourgeoisie and proletariat, are, as David Harvey shows, a class determined by neoliberal economics, and re-establishes the lines of class division in its most contemporary form.
So how to we express ourselves when the threat of police privatisation arises? On the one hand we want to save things from the invisible hand of the market as it grabs for everything in sight, but on the other hand we recognise the problematic position that the police currently holds. Furthermore, whilst appreciating this problematic position, we hope the police to be nearby to protect our houses when the next round of riots breaks out, and tackle the bad guys to the ground. Abolishment of some kind of protective force is just not something society can take seriously. So we want the police, or something like it, but do we want it in its current form, being haggled for by two sides of the same coin? Accountability is often something we often fall back on. We want the police to be accountable, and privatisation inhibits this. So do we call for the nationalisation of everything - education, healthcare, energy, transport, banks...? Some would say yes, but this prospect would ignore and only encourage the tendency to be ruled by a narrow business-oriented technocratic elite. Instead, we need to conceive of a distinction beyond the private and public and turn the notion of accountability on its head, no longer relying on 'public ownership' for it. Equally so for the other institutions we fear we are losing to the market. Instead, as Georges Sorel says, control of the means of production enables the shift in the balance of power. The neoliberal capitalist elite blend the state and the market, conflating the existing categories of public and private instead of simply squeezing out the public. What they increasingly leave behind, or indeed create as the wealth gaps widen, is a new form of masses, and with this comes the Sorelian clarity of class distinction. 'The middle class is a luxury that capitalism can no longer afford,' said John Gray, and, to slightly amend the words of Marx, they have nothing to lose but their consumerist possessions. The middle is being 'squeezed', as they say, or more accurately, it is being relocated. Some go up, some go down. The police, given this distinction, are protectors of both the state and capital, and neither nationalisation nor privatisation changes this. So do we have them or eat them? Do we fight for the institution as it stands or let it be swallowed by the neoliberal program? We eat, digest, and shit out something new.
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