Review of Cops, Crime and Capitalism (Todd Gordon)
By Adam Barker
“If you have done nothing wrong, then you have nothing to fear.” This patronizing response to an ever increasing police-enforced ordering of Canadian life is all too familiar. Thankfully, Todd Gordon in Cops, Crime and Capitalism engages seriously with this shallow thinking and returns a raft of questions.
Through a theoretical reframing of the state and capitalist economics and a shrewd analysis of applications of law, Gordon identifies who benefits and who is targeted by police action and anti-crime legislation in Canada. He explodes accepted notions of police as good guys who catch criminals, law as something that protects citizens, and the liberal lie that everyone is equal before the law.
Gordon begins his analysis by moving past simplistic or reactionary critiques of the “failure” of the law to illuminate a deeper motivation behind the clashes between police and groups like squeegee kids and indigenous communities. He argues the Canadian state and the logic of exploitative capitalist economics are inseparable; state mechanisms for law creation and enforcement are guided by overarching support of capitalist accumulation, necessitating repression of both workers who threaten profits, and problematic “others” who defy the system. Policing, he writes, “has evolved historically into the key means by which the state produces the working class and responds to its day-to-day struggles against social order.”
Gordon notes that Foucauldian predictions of panoptical, technological policing that treat all people equally and generate docile, self-policing subjects, while reducing the role of the state in maintaining order, have never existed. It’s almost possible to hear him scratching his head, wondering what world these theorists are discussing. Perhaps the “techno-fetishism” he identifies as informing such theory blinds some of its proponents; more likely, the racial and gender groups most directly affected wield a similarly small amount of power in the Ivory Tower as they do in the court room.
Parts of Gordon’s analysis are somewhat problematic; for example, while acknowledging the state exists in a dynamic relationship with challengers to established order, he discusses indigenous experiences of law and order in Canada almost exclusively from an Open Marxist perspective. While he is correct in noting indigenous peoples provided challenges to the state and capitalism – and acquiring indigenous land and labour have been key goals of colonial expansion – Gordon does not engage with the experiences of colonialism that fall outside his theoretical framework (such as indigenous experiences with missionaries, who were often in competition with both government and business for the “souls” of the community).
Further, while Gordon demonstrates one goal of capitalist production – to create a predictable, orderly, sober, hard-working population – has been increasingly reflected in state actions, it’s unclear whether he is claiming this is an essential element of the state, and as such, if enforcement of capitalist oppression is an essential duty of the police. While his argument holds for Canada, similar police and military repression in both pre-capitalist and later communist or totalitarian states raises the question: is capitalism the problem, or is the issue a deeper, hierarchical drive for domination that can be manifested in many regimes?
Regardless, Gordon’s identification of the interrelation between the desires of capital production and the power of the state is prescient in the Canada context. Perhaps the strongest sections of Gordon’s book are his in-depth analysis of the economic history and correlated rise of a law-and-order agenda in Canada, America and Britain. His portrayal of economic dynamics is balanced, well documented, and he is relentless in criticizing the powerful in their drive to take advantage of working classes. His detailed look at how the law affects immigrants is particularly refreshing. 9-11, he notes, “does not represent a watershed in policy implementation. More accurately, it expedited processes that were already underway.” These processes include the use of fear tactics and selective immigration.
This is one more reason why books this are incredibly important for Canadians: they remind us how our political and economic privilege is founded upon state-sanctioned oppression, coercion and exploitation of indigenous peoples, women, immigrants, and even the panhandlers and squeegee kids who simply want to live life differently than the way prescribed by capital and state rationale.
Adam Barker is a settler academic and recent graduate of the MA in Indigenous Governance Program, University of Victoria.
