Security forces in the DOTP?

[Die Neue Zeit]

Given all the news of police brutality, private prisons, etc. one would be tempted to shout the slogan "abolition of the police" from the days of the Paris Commune.

However, there are various types of security forces in modern society since the mid 20th-century. Here's a short list of some of them:

1) Investigative units (like detective work)
2) Foreign intelligence and domestic counter-intelligence units (http://www.orange.mu/kinews/afp/people/107287/putin-issues-chekists-day-greetings-to-spies.html) (for both espionage and sabotage, like part of the NKVD and later KGB)
3) Surveillance operations in the armed forces (not just political oversight by a commissar, like part of the NKVD and later KGB)
4) Paramilitaries
5) Prison security (like the NKVD and the gulags)
6) Typical police forces
7) "Secret police" organizations

In the case of the seventh and perhaps fourth, I'm inclined to think that the profiling, ostracizing, etc. that occurred to operatives after the collapse of Soviet-aligned regimes (http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/12/world/europe/12spooks.html) may be more instructive on how a DOTP should handle all those who worked in bourgeois "national security" organs than mere abolition.

So, to what extent is "abolition of the police" still applicable, and to what extent is it obsolete (i.e., that the DOTP - in spite of recallability, random selections where needed, and other radical democratic oversights - needs "Chekists (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronology_of_Soviet_secret_police_agencies)")?

[Jose Gracchus]

I'll reply in greater detail later, but let me say this:

You're more likely to get an ecumenical response is you detail what the initial purpose of VCheka was, and that was to bust "managers' and senior civil servants' strikes" (a la your excellent analogy to the "management strike" against the government and oil workers in Venezuela) and to counter sabotage and disobedience by senior civil servants and managers. The fact is, anarchists should agree as well - as I'm sure the CNT-FAI had to resort to these measures -, there is a need for revolutionary workers' and peasants' to resort to organized means to suppress capricious sabotage of the economy and now public property, which is inevitable by spiteful capitalists and private and public managers (to say nothing of the problem of the potentially general withdrawal of specialists from revolutionary institution-building), as well as state officials disobedience (for instance, even in a revolutionary anarchist scenario, wouldn't they resorting to whatever means to seize the armories for the workers' militia)?

This is quite apart from political policing functions and monitoring and repression of dissenting politics and attitudes.

[Die Neue Zeit]

Trivia before the storm that will be your "greater detail": The busting of coordinator "strikes" is similar in function to the third point above, which was the function of the KGB's Third Chief Directorate. I didn't include economic surveillance, which is more in line with busting coordinator "strikes" than that third point; this was the function of the KGB's Sixth Directorate.

[Kiev Communard]

Given all the news of police brutality, private prisons, etc. one would be tempted to shout the slogan "abolition of the police" from the days of the Paris Commune.

However, there are various types of security forces in modern society since the mid 20th-century. Here's a short list of some of them:

1) Investigative units (like detective work)
2) Foreign intelligence and domestic counter-intelligence units (http://www.orange.mu/kinews/afp/people/107287/putin-issues-chekists-day-greetings-to-spies.html) (for both espionage and sabotage, like part of the NKVD and later KGB)
3) Surveillance operations in the armed forces (not just political oversight by a commissar, like part of the NKVD and later KGB)
4) Paramilitaries
5) Prison security (like the NKVD and the gulags)
6) Typical police forces
7) "Secret police" organizations

In the case of the seventh and perhaps fourth, I'm inclined to think that the profiling, ostracizing, etc. that occurred to operatives after the collapse of Soviet-aligned regimes (http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/12/world/europe/12spooks.html) may be more instructive on how a DOTP should handle all those who worked in bourgeois "national security" organs than mere abolition.

So, to what extent is "abolition of the police" still applicable, and to what extent is it obsolete (i.e., that the DOTP - in spite of recallability, random selections where needed, and other radical democratic oversights - needs "Chekists (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronology_of_Soviet_secret_police_agencies)")?


If I am not mistaken, Makhno forces had their own operatives of the 3rd type from your list, that is, military counter-intelligence, and the Makhnovists, contrary to popular stereotype, did not open the prisons for common-law criminals to roam free, so the 5th type (with necessary limitations) evidently also applies even in the case of purely Anarchist revolution (genuine, that is). As for detective work and foreign intelligence, these are indispensable until, on the one hand, the material conditions for criminal activities are not abolished by means of social revolution, and, on the other hand, until there exist hostile foreign capitalist powers. As for so-called "typical police", it is rather complicated question. I would propose using late-Soviet experience of creating "people's militias" (narodnye druzhyny (http://www.anonym.to/?http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voluntary_People%27s_Druzhina) in Russian, as opposed to practically police-like "official" Soviet militsiya) for conducting patrol/traffic surveillance activities, perhaps, with the assistance of former members of professional police force.