A party’s policing function is progressive or regressive depending on whose development it serves

Evidence

Is its purpose one of repression or of dissemination; in other words, does it have a reactionary or a progressive character? Does the given party carry out its policing function in order to conserve an outward, extrinsic order which is a fetter on the vital forces of history; or does it carry it out in the sense of tending to raise the people to a new level of civilisation expressed programmatically in its political and legal order? In fact, a law finds a lawbreaker: 1. among the reactionary social elements whom it has dispossessed; 2. among the progressive elements whom it holds back; 3. among those elements which have not yet reached the level of civilisation which it can be seen as representing. The policing function of a party can hence be either progressive or regressive. It is progressive when it tends to keep the dispossessed reactionary forces within the bounds of legality, and to raise the backward masses to the level of the new legality. It is regressive when it tends to hold back the vital forces of history and to maintain a legality which has been superseded, which is anti-historical, which has become extrinsic. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 685

Categorization

• DEFINE: Distinguishes progressive from regressive policing functions of political parties by whether they raise the masses or conserve superseded legality.
• XREF: The progressive/regressive distinction of legality prefigures the biopolitical and necropolitical readings later used in Islamophobia critique, where state control of populations serves either integration or exclusion.