From debt to the baton: usury capitalism and the making of the police state
Current events are full of contradictions mixing the desire for freedom and authoritarian impulses. How can we understand this global phenomenon, which consists of exchanging ever more freedom for ever more security?
An unfair balance of power in favor of capital
Without wanting to give too much credit to Marxist analysis which interprets history as that of a perpetual conflict between presumed antagonistic economic classes, today’s world could not be understood without recognizing the importance of preserving the private interests of global capitalism. Let us say things clearly: for several decades we have been witnessing the emergence of modern slavery where the driving forces of a society – entrepreneurs, craftsmen, workers, that is to say the labor factor – are gradually placed in the service of financial forces whose income comes mainly from rent and capital.
This phenomenon is not new. It has already been observed in different forms throughout history, particularly in colonial systems. Its particularity today is to have been generalized on a global scale.
At the origin of this transformation, there is a mechanism that we have come to consider as natural: debt with interest, in other words usury. Usury creates a permanent tension between those who own the capital and those who must produce the income necessary to remunerate it. The question is therefore not only that of ownership of capital, but that of the balance of power that debt establishes throughout the economy. Whoever has a claim can wait. The one who must repay must produce.
This is a fundamental difference. Today, this balance of power is largely favorable to capital. An increasing share of wealth is concentrated in the hands of a very small fraction of the population, while work supports a significant part of the effort necessary for the functioning of the system. However, a society cannot indefinitely demand the same sacrifices from the same categories of population without causing frustration. When effort is always demanded from the same side, it eventually produces bitterness, resentment and, sooner or later, anger.
The withdrawal of the State and the return of force
One of the great transformations of recent decades has been the decline of the State in the economic sphere. The neoliberal ideology, which took hold from the 1980s, is based in particular on the idea that the market must take charge of an increasing part of what previously fell under public intervention. Deregulation, privatization, financial liberalization and reduction of state economic intervention have profoundly changed the relationship between political power and economic power.
The financial sector has been one of the major beneficiaries of this transformation. But this withdrawal of the State produces a paradox. The more the State abandons its function of economic protection, the more it is led to strengthen its function of protection of order. This is where we find one of the keys to understanding the rise of contemporary authoritarianism.
Having yielded to the call of private lobbies to delegate part of its economic power, political power will gradually work to withdraw the State from the economic and regulatory sphere. This identity crisis of the State, characterized by the abandonment of its duty of economic and social protection of the population, results in a fall back on its competence of “physical protection” of citizens and on the monopoly on the use of force, through the police and the armed forces.
When the State can no longer or no longer wants to act on the economic causes of discontent, it must manage the social consequences of these same imbalances. And when a population suffering precariousness, downgrading or austerity protests, the State can no longer respond with economic policy, but by maintaining order. The social state is in retreat. The economic state is withdrawing. But the police state remains. This is how usury capitalism can gradually produce a state that protects less citizens against the consequences of the system and more the system against those who challenge it.
Police violence as an outcome
It is also from this perspective that we must look at the issue of police violence. We generally look for their origin in the police themselves: training of officers, doctrine of maintaining order, intervention methods or individual behavior. These factors obviously exist and must be examined. But they don’t answer a deeper question: why does society become sufficiently conflicted that the police have to intervene with such intensity?
The police are generally not the origin of social conflict. She intervenes when he is already there. Before the demonstration, there is a demand. Before the claim, there is frustration. And behind this frustration, there is often an economic reality. A salary that no longer allows you to live properly. Housing that has become inaccessible. A debt that accumulates. Public services that disappear. A retreat that goes backwards. Taxation that becomes heavier. A feeling of being downgraded.
Police violence is therefore sometimes the last link in a chain, the first of which is not in the streets but in the economy.. The truncheon appears when economic policy no longer has anything to offer.
Individual behavior, police doctrines, political circumstances and the specific history of each country play their role. But it would be naive to consider police violence independently of the economic and social conditions in which it appears. A society that is deeply unequal, highly indebted and subject to permanent pressure to perform produces more tensions. And when the political mechanisms for correcting these tensions weaken, public force becomes necessary to maintain order.
The safe smoke screen
It is in this context that we must also understand the place taken by the security discourse.
Fear is politically effective. When a population is worried about its economic future, it is always possible to shift its concern to another threat: immigration, crime, terrorism, insecurity, radicalism or social disorder. This is not to deny the existence of these problems. It is a question of understanding their political function when they become the only subjects making it possible to explain the difficulties of a society. The risk then is to ask the police to solve problems that economics and politics have helped to create.
The police are asked to deal with the delinquency produced by marginalization. He is asked to contain the social movements caused by the downgrading. It is asked to manage the consequences of economic policies which have reduced the State’s capacity for intervention. And when the protest becomes too strong, the powers granted to the security forces are further expanded in the name of protecting the population.
This is how a “security coup” can take place: not necessarily a coup in the classic sense, but a progressive shift in the social pact in which freedom is increasingly exchanged for the promise of security. The citizen accepts more surveillance, more control and more restrictions, because he is afraid. And all the while, the root economic causes of the malaise remain largely intact.
The real issue: economic justice
This is ultimately where the fundamental contradiction of financial capitalism lies. It claims to free the economy from state intervention, but it needs the state to guarantee contracts, protect debts and maintain order when tensions become too high. It requires less government when it comes to regulating capital. But he demands more from the state when it comes to protecting the social order.
Less state for the economy. More state for security. And that is perhaps, deep down, the authoritarianism that does not speak its name. It does not necessarily start with a dictatorship. It begins with an economic imbalance. Then comes frustration, insecurity, fear, the demand for protection, and finally, the strengthening of the coercive power of the state.
The police are therefore not necessarily the beginning of social violence. It is the outcome. This is why the question of police violence can never be resolved only in police stations or in demonstrations. We must also look at what is happening in the banks, on the financial markets and in state budgets.
Behind some of the tensions we seek to repress lies a much older question: who has to work, who has to pay and who has the power to wait? As long as this question remains unanswered, social peace will remain fragile. And it would be a shame if controversies over the police, security or immigration made us forget the real issue: economic justice and peace.
