Debt as Pacification

Police power is the state’s ability to transform non-wage laborers into wage-laborers. The police power is thus integral to the production and reproduction of bourgeois order. To focus our attention entirely on professional police forces (the uniformed police, the cops, the bobbies) when considering this power is to invite a narrow reading of policing, bracketing out the plethora of techniques, organisations, and institutions through which social order is achieved. At the heart of Abstract