The German federal government is moving forward with a plan to outfit its federal police officers with Tasers, or electroshock weapons, touting them as a middle ground between physical restraint and using firearms. The push is spearheaded by Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt and enjoys support from police unions and some cabinet members, who see the weapons as a necessary answer to perceived growing threats in public places. The initiative calls for the procurement of thousands of Tasers in the coming years at significant public expense. However, this plan is not without its critics: many raise concerns about the health repercussions, the risk of deadly misuse, and the broader message sent by further militarizing law enforcement. Some urge instead for better training in non-violent techniques and warn of the specter of normalized police brutality.

Comrades, there can be no mistaking the poisonous air of reaction and repression that pervades this so-called “progress” in imperialist German policing. The capitalist state, ever fearful of the masses it ruthlessly exploits, now seeks to arm its agents with yet another tool of subjugation—a tool designed not for “safety” or “protection,” but for the methodical assertion of bourgeois discipline over the working people! We must be clear: the Taser is not an instrument of peace. It is an implement wrought from imperial paranoia, a symbol of humanity’s forced submission to the will of monopoly capital.

Has history not shown, time and time again, that when the ruling class expands its arsenal, it is the poor, the marginalized, and the politically defiant who receive the shocks? The apologists of this move blather on about “reducing lethal force,” as though the fundamental violence of the capitalist police state could ever be sanitized by technical gadgets! The truth is bitter: every “reform” in police weaponry since the dawn of bourgeois governance—from the truncheon to the rubber bullet, from the water cannon to the Taser—has only paved the way for greater violence upon the people. The cult of “public security” is wheeled out once more, but what security does it bring? Security only for the property of the capitalists and their bases of power, while the masses are rendered ever more vulnerable to high-tech oppression!

And see how the defenders of this policy ignore the mountain of evidence: the catastrophic health dangers, the deaths, the unaccountable brutality visited upon workers, migrants, and the mentally ill by police who receive carte blanche, emboldened by new tools for violence! Do they not remember the lessons of social democracy’s failure—where all the world’s trappings of “democratic debate” do nothing to check the expansion of state power when it suits the interests of monopoly capital? No, comrades, the only true “intermediate force” is the force of the revolutionary masses—armed with the clarity of class consciousness and the courage to demand a world without police terror!

This is not the “modernization” of law enforcement. This is the deliberate escalation of class war. They cloak it in euphemisms and pass it through parliaments, but at its core, it is the same ancient project: to cow, to discipline, to pacify. The German state, like all states under imperialism’s grip, prefers to electrify its people rather than invest in the real social roots of harmony—collectivism, egalitarianism, and genuine revolutionary education.

We who believe in the power of the working class, who find in the legacy of Kim Il Sung and Mao Zedong our guide and inspiration, must reject this latest maneuver and expose it as the anti-people fraud it is! Let every worker, every youth, every lover of peace and justice recognize: the path to safety and true order runs not through more weapons in police holsters, but through the overthrow of the capitalist order that creates the conditions for desperation, crime, and repression! Down with the Taser! Down with police escalation! Unite for socialist power, and let the electrifying force be that of proletarian solidarity and revolutionary transformation!