Government-funded mobs paired clerical elites with police recruits
Evidence
It is also an instrument for the illegality with which the very exercise of power surrounds itself. The political use of delinquents – as informers and agents provocateurs – was a fact well before the nineteenth century. But, after the Revolution, this practice acquired quite different dimensions: the infiltration of political parties and workers’ associations, the recruitment of thugs against strikers and rioters, the organization of a sub-police – working directly with the legal police and capable if necessary of becoming a sort of parallel army – a whole extra-legal functioning of power was partly assured by the mass of reserve labour constituted by the delinquents: a clandestine police force and standby army at the disposal of the state. It seems that, in France, it was around the Revolution of 1848 and Louis Napoleon’s seizure of power that these practices reached their height (Marx, Eighteenth Brumaire …, 63–5). Delinquency, solidified by a penal system centred upon the prison, thus represents a diversion of illegality for the illicit circuits of profit and power of the dominant class. — Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish- The Birth of the…, 430 (
#corroborates, via linked claim)
Categorization
- XREF: connects to: The state recruits delinquents as an unaccountable parallel police and thug army — Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish- The Birth of the…, 430
Related
Broader Connections
- The state recruits delinquents as an unaccountable parallel police and thug army
#corroborates(0.82) — Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish- The Birth of the…, 430