Violent Order: Essays on the Nature of Police by David Correia & Tyler Wall

Author:David Correia & Tyler Wall [Correia, David & Wall, Tyler]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: political science, Civil Rights, Security (National & International), law enforcement, human rights
ISBN: 9781642594874
Google: 5T8KEAAAQBAJ
Publisher: Haymarket Books
Published: 2021-08-17T23:36:31.671520+00:00

ANOTHER ORDER: THE POTENZA STRIKES BACK

In October 2018, Foytlin and others traveled to Dallas to disrupt an Energy Transfer Partners shareholders meeting. They each stood up during the meeting, decrying the violence of the pipeline, the potential health and environmental impacts, the dangers and unequal distribution of risks, and the pipeline’s contribution to the climate crisis. “Just because you’re rich doesn’t mean you can make others suffer,” one activist declared. The activists were quickly pushed and dragged out of the meeting and handcuffed. As they filmed and livestreamed the action with cell phones, the video goes dark as Foytlin proclaims forcefully, “Not today, colonizers! Not today! Not today colonizers!” When the officer arresting her told her she was “out of order,” Foytlin responded, “I’m out of order? You’re out of order! You’re all out of order! All of you are out of order! ETP kills!”67

Police, again, are waging a war against antipipeline activists to secure an order of nature for capital accumulation. Police, as Neocleous puts it, are always at war against the “enemies of order” as they work to establish “new grounds of accumulation” in the midst of planetary crisis. However brutal the war waged against antipipeline movements has been, there is nothing exceptional or special about it. Police are simply continuing the long tradition of securing the grounds for capital accumulation, a tradition that began at least in the nineteenth century, as British capitalists called on the cavalry to squash the worker rebellion against fossil capital. On May 13, 1985, Philadelphia police dropped a bomb on the homes and headquarters of MOVE, a Black liberation organization committed to animal liberation and ecological sustainability. MOVE argued that capitalism, war, and police must be abolished for a world with “clean air, clear water and pure food” and a world where “human beings, dogs, birds, fish, trees, ants, weeds, rivers, wind or rain” could flourish.68 When police ignited buildings where MOVE revolutionaries worked tirelessly to embody and live out a relationship with the more-than-human world untied from the logics of accumulation, police waged war on the enemies of the natural order of capitalism. As the great journalist and Black liberation activist Mumia Abu-Jamal put it, “On that day, the city, armed and assisted by the US government, dropped a bomb on a house and called it law. The fire department watched buildings ignite like matches in the desert and cut off water. The courts of the land turned a blind eye, daubed mud in their socket, and prosecuted Ramona Africa for having the nerve to survive an urban holocaust, jailing her for the crime of not burning to death.”69 As fossil capitalists ignite the world for endless accumulation, police set fire to any order of nature that challenges the logic of capital accumulation, white supremacy, and colonialism. If fossil fuels must be set ablaze, so, too, must the enemies of order.

What the war against antipipeline movements and the bombing of MOVE reveal, then, is not the exceptional violence of police. Rather,

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