The armed bodies of the capitalist state — why the police exist, who they serve, and the Marxist-Leninist analysis of repression
The liberal myth holds that the state is a neutral arbiter standing above society, mediating between competing interests for the common good. The police, in this fairy tale, exist to protect "the public" from crime and disorder. Marxism-Leninism rejects this entirely. The state — including its police, courts, prisons, and armed forces — is an instrument of class domination. It exists because class antagonisms are irreconcilable, and its primary function is to maintain the rule of the exploiting class over the exploited.
Engels established this with scientific precision. The state arose at a definite stage of social development when society split into irreconcilable classes. It consists, at its core, of special bodies of armed men — the police, the army, the prison system — separated from and standing above society. These armed bodies do not serve "the people." They serve the class that controls the means of production. Under capitalism, that means the bourgeoisie.
The modern police force was not created to stop crime. It was created to protect private property, discipline the working class, and break strikes. The Metropolitan Police, founded in London in 1829, was established in direct response to growing working-class organisation and unrest. From its inception, the police have been an instrument of class war — waged by the bourgeoisie against the proletariat.
The state is not neutral. It has never been neutral. Every institution of the capitalist state — from Parliament to the police station — ultimately serves to reproduce and defend capitalist property relations. The question is not whether the state takes sides, but which side it is on.
"The state is a product and a manifestation of the irreconcilability of class antagonisms. The state arises where, when and insofar as class antagonisms objectively cannot be reconciled."
— V. I. Lenin, The State and Revolution (1917)The capitalist state deploys multiple, interlocking instruments to suppress the working class and defend bourgeois rule. Each reinforces the others.
The front line of class repression. The police exist to enforce bourgeois law — that is, to protect private property and maintain the social order that benefits capital. They break strikes, kettle demonstrators, surveil organisers, and criminalise poverty. Individual officers may be drawn from the working class, but the institution serves the bourgeoisie. A worker in a police uniform is a class traitor performing the function of class suppression.
Bourgeois law is class law. The courts enforce property rights, criminalise the poor, and grant impunity to the rich. A worker who steals bread is imprisoned; a capitalist who steals wages faces a fine. Trade unionists are injuncted; corporate fraud is settled out of court. The legal system presents itself as blind justice while systematically serving those who own the means of production.
Prisons are warehouses for the surplus population that capitalism discards. The overwhelming majority of prisoners are working class. Many are there for crimes of poverty — theft, drug offences, debt. The prison system does not rehabilitate; it punishes, isolates, and destroys. Under capitalism, mass incarceration is a structural necessity: a system that produces poverty must also produce institutions to contain the impoverished.
The capitalist state monitors, infiltrates, and disrupts working-class organisations. From MI5's surveillance of trade unions and communist parties to the FBI's COINTELPRO, from undercover police in activist groups to mass digital surveillance — the state devotes enormous resources to watching, cataloguing, and neutralising threats to bourgeois rule. Surveillance is not about "national security." It is about class security.
The legal framework of capitalist states systematically restricts workers' ability to organise. In Britain, anti-trade-union legislation — from the Combination Acts of 1799 to the Trade Union Act 2016 and the Strikes (Minimum Service Levels) Act 2023 — exists to limit, contain, and criminalise collective working-class action. The right to strike is hedged with so many legal restrictions that exercising it becomes an act of defiance in itself.
The repressive apparatus is reinforced by ideological conditioning. The capitalist media presents the police as heroes, strikers as thugs, protesters as extremists, and the existing order as natural and permanent. This ideological function is inseparable from physical repression — it manufactures consent for state violence and delegitimises resistance before it can organise.
The history of the police is the history of class war from above. Every major advance of the working class has been met with state violence. Every time workers have organised, struck, marched, or demanded their rights, the capitalist state has responded with truncheons, bullets, imprisonment, and legal repression.
At St Peter's Field in Manchester, cavalry charged into a crowd of 60,000 workers peacefully demanding parliamentary reform. Eighteen were killed and hundreds wounded. The state's message was clear: working-class political organisation would be met with armed force. The ruling class called it "restoring order." It was class terror.
When the workers of Paris seized power and established the Commune, the bourgeois French state — with the assistance of the Prussian army that had just defeated it in war — drowned the revolution in blood. Over 20,000 Communards were massacred in the Semaine Sanglante. The bourgeoisie will always prefer foreign invasion to working-class rule.
Throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, the police and military were deployed against striking workers with lethal regularity. The Tonypandy riots of 1910, the Battle of Blair Mountain in 1921, the Ludlow Massacre of 1914 — in every case, the state acted as the armed wing of the employer class. Strikers were beaten, shot, and imprisoned for the crime of withdrawing their labour.
The FBI's Counter Intelligence Program systematically targeted communist, socialist, Black liberation, and anti-war organisations in the United States. It used infiltration, blackmail, disinformation, and assassination to destroy progressive movements. Fred Hampton, chairman of the Illinois Black Panther Party, was murdered in his bed by police in a raid coordinated with the FBI. This is the true face of bourgeois democracy.
The Thatcher government deployed the full apparatus of state repression against the National Union of Mineworkers. Police were brought in from across the country, roadblocks were set up to prevent miners travelling, pickets were violently attacked, and thousands were arrested. At Orgreave, mounted police charged miners in what amounted to a planned military operation. The strike was defeated not by the market but by the state.
The police forces of the colonial empires — in India, Ireland, Kenya, Malaya, and across the colonised world — were instruments of imperial terror. The techniques of mass surveillance, collective punishment, internment without trial, and the use of paramilitaries against civilian populations were developed in the colonies and brought home to be used against the domestic working class. Policing and imperialism are inseparable.
"The state is an organ of class rule, an organ for the oppression of one class by another; it is the creation of 'order,' which legalises and perpetuates this oppression."
— V. I. Lenin, The State and Revolution (1917)In the 21st century, the repressive character of the police has intensified. Police forces across the capitalist world have undergone a process of militarisation — equipped with armoured vehicles, automatic weapons, drones, and surveillance technology that would have been unimaginable a generation ago. This is not a response to rising crime. Crime rates have fallen in most capitalist countries. It is a response to the deepening crisis of capitalism and the growing potential for social unrest.
The suppression of protest has become a central function of modern policing. From the kettling of anti-austerity demonstrators in London to the tear-gassing of Black Lives Matter protesters in American cities, from the brutality against the Gilets Jaunes in France to the repression of environmental activists — the police respond to every expression of popular discontent with escalating force. Protest is tolerated only insofar as it is ineffective. The moment it threatens the interests of capital, the truncheons come out.
Racial profiling is not a deviation from "proper" policing — it is an integral part of it. The disproportionate targeting of Black, Asian, and minority ethnic communities by police is a function of class control. Racialised communities are disproportionately working class, and the criminalisation of these communities serves to divide the working class, justify expanded police powers, and maintain a reserve of unfree labour through mass incarceration. Racism is not a bug in the system of policing. It is a feature.
The militarisation of the police is not an aberration — it is the logical development of the capitalist state in a period of deepening crisis. As the contradictions of capitalism sharpen, the ruling class relies ever more heavily on naked force to maintain its position.
The question of what to do about the police divides the political landscape into three broad camps. The Marxist-Leninist position is distinct from both the liberal reformist and the anarchist abolitionist positions.
Liberals argue that the police can be reformed — better training, body cameras, community policing, diversity hiring, civilian oversight. This is idealism of the most naive kind. The police cannot be reformed because the problem is not bad individuals or poor procedures. The problem is the function of the institution itself. You cannot reform an institution whose purpose is class oppression into an instrument of class liberation. Body cameras do not change the class character of the police. They merely record it.
Anarchists call for the abolition of the police without the seizure of state power. This is utopian. In a class society, the abolition of the bourgeois state apparatus without replacing it with a proletarian state apparatus simply leaves the working class defenceless against the organised violence of the capitalist class. The ruling class will not disarm voluntarily. Abolition without revolution is a fantasy that disarms the working class politically and practically.
The police cannot be reformed under capitalism because they are doing exactly what they were designed to do. They cannot simply be abolished while the capitalist class retains its economic power. The bourgeois state must be smashed — not reformed, not gradually transformed, but decisively overthrown — and replaced with a workers' state. Under the dictatorship of the proletariat, the organs of public order serve the working class, not capital. As class antagonisms diminish under socialism, the state itself begins to wither away.
Marxist-Leninists do not oppose all forms of public order — they oppose the class character of bourgeois public order. A workers' state has every right and duty to defend itself against counter-revolution and organised crime. The difference is which class holds power and in whose interest that power is exercised.
The Marxist-Leninist critique of the police is not a critique of public order as such. It is a critique of the class character of bourgeois public order. Under capitalism, "law and order" means the protection of capitalist property and the suppression of working-class resistance. Under socialism, public order means the defence of the revolution, the suppression of counter-revolutionary activity, and the protection of the working class and its conquests.
The Paris Commune showed the way. One of its first acts was to abolish the standing army and police and replace them with the armed people. Officials were elected, subject to recall, and paid no more than a worker's wage. This is the model: not the abolition of all authority, but the replacement of bourgeois authority with proletarian authority — accountable, democratic, and serving the interests of the vast majority.
The experience of every socialist revolution confirms this. The working class needs its own organs of power — organs that defend the revolution against the inevitable attempts of the deposed bourgeoisie and their imperialist allies to restore exploitation. The dictatorship of the proletariat is not a contradiction of democracy but its highest form: the rule of the many over the few, replacing the capitalist rule of the few over the many.
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