Police in the revolution

[Fawkes]

I know that going back as far as the Paris Commune nearly every revolution has had the aid of a large percentage of that country's military ranging from outright changing sides and joining revolutionary forces to a refusal to fire upon revolutionaries without actively fighting alongside them. Are there any notable examples of the same thing happening with domestic police forces?

[PhoenixAsh]

Not like the amry used to do.

I think a lot of that has to do with both the role and the make up of the police.
The police was always recruited out of volunteers who were trained and selected to fullfil a position of power in order to serve the state and its elite and protect the state from enemies within.

I have heard of police refusing to interfere or confront large groups because they were outnumbered and out of motivations of self preservation. And I know some induuvidual police personel and small groups switching sides. But I have never heard of the police switching en masse in an equivalent of what the army did.

Interesting to note here that armies back in those days had a completely different make up from armies today (in many cases). Armies were recruited. Soldiers often did not want to join but had no choice or simply joined because they were obligated to do. So the loyalty to the army was low...and mainly fuelled by patriotism and patriotic duty in times of war...this offcourse did not count in the case of being pitched against the own population.

These days many armies have changed to volunteer armies. Not everywhere....but in many countries. And that changes the attitude of soldiers towards the army and their job. It creates more loyalty and dedication. So that may influence the attitude of the army in future revolutions.

This is not said that induvidual police officers will not switch sides by the way or that induvidual policeofficers are hopeless. Just that it does not pay for revolutionaries to spend a lot of time and effort in the police as a group in order to turn them.

[SemperFidelis]

Is police not class therefore an enemy?

[The Jay]

Is police not class therefore an enemy?

The police are technically proletarians, yet they are paid to uphold the class interests of the bourgeoisie. They could be called class traitors if they side with the capitalists during revolution but for now they are just misguided workers for the most part.

[Fawkes]

They're not "misguided", nor are they "technically" anything. It is in the class interests of the police for capitalism to continue. I'm not remotely surprised that there aren't really any examples of police forces becoming revolutionary in the past, I was just wondering if there were any exceptions.


sorry if I just came across as a dick, liquidstate.

[The Douche]

Weren't the guardia assaulto in the Spanish republic essentially reorganized and renamed guardia civil?

I guess that would be an example of the police "switching sides" since they reorganized under the popular front government... but they of course still served the interests of capital (this time capital under the red flag of the communist party/comintern) in rounding up/attack working class militants.

[Ocean Seal]

I believe during the 1918 uprising in Germany, one of the few unions to support the revolutionaries was the police union, whereas military personnel played a counter-revolutionary role for the most part. That's probably the only counter-example I can think of right now though.

[Per Levy]

i've read in louis adamics dynamite, that during the great railroadstrike of 1877 several(2 or 3) companies of police men joined forces with the strikers. but as you can see that was almost 150 years ago and i dont know any actions like this in recent(last 50 or so years) future. so yeah police is a tool of the ruling class and even if some join force with revolutionaries the majority will do their job and represse said revolutionarys in any way imaginable.

[Os Cangaceiros]

It happened during the Winnipeg general strike, IIRC.

Also, like the previous poster said, the 1877 mass strike (in Pennsylvania, to be specific).

Drawing cops away from their occupation seems pointless to me as a tactic, though.

[Psy]

They're not "misguided", nor are they "technically" anything. It is in the class interests of the police for capitalism to continue. I'm not remotely surprised that there aren't really any examples of police forces becoming revolutionary in the past, I was just wondering if there were any exceptions.


sorry if I just came across as a dick, liquidstate.

The problem is police are hired guns and their masters do want to extract surplus value out of them thus why many police are used for issuing tickets or busting drug rings as this nets the police department the highest rate of profit (budget over return).

[Renno]

The problem is police are hired guns and their masters do want to extract surplus value out of them thus why many police are used for issuing tickets or busting drug rings as this nets the police department the highest rate of profit (budget over return).

That is if you see police as part of the working class.

I do not see police as part of the working class, I agree with Fawkes;


It is in the class interests of the police for capitalism to continue.

The payment they get is coming from the surplus value of labour,therefore they can never be a part of the working class.

And back to the OP, the union of sergeants of the portuguese army, announced that they will join the protesters if .........

http://www.gewoon-nieuws.nl/2011/10/portuguese-army-joins-protesters/#.TrXRx3JU2uI

[The Jay]

They're not "misguided", nor are they "technically" anything. It is in the class interests of the police for capitalism to continue. I'm not remotely surprised that there aren't really any examples of police forces becoming revolutionary in the past, I was just wondering if there were any exceptions.


sorry if I just came across as a dick, liquidstate.

No offense taken, comrade. I just have one question: why would you not include the police in the proletarian class?

[The Jay]

That is if you see police as part of the working class.

I do not see police as part of the working class, I agree with Fawkes;
The payment they get is coming from the surplus value of labour,therefore they can never be a part of the working class.


Wouldn't that make everyone that gets their pay from tax dollars not a part of the working class? Would you put teachers or librarians in the same non-worker category?

[Kitty_Paine]

No offense taken, comrade. I just have one question: why would you not include the police in the proletarian class?

I would have to agree with you on this one. The "Working Class" is determined primarily by a low socioeconomic status, of which the police would fall into. The working class makes up all "lower tier" jobs, a.k.a. lower skill bases and pay. No?

[The Jay]

I would have to agree with you on this one. The "Working Class" is determined primarily by a low socioeconomic status, of which the police would fall into. The working class makes up all "lower tier" jobs, a.k.a. lower skill bases and pay. No?

Oui, the police do not technically own their means of production, at least not directly. With the quota system it gets kinda iffy depending what you see their source of production is: the people they catch, or the people's taxation. I just realized that this should be it's own thread. I'll make one.

[The CPSU Chairman]

Police as individuals are definitely working class. It's the police as an institution that's reactionary.

[mrmikhail]

Police (and all government workers to be true to definition) are members of the Petit-bourgeois class. Personally I believe they are nothing more than puppets of the Capitalists who serve to make sure their interests are carried out, and the ideals of the revolution are suppressed. Definitely not to be considered allies...while some may have leanings to a revolution by and large they are pro-establishment and would only serve their capitalist masters in a revolution.

[Lynx]

Marx would have called them unproductive workers, as they are not part of the workforce that produces surplus value?

[Die Neue Zeit]

^^^ And unproductive workers, comrade, aren't proletarians. [Leaving aside the debate re. Marx vs. Cockshott vs. myself vs. others on "productive labour"]

[Partizani]

Weren't the guardia assaulto in the Spanish republic essentially reorganized and renamed guardia civil?



Nope, they were two seperate organisations. Guardia Civil patrolled the rural areas, Guardia assaulto were in the towns and cities. As you would assume the guardia civil rallied to franco and the landowners, the guardia assaulto rallied behind the proletariats.

[Jose Gracchus]

^^^ And unproductive workers, comrade, aren't proletarians. [Leaving aside the debate re. Marx vs. Cockshott vs. myself vs. others on "productive labour"]

That's not Marx's definition of proletarian or proletariat. Care to prove your claim?

[Die Neue Zeit]

^^^ I'll answer in the Theory thread on the police.

[Rocky Rococo]

When robber baron Jay Gould bragged, "I can always hire half the working class to shoot the other half" the police were what he was talking about.

[Blackscare]

The payment they get is coming from the surplus value of labour,therefore they can never be a part of the working class.

Then what class do public school workers or DMV clerks belong to? :rolleyes:

[RedGrunt]

When robber baron Jay Gould bragged, "I can always hire half the working class to shoot the other half" the police were what he was talking about.


Either that or they'd just get the state to call in the Cavalry.

[Yuppie Grinder]

Police (and all government workers to be true to definition) are members of the Petit-bourgeois class. Personally I believe they are nothing more than puppets of the Capitalists who serve to make sure their interests are carried out, and the ideals of the revolution are suppressed. Definitely not to be considered allies...while some may have leanings to a revolution by and large they are pro-establishment and would only serve their capitalist masters in a revolution.
What about firemen, teachers, and social workers?

[A Marxist Historian]

I believe during the 1918 uprising in Germany, one of the few unions to support the revolutionaries was the police union, whereas military personnel played a counter-revolutionary role for the most part. That's probably the only counter-example I can think of right now though.

You havd a strange situation in Berlin in 1918, with a very left wing Independent Social Democrat (USPD), who later joined the Communist Party, appointed as chief of police, in the revolutionary chaos with the Berlin workers council, led not by Rosa Luxemburg's Communists but by right wing SD's and independent USPD's, briefly in control of the city for a couple weeks. So naturally he hired a bunch of leftists into the police force, which was revamped.

They all got fired sooner or later, and a lot of them ended up in prison or dead.

Afterwards the right wing Social Democrats controlled the Berlin police force, but when Hitler came to power, they almost all just threw away their SD badges and joined the Nazi Party. Except for the ultra-reactionary SD police chief, Gustav Noske, who was the guy who arranged the murder of Rosa Luxemburg. He went the other way and went anti-Nazi, and even joined the resistance. People are complicated.

-M.H.-

[A Marxist Historian]

I would have to agree with you on this one. The "Working Class" is determined primarily by a low socioeconomic status, of which the police would fall into. The working class makes up all "lower tier" jobs, a.k.a. lower skill bases and pay. No?

No, by relationship to the means of production.

The role of the police is to guard the means of production from the lower classes. Whether their pay is high or low is irrelevant. In fact, cops in the USA are paid awful damn good, and have benefits vastly better than anyone else's. Don't know about elsewhere.

-M.H.-

[A Marxist Historian]

What about firemen, teachers, and social workers?

Firemen, teachers and social workers perform useful work for society. If they work for a wage for an employer, then since their labor is socially necessary, their labor adds to the value of the collective social product, so their labor is essentially productive.

Wages to cops come out of surplus not variable capital, in technical Marxist terms, so they are appendages of the capitalist class rather tahn part of the working class. How they split the proceeds from exploitation of the working class with their capitalist masters is their affair in which workers have no interest.

Or rather, we do have an interest. The worse cops are paid, the worse their benefits, the worse their morale will be, and the less effective tools of the capitalist class they will be. So workers have an active interest in seeing everything possible bad happening to cops, and seeing the destruction of police so called "unions."

the Black Panthers had a lot of pithy ways of expressing this important insight.

-M.H.-

[Quinn]

Police can not be thought of as people in the revolution. They are tools to keep current property relations and wealth gap in place. Hobbes and Locke state this clearly in their social contract theories. I think it is nice to think of police as people that might join the sturggle, but realistically, they are drones carrying out orders. It was cool to see what happened in Egypt with their Army, but i don't think we'll be as lucky.

[A Marxist Historian]

Police can not be thought of as people in the revolution. They are tools to keep current property relations and wealth gap in place. Hobbes and Locke state this clearly in their social contract theories. I think it is nice to think of police as people that might join the sturggle, but realistically, they are drones carrying out orders. It was cool to see what happened in Egypt with their Army, but i don't think we'll be as lucky.

Spoken too soon, read the newspapers. By now, the Egyptian people have finally figured out that the army didn't come over to their side, but rather that there really was no revolution, just a military dictatorship with Tantawi instead of Mubaraq.

-M.H.-