The main subject of the spring issue of the anarchist revue Existence is “the Protectors of the Order”. We’ve decided to focus on police as an institution, which is a part of the wider repressive apparatus with its tools of control, surveillance, threat, discipline, punishment, and vengeance.
The presumption that the police exists in the first place in order to help to the common people is the same misleading as that we vote for politicians, who protect our interests, and that capitalists want to give jobs to the people. However, the whole repressive apparatus exists mainly in order to protect the order. Don’t imagine the order, though, as a swept street. The order is a system with certain values, ideology (declared ad nauseam, or cleverly hidden), and certain class of privileged, who gain profit from its setting – both material and social. The authoritarian power is kept alive both by ideology and when it is not enough, by brute force, and it doesn’t matter whether it is of psychological or physical nature.
In order to understand better the role of police, we’ve looked to the past how this institution even originated. We’ve used for this a transcription of the David Whitehouse’s lecture. In order to explain the nature of law, we’ve used then the classic of the anarchist theory, Peter Kropotkin. Celý příspěvek