The police are capital’s impersonalized trigger finger, pulling on a gun pointed across borders, across property lines, across classes, and across races. They are the status quo’s heavily armed militia, designed to insulate the ruling class from popular pressure, and thus they constitute the most direct obstacle to all progressive plans for the future. The police are there to shoot you if you start acting too reasonably or too human. Communists recognize that the police (and police-like authorities) volunteer to place themselves outside the human community, and communists plan to defend themselves and their values accordingly. The Zapatistas, for example, are not commonly understood as a movement of Indigenous women practicing agroecology—similar to the NSS—even though that’s in large part what they are.50 Instead, people know them as masked militants wielding AK-47s and marching in columns through the jungle. Communists are willing to do the latter to achieve the former without too much concern about whether their actions are legitimate in the state’s eyes or not. As the communist poet and playwright Bertolt Brecht put it: “What is the use / Up to your chin in the shit, in keeping your / Fingernails clean?”51