Comment: The Fabrication of a New Social Order.

• Date: 22 September 2021
• Author: Rigakos, George S.
• Published date: 22 September 2021
• Author: Rigakos, George S.

Situating the legacy or importance of any scholarly contribution inevitably becomes a subjective endeavor. There are certainly those impact factor scores and citation rates one may consider, but these appear to be increasingly rigged and meaningless measures. Among mainstream corners of social theory, sociology, criminology, legal studies, security studies (and so forth), Neocleous's (2000) The Fabrication of Social Order: A Critical Theory of Police Power is certainly far better known and less peripheral than most any other contemporary Marxist analysis. This might seem modest praise but considering the marginal place of Marxism in general, it is perhaps evidence enough of its impact and significance. To me, however, the book's clout is obvious. No other text on policing in recent memory has come close to its influence on the theoretical and political imagination of radical scholars concerned with state power, policing, and security. The Fabrication of Social Order provided a historical understanding of police power and its role in the construction and maintenance of capitalism. It set in motion a political and theoretical intervention that toppled the self-referential and limiting nature of Foucauldian notions of security. It took Marx's (1843, 43) pronouncement that security is the "supreme concept of bourgeois society" seriously and laid a philosophical foundation for a comprehensive attack on what passes for contemporary critical analyses of security. Finally, and most importantly, the book provided a lexicon for the convergence of a group of radical anti-security (antisec) scholars to move the critique of security forward. Subsequent conceptual elaborations, including Neocleous's own later work, have driven a renewal of radical scholarship through a series of meetings, special issues, and anthologies interrogating--inter alia--police power, state formation, and capitalism. Among the left, The Fabrication of Social Order has emerged as an important work, a milestone text that has helped ignite an energetic coalescence of disparate radical analyses of the police by honing in on a critique of the broader historical political economy of bourgeois security.

The contributions to this special issue, in one way or another, engage with the effects of Fabrication or the subsequent scholarly work it has influenced. My intention in this commentary is to push this engagement a little further and to challenge what appears to be an emerging self-satisfaction with the intent and potential for a radical critique of security. I proceed from the well-worn Marxist entreaty and epigraph that "[p]hilosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it" (Marx 1845/1938, 11). In what is to follow, I provide a brief overview of the general tenets and contributions of Fabrication, address the ostensible limits of antisec discourse, and then offer my insights on where we can go from here. My thesis is simple: if our critique of security has indeed revealed the particular mechanics by which capitalism was made possible through police science, and if this marks an important breakthrough for Marxist understandings of state and political economy under the organizing principle of security, then why can a similar process not be explored for a transition to a post-capitalist future? And, finally, should this not be a focus for antisec scholarship moving forward?

To my mind there are two overlapping, general assertions made by Neocleous in The Fabrication of Social Order. The first assertion is that the history of police power is the history of class war. This means that we cannot grasp the emergence of police science, police power, or the establishment of capitalism itself without reckoning with the weight of empirical evidence to reveal that the architects of police science were consciously creating a violent institutional and regulatory order to secure private property relations. For Neocleous (2000, 61; 2021, 140), the "history of police as a security project is a history of private property's fear." Second, this class war immediately merged police power with the criminalization of noncapitalist subsistence. That is, the police were set up to enforce wage labor by systematically eliminating all alternatives. When the simple status of vagrancy was made illegal under the New Poor Law (1834), this "could only be settled by a massive police operation" (Neocleous 2000, 69; 2021, 152). Again, the enforcement of this wage system was violent and there is ample evidence that police scientists were particularly invested in criminalizing vagabonds and masterless men, and in vetting the idle poor into so-called dangerous or useful categories for capital accumulation (Neocleous 2000, 37-39; 2021, 106-8). These two tenets, for me, form the core contribution of the book. Neocleous also reminds us that the idea of police science ought to be appreciated in its historic, predisciplinary context and that the institutional formation of what we understand as the contemporary police is merely an elaboration on the broader bourgeois compulsion to preserve order, to govern, and to fabricate a new economic system. To push beyond Foucauldian conceptions he contends that the foundations and purpose for...