Review: The origins of the modern police force and the socialist case for their overthrow

Brian Bean, Their End is Our Beginning. Cops, Capitalism, and Abolition, Haymarket Books, 2025.

Two days after the fifth anniversary of the murder of George Floyd, 24-year-old Warlpiri man Kumanjayi White was killed by police in a Coles supermarket in Alice Springs. Weeks before, one of the same officers who killed White was photographed with his knee on the neck of an Aboriginal woman. The same police force that killed White was also responsible for the shooting of Kumanjayi Walker in 2019, and the coronial inquest into Walker’s death found that Zachary Rolfe, the officer who murdered him, was “the beneficiary of an organisation with hallmarks of institutional racism”.^[1] This recurring brutality forces those on the left to confront the question of how we can end the violence meted out by police.

Brian Bean’s Their End is Our Beginning traces the origins of the modern US police force as it developed alongside the burgeoning capitalist system. The police, he argues, were created as a means of forcing workers to submit to capitalist exploitation. They were professionalised and extended in response to working-class resistance and are used to enforce racial oppression. Bean argues that police violence and racism are not symptoms of the bad attitudes of specific police officers, or even of cultural problems in police organisations. Instead, they’re built into the social role of the police. Police forces are not neutral organisations designed to protect ordinary people from crime, but violent institutions whose purpose is to enforce capitalist domination of an oppressed working class. So the police can’t simply be reformed or made more culturally sensitive. They must be abolished altogether – a project that rests on the overthrow of capitalism through working-class revolution.

Disciplining the working class

Bean argues that the central role of the police – as the armed wing of the capitalist state – is to dominate and oppress the working class to ensure the flow of profits to the capitalist class. This argument sets his book apart from mainstream literature produced on the police, much of which sees police brutality and racist excesses as either accidental or symptomatic of a bad culture which could be transformed through appropriate training. Other authors call for abolition but don’t identify the oppressive relationship between the police and the working class. As a result, they look for solutions entirely separate from working-class resistance. For example, settler colonial theory scholar John Kamaal Sunjata argues that “the role of the police has served to protect white supremacy and wealth creation for white people while denying Black people essential human rights”.^[2] Bean argues that the police do not act for white people in general, but for the capitalist minority. Enforcing the will of this minority necessitates racist brutality.

Capitalists need a domestic armed force to ensure class dominance. Police exist to fulfill this.^[3] Under capitalism, workers create value for the rich minority capitalist class but receive only a small amount in return – enough to keep us alive and working. The gap between the value that we create compared to the meagre wage we receive is hoarded by the rich; thus businesses can turn a profit. Workers have a material interest in unravelling capitalism, and the collective power to end it. Bean argues that the modern police were created for the purpose of “the suppression, prevention, and pacification of working-class resistance” (p.13). Police discipline workers who strike or protest and can be mobilised in large numbers to suppress rebellions. Police use force as a means of social control. Because of the constant presence of police on the streets, working-class people know that a toe out of line can mean being arrested.

Police protect the private property of the wealthy, ensuring that workers do not simply reach out and take the goods we have created but instead pay for what we need out of hard-earned wages. As Bean points out, “the motive to steal, rob, trespass, and the like is continually recreated through the pressure of material need” (p.138). Workers are deprived of what they need to live decent lives, creating a pressure towards forms of crime and therefore a need for police intervention. Racism and discipline of other oppressed groups are crucial parts of this project. Deliberate racist oppression of Black people in the United States keeps large swathes of the working-class population in conditions of even more extreme poverty, allows for sections of the class to be paid even lower wages, and helps the state to justify neglect and violence. Racist division breaks up working-class unity, weakening resistance.

The capitalist state, of which the police form part, is a tool of class domination, not a neutral institution. The capitalist state encompasses, in all countries, a sprawling set of institutions which govern over society in the broad interests of the capitalist class. Rather than acting for individual capitalists, the state’s role is to advance the interests of the capitalist class in general and to ensure its dominance over the working masses. It includes a political wing, sometimes elected, alongside swathes of unelected bureaucracies which facilitate trade, use of water and land, industrial relations, banking and other aspects of society. The police force and the military are the two key parts of the capitalist state, because they ensure its ability to use armed force over the working class domestically and advance the interests of the ruling class it represents abroad. As Bean argues, “rather than capitalist states being sites of struggle that can be perhaps repurposed for our aims, states are the chief obstacle to achieving abolition” (p.9). To end police oppression, we need to overthrow the capitalist state in its entirety.

Origins of the police

In every form of class society, the ruling class has wielded a violent apparatus to dominate those they exploit. In feudal England, owners of large estates controlled private militias, and the aristocracy used the military to put down rebellions. Modern police originated with the advent of capitalist society. Bean briefly charts the development of the modern working class in Europe. Peasants and the poor were rounded up and forced into immense cities where they were worked to death in factories, living in desperately poor conditions. But, “by assembling them all in one place and forcing them to cooperate on the job, employers also increased the capacity for collective working-class struggle against exploitation and tyranny” (p.59). From its advent, the working class collectively resisted. In doing so, they came into physical conflict with armed representatives of the capitalist class. One example is the Peterloo Massacre. In 1819, workers in Manchester organised themselves in hunger marches, strikes and an illegal union, culminating in 100,000 workers marching on St. Peter’s Field on 18 August in military-like columns. Bosses’ militias were backed up by the English army, which charged the workers, killed 14 and injured more than 400, provoking bitter riots and working-class organising.

In response to growing working-class resistance, Home Secretary Sir Robert Peel established the London Metropolitan Police force on 29 September 1829. Other nations followed the example. England’s Royal Irish Constabulary, used to enforce colonial order in Ireland, became the model for state discipline in European colonial projects including Palestine, India, Egypt and Brazil. In Japan, where the Meiji Restoration ushered in capitalist industrialisation, a combination of the English and the more military-style French policing models was implemented in 1874 after Superintendent General Kawaji Toshiwoshi toured Europe to find a model that would work for the new capitalist state.

The working class did not readily accept the discipline of the cops. Less than two months after the advent of the London Metropolitan Police, demonstrators converged on parliament house in protest. In Manchester, early police were regularly beaten and in Birmingham a public assembly declared them “a bullying and unconstitutional force” as street fighting pitted workers against cops.

North America

Modern police forces were established in Boston in 1838, New York in 1844 and Chicago in 1853. These were modelled, Bean explains, explicitly on the London Metropolitan Police. At this time bosses hired private security gangs to use against workers, the most famous being the Pinkertons. They infiltrated unions and forcibly broke strikes from the 1850s onward. The rich also relied on semi-private police forces like the Coal and Iron Police, set up by the state government of Pennsylvania but paid for by coal companies to break strikes, evict workers from their homes and protect the property of the coal bosses.^[4]

While these private gangs were widely and violently used against workers, Bean argues that “the ruling class, while keen to throw money at private security, much preferred that the forces of repression be socialized, for the reason of cost and the ideological function of their appearing ‘public’” (p.66). State-run police forces play an almost identical role to these private firms, but the fact that they’re paid for with taxes and work for the government creates an appearance of serving the people. The Pennsylvania State Constabulary, on which the majority of state police forces were modelled, was introduced in response to the 1902 anthracite coal strike in eastern Pennsylvania.

Earlier precursors to American police were the patrols which controlled the enslaved population and disciplined poor and indentured whites, as well as militias like the Texas Rangers which massacred native Americans. The structures and legal codes which governed the lives and discipline of slaves were based on legal codes developed in England to govern the new working class. Bean argues that “the violent construction of the European proletariat and the obscenity of African chattel slavery were tightly bound together” (p. 36). Slaves bravely resisted, and slave owners established armed bands to hunt down men and women seeking freedom. Patrols were initially paid for by plantation owners, staffed in particular by property owners, and armed by the white participants themselves. But as they became more stable features of an oppressive society, the patrols were increasingly formalised and taken over by local courts.

Bean introduces a less discussed history of the organisation of slave catching: the inconsistency of participation by poor and indentured whites in slave patrols, and the potential for interracial solidarity. Authorities attempted to mobilise all whites to participate in slave-catching gangs, including poor whites and those in servitude. They hoped that the racist legal systems and social structure would bind the poor to their own race, and used financial incentives to mobilise them to catch slaves. But the poor were unreliable. In 1775, one South Carolina regiment commander complained that “the slave patrols had ‘stagnated’ because working-class whites were lax in their participation” (p.39). In response, an influx of professional troops bolstered the patrols. Slave owners imposed a punishment of five years of slavery upon any white accomplice to an escaping slave. A Virginia law for the brutal suppression of resistance by the enslaved warned that “dangerous consequences may arise to the country if other negroes, Indians, or [white] servants should happen to fly forth and joyne with them” (p.37).

Discipline, racism and poverty

Today, police forces are far more vast, professional and heavily armed. Since the 1980s, a capitalist offensive against the working class in the United States and Australia has increased police powers and numbers while curtailing access to welfare and social supports.^[5] Union rights have come under attack, in tandem with a legal offensive against protesters. At the same time, police numbers in impoverished and racially oppressed communities have ramped up and prison populations have swelled. This has accompanied a neoliberal offensive on the welfare state, with privatisation of services, depletion of bulk billing, and constrained access to dole payments.^[6] Sapping funding to social services while increasing police spending is sometimes presented as a simple either/or decision that governments are making about budget lines. But police expansion over the last forty years has been, for the capitalist class, a necessary component of their project of constraining social spending and increasing exploitation of the working class.

Police discipline workers in the ruins left behind by decades of attack on living standards. Law and order campaigns are used as an ideological tool to turn working-class people against each other, explaining social decay as a by-product of individual criminality rather than a deliberate choice emerging from attacks upon working-class living standards. Law and order narratives tend to be deeply racialised, both in Australia and in the United States, as is policing itself. For example, Aboriginal people were 4.5 times more likely to receive a COVID-related fine from police than is proportionate to their population in the first half of 2020, while for Sudanese and South Sudanese people the figure was a staggering 35.6 times.^[7] This can be traced, in part, to the systematic oppression of both of these groups, including the child removals of the Stolen Generations, the violent forcible removal of Indigenous people from their land and the withholding of basic rights from those who arrive in this country as refugees. It is also rooted in the present-day neglect of these communities. Bean argues, speaking about the United States, that “the organized abandonment of working-class Black neighborhoods is enacted through the economic violence of budget cuts, political disenfranchisement, lack of investment resulting in job scarcity, and entrenched workplace and housing discrimination” (p.144). Much of this is also applicable to impoverished and racially oppressed areas of Australia. But racist policing is also clearly connected to the ideological racism which positions these groups as more prone to criminality, and higher imprisonment rates in turn feed this narrative.

As services and infrastructure come under attack, prisons balloon. In the US, hulking new prisons have been constructed on the barren lands of former mines, sold to impoverished working-class communities with the promise of new jobs and constraint of criminality.^[8] In Australia, prisons are increasingly constructed on urban peripheries with high unemployment, and promoted as creating jobs.^[9] Governments do not spend on policing and prisons in order to decrease crime rates, but because building up the disciplinary arm of the state is vital to their project of attacking working-class living standards. Impoverished neighbourhoods are told that an increased police presence will protect them, when in reality the purpose of that police presence is to discipline them into accepting their lot.

The way forward

Bean argues, rightly, that the only way to do away with the police is to overthrow capitalism through working-class revolution. Years of “reforms” to United States police departments have led to the brutality we see today. As Alex S Vitale points out in The End of Policing, training packages miss the point. Police do not murder Black people because they haven’t been trained in appropriate arrest strategies. They do it because the experience of disciplining ordinary people day in and day out teaches police to treat the lives of those they are oppressing with complete disregard. This applies doubly to those who are racially oppressed. Cultural sensitivity training is meaningless when we consider that racism is not a product of individual ideas but a tool used to structure capitalist society, and that police are the armed enforcers of oppression. Attempts to improve policing by recruiting more officers from racially oppressed groups are fraught. Vitale points out that

there is now a large body of evidence measuring whether the race of individual officers affects their use of force. Most studies show no effect. More distressingly, a few indicate that Black officers are more likely to use force or make arrests, especially of Black civilians.^[10]

As Bean reminds us, one of the cops who held George Floyd down while Derek Chauvin murdered him was Black.

The Black Lives Matter urban rebellion popularised calls to “abolish” or “defund” police rather than slogans calling only for reform. This was a step forward. These demands alone, however, are insufficient. Bean also advocates for “demands that can reduce the scope, power, and legitimacy of the police state” (p.231). In Australia, this includes demands to end the practice of “designated zones” in working-class areas, ban strip searches, and introduce independent bodies to investigate police brutality and racism rather than allowing police to do it themselves.

Moments of revolution and uprising can also push the oppressed into direct confrontations with the police. Egyptian revolutionary Hossam el-Hamalawy described how at the National Police Day protest during the 2011–12 Egyptian revolution, “when the cops were run off the streets they literally stripped off their uniforms on the spot and sprinted home in their boxers” (p.189).

Ultimately, however, the rule of the capitalists and their police lackeys will always reassert itself if capitalism isn’t completely replaced by a socialist system. Police are an essential component of capitalist enforcement, and as long as the system stands it will rely on police violence. So those who want to see the abolition of the police must be for the overthrow of capitalist society altogether, as Bean argues.

Only the working class has the power to overthrow capitalism, because the capitalists directly rely on workers to create the profits that give their class life. By halting production, creating new democratic institutions of worker rule, and carrying out an insurrection to defeat the capitalist state, workers can subordinate the capitalist class and begin the project of creating a socialist society.

To do this, conscious intervention by revolutionary socialist political parties is necessary. In the course of every revolution, an array of political parties and institutions attempt to hold back or crush the advancing working class. A party is necessary to cohere large layers of workers with different ideas, win them to the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism, and organise them in action. Without this, defeat is inevitable. While Bean makes a considered argument for the necessity of revolution, he only briefly mentions the need for a party. This is the key task facing socialists the world over today, including in the United States. In the last twenty years, mass uprisings and revolutions have shaken capitalist countries including Egypt, Sudan, Syria, Lebanon, Hong Kong, Myanmar, Ecuador and others. In every one of these, socialists were unable to take the struggle forward because they lacked the organised forces necessary. Like its counterparts across the world, the American working class is exploited, oppressed, and will at some stage enter into struggle. The key task then, for those who dream of the end of the police and a non-capitalist world, is to begin organising revolutionary forces today.

References

Bramble, Tom 2014, “Australian capitalism in the neoliberal age”, Marxist Left Review, 7, Summer. https://marxistleftreview.org/articles/australian-capitalism-in-the-neoliberal-age/

Bramble, Tom 2019, “Police state: The politics of law and order”, Marxist Left Review, 17, Summer. https://marxistleftreview.org/articles/police-state-the-politics-of-law-and-order/

Corrections Victoria 2025, “Western Plains Correctional Centre is ready for opening”, 27 June. https://www.corrections.vic.gov.au/about-the-corrections-system/stories-and-statements/western-plains-correctional-centre-opening

Coroners Court of the Northern Territory 2025, Inquest into the death of Kumanjayi Walker, NTLC 8, 7 July. https://agd.nt.gov.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0009/1541754/A00512019-K.-Walker-findings.pdf

Hopkins, Tamar and Gordana Popovic 2023, Policing COVID-19 in Victoria: exploring the impact of perceived race in the issuing of COVID-19 fines during 2020, Inner Melbourne Community Legal. https://imcl.org.au/assets/downloads/2304_IMCL_PAP_AA_V2.pdf

Lenin, Vladimir 1917, “They Have Forgotten the Main Thing”, Pravda, 18 May. https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/may/05b.htm

Meyerhuber, Carl I 1987, Less than Forever: the Rise and Decline of Union Solidarity in Western Pennsylvania, 1914–1948, Selinsgrove: Susquehanna University Press.

Russell, Emma, Andrew Burridge, Francis Markham, Naama Blatman and Natalie Osborne 2025, “Prisons don’t create safer communities, so why is Australia spending billions on building them?”, The Conversation, 23 January. https://theconversation.com/prisons-dont-create-safer-communities-so-why-is-australia-spending-billions-on-building-them-247238

Story, Brett 2019, Prison Land: Mapping Carceral Power across Neoliberal America, University of Minnesota Press.

Sunjata, John Kamaal 2021, On Police Abolition: Decolonization Is The Only Way, Hampton Institute. https://www.hamptonthink.org/read/on-police-abolition-decolonization-is-the-only-way

Vitale, Alex S 2017, The End of Policing, Verso.

^[1] See Coroners Court of the Northern Territory 2025.

^[2] Sunjata 2021.

^[3] See Lenin 1917.

^[4] Meyerhuber 1987, pp.37, 76.

^[5] Bramble 2019.

^[6] Bramble 2014.

^[7] Hopkins and Popovic 2023.

^[8] Story 2019, pp.80–82.

^[9] For instance, Victoria’s Western Plains Correctional Centre opened on 1 July 2025 at a cost of around $1.1 billion: Corrections Victoria 2025. See also Russell et al 2025.

^[10] Vitale 2017, pp.10–14.