“Little wars with the police”: Aesthetic arsenals and intellects of insult

Abstract

This paper describes the contemporary entanglement of “fuck the police” (FTP) and “all cops are bastards” (ACAB), locating each as examples of a growing rejection of an immiserating police power. We argue that these confrontational phrases emerge from the policed classes as relatively precise political diagnoses of a police power that is elementally concerned with the fabrication of capital’s social, racial, economic, and aesthetic order(s). In our view, the anti-police vitality communicated in these and other crude, combative, and dismissive symbolic confrontations with police is part of the necessary conditions for the revolutionary pursuit of a livable future.