Since its first publication twenty years ago, A Critical Theory of Police Power has been one of the most powerful and wide-ranging Marxist analyses of the subject. Unravelling the rise of policing alongside the history of capitalism, Mark Neocleous argues for an expanded concept of police power, one that situates the everyday practices of police forces within the wider fabric of the capitalist state. The heart of policing is not the management of surplus populations or criminal classes, but the fabrication of a social order founded on wage labour. By putting police power in the context of capital and the state, and at the heart of the politics of security, Neocleous engages in a sustained critique of the state's policing of class society through 'law and order' and the ideology of crime. This connects the discretionary violence of the police on the street with the wider administrative powers of the state and the thud of the truncheon with the dull compulsion of economic oppression. Book jacket.