2. Property Is a Plantation

This chapter follows along the track set out by Antony Farley’s statement that the system of property is a plantation is not metaphorical.1 I suggest that the codes that bound white collectives as police were also an aftereffect of the collective formation of property regimes requiring planters and servants to act together as protective tissue. Property, then, is primarily a relation between people that later became processed through the lens of owner and commodity.2

Yet, as I mentioned earlier, policing is often characterized as the thin blue line of property protection. For example, while many recent approaches attend to relationships between police and colonial history, these center how policing was required to protect property regimes produced through colonization.3 The suggestion is that policing was set up as the violent arm of racial capitalism, buoyed by claims regarding the historical birth of the police as a force to maintain plantocratic power.4 Property, for these approaches, is necessarily understood as a system of rights over land and commodities that guarantees ownership as excludability of others. This understanding of property orbits around (critiques of) the widespread view of the consolidation of colonial property regimes in the mid-seventeenth century most associated with the work of John Locke, sometimes known as the father of liberalism.

Against the Lockean view, I suggest that in the moment that the frontier was shaped into an emerging capitalist world, the violences that became embedded into white social relations produced through slavery were one and the same as the property relation.5 I draw attention to the ways that Locke’s justification for colonization as necessarily annihilating the state of nature in fact required the continued presence of the state of nature as slave. Concentrating on the interweaving of police, property, and the function of slavery highlights how the consolidation of whiteness through the collective subjection of Black people simultaneously functioned as collective possession. Put bluntly, policing cannot be reduced to colonial property protection because property and policing coincide.

The point here is not (only) that an emergent liberalism was coextensive with the plantation but rather that its primary concern (as with Kant) was to transform a frontier into a world through the internalization, domestication, and disavowal of slavery and its violences. These violences were continued through the management of the tensions inherent in a social order built on proximity with those who are required for the ongoing production of property regimes while being barred from access to them. As Fanon emphatically stated, “Europe is literally the creation of the Third World.”6 Capitalism today continues to depend on those Black, Indigenous, and colonized people whose lives and labor are expropriated across the world.

The slave codes characterized slaves as chattel property, something that beforehand had not required explicit law because it was so entrenched in custom and practice.7 In the process, long-established forms of violence became prescribed in law and have four essential characteristics: lifetime status, that the status of slave follows the mother, racial identification, and slave as chattel.8 While these characteristics followed English legal concepts typically applied to chattel as exchangeable commodity, slaves were also subject to legal concepts of real estate that were distinct in English law.9 Left implicit in the codes, their prescription emerges in formulations of the use of slaves for bequeathment in wills and deeds of sale, as gifts, for payment, as loan security, and as plantation inventory.10 Slaves functioned as both fungible commodity and sources of further financial accumulation through widespread English investment and collateral, while also forming an enduring source of inherited labor.11

Let us first consider how foregrounding chattel and labor (rather than fungibility) coheres with the colonial labor theory of property at the core of Locke’s ideas, in which property is made through the transformation of land by labor upon it:

Whatsoever [one] removes out of the State that Nature hath provided, and left it in, he hath mixed his Labor with, and joined to it something that is his own, and thereby makes it his Property.12

This state of nature prior to civility was identified with African and what later became known as American land and Indigenous people. For Locke, this made possible the preparing of land for property relations as terra nullius, as well as a people not only fit for enslavement but morally requiring mastery. Land and people in the state of nature would be appropriated and reorganized into regimes of property through the improvement of that land by human action upon it:

As much Land as a Man Tills, Plants, Improves, Cultivates, and can use the Product of, so much is his Property. He by his Labor does, as it were, inclose it from the Common.13

The reality, as Robert Nichol polemically suggests, is that property relations are thus generated by theft.14 In the work of Locke, property is made as a regime of rights over homelands and personhood through collective expropriation and labor. For Locke, colonization is a process of cultivation to improve land to its best potential. Not only is this supposedly vindicated by God’s will but it is also a requirement upon the colonizer to redeem land from being “wasted”:

God gave the world to men in common; but since he gave it them for their benefit, and the greatest conveniences of life they were capable to draw from it, it cannot be supposed he meant it should always remain common and uncultivated. He gave it to the use of the industrious and rational, (and labor was to be his title to it).15

Under the moral requirements of natural law, any wasted land should be developed and made productive. Preexisting forms of cultivation and commerce were disavowed and destroyed, and legitimate possession was formed as a relationship that could be produced only by the colonizer. Land not cultivated by empire was understood as waste, with only the colonizer capable of shepherding the transformation of nature into property.16

Indigenous people were excluded from property rights because they were seen as an integral part of that nature in a state of waste. They were rationally dispossessed by their own state of nature—a “people arrested in their evolution, impervious to reason, incapable of directing their own affairs,” as Fanon later describes this colonial projection.17 On these grounds, Indigenous people were not seen as benign—they also required “improvement” through the force of colonial regimes. Their relationships with land were invalidated, and their clearance, enclosure, and genocide were legitimated as improving the “wastelands.”

Critics of Locke’s justification for colonialism thus suggest that nascent systems of property and of white supremacy were mutually co-constitutive, with racial capitalism the emerging result. But, as Cedric Robinson suggests, though these racial regimes of ownership were made global through slavery and colonialism, their origins lay in the population controls familiar to Western feudal society.18 Building on this, legal systems were written into being through the material and legal reconstruction of colonial lands as a regime of rightful possession marking distinctions between colonizer and Indigenous other.

A problem with this analysis is that the Lockean matrix obscures the fundamental role of the slave in the constitution of property regimes. Even Locke’s critics foreground the central role of land, supposedly made property through colonial dispossession and the legitimizations of the labor theory. However, if we foreground the labor theory of property, the fundamental role played by ownership of chattel labor in Locke’s formulations is obscured.19 The requirement that wasted land could not be tolerated, according to Locke, did not only justify colonial expropriation but also actively required a chattel labor force.

The productive working of that land was supposedly a social good. Moreover, for Locke, the slave was “by the right of Nature, subjected to the absolute dominion and arbitrary power of their masters.”20 Cultivating the wastelands through the labor of enslaved Black people was essential to produce civilized society and rational collective systems. Protection against the state of nature as land required the continued presence of the state of nature as slave.

The labor theory of property presents the positioning of slaves as chattel as derivative of property ownership through the admixture of (enslaved) labor and expropriated land. As Tapji Garba and Sara-Maria Sorentino describe, this forces the idea that the role of slavery lies primarily in working the land that the settlers have claimed. This leads to a widespread reduction of slavery to forced labor, which they call the “labor theory of slavery.”21 But here I follow Garba and Sorentino in foregrounding the ways that enslaved people also had noneconomic utility.22 We saw in the previous chapter that the material and symbolic significance of African slavery precedes and configures global arrangements prior to and beyond 1492. Moreover, slavery functioned to make possible the formation of white collectives in the image of police. The continued presence of the slave is required for more than labor; the slave is required to define the contours of property ownership across the board.

For example, consider how we think about the slave as property and possession.23 Though the logic of chattel is clear in the Barbados codes, the transformation of brutish violence into the legibility of legal form did not take the simple form of a property relation between master (as possessor) and slave (as possession).24 This simple form would mirror a typical understanding of the property relation as legally marking who can be excluded from ownership of certain things so that exploitation can be organized around class hierarchies. However, following Cheryl Harris’s argument that property should be understood as a set of relations, we may consider how the slave codes made legal the assertion of claims to collectively limit and exclude access and power over things or persons.25 That is to say, the form that the property relationship takes is primarily one of proscription and limit across relationships between groups of people and things that are thereby consolidated in the process.

Considering property as foremost a mode of social organization clarifies how it operates as a technology of domination.26 Though this view is prima facie coherent with the labor theory, by focusing on how Black slaves were integral to the emerging property relation, we can better see how liberal property regimes were inextricable from collective subjection. For example, the metaphorical slave that so animated colonial modernity provided an example of negative freedom against which to ground autonomy. Across the Enlightenment period, slavery became forged into a specter against which a multitude of injustices could be named—from unjust taxation to state or church control.27 Slavery was therefore abstracted away from the anti-Black violences of the plantation and remade as universal oppression or obstacle to the making of autonomy and self-possession. In these debates, slavery, as Sabine Brock writes, “actually de-signified black social death in New World regimes of enslavement.”28

This metaphorical slavery therefore necessarily disavowed a slavery that cannot possibly be inhabited by those whose freedoms are won in distinction with it. The identification of Africa with slavery, as Binder points out, “suggest[s] that freedom was in large measure identified by . . . whites as freedom from the black race.”29 We see in the Barbados codes the making legible of a framework of relative freedoms against the Black slave. Unlike those who could potentially be freed from metaphorical slavery (and indentured servitude), Rinaldo Walcott describes how the slave, and any child of matrilineal descent, could not possibly be free because he was by his nature destined to remain under domination in violence.30 Black enslaved people had no autonomy or capacity to act freely because that was invested only in their white masters.31

The sedimenting of Black people as chattel slaves into law was inextricable from the making of white property regimes, where this was primarily understood as a means of consolidating the rights of white people. Sabine Broeck discusses this at length, explaining how slaves functioned to signify the right to property for white people.32 The expansion and distribution of property regimes and mastery over slaves had vastly enlarged the experience of entitlements for white people. As Broeck suggests, this allowed the power of knowing the world for oneself to become more widespread, while also allowing for a central distinction to be made between those who possessed property and those who were themselves possessed.33

By virtue of their inclusion in collective mastery, even white indentured servants were granted the possibility of freedom even while under contract. Freedoms lay along a continuum between plantation owner (master) and indentured servant (unfree laborer and metaphorical slave). In distinction, the Black slave cannot appear along this continuum but rather functioned to render freedom possible at all insofar as their subjection provides the infrastructure for that collective mastery and possession. The legal and material practices defining collective possession over slaves functioned to enable the accumulation of rights and capacities for all whites.34 The function played by the Black slave would therefore also shore up freedom as the potential for limits and proscription under policing and property rights codified under law. As a relationship of power, property was consolidated against and through the status of the slave.

Distinctions between servant and slave, white and Black, were made possible through the limitation and proscriptive force of property relations as regime of collective possession and authority. Whereas the labor theory requires that slaves as property be derivative of land-as-property, instead I am suggesting that the continual presence of the slave was required to make possible the distinctions through which property regimes could be born. The status of the slave was not derived from ownership, labor, or economy so much as that status allowed for whiteness to be set as their boundaries.35 The slave labors, Sorentino writes,

not only in the production of commodities, not only as a commodity, but in the further circulation of labor-power, insofar as the slave regulates between nonwaged work and wage labor, past and present, nature and history, the concrete and abstract, force and form, nothingness and species-being.36

Positioning slaves as property—so thinking of slaves as chattel under collective white control—was central to the coalescing of white community. To be part of civil society—which is also to be part of the regime of property—was to be distinct from slaves.37

The epigraph to this chapter excerpted from the codes makes explicit the tensions at the heart of this maneuver. Black people were inscribed in law as brutish and dangerous, but as chattel, they required entanglement within a system of property ensuring that they were protected “as wee doo many other goods and Chattles.” The Slave, who is but a “chattel” on all other occasions, wrote the abolitionist William Goodell in 1853,

becomes “a person” whenever he is to be punished! He is the only being in the universe to whom is denied all self-direction and free agency, but who is, nevertheless, held responsible for his conduct. . . . He is under the control of law, though unprotected by law and can know law only as an enemy, and not as a friend.38

Locke argued that those in the state of slavery are “not capable of any property, cannot in that state be considered as any part of civil society, the chief end whereof is the preservation of property.”39 The tension between the drive toward the annihilation of the state of nature and the necessary dependence of that drive on the labor of the slave is acute.

For example, Locke, having cowritten the slaveholder’s Constitution of the Carolinas, ensured that liberalism would enshrine how “everything a free man does to safeguard and accumulate his private property is legitimate, provided he does not encroach on another free man’s property.”40 Rights over slaves were interwoven with proscription from arbitrary incursions on the domain over which those rights hold. Protection of property was thus strengthened in opposition to the arbitrary disorder of the state of nature. But, made to embody this disordering threat, the slave was both subject to property rights and the object of forcible exclusion against incursion on those rights. Where land could be “rescued” from the wasted state of nature through clearance, genocide, and labor, the slave represented a state of nature that was both irredeemable and essential to the liberal project.

Civil society was constructed through those who cannot also be part of civil society—because slaves do not have the possibility of owning themselves, by definition, they cannot take up a position within the civil society that is reliant on them. The “right rule of reason and order” in the epigraph indicates the nascent systems of civil order and liberalism in which that tension would be managed by equating order with the embedding of fundamental violences into the structure of property law.

Colonial property regimes were predicated on a system in which, as described in the previous chapter, all white people were conscripted to uphold authority of white possession over Black people, regardless of whether they owned slaves themselves.41 The slave codes were not passed only so that planters could better control their slaves; rather, they ensured that slaves across the colonies would be controlled to uphold the property regime as a whole. Positioning the slave as chattel in law was part of the transformation of slavery into the collective condition of being for liberalism that would ensure its continuation long after slavery had been written out of law altogether.

For example, the later Slave Trade Act 1807 (officially called An Act for the Abolition of the Slave Trade) made it illegal for subjects of the British Crown to buy or sell slaves and be otherwise involved in the slave trade. However, the ends of slavery stuttered and staggered across the nineteenth century. Slave trading continued long after the 1807 act, and emancipation wasn’t carried through by the British until the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833 was rolled into motion a year later. Even then, emancipation would apply only in the Caribbean, with the United States actively supporting slaveholding until after the American Civil War, and in many places under indirect British rule, such as Nigeria, slavery was quietly permitted into the middle of the twentieth century.

Through emancipation, supposed freedom was brought together with the strengthening of slave patrols transformed into institutionalized police forces and pervasive forms of social control, both legislative and extrajudicial.42 Compensation for masters, apprenticeships, and control of movement coalesced into a socioeconomic exchange between master and state, rather than master and slave, operating to (re)constitute the social realm.43 In effect, Black people were sold to the state as existing under the ward of civil society, so requiring the ongoing dispersal of subjection. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the visions of white community, property, and freedom shaped across the “new world” were, far from being destabilized in the process, embedded further. In the context of Barbados, Bruce Taylor writes of this period that the planter class experienced very little economic or social change.44

Colonial society—as white community and property relation—was strengthened insofar as it was made synonymous with the social good. As early as 1676, in response to an attempted slave rebellion, an act further restricting slave movement, punishment, and activities had been explicitly motivated by the positioning of rebellion as an assault on whites and white property.45 This was further ingrained through emancipation, apprenticeships, and the protection of the labor force. Stability for the political community was made possible insofar as Black people became distributed property. Labor would come to be seen as a common resource for the entire community that should be guided by the interests of the plantation.46 Sovereignty over labor did not lie with the workers but with the colonial state and plantocracy, who were therefore charged with protecting slaves from themselves.47

The foremost concern of the property relation has been the distribution of an interwoven relationship between possession and authority. More basic than the singular relationship between possessor and commodity is the ability to distinguish between possessor and possessed, from which other property relations follow. The thought here is that property as written into law and code—including that of the slave—was itself constructed through the violences of enslavement. So, as Orlando Patterson describes, the legal and social concept of ownership requires explanation in terms of slavery, rather than the other way around.48 The consolidation of white communities as a system of exclusion and power under property law was not enabled only by specific forms of colonial violence—enabling violences had already been built in to the form of possession itself.

It is a mainstream position to consider slavery as regressive and antagonistic to capitalist development, even if it may have been a central condition of its possibility.49 Slavery, on this view, could be understood as an anomaly in the processual formation of capitalism with the imposition of its social categories coming undone as it developed. The resurgent interest in racial capitalism has invigorated concern in how these categories may be, in fact, fundamental to the operations of capital primarily by destabilizing its supposed European origin. This, however, does little to disrupt the underlying understanding that capitalism functions through the “tendency toward universalizing wage-labor.”50 Capitalism is still understood to establish a primary relationship between capital and wage labor, and so even if slavery was essential to capitalist development, it is necessarily its exterior.

In Eric Williams’s account, for example, slavery as matrix of primitive accumulation constituted the infrastructure and wealth required for industrial capitalism to take hold in Europe.51 However, Williams reinforces a strong distinction between a regressive slavery and an ultimately liberating capitalism that proletarianized slaves through emancipation.52 Capitalism is then understood to correspond to the end of the violences of slavery either as coherent with emancipation or as producing it. This is consistent with abolitionist arguments at the time that suggested emancipation would bring Black people under contract and therefore into civil society. The suggestion was that class interests would be consolidated through emancipation, which therefore brings with it a truth about labor.53 But, as Jason Read writes, “primitive accumulation was not just a violent transformation—the violent birth throes of the rise of the capitalist mode of production—but was itself a transformation of the form of violence.”54 This mirrors the discussion in the previous chapter regarding the absorption of the slave into legal frameworks as making way for the internalization and dispersal of violence through law and norm. In the same sense, shifts toward a liberal form of capitalism operated as a transformation of the form of slavery.

The continuation of slavery by other means was necessary because, as we have seen, colonial modernity formed a system of dependency of Europe on Black, Indigenous, and colonized people. Emancipation caused a crisis of capital, as Walcott writes,55 which brought about the transformation of property regimes to embed relations of power across the colonies. So, for example, the slave appeared on the ledger of property laws that protected value. Emancipation saw compensation granted to the plantocracy while the formerly enslaved were drawn into postslavery colonial rule. In August 1834, the Abolition Act provided planters with the labor force of the previously enslaved as apprentices. Though widely resisted, slaves in British colonies were supposed to serve as unpaid apprentices for up to seven years on the plantation with just one day a week to work for themselves. As Beckles writes, the planters knew that control over apprentices would ensure that labor continued to operate in the interests of the plantocracy.56

This was a unilateral dependency on land, lives, labor, and resources, reliant on the perpetuation of violence toward, and expropriation from, colonized and enslaved people. Long after abolition, Britain continued to profit directly from enslavement, evading laws by fitting out the holds of slave ships just off-coast, using Spanish or Portuguese flags, and selling confiscated slaves to slavers. Indirectly, British industry continued to depend on slave labor for cheap cotton and sugar from northern America, Cuba, and Brazil, where slavery continued until later in the nineteenth century. For example, in the 1840s, 20 percent of British sugar imports came from Cuba, where British merchants lived and helped to finance the trade. Moreover, forced labor continued across the British Empire up until the formal successes of decolonization were transfigured into other forms of imperial control.

The tensions that arose from intimacy with and dependence on those whose lives and labor Europe expropriated were central to the drive to filter, regulate, and limit access to property but also to continually subsidize through property regimes. Imperial revenues had enabled the consolidation of power for Britons as a “racial subsidy” to the metropole lasting long after decolonization. For example, unequal exchange and a superexploited postcolonial workforce allowed the white working classes within the metropole access to consumer goods, a welfare state, and a greater standard of living.57 The logics of the plantation continued in sustained dependence on those who, while required to provide the resources for white accumulation and expropriation, are simultaneously produced as abject and incapable of property or civil society.

These plantation logics and subsidies are ongoing. With postcolonial migration into the metropole in the mid-twentieth century, an informal color bar separated people into jobs with artificially lowered wages through which superexploitation could continue inside the British state.58 White British workers were able to leave lower-paid jobs or to supervise migrants for higher wages. Labor stratifications made possible internal unequal exchange, transferring surplus to subsidize labor and capital for the burgeoning white middle classes.59 The accumulation of capital for the establishing middle classes brought about the freedoms of property ownership through and as policing and proscription from access to British wealth. For instance, in the 1960s and 1970s, white residents had abandoned inner-city areas, leading to neighborhoods becoming populated primarily by migrants of color, while the white middle class self-segregated to monocultural suburbs. This so-called white flight led to a desire to guard these white territories against what the politician Enoch Powell had named a “separate and strange population.”

Central to this process were “soft” community policing projects, including seemingly innocuous projects like Neighborhood Watch. Emerging from strategies used in Northern Ireland and white communities’ response to civil rights in the United States, Neighborhood Watch implicated many into routine and formalized low-level intelligence gathering. The seemingly antagonistic drives toward individual acquisition and collective action were made interdependent in service of marshaling differential power over space, property, and the means of accumulation. The suburbs needed their middle-class self-defense leagues to embed surveillance into everyday life and continue to draw distinctions and limits within and between communities.60

The protection and exclusion at work in schemes like Neighborhood Watch were part and parcel of a conscription to uphold the authority of white possession against those people deemed both irredeemable and essential. The formation of collective blocs like neighborhood associations and white-only labor unions was fundamental not only to the protection from and exclusion of Black people but also to the continuation of subsidies of white possession at the cost of being conscripted into its policing. This collective governance produced postemancipation debt, segregation, superexploitation, hierarchy of labor, and unequal exchange. The differences between the Black worker and the abstract worker produced under capitalism are the continued effect of “historically specific accumulation of interlocking exclusions.”61

Just as Black presence had been required for the formation of civil society, Black people are continually demanded by global capital accumulation. Black people—recalling the slave—are made to embody tensions at the heart of property, through their exploited and predatory inclusion in property regimes, while prerequisite for their creation and the accumulation of value through them.62 For instance, mass-scale development projects in British urban areas were set in motion in the late 1990s under the rubric of urban renewal. The “sink estate” was at the center of these plans—essentially a translation of the ghetto—and formulated as a space beyond salvation. This would open up inner-city housing to wealthier renters but also to the mass accumulation of wealth through public–private partnerships like private finance initiatives. The conditions of possibility for the discourse and demolition of sink estates were disinvestment, state attrition, and infrastructural negligence. The underlying logic supporting these violences was the economic and social differentiation of spaces into places for neglect, exploitation, and disposal.63

But with these revanchist policies of urban “development,” the accumulation of capital has become increasingly reliant on the intensification of separation—of precarious bedsits, multiplying rents, and luxury flats both proximate and separated. The sink estate becomes not only the site for urban renewal but also the site of violence and fear. For example, in 2016, Conservative prime minister David Cameron wrote,

Step outside in the worst estates, and you’re confronted by concrete slabs dropped from on high, brutal high-rise towers and dark alleyways that are a gift to criminals and drug dealers. The police often talk about the importance of designing out crime, but these estates actually designed it in. Decades of neglect have led to gangs, ghettos and anti-social behavior.64

These areas were framed as “breeding grounds” for social unrest, for terrorism, for gang violence. Black criminality was made contagious in these discourses, requiring not only quarantine to the sink estate but far more invasive management of their inhabitants. Because gangs had supposedly rendered them “no-go areas,” according to work and pensions secretary Iain Duncan Smith, the sink estate required the cleansing demolition of private development to quell the possibility of a disintegrating nation-state.

However, redevelopment does not only push people out of areas. The separation of high-wage tech, information, and management work from a low-wage service sector has the effect of tightly coupling both together. As lockdowns under COVID-19 confirmed, the wealthy are reliant on service workers, cleaners, child minders, and food delivery riders, who are required to live elsewhere and hidden from view.65

Within this spatialized intimacy, policing forms a tissue of intimate segregations. Corporate–state collaborations operate to ensure that access and movements are tightly controlled, with targeted policing used alongside schemes like Met Patrol Plus, which would increase the police force within an area by allowing businesses and local authorities to match-fund policing in a “two-for-one” deal. Regulating the lives of the Black urban poor has become a primary activity for police and property. Where developments fail to trigger loopholes to evade building a small number of affordable homes, separate entrances are often created. These “poor doors” preclude access to those residents from building amenities like gardens, gyms, and play areas. In conjunction with a massive private security industry, spaces of “regeneration” consolidate partnerships between local authorities, policing, and private companies.

Building on community policing strategies, a barrage of antisocial behavior order powers allow for increasing control of people’s movement. For instance, dispersal orders are used to bar access to specific areas on the shakiest of grounds. The criminalization of people is supported by a routine military-style presence, raids, and mass arrests, while working with public sector partners to seek injunctions and containment measures, such as checkpoints, curfews, and the removal of driver’s licenses. What has resulted is a distributed and decentralized mode of policing at the nexus of capital, politics, and security working not only to confine and territorialize people but to manage the tensions of proximity through illusions of separation.66

Although the plantation has become widely recognized as the site of policing’s emergence and consolidation, policing is most often characterized as the thin blue line of property protection. This relies on an articulation of property regimes in which land and commodity born through violent dispossession and colonial law are to be protected from incursion by racialized people.

Here I have suggested instead that the Lockean account underlying this sort of approach leads us away from the tensions at the heart of property as plantation. The machinery through which civil society was created required the institution of property through the dispersal of subjection. Whiteness was formed through collective subjection as collective possession. Liberal capitalism is required to manage the tensions of a social order demanding the presence of Black people while being barred from taking up a position within it. These tensions, rooted in property’s aporetic form as the plantation, continue to drive deployments of violence required for expropriation and global accumulation through predatory inclusion.

The machinery of capitalism has operated to generalize and entrench property relations as a collective web of relations in which terror is ratified by and submerged under legal rights. This runs against the grain of seeing police as involved primarily in protecting property. This isn’t incorrect so much as it is misleading. Rather, property itself is primarily a relationship of policing, protection, and proscription. Property and police coincide—which is to say, property is police.