| This thesis is an anti-racist study of the emergence of law and order policing in Canada over the last couple of decades. It employs a heterodox (or "Open") Marxist theoretical framework, which views state power as the political mode of existence, or expression, of the dynamics of class struggle at the heart of capitalist social relations, and emphasizes the constitutive or productive character of that power. Using this framework, the thesis locates law and order policing as a central moment of capitalist state power in the era of neoliberalism.;The thesis begins with an imminent critique of the currently trendy, poststructuralist-inspired panopticon theories of policing, which virtually ignore the role of the state, emphasize at-a-distance policing techniques, and erroneously suggest that all classes and races are policed equally. It then takes up heterodox Marxist theories of the state and policing, and fills them out with much-needed anti-racist and feminist analysis, as state power, and policing as a moment of that power, is sharply racialized and gendered. This is followed by a class struggle, political-economic analysis of the end of the postwar period and the emergence of neoliberalism, and with it law and order policing. The thesis is rounded out with a more focused look at two important features of the law and order agenda. The first is a study of Ontario's Safe Streets Act and municipal anti-panhandling By-laws, which, it is argued, express the re-emergence of vagrancy law as they are designed to force the able-bodied poor into market relations. The second examines the criminalization of immigrant communities. As immigrants, especially those from the Global South, are now increasingly important to capitalism in Canada as a vulnerable and cheap source of labour, their subjection to a very direct and coercive surveillance by the police has become pivotal to neoliberal order. (Abstract shortened by UMI.). |
