Interesting, in this connexion, are the methods of the American secret police. They are in league with a vast number of private and semi-official “detective bureaux.” The notorious adventures of Nat Pinkerton were really a campaign against the workers. The detectives palmed off bombs on the workers’ leaders, incited them to kill the capitalists, and so forth. Such “detectives” likewise recruit vast numbers of strikebreakers (known in the United States as “scabs”), and troops of armed ruffians who murder strikers when opportunity arises. There is no villainy too black for these assassins, who are employed by the “democratic” State of the American capitalists!
The administration of justice in the bourgeois State is a means of self-defence for the bourgeois class. Above all, it is employed to settle with those who infringe the rights of capitalist property or interfere with the capitalist system. Bourgeois justice sent Liebknecht to prison, but acquitted Liebknecht’s murderer. The State prison service settles accounts quite as effectively as does the executioner of the bourgeois State. Its shafts are directed, not against the rich, but against the poor.
Such are the institutions of the capitalist State, institutions which effect the direct and brutal oppression of the working class.
Among the means of spiritual subjugation at the disposal of the capitalist State, three deserve especial mention: the State school; the State church; and the State, or State-supported, press.