CyM
11th September 2013, 23:27
This came up previously, and I think the debate was started off in the wrong way. Instead of attempting administrative action against leftists we disagree with, we should be seeking a political, theoretical debate on the issues.
The point of these debates is not some petty "victory" or point scoring, but to educate ourselves and the younger comrades, to be better prepared for the period of revolutions and counterrevolutions the world has entered into. We have to be ready for the tasks ahead of us, and that means learning from the rich history of labour struggles and revolutions, and generalizing that experience into a theoretical guide to action.
In that spirit, I would like to begin this with a quick run down of the Marxist theory of the state.
The state, according to Engels, is in the final analysis armed bodies of men in defence of the property of the ruling class. I'm paraphrasing here. But it is important of course to note "in the final analysis". Before we get down to the naked gun, there is a whole series of more "soft" organs of the state. So the courts, which work on the threat of the gun, the media, the schools, the churches, etc...
In capitalist society, the role of all of these parts of the state is to convince the working class to accept its role, and to accept "the way things are". In normal periods in history, the roles of the teacher, the priest, the member of parliament, are all more important than the role of the police officer or the soldier in maintaining the status quo.
The bourgeois rely more on the ideological support for their regime than the barrel of the gun at home normally. The gun is used in exceptional circumstances, usually reserved for isolated sectors of the working class, particularly the doubly oppressed minorities and immigrants.
In periods of crisis, these "democratic" methods burst at the seams. The working class is not willing to accept austerity without end, wars for profit, etc... The attacks drive it onto the road of struggle, and the "ideological" methods of convincing the workers to go home no longer work. The riot police, and in extreme circumstances even the national guard or the regular army, are called to save capitalism from the organized working class. Battles in the streets become necessary for the simple every day functioning of the social system. The workers' strike, reaching general proportions, threatens to shut down the entire system, and their picket lines must be crushed. At first, court orders, back to work laws, and legislated contracts are enough to send the weak leaders running to their members with a recommendation to end the strike. But as the crisis develops and those leaders are replaced by more radical representatives who reflect the new mood, the baton becomes an essential armament in the arsenal of capital.
It is at this point that our debate becomes important.
What is the attitude to the baton of the capitalist class?
What is this baton? Again, armed bodies of men and women at the service of the capitalist class. Being composed of people, this tool is not just a dumb machine. It is not immune to the crisis in society. The army, and the police, reflect indirectly the same political crisis. The army, being trained to "defend the homeland", tends to be badly fitted to the job of smashing the workers. Every use of the army at home, tends to produce crises in the ranks.
The average soldier is drawn from the working class with the promise of free education, a job, and pride. He buys wholeheartedly into the myth of his country and what it is doing in the world. But use him at home, and the myth is shattered. This is what has happened in many revolutions in history. The navy is even more prone to revolts, because of its nature as a series of factories on the ocean.
The gap between the soldiers in the canteen and the generals in their air conditioned offices opens into a real gulf in periods of crisis. "Fragging", a term that many youth find useful when playing video games, actually comes from the revolt of the American soldiers stationed in Vietnam. They would chuck a fragmentation grenade into their officers' tents. This epidemic of fragging officers spread across Vietnam, and was ultimately very important in forcing US imperialism to withdraw. The army was slipping out of their hands.
In the Russian revolution, not only did the army play a fundamental role in the revolution itself, but the skillful propaganda of the Bolsheviks demoralized the German, British and French armies. Germany opted to end world war I, because its soldiers were revolting. The british opted to end intervention against the russian revolution. When questioned by his opposition in parliament, the British prime minister explained that they withdrew the army to save it from the botulism of revolution. They risked losing the entire army sent to Russia. The french fleet revolted.
This all to say, the "state" needs to be approached with a cool head. We need to understand our tasks, and how they have been achieved in the past.
There is also the role of the Cossacks for example. The cossacks are closer to riot police. Mounted riders, they were hated for their whips and the way they would ride over protesters.
History of the russian revolution by Trotsky, chapter about the february revolution:
In the State Duma that day they were telling how an enormous mass of people had flooded Znamensky Square and all Nevsky Prospect, and the adjoining streets and that a totally unprecedented phenomenon was observed: the Cossacks and the regiments with bands were being greeted by revolutionary and not patriotic crowds with shouts of "Hurrah!" To the question, "What does it all mean? the first person accosted in the crowd answered the deputy: A policeman struck a woman with a knout; the Cossacks stepped in and drove away the police." Whether it happened in this way or another, will never be verified. But the crowd believed that it was so, that this was possible. The belief had not fallen out of the sky; it arose from previous experience, and was therefore to become an earnest of victory.
The workers at the Erikson, one of the foremost mills in the Vyborg district, after a morning meeting came out on the Sampsonievsky Prospect, a whole mass, 2,500 of them, and in a narrow place ran into the Cossacks. Cutting their way with the breasts of their horses, the officers first charged through the crowd. Behind them, filling the whole width of the Prospect galloped the Cossacks. Decisive moment! But the horsemen, cautiously, in a long ribbon, rode through the corridor just made by the officers. "Some of them smiled," Kayurov recalls, "and one of them gave the workers a good wink" This wink was not without meaning. The workers were emboldened with a friendly, not hostile, kind of assurance, and slightly infected the Cossacks with it. The one who winked found imitators. In spite of renewed eff6rts from the officers, the Cossacks, without openly breaking discipline, failed to force the crowd to disperse, but flowed through it in streams. This was repeated three or four times and brought the two sides even closer together. Individual Cossacks began to reply to the workers' questions and even to enter into momentary conversations with them. Of discipline there remained but a thin transparent shell that threatened to break through any second. The officers hastened to separate their patrol from the workers, and, abandoning the idea of dispersing them, lined the Cossacks out across the street as a barrier to prevent the demonstrators from getting to the centre. But even this did not help: standing stock-still in perfect discipline, the Cossacks did not hinder the workers from "diving" under their horses. The revolution does not choose its paths: it made its first steps toward victory under the belly of a Cossack's horse. A remarkable incident! And remarkable the eye of its narrator-an eye which took an impression of every bend in the process. No wonder, for the narrator was a leader; he was at the head of over two thousand men. The eye of a commander watching for enemy whips and bullets looks sharp.
This adequately expresses the contradictions within the armed forces of the state, and the floodgates that are opened by these cracks in a revolutionary situation.
Similar sights can be seen in the Egyptian and Tunisian revolutions. Egypt, where the soldiers had fraternized with the people in Tahrir square and were no longer fit to be used by Mubarak. On the night of the camels, the soldiers in the square were disarmed by the high command, signifying that they did not trust the soldiers not to shoot at Mubarak's reactionaries on horses and camels. In Tunisia, there were plenty of examples of police officers refusing orders to shoot and then joining the crowd. One officer was shot by his commander for refusing orders.
Many of these officers, whatever role they play in the state, join because they believe whatever it is they are told about the police upholding "justice". A huge amount of pressure exists of course, to become the biggest bastard. But that does not mean that there do not exist some useful idiots in the police forces who are "generally honest" agents of the bourgeoisie.
More importantly than their honesty however, is their class background. I don't think anyone is under any illusion that the soldiers who took up arms against the bourgeoisie in the russian revolution were "untainted". They had fought, and killed, in the service of capital.
They were the murderous servants of capital, risen up against their masters. Should we have rejected their support because they had killed our working class brothers and sisters?
Or should we accept that the entire working class maintains the class rule of the bourgeoisie so long as it does not actively understand it and the need to overthrow it. The workers at Pratt & Whitney, who make the fighter jet engines? The workers at SNC Lavalin, who make NATO's bullets? The workers who sell the iPhones made by other workers so exploited they had to install a net around the building to prevent suicides?
Approaching the class struggle from a moral perspective is worse than useless, it will prevent us from achieving our goals.
We are not interested in guilt or otherwise. What we are interested in is the fact that the entire state and its workforce, is riven from top to bottom with class contradictions. In the teachers' unions, we find a fighting section of the working class. They were once the most reactionary agents of the bourgeoisie.
When police are facing job cuts in the same austerity attacks as the rest of the working class, to not attempt to skillfully use that to draw them into the struggle against the austerity is sheer stupidity.
Do police officers own the means of production? For the most part, no. Do they come from a social background of bourgeois owners? Only a minority does. The majority of the police, like the majority of the armed forces, come directly from working class families and neighborhoods, and work only for a wage. The ranks and file are workers, no less than soldiers are. The higher officers come almost exclusively from bourgeois social backgrounds. The class division is reproduced even within this most essential arm of the state.
"Fuck the police" and "all cops are bastards" are nice slogans, but do nothing to disarm the ruling class. Splitting the state, ranks against higher officers, does. It is clear that this does not happen easily, hard enough with the army, harder still with the police. But even they can split in half in the end.
I will leave you with a final historical example, in the hope that we can have a real honest debate, and focus on the politics.
The Winnipeg 1919 General Strike in Canada, was a revolutionary General Strike. The strike committee shut the city down, and then began to issue permission for specific services. Ambulances, coal, etc... anything that was essential to the workers themselves would be allowed, and displayed a little sign that said "Operating by permission of the Strike Committee".
In other words, Winnipeg was governed by a soviet, an organ of working class rule.
Most importantly, the Winnipeg police went on strike and applied for membership in the strike committee. They refused to fire on the workers. The bosses' organization, the chamber of commerce, was forced to organize a paramilitary militia, a "committee of order" of sorts. Made up of war vets, shopkeepers, rich students, it was a protofascist gang that went around beating strikers.
But the reality is, power was in the hands of the strikers. The federal government had to intervene. For the first time in Canadian history, the RCMP was sent into a city to restore order, since they could not rely on the Winnipeg police to do it.
Before the strike was crushed, the RCMP and the Winnipeg police fought running street battles.
This, comrades, is the real fact we have to take into account when talking about how to approach the police.
We are not in a revolutionary situation now of course, but we must never forget that this is what revolution means. Not yelling louder than anyone else how much we hate the police, but knowing how to break it as an institution, by skillfully using every division and turning it against the ruling class.
The point of these debates is not some petty "victory" or point scoring, but to educate ourselves and the younger comrades, to be better prepared for the period of revolutions and counterrevolutions the world has entered into. We have to be ready for the tasks ahead of us, and that means learning from the rich history of labour struggles and revolutions, and generalizing that experience into a theoretical guide to action.
In that spirit, I would like to begin this with a quick run down of the Marxist theory of the state.
The state, according to Engels, is in the final analysis armed bodies of men in defence of the property of the ruling class. I'm paraphrasing here. But it is important of course to note "in the final analysis". Before we get down to the naked gun, there is a whole series of more "soft" organs of the state. So the courts, which work on the threat of the gun, the media, the schools, the churches, etc...
In capitalist society, the role of all of these parts of the state is to convince the working class to accept its role, and to accept "the way things are". In normal periods in history, the roles of the teacher, the priest, the member of parliament, are all more important than the role of the police officer or the soldier in maintaining the status quo.
The bourgeois rely more on the ideological support for their regime than the barrel of the gun at home normally. The gun is used in exceptional circumstances, usually reserved for isolated sectors of the working class, particularly the doubly oppressed minorities and immigrants.
In periods of crisis, these "democratic" methods burst at the seams. The working class is not willing to accept austerity without end, wars for profit, etc... The attacks drive it onto the road of struggle, and the "ideological" methods of convincing the workers to go home no longer work. The riot police, and in extreme circumstances even the national guard or the regular army, are called to save capitalism from the organized working class. Battles in the streets become necessary for the simple every day functioning of the social system. The workers' strike, reaching general proportions, threatens to shut down the entire system, and their picket lines must be crushed. At first, court orders, back to work laws, and legislated contracts are enough to send the weak leaders running to their members with a recommendation to end the strike. But as the crisis develops and those leaders are replaced by more radical representatives who reflect the new mood, the baton becomes an essential armament in the arsenal of capital.
It is at this point that our debate becomes important.
What is the attitude to the baton of the capitalist class?
What is this baton? Again, armed bodies of men and women at the service of the capitalist class. Being composed of people, this tool is not just a dumb machine. It is not immune to the crisis in society. The army, and the police, reflect indirectly the same political crisis. The army, being trained to "defend the homeland", tends to be badly fitted to the job of smashing the workers. Every use of the army at home, tends to produce crises in the ranks.
The average soldier is drawn from the working class with the promise of free education, a job, and pride. He buys wholeheartedly into the myth of his country and what it is doing in the world. But use him at home, and the myth is shattered. This is what has happened in many revolutions in history. The navy is even more prone to revolts, because of its nature as a series of factories on the ocean.
The gap between the soldiers in the canteen and the generals in their air conditioned offices opens into a real gulf in periods of crisis. "Fragging", a term that many youth find useful when playing video games, actually comes from the revolt of the American soldiers stationed in Vietnam. They would chuck a fragmentation grenade into their officers' tents. This epidemic of fragging officers spread across Vietnam, and was ultimately very important in forcing US imperialism to withdraw. The army was slipping out of their hands.
In the Russian revolution, not only did the army play a fundamental role in the revolution itself, but the skillful propaganda of the Bolsheviks demoralized the German, British and French armies. Germany opted to end world war I, because its soldiers were revolting. The british opted to end intervention against the russian revolution. When questioned by his opposition in parliament, the British prime minister explained that they withdrew the army to save it from the botulism of revolution. They risked losing the entire army sent to Russia. The french fleet revolted.
This all to say, the "state" needs to be approached with a cool head. We need to understand our tasks, and how they have been achieved in the past.
There is also the role of the Cossacks for example. The cossacks are closer to riot police. Mounted riders, they were hated for their whips and the way they would ride over protesters.
History of the russian revolution by Trotsky, chapter about the february revolution:
In the State Duma that day they were telling how an enormous mass of people had flooded Znamensky Square and all Nevsky Prospect, and the adjoining streets and that a totally unprecedented phenomenon was observed: the Cossacks and the regiments with bands were being greeted by revolutionary and not patriotic crowds with shouts of "Hurrah!" To the question, "What does it all mean? the first person accosted in the crowd answered the deputy: A policeman struck a woman with a knout; the Cossacks stepped in and drove away the police." Whether it happened in this way or another, will never be verified. But the crowd believed that it was so, that this was possible. The belief had not fallen out of the sky; it arose from previous experience, and was therefore to become an earnest of victory.
The workers at the Erikson, one of the foremost mills in the Vyborg district, after a morning meeting came out on the Sampsonievsky Prospect, a whole mass, 2,500 of them, and in a narrow place ran into the Cossacks. Cutting their way with the breasts of their horses, the officers first charged through the crowd. Behind them, filling the whole width of the Prospect galloped the Cossacks. Decisive moment! But the horsemen, cautiously, in a long ribbon, rode through the corridor just made by the officers. "Some of them smiled," Kayurov recalls, "and one of them gave the workers a good wink" This wink was not without meaning. The workers were emboldened with a friendly, not hostile, kind of assurance, and slightly infected the Cossacks with it. The one who winked found imitators. In spite of renewed eff6rts from the officers, the Cossacks, without openly breaking discipline, failed to force the crowd to disperse, but flowed through it in streams. This was repeated three or four times and brought the two sides even closer together. Individual Cossacks began to reply to the workers' questions and even to enter into momentary conversations with them. Of discipline there remained but a thin transparent shell that threatened to break through any second. The officers hastened to separate their patrol from the workers, and, abandoning the idea of dispersing them, lined the Cossacks out across the street as a barrier to prevent the demonstrators from getting to the centre. But even this did not help: standing stock-still in perfect discipline, the Cossacks did not hinder the workers from "diving" under their horses. The revolution does not choose its paths: it made its first steps toward victory under the belly of a Cossack's horse. A remarkable incident! And remarkable the eye of its narrator-an eye which took an impression of every bend in the process. No wonder, for the narrator was a leader; he was at the head of over two thousand men. The eye of a commander watching for enemy whips and bullets looks sharp.
This adequately expresses the contradictions within the armed forces of the state, and the floodgates that are opened by these cracks in a revolutionary situation.
Similar sights can be seen in the Egyptian and Tunisian revolutions. Egypt, where the soldiers had fraternized with the people in Tahrir square and were no longer fit to be used by Mubarak. On the night of the camels, the soldiers in the square were disarmed by the high command, signifying that they did not trust the soldiers not to shoot at Mubarak's reactionaries on horses and camels. In Tunisia, there were plenty of examples of police officers refusing orders to shoot and then joining the crowd. One officer was shot by his commander for refusing orders.
Many of these officers, whatever role they play in the state, join because they believe whatever it is they are told about the police upholding "justice". A huge amount of pressure exists of course, to become the biggest bastard. But that does not mean that there do not exist some useful idiots in the police forces who are "generally honest" agents of the bourgeoisie.
More importantly than their honesty however, is their class background. I don't think anyone is under any illusion that the soldiers who took up arms against the bourgeoisie in the russian revolution were "untainted". They had fought, and killed, in the service of capital.
They were the murderous servants of capital, risen up against their masters. Should we have rejected their support because they had killed our working class brothers and sisters?
Or should we accept that the entire working class maintains the class rule of the bourgeoisie so long as it does not actively understand it and the need to overthrow it. The workers at Pratt & Whitney, who make the fighter jet engines? The workers at SNC Lavalin, who make NATO's bullets? The workers who sell the iPhones made by other workers so exploited they had to install a net around the building to prevent suicides?
Approaching the class struggle from a moral perspective is worse than useless, it will prevent us from achieving our goals.
We are not interested in guilt or otherwise. What we are interested in is the fact that the entire state and its workforce, is riven from top to bottom with class contradictions. In the teachers' unions, we find a fighting section of the working class. They were once the most reactionary agents of the bourgeoisie.
When police are facing job cuts in the same austerity attacks as the rest of the working class, to not attempt to skillfully use that to draw them into the struggle against the austerity is sheer stupidity.
Do police officers own the means of production? For the most part, no. Do they come from a social background of bourgeois owners? Only a minority does. The majority of the police, like the majority of the armed forces, come directly from working class families and neighborhoods, and work only for a wage. The ranks and file are workers, no less than soldiers are. The higher officers come almost exclusively from bourgeois social backgrounds. The class division is reproduced even within this most essential arm of the state.
"Fuck the police" and "all cops are bastards" are nice slogans, but do nothing to disarm the ruling class. Splitting the state, ranks against higher officers, does. It is clear that this does not happen easily, hard enough with the army, harder still with the police. But even they can split in half in the end.
I will leave you with a final historical example, in the hope that we can have a real honest debate, and focus on the politics.
The Winnipeg 1919 General Strike in Canada, was a revolutionary General Strike. The strike committee shut the city down, and then began to issue permission for specific services. Ambulances, coal, etc... anything that was essential to the workers themselves would be allowed, and displayed a little sign that said "Operating by permission of the Strike Committee".
In other words, Winnipeg was governed by a soviet, an organ of working class rule.
Most importantly, the Winnipeg police went on strike and applied for membership in the strike committee. They refused to fire on the workers. The bosses' organization, the chamber of commerce, was forced to organize a paramilitary militia, a "committee of order" of sorts. Made up of war vets, shopkeepers, rich students, it was a protofascist gang that went around beating strikers.
But the reality is, power was in the hands of the strikers. The federal government had to intervene. For the first time in Canadian history, the RCMP was sent into a city to restore order, since they could not rely on the Winnipeg police to do it.
Before the strike was crushed, the RCMP and the Winnipeg police fought running street battles.
This, comrades, is the real fact we have to take into account when talking about how to approach the police.
We are not in a revolutionary situation now of course, but we must never forget that this is what revolution means. Not yelling louder than anyone else how much we hate the police, but knowing how to break it as an institution, by skillfully using every division and turning it against the ruling class.