The police as workers [Archive]

Bala Perdida

5th June 2014, 06:32

This year I took a class about crime and administration of justice. My teacher is a relatively nice person, he let us do things other classes wouldn't and such. He is very popular among the students. He is also an ex-cop and conservative. He told us many stories of the things he did when he was young, and of his work in jails and as a police officer. After hearing his stories, I realized that their job actually is important but must be heavily revised and reformed. Mostly his stories about seeing the worst in people (such as interviewing a child rapist and and a drunk guy who felt no remorse after killing a family) made me think about the job. I know there are better ways of going about this so I guess that won't be the focus of the thread.

He also talked about the adrenaline rush that comes with being a cop and that makes it easy to flip your shit and beat the crap out of someone. As well as how easy it is to 'accidentally' shoot someone, or kill them in a different way. I personally wasn't phased by these stories and continue to give no sympathy to criminal police officers, or any police officers.

So taking these stories into consideration, how do you see police as workers? Obviously they are workers acting against their class' interests and serving the bourgeoisie(is their a term for that?), but how much hate do they deserve? Most things they do are just a thoughtless routine for them like in any job, but what they do is not innocent obviously. We all know that police brutality is very common, and usually unreported. Keeping that in mind I always wondered what my teacher didn't tell us, in his effort to put a human face on brutality. My biggest concern is the fact that many people are becoming police officers for the pay and benefits. How do you consider those that think they are just simply doing a job?

So being a cop is a stressful hard job, but the institution has proven itself harmful and illegitimate to many of us. I personally have no respect for the police. I view them like I do the military or street gangsters. I sympathize with those that join because of economic difficulties and lack of opportunities, but I'm not going to clap for them when (or after) they harm the populace. Much less do I support these institutions, and their conversion of oppressed people into criminal murderers.

So in short I feel comfortable saying fuck the police, fuck the troops, and fuck street gangs. Although I still know how hard it is for the people involved, I can't support their bad decisions.

So what do you think?

willwinall

5th June 2014, 06:41

The police, troops, and street gangs all have something in common and that is that they all take orders and just do what the are told. To be a good soldier you don`t have to be smart you just have to be able to obey your superiors and this applies to police officers as well. So wen you say you hate cops, think about it, because they are just following orders and its not like they choose what to do. In a sense I think they don`t have a mind of their own because the police academy takes care of molding it for them.

Naroc

5th June 2014, 07:25

I said this in another thread with a similar topic again, but i'll repeat myself. My opinion doesn't differ that much from yours. They're people who're doing their job, though i don't like it. For me it doesn't mean i hate them as the persons they are, as most of them are doing it to get their bills paid as everyone else. Problem is the current system they're working for. I mean somebody has to fight crime. The other side of the medal is that they're tools of the state to suppress the people. Police violence against peaceful demonstrants should be 'nough to be said. Their main job isn't to protect the people, but to maintain the status quo.

I think the only task they should've is to protect society itself, and nothing more. But as we all know, this won't ne happening so soon.
Hate the job, not the guy who's doing it.

Bala Perdida

5th June 2014, 07:38

Hate the job, not the guy who's doing it.Can't say I agree with that. I mean, if they're just standing there I won't be mad at them, but when they give me ticket for j-walking or get all aggressive when I question them, then they just found themselves a new enemy.

Naroc

5th June 2014, 08:11

Of course, some of them are total scumbags who are taking advantage of their authority. But they're also the normal ones (at least i made this experience here in germany), which is why you shouldn't generalize 'em all. But yeah, i never said you have to like everyone of these guys.

Per Levy

5th June 2014, 08:40

the point is that being in the police is not just a job, the police is an institution, a tool to keep the status quo and to protect private property. the police will beat up and shoot rebelling workers and also non rebelling workers for the ruling class. it doesnt matter if there are "good cops" or not they are totally on the side of the bourgeoisie.

I realized that their job actually is important but must be heavily revised and reformed

their "job" is only importent in a capitalist society, when the revolution comes the police must be smashed just as the state must be smashed.

consuming negativity

5th June 2014, 09:36

This is going to get me lynched by the mob, but the anti-police sloganeering, while fun to take part in, is based more in emotion than in reality. Everybody, in one way or another, supports the status quo. Buy anything recently? Not only did you support capitalists by buying their products, but you gave the government tax money that will be used to pay cops and soldiers who you all loathe. Do any of you have jobs? You're most likely, again, working for capitalists, and at the end of the year giving the government tax money.

Now, you're probably thinking "well that's not fair, not everybody can live outside the system - that's why capitalism is so insidious". Which, you're completely right, it's just that the logic suddenly stops when it comes to the police. Which makes sense for several reasons. For one, they're visible extensions of the state, on the front lines of the apparatus, meaning we have lots of bad experiences with them. And many of them are stupid dickheads due to the nature of the profession attracting a certain type of people. However, that they're supporting the state either directly or indirectly doesn't really matter very much when you consider that all of us do it. An argument can be made to say "well they didn't have to be /fucking cops/, I mean come on", but I could just as easily say "and yeah, you didn't /have/ to buy an Apple computer of all companies"... which you would probably point out is just descending into bourgeois boycotting bullshit. And again, you'd be right, which is my point: you've got to buy something, and you've got to work somewhere, and the police give damn good benefits considering their job requirements.

I just don't see the choices being made here as being fundamentally any different. If anything, we should be trying to convince the armed enforcers of the state to come on our side given their crucial role with regard to the state apparatus... sort of like the crucial role that us workers play in regard to the capitalist apparatus. Having the army and police go against the real enemies would be awful useful in any revolutionary situation, so it might be better for us in the long-term for our movement to not jump on emotion-filled chants like "all cops are bastards", even if we have to kick officer asses in the meantime.

exeexe

5th June 2014, 10:02

By being a cop you get a lot of privileges. The problem is that other people are excluded from these privileges. For example you have the monopoly of violence and if you by some mistake overreacted and used too much violence the chances are you will not get fired just get a nice vacation.

Destroy the privileges so everyone can do copwork when its needed.

Also as a cop you are physically defending the exploitation that is taking place in our society. The cops can then say that exploitation is good because it has been decided through democratic representation that it is good.
But a national majority should never have the political power to decide over a national minority that they should be exploited. Its morally wrong on so many levels.

If socialist thinks they shouldnt be exploited then the cops should leave them alone so they can pursue their dream for a better world.

Ethics Gradient, Traitor For All Ages

5th June 2014, 12:32

Danielle Ni Dhighe

5th June 2014, 13:16

Police are part of the physical force wing of the state. Whether some of them might be nice away from the job is irrelevant.

"If you need help, don't call the cops!" as my great-grandfather liked to say, and he was a cop.

GiantMonkeyMan

5th June 2014, 13:35

Police are part of the physical force wing of the state. Whether some of them might be nice away from the job is irrelevant.
That's true. What's your opinion of the class nature of the police? Are they proletarian? I was recently arguing with some folks that people on benefits were still proletarian due to the nature of how they have to survive but it also occurred to me that the police perform many of the same tasks as those on benefits (filling out paperwork, for example) but also perform actions that ultimately are detrimental to the working class as a whole in their role as the armed wing of the state. What are your thoughts?

"If you need help, don't call the cops!" as my great-grandfather liked to say, and he was a cop.
What are you supposed to do then if you need help?

Ethics Gradient, Traitor For All Ages

5th June 2014, 13:54

I don't think it's realistic to never call the cops although I think it's possible to do many of their functions on your own that people seem to think can only be handled by police. It's unfortunate that the same people who hurt us do in fact provide some useful services like protecting children and victims of abuse (although I could provide tons of incidents where police ignore this responsibility when it suits them) but that is likely by design, because such a combination of duties produces all sort of confusing and conflicting feelings within the public, like what's on display in this thread. The capitalist who buys my labor is pretty nice to me too when I interact with her and has even fulfilled a number of my requests regarding payment and flexibility in my schedule, but those nice things can't change what our relationship truly is, instead all they can really do is play with my emotions and put me in a weaker position when dealing with her.

Danielle Ni Dhighe

5th June 2014, 13:56

That's true. What's your opinion of the class nature of the police? Are they proletarian? I was recently arguing with some folks that people on benefits were still proletarian due to the nature of how they have to survive but it also occurred to me that the police perform many of the same tasks as those on benefits (filling out paperwork, for example) but also perform actions that ultimately are detrimental to the working class as a whole in their role as the armed wing of the state. What are your thoughts?
I think most cops have a working class background, but I wouldn't consider police themselves to be working class. I believe there are small classes that exist outside of the tripartite working class/petit bourgeoisie/bourgeoisie dynamic. We can call this one the police class.

What are you supposed to do then if you need help?
That's just it, the first duty of the police is to serve the capitalist order not the working class.

consuming negativity

5th June 2014, 14:04

The knowledge that our society currupts everyone is not a new insight. There is a stark difference in purchasing food to survive or working for a wage and thereby perpetuating the system, and say, murdering a mentally unstable vagrant in the foothills or attacking striking fast food workers demanding a living wage and thereby perpetuating the system. Sympathy for cops is misplaced. Many victims of torture will tell you that the most terrifying thing about their tormentors is that once they go home at night after a day of beatings and electrocutions they go back to being a 'regular' person with spouses and children and bills etc. Do these people deserve special sympathy as well? Are they "just doing their job"?

You claim there is a "stark difference" between the behaviors of normal people which reinforce capitalism and the behaviors of police that reinforce capitalism. What is the difference, then? And why should I care about any alleged difference(s), assuming that they exist? I already addressed the reality that police are more visible and more directly participating in the systemic violence that is capitalism, but I fail to see how this results in anything fundamentally different than farther-removed and more common methods by which we perpetuate the system.

Moreover, when did I ever say anything about being empathetic, sympathetic, or otherwise to the police? Let alone saying that they "deserve" "special sympathy", or that they are "just doing their job". And since when did government agents who torture people even enter into this conversation about the rank-and-file police force? Of course I find many of the actions that police undertake to be morally reprehensible, but that has nothing to do with their relation to the means of production or their unique position as a certain type of worker in our society - which is the topic of this thread. Cops are not members of the bourgeoisie, but of the working class. Their class interests do align with ours, even if they don't see that, and they share with the rest of the working class a powerful, albeit different, position in relation to the state and capital.

VivalaCuarta

5th June 2014, 14:13

Police are the core of the modern capitalist state. They exist to protect capitalist property, and all the institutions and social norms that capitalist property has grown to depend on.

For the workers to take power the capitalist state must be smashed.

Ethics Gradient, Traitor For All Ages

5th June 2014, 14:15

You claim there is a "stark difference" between the behaviors of normal people which reinforce capitalism and the behaviors of police that reinforce capitalism. What is the difference, then? And why should I care about any alleged difference(s), assuming that they exist? I already addressed the reality that police are more visible and more directly participating in the systemic violence that is capitalism, but I fail to see how this results in anything fundamentally different than farther-removed and more common methods by which we perpetuate the system.

Moreover, when did I ever say anything about being empathetic, sympathetic, or otherwise to the police? Let alone saying that they "deserve" "special sympathy", or that they are "just doing their job". And since when did government agents who torture people even enter into this conversation about the rank-and-file police force? Of course I find many of the actions that police undertake to be morally reprehensible, but that has nothing to do with their relation to the means of production or their unique position as a certain type of worker in our society - which is the topic of this thread. Cops are not members of the bourgeoisie, but of the working class. Their class interests do align with ours, even if they don't see that, and they share with the rest of the working class a powerful, albeit different, position in relation to the state and capital.

Additionally, most people, even if they've had terrible experiences with the police, see the police as necessary and are very much in favor of doing something to handle the problems of child molestation, serial killing, and other reprehensible acts. Refusing to acknowledge this aspect of policing and instead resorting to ACAB sloganeering does us no favors, but instead just makes it easy to dismiss our position as nonsense. Hard-line moral posturing doesn't make the police any less likely to follow orders that involve mowing us down in the streets or make our movement stronger in any way, and therefore I'm not interested in it.

How do our interests and theirs align? No one is drafted into police work, it's a volunteer position that requires a lot of prerequisites to be considered for, which implies that the individual must desperately want to perform that specific function within our society for whatever reason.

In a post revolutionary society there will be no property rights for them to protect or working class to keep in line, so their function, which they clearly are very keen on, will not even be possible let alone desirable. So no I do not believe their interests align with mine at all as I want communism while they clearly desire police work.

I've already addressed the useful functions they provide in my other post, it doesn't change anything. I agree with Danielle that the security services represent a separate class outside of the prole/bourgeois dynamic.

Anglo-Saxon Philistine

5th June 2014, 14:15

Proletarians are people who are forced to sell their labour-power, either overly or through ideologically-concealed means (household labour etc.), and who participate in the capitalist production of exchange-values.

The police are part of the state apparatus, a special organ (Lenin calls them a special body of armed men) of society that secures private property but does not participate in the production of commodities.

Furthermore, since the position and security of the policeman are tied to the existence of the police and the first act of any revolution is to smash the old state apparatus, the interests of the police are diametrically opposed to those of the workers.

consuming negativity

5th June 2014, 14:28

How do our interests and theirs align? No one is drafted into police work, it's a volunteer position that requires a lot of prerequisites to be considered for, which implies that the individual must desperately want to perform that specific function within our society for whatever reason.

In a post revolutionary society there will be no property rights for them to protect or working class to keep in line, so their function, which they clearly are very keen on, will not even be possible let alone desirable. So no I do not believe their interests align with mine at all as I want communism while they clearly desire police work.

I've already addressed the useful functions they provide in my other post, it doesn't change anything. I agree with Danielle that the security services represent a separate class outside of the prole/bourgeois dynamic.

No one is drafted into any civilian work either and yet none would argue with me when I say that we are compelled to work in factories, fast food, or any other occupation by the capitalist system. In this sense, the police are no different than anybody else - they wouldn't be waking up early to go out and do police work if it wasn't for the paycheck they get. They are compelled to work just like the rest of us. Yes they reinforce state power and capitalism, but almost all of our consumption and work does this to one degree or another. I've yet to see anybody make a convincing argument for separating police from the rest of the working class that can't apply to any reactionary member of our class. Supporting the state covertly, overtly, or however else does not suddenly change your relation to production or capital.

Proletarians are people who are forced to sell their labour-power, either overly or through ideologically-concealed means (household labour etc.), and who participate in the capitalist production of exchange-values.

The police are part of the state apparatus, a special organ (Lenin calls them a special body of armed men) of society that secures private property but does not participate in the production of commodities.

Furthermore, since the position and security of the policeman are tied to the existence of the police and the first act of any revolution is to smash the old state apparatus, the interests of the police are diametrically opposed to those of the workers.

The positions of many workers are put into jeopardy by the dismantling of the capitalist system, not just police. For example, factory workers will no longer be assembling tanks or yachts for purchase by the state. Millions of public sector workers will have their employer destroyed as well. This does not change their class, and it does not mean their interests are ultimately any different than the rest of ours. Having a job dependent on the state doesn't suddenly mean that a person has a vested interest in the perpetuation of capitalism or the state. The logic you're using could be applied to anyone given enough mental gymnastics.

Anglo-Saxon Philistine

5th June 2014, 14:33

The positions of many workers are put into jeopardy by the dismantling of the capitalist system, not just police. For example, factory workers will no longer be assembling tanks or yachts for purchase by the state. Millions of public sector workers will have their employer destroyed as well. This does not change their class, and it does not mean their interests are ultimately any different than the rest of ours. Having a job dependent on the state doesn't suddenly mean that a person has a vested interest in the perpetuation of capitalism or the state.

This doesn't make sense. In socialism, workers would not be producing objects for sale on a market, so the entire "well no one will buy tanks anymore" argument fails, because no one will buy anything.

"Public sector workers" is also an ambiguous term that can mean anything from secretaries to cops and other cop-like beings.

Ethics Gradient, Traitor For All Ages

5th June 2014, 14:35

No one is drafted into any civilian work either and yet none would argue with me when I say that we are compelled to work in factories, fast food, or any other occupation by the capitalist system. In this sense, the police are no different than anybody else - they wouldn't be waking up early to go out and do police work if it wasn't for the paycheck they get. They are compelled to work just like the rest of us. Yes they reinforce state power and capitalism, but almost all of our consumption and work does this to one degree or another. I've yet to see anybody make a convincing argument for separating police from the rest of the working class that can't apply to any reactionary member of our class. Supporting the state covertly, overtly, or however else does not suddenly change your relation to production or capital.

The positions of many workers are put into jeopardy by the dismantling of the capitalist system, not just police. For example, factory workers will no longer be assembling tanks or yachts for purchase by the state. Millions of public sector workers will have their employer destroyed as well. This does not change their class, and it does not mean their interests are ultimately any different than the rest of ours. Having a job dependent on the state doesn't suddenly mean that a person has a vested interest in the perpetuation of capitalism or the state.

The reactionary boot maker or structural engineer or numbers cruncher will still be able to perform their desired functions in a new society, albiet in a fundamentally different capacity, the cop will literally be incapable of doing so regardless of his feelings towards that new society. Communism offers him nothing if his desire is to be a cop, which we can infer is in fact his desire due to the prerequisites I mentioned.

VivalaCuarta

5th June 2014, 14:41

Under capitalism factory workers and fast food workers produce commodities. That is, they produce capital which oppresses them. When they organize, the police, guard dogs of that capital, break their strikes, jail them, beat them and kill them.

There is a fundamental difference between workers for nationalized industries or government services (education, transportation, etc.) and cops, even if their paychecks are drawn from the same funds. Anyone who's been on strike knows the difference.

consuming negativity

5th June 2014, 14:53

This doesn't make sense. In socialism, workers would not be producing objects for sale on a market, so the entire "well no one will buy tanks anymore" argument fails, because no one will buy anything.

"Public sector workers" is also an ambiguous term that can mean anything from secretaries to cops and other cop-like beings.

This is more or less my point. Saying that the interests of police are diametrically opposed to those of us because their jobs won't exist post-revolution doesn't logically follow. Their jobs aren't any more important to them than anybody else's; why is there suddenly a dichotomy? It seems that all of you are predicating your position based on the idea that police officers would forsake communism over not being able to get paid to be cops anymore, and it's just strange. They would benefit from the loss of their jobs in the same way everybody else would.

The reactionary boot maker or structural engineer or numbers cruncher will still be able to perform their desired functions in a new society, albiet in a fundamentally different capacity, the cop will literally be incapable of doing so regardless of his feelings towards that new society. Communism offers him nothing if his desire is to be a cop, which we can infer is in fact his desire due to the prerequisites I mentioned.

See above.

Anglo-Saxon Philistine

5th June 2014, 14:59

This is more or less my point. Saying that the interests of police are diametrically opposed to those of us because their jobs won't exist post-revolution doesn't logically follow. Their jobs aren't any more important to them than anybody else's; why is there suddenly a dichotomy? It seems that all of you are predicating your position based on the idea that police officers would forsake communism over not being able to get paid to be cops anymore, and it's just strange. They would benefit from the loss of their jobs in the same way everybody else would.

The point is, they wouldn't. Not only would they lose their jobs, they would have a lot to answer for to the ruling proletariat, and if they are given a new job, it would not pay as much as their old job (cops are remunerated much more than an unskilled worker). And all of their old privileges, including their ability to inflict structural violence on the proletariat and the oppressed, would be gone.

If you want to get rid of the slaveowners, don't expect help from the foremen.

Ethics Gradient, Traitor For All Ages

5th June 2014, 15:06

Most people don't get to choose their jobs, at best you can take some steps to ensure whatever job you'll get will be in a desired field. I don't think it's unreasonable to assume that the individuals who do get to choose are going to have different interests than the rest of us. Taking a soldier for instance, would someone who enlisted have the same interests as someone who was conscripted? No, the person who enlisted has certain career goals in mind which will determine how he pursues his work, the conscript is simply waiting out a period of time before they can return to their normal life. In reality their interests are opposed to one another even though superficiality they appear to belong to the same grouping. Suppose the option to shut down the military as whole was put to a vote, do you believe it is assured that both of these individuals would vote the same?

VivalaCuarta

5th June 2014, 15:07

What dream world do these cop-lovers live in?

Socialism is going to come about as a result of the working class taking power, forming its own government.

Now whenever the workers organize for even the most modest goals, what do the cops do? What does policeman's "job" entail? Which side are they on?

Trap Queen Voxxy

5th June 2014, 15:19

Police deserve any and all hate they get, why? Because they don't do a God damn thing. Think about it. Someone gets trapped in a car, is in critical condition and so on, who saves them? Who cuts them out? Fire dept and EMTs. Your grandmother has fallen and can't get up? EMTs and fire dept. Just got stabbed? EMTs and fire dept. It's the firemen and EMTs who actually save people and do things. The police don't do fuck all except harass and oppress the working class. They're not workers, they're not anything, they're a fucking joke. Someone gets shot and or killed daily where I live, you think Shittsburgh's fattest ever find the shooter(s)? No, ridiculous, over paid assholes. It's that cut and dry for me.

consuming negativity

5th June 2014, 15:23

The point is, they wouldn't. Not only would they lose their jobs, they would have a lot to answer for to the ruling proletariat, and if they are given a new job, it would not pay as much as their old job (cops are remunerated much more than an unskilled worker). And all of their old privileges, including their ability to inflict structural violence on the proletariat and the oppressed, would be gone.

If you want to get rid of the slaveowners, don't expect help from the foremen.

The idea that a cop who refuses to oppose the revolution or even joins us having "a lot to answer for" to a ruling class that they belong to is absurd. Your situation only happens if we assume the cop is reactionary in political views, in which case they're in a position not any different than any other working class reactionary who would take up arms against the revolution.

Most people don't get to choose their jobs, at best you can take some steps to ensure whatever job you'll get will be in a desired field. I don't think it's unreasonable to assume that the individuals who do get to choose are going to have different interests than the rest of us. Taking a soldier for instance, would someone who enlisted have the same interests as someone who was conscripted? No, the person who enlisted has certain career goals in mind which will determine how he pursues his work, the conscript is simply waiting out a period of time before they can return to their normal life. In reality their interests are opposed to one another even though superficiality they appear to belong to the same grouping. Suppose the option to shut down the military as whole was put to a vote, do you believe it is assured that both of these individuals would vote the same?

The enlisted and conscripted are not homogenous groups, and neither is the police force. Many soldiers and police are there for the benefits and relatively easy entry requirements, contrary to what you said previously. Not out of some weird desire to persecute communists or anarchists.

Anglo-Saxon Philistine

5th June 2014, 15:32

Ethics Gradient, Traitor For All Ages

5th June 2014, 15:33

The idea that a cop who refuses to oppose the revolution or even joins us having "a lot to answer for" to a ruling class that they belong to is absurd. Your situation only happens if we assume the cop is reactionary in political views, in which case they're in a position not any different than any other working class reactionary who would take up arms against the revolution.

The enlisted and conscripted are not homogenous groups, and neither is the police force. Many soldiers and police are there for the benefits and relatively easy entry requirements, contrary to what you said previously. Not out of some weird desire to persecute communists or anarchists.

Those same benefits are available to people working at the DMV or any other bureaucratic position, and typically these positions will not require a specific degree or specialized academy training. No one settles on being a cop unless their ambitions had been higher up in the security services, FBI, DEA, whatever. Its not a vocation that one falls into just for the sake of employment, it requires effort to become a cop.

Trap Queen Voxxy

5th June 2014, 15:39

Brutus

5th June 2014, 15:45

They may be workers, but their class-interests lie with the bourgeois. There are reactionary layers of the proletariat, and these must be suppressed like the counter-revolutionaries they are. It doesn't matter what class they belong to; what matters is which class their allegiance lies with, and which side of the barricades they will be on. Obviously, these "workers in uniform", these despicable servants of Capital, will fight with their masters against us. This has been shown during strikes and revolutions alike.

consuming negativity

5th June 2014, 15:50

Sure, because that erases the decades that these "workers in uniform" have beaten, harassed and killed the proletariat and oppressed groups. Go down to the factory if you please and listen to what the workers have to say about their "brothers" policemen.

I think you grossly overestimate how many people who have had bad experiences with the police would abolish them. I doubt you could at this point in time convince a majority of imprisoned persons to abolish the police and their functions, much less any segment of the general population. Most people see many functions of the police, if not the police themselves, as necessary to a civil society. If I was wrong, we wouldn't be discussing communism theoretically right now. But this response, much like the others, has been more about an appeal to emotion than anything else.

Those same benefits are available to people working at the DMV or any other bureaucratic position, and typically these positions will not require a specific degree or specialized academy training. No one settles on being a cop unless their ambitions had been higher up in the security services, FBI, DEA, whatever. Its not a vocation that one falls into just for the sake of employment, it requires effort to become a cop.

This is just objectively not true. That you think you can tell me the reasons that every cop has become a cop, and that they all have the same one - career aspirations in the FBI or DEA - just shows me that you've painted millions of people with such a broad brush that they've lost all individuality or humanity. Police are not comic book villains or boogiemen, they're people with emotions and beliefs and lives. I'd be willing to bet almost none of them became cops because they wanted to beat up unionizing workers or student protesters.

Anglo-Saxon Philistine

5th June 2014, 15:53

Bala Perdida

5th June 2014, 15:54

Those same benefits are available to people working at the DMV or any other bureaucratic position, and typically these positions will not require a specific degree or specialized academy training. No one settles on being a cop unless their ambitions had been higher up in the security services, FBI, DEA, whatever. Its not a vocation that one falls into just for the sake of employment, it requires effort to become a cop.I mean sure, there is police academy, but they don't ask for much else. Just a high school diploma, and college is an advantage. They do a background check, then your in. My teacher walked us through the hiring process, it's not that hard to become a cop apparently. Many of my friends and classmates then wanted to become cops because of that and the pay. I'm not sure how serious they were. One was very serious and I'm trying to talk him out of it, but maybe the opposition he gets if he ever does become a cop will be proof enough. I don't care about their personal life. When I see a cop, all I see is a cop. Yes they have a job to do, but that job is to fight against the interests of my class (so the vibe is cops not prols?). If we sympathies with any thugs who are "just following orders" we'll never get anywhere. If they come to our side, then that's marvelous! To bad it's not happening any time soon.

Trap Queen Voxxy

5th June 2014, 15:57

This is just objectively not true. That you think you can tell me the reasons that every cop has become a cop, and that they all have the same one - career aspirations in the FBI or DEA - just shows me that you've painted millions of people with such a broad brush that they've lost all individuality or humanity. Police are not comic book villains or boogiemen, they're people with emotions and beliefs and lives. I'd be willing to bet almost none of them became cops because they wanted to beat up unionizing workers or student protestors.

Ok, let's say this is true, my question is, so? Who cares? In fact, tbh, I would say fuck your dreams, this is reality, you chose a piss poor profession, sorry, BANG. What difference does it make if some cop has hopes, dreams, family, etc. what do I care? What relevance does that have to me? Legiately I seek and preach the abolishment of law enforcement as we know it. How are they workers exactly? Cuz they have a shot job and only make 50k? Boo-fuckity-hoo.

Ethics Gradient, Traitor For All Ages

5th June 2014, 16:01

I think you grossly overestimate how many people who have had bad experiences with the police would abolish them. I doubt you could at this point in time convince a majority of imprisoned persons to abolish the police and their functions, much less any segment of the general population. Most people see many functions of the police, if not the police themselves, as necessary to a civil society. If I was wrong, we wouldn't be discussing communism theoretically right now. But this response, much like the others, has been more about an appeal to emotion than anything else.

This is just objectively not true. That you think you can tell me the reasons that every cop has become a cop, and that they all have the same one - career aspirations in the FBI or DEA - just shows me that you've painted millions of people with such a broad brush that they've lost all individuality or humanity. Police are not comic book villains or boogiemen, they're people with emotions and beliefs and lives. I'd be willing to bet almost none of them became cops because they wanted to beat up unionizing workers or student protestors.

I feel as though you are trying to avoid discussion by appealing to moralism at this point. I don't care if every cop gets rounded up and thrown into a kiling pit after the revolution or if they get all the ice cream they can eat instead, its all irrelevant. I'm sure a great many cops are nice people off the job, but anyone with a brain can see that, yes, in fact being a cop means attacking unarmed protesters and also hunting down serial killers depending on the situation, that's what they exist for. You keep presenting it as some kind of minimum wage work that anyone can accidentally stumble into and find themselves in an uncomfortable situation that they were powerless to avoid. This is not the case, its a specialized job that requires years of effort on the part of the applicant. Yes the only people who "settle" for police work are those who weren't able to climb higher, and the rest are there because they specifically wanted to be cops. What is your personal stake in this, are you a cop or something?

consuming negativity

5th June 2014, 16:06

Most workers do not think the police can be abolished, but the amount of antipathy they display for the police is impressive, and healthy. And no, my argument has nothing to do with emotions - most workers despise the cops. When the workers rule, and the police force has been smashed, do you think the policemen can expect much good?

Not if the people in charge sound like you. :laugh:

No, but seriously, I don't think anybody in opposition can expect much good. That's kind of a hallmark of violent revolution. What makes you think there will be something different for police who take up arms against it as opposed to anyone else? That they're disliked by people now? So are clowns but I doubt they're going to be summarily executed. Bad example, yes, but I wanted to use a humorous one because I think you get my point either way.

Ok, let's say this is true, my question is, so? Who cares? In fact, tbh, I would say fuck your dreams, this is reality, you chose a piss poor profession, sorry, BANG. What difference does it make if some cop has hopes, dreams, family, etc. what do I care? What relevance does that have to me? Legiately I seek and preach the abolishment of law enforcement as we know it. How are they workers exactly? Cuz they have a shot job and only make 50k? Boo-fuckity-hoo.I had to manually quote your post because the forum quote function is being stupid again. Alternatively, it realized the ridiculous amount of edge in your post and decided to protect itself from getting cut. My point was that the person I was responding to was ignoring the fact that people aren't just carbon copies based on SES combined with 2-3 other factors, like dolls on an assembly line.

are you a cop or something?

I was wondering how long it would take for someone to ask me this. Even if I was I would deny it, but no, anybody who pays attention to my Non-Political posts knows I'm not a cop. As for your claim earlier in the post that I was making an appeal to emotion, read my response to Vox Populi.

Ethics Gradient, Traitor For All Ages

5th June 2014, 16:07

I mean sure, there is police academy, but they don't ask for much else. Just a high school diploma, and college is an advantage. They do a background check, then your in. My teacher walked us through the hiring process, it's not that hard to become a cop apparently. Many of my friends and classmates then wanted to become cops because of that and the pay. I'm not sure how serious they were. One was very serious and I'm trying to talk him out of it, but maybe the opposition he gets if he ever does become a cop will be proof enough. I don't care about their personal life. When I see a cop, all I see is a cop. Yes they have a job to do, but that job is to fight against the interests of my class (so the vibe is cops not prols?). If we sympathies with any thugs who are "just following orders" we'll never get anywhere. If they come to our side, then that's marvelous! To bad it's not happening any time soon.

Your teacher is either mistaken or you live in a very rural area with lax requirements. Cops require specific degrees in addition to training, physical aptitudes and clean personal records.

Bala Perdida

5th June 2014, 16:11

This is not the case, its a specialized job that requires years of effort on the part of the applicant.
Can you please provide me some more info on this? Maybe a link or something. From what I heard all you need is a high school diploma or GED to apply. Having a college education in any field is just a bonus. Also speaking a second language. The prerequisites are pretty easy to fulfill, based on what my teacher said.

Ethics Gradient, Traitor For All Ages

5th June 2014, 16:19

Im at work at the moment, but I can post stuff later. I worked as a contractor in local government for a few years so I had to interact with lots of cops in many different states. It wouldn't supirse me if areas outside of major cities don't "require" a degree but you'd have no chance of getting the position due to how desirable those jobs are, particularly for people coming out of the military with few useful skills.

VivalaCuarta

5th June 2014, 16:59

Our cop apologists manage to ignore 100% of the empirical evidence indicating that whenever the workers act in their class interest, the police perform a very specific role in effecting the interest of the bourgeois class enemy.

They point to individual, or more frequently hypothetical-counterfactual individual, examples of cops who might hold some beliefs that complicate their "jobs" or might be paid less than a certain level or might not meet a certain arbitrary standard of elitism (training, education, selection, etc.)

But aside from all this, it is necessary to understand society under the rule of a particular class as a system with its own laws of motion that are not immediately apparent on the basis of the beliefs or actions of its individual members. Our cop apologists fail to do this. Also, many who oppose our cop apologists fail to do this.

What is class? One's opinions do not constitute one's social class. Most workers would be capitalists if this were the case, but nevertheless workers (not cops) can only survive by selling their labor power and thereby augmenting capital.

Is this the policeman's relation to the means of production? No, he is not a part of capital that the capitalist buys and incorporates into his products, like labor, raw materials, machinery, buildings, etc. His function is entirely unrelated to the production of commodities. He can "work" his ass off all day killing black kids, beating strikers, framing up leftists, lying in court, etc. and no capital, no commodities are produced by his efforts! Whether he is highly trained and paid "elite" cop or a minimum wage rent-a-cop security guard makes no difference in this regard. Neither does how he feels about himself and his role in society.

A worker is like a tool or a raw material that the capitalist buys and incorporates into his product, with the special difference that the worker adds more value to the product than his price represents. A cop is like a whip, or a shotgun, a lock on the door or an attack dog. The capitalist buys him for an entirely different purpose. He is part of a different class that depends for its existence on the continuation of class society, whereas the future of the working class is either socialism (a classless society) or descent into barbarism.

They may be workers, but their class-interests lie with the bourgeois. There are reactionary layers of the proletariat

Wrong. Without revolutionary theory there can be no revolutionary movement.

Brutus

5th June 2014, 17:03

Without revolutionary theory there can be no revolutionary movement.

Yes, I agree. But how does this relate to the text you quoted?

VivalaCuarta

5th June 2014, 17:09

Yes, I agree. But how does this relate to the text you quoted?

Your theory is wrong. Cops are not part of the proletariat. Your theory, while more empirically justifiable, is on the same impressionistic level as that of the cop-apologists.

Evil Stalinist Overlord

5th June 2014, 17:09

They may be workers, but their class-interests lie with the bourgeois. There are reactionary layers of the proletariat

Yes. Whenever we study the matter of the "organized corps of armed men" we need to look at their class background first. Special Forces will never join a Revolution, but the Bolsheviks agitated within the army because most of the soldiers fighting in the trenches were poor peasants and workers recruited off from their homes.

Also, regarding street gangs: the drug business as a whole is a product of capitalism, but gangs can work as a basic template for organizing the urban youth. We should strive to co-opt the unfortunate by-products of our system.

Anglo-Saxon Philistine

5th June 2014, 17:23

Just to expand, while we oppose the reactionary members of the proletariat politically, we support them in their economic struggle. When a Catholic worker wishes to restrict abortion, we oppose him. When he strikes for a higher wage, we support him, even if he is a right bastard.

Not so with cops. Calling the cops workers is bad enough - it's equivalent to putting on the noose around our own necks - but supporting cop unions is worse. In this analogy, it would be the same as putting the noose around our necks and then taking a flying leap.

Ethics Gradient, Traitor For All Ages

5th June 2014, 17:41

Yes. Whenever we study the matter of the "organized corps of armed men" we need to look at their class background first. Special Forces will never join a Revolution, but the Bolsheviks agitated within the army because most of the soldiers fighting in the trenches were poor peasants and workers recruited off from their homes.

Also, regarding street gangs: the drug business as a whole is a product of capitalism, but gangs can work as a basic template for organizing the urban youth. We should strive to co-opt the unfortunate by-products of our system.

Those soldiers had also been conscripted to fight a war that was against their interests in every sense of the word. They can't be compared to volunteers like special forces or cops in this instance.

Evil Stalinist Overlord

5th June 2014, 17:46

Those soldiers had also been conscripted to fight a war that was against their interests in every sense of the word. They can't be compared to volunteers like special forces or cops in this instance.

Very true. "Cops are not workers" is a basic leftwing thought in my opinion.

consuming negativity

5th June 2014, 18:01

Our cop apologists manage to ignore 100% of the empirical evidence

If you're going to be a dickhead and keep calling me a "cop apologist" you could at least provide me with empirical evidence that isn't repeating the same arguments I've already addressed ITT multiple times.

Ethics Gradient, Traitor For All Ages

5th June 2014, 18:05

I haven't seen you respond to the assertion that they do not actually take part in commodity production which is the general Marxist view of cops. Unless I missed it

Црвена

5th June 2014, 18:30

Sinister Cultural Marxist

5th June 2014, 18:32

A cop might be a perfectly nice person as an individual, but if he catches a black kid selling crack, the only way for him to do the "right thing" is for him to not do his job. Its his job to enforce racist or abusive laws. That should be the basis of our critique of cops - not that they all lack virtue as human beings, but that their institution exists to control people and to a large extent to maintain the status quo.

If a cop arrests a rapist, that is fine. If a cop arrests someone drunk driving outside of a school when kids are getting out, great. But most people arrested by the police are not like that. I think the dream many cops have when they join the force is dealing with cases like that, and psychologically I am sure they hone in on such cases to justify the kind of job they do, but for every person the cops put away for truly brutal activity, they put countless young people away (usually young men of color, and predominately the poor of both races) for petty crimes, to get jailed and tortured (often sexually) by guards and other prisoners for a few years.

And we're not even getting at the way every police force backs up any cop who kills someone on the street.

Most workers do not think the police can be abolished, but the amount of antipathy they display for the police is impressive, and healthy. And no, my argument has nothing to do with emotions - most workers despise the cops. When the workers rule, and the police force has been smashed, do you think the policemen can expect much good?

Sure, because that erases the decades that these "workers in uniform" have beaten, harassed and killed the proletariat and oppressed groups. Go down to the factory if you please and listen to what the workers have to say about their "brothers" policemen.

What source do you have for saying "most workers hate cops"? SOME sectors of workers hate cops (particularly workers of color, or British coal miners from the 80s) but that hardly makes it some kind of universal disposition of the working class. Do you have polls, or is it just your anecdotal experience from going to a couple factories where you live?

I don't want to deny that cops have historically fucked up striking workers, and yes in times of extreme class struggle the cops will be seen by workers as enemies, but I think the picture is much more complex than you paint it.

The police are part of the state apparatus, a special organ (Lenin calls them a special body of armed men) of society that secures private property but does not participate in the production of commodities.

I don't think the ONLY job of the modern police is to secure private property. I think that is an outmoded way of looking at things.

Also, the Cheka had pretty much all of the same problems as a police force - unaccountability, abusive practices, use of torture to gain confessions and so on, with the only difference being that sustaining the revolution replaced sustaining private property.

The Cheka eventually developed into the NKVD, which ultimately became one of the most brutal apparatuses of state force outside of the fascist states and Europe's overseas colonies. Why did the police exist in Leftist police states if they only exist to preserve private property? Or do we call them something else?

When Left-coms, "revolutionary marxists", anarchists, and anarcho-communists cop-hate, that makes sense. Less so from any hardcore Leninist tradition.

Not so with cops. Calling the cops workers is bad enough - it's equivalent to putting on the noose around our own necks - but supporting cop unions is worse. In this analogy, it would be the same as putting the noose around our necks and then taking a flying leap. I agree with supporting cops unions - although cops going on strike can be a good opportunity for other mass movements to act. There was a recent cop strike in Argentina I believe which led to mass looting and appropriation of the commodities in the private stores.

Police deserve any and all hate they get, why? Because they don't do a God damn thing. Think about it. Someone gets trapped in a car, is in critical condition and so on, who saves them? Who cuts them out? Fire dept and EMTs. Your grandmother has fallen and can't get up? EMTs and fire dept. Just got stabbed? EMTs and fire dept. It's the firemen and EMTs who actually save people and do things. The police don't do fuck all except harass and oppress the working class. They're not workers, they're not anything, they're a fucking joke. Someone gets shot and or killed daily where I live, you think Shittsburgh's fattest ever find the shooter(s)? No, ridiculous, over paid assholes. It's that cut and dry for me.

I've actually been in situations where a cop helped, specifically car-related ones. I'm not defending cops but perhaps you could come up with a better argument against them than an extreme and inaccurate generalization.

Comrade #138672

5th June 2014, 18:38

I think it is appropriate to quote Trotsky here:

In case of actual danger, the social democracy banks not on the "Iron Front" but on the Prussian police. It is reckoning without its host! The fact that the police was originally recruited in large numbers from among social-democratic workers is absolutely meaningless. Consciousness is determined by environment even in this instance. The worker who becomes a policeman in the service of the capitalist state, is a bourgeois cop, not a worker. Of late years, these policemen have had to do much more fighting with revolutionary workers than with Nazi students. Such training does not fail to leave its effects. And above all: every policeman knows that though governments may change, the police remains.

- Leon Trotsky (http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/works/1944/1944-fas.htm#p5)

Trap Queen Voxxy

5th June 2014, 19:00

There are times where I hate the police because of their awful "eye for an eye," ideals, but I don't think it's fair to convict individual policemen, who may have joined due to hardship, for crimes that are committed by the whole of our corrupt society. Most policemen are workers who are brainwashed by society and very few will genuinely believe in the terrible things they're made to do. I think we should be focusing on bringing people like this to full consciousness, not antagonising them.

Not to pick on you or your post but I think it's weir that those whom keep saying "we shouldn't generalize or paint things with a broad brush," are doing just that while defending law enforcement. Generalizing about the assholes? Bad, generalizing about everyone else? Good, poor them, etc. :rolleyes:

Yes, poor cops with their government benefits, retirement plans, premium health insurances, wages, etc. Where I'm from, earning 50-60k annually is being "well off." Which is to say, again, I will not accept any sob stories. Let's see a couple examples of fine police work. Alexandria Hill, a two yr old happy little girl was removed from her loving parents because they smoked marijuana and then put into a foster home where a couple weeks later she had been beaten to death. What about all of the dogs and animals senselessly murdered because idiots with 0 animal handling experience perceived them as a threat? What about the children killed yearly by flash bang grenades during raids? What about the youth whom are killed for no reason other than being young and dumb? What about that corruption? What about all those unsolved murders, rapes and molestation? What about all those wrongful convictions? Wtf do the police do, how are they workers and why should I feel sorry for them?

Tbh honest, if you don't see cops as the enemy I can only assume your probably a role playing trust fund baby and haven't experienced the dark aide or true side of law enforcement.

Trap Queen Voxxy

5th June 2014, 19:10

I've actually been in situations where a cop helped, specifically car-related ones. I'm not defending cops but perhaps you could come up with a better argument against them than an extreme and inaccurate generalization.

So, one scenario, in which one cop, may have allegedly helped someone for once negates what I'm saying? How did the cop, specifically, him or herself, help you? Did he offer emergency medical assistance? Did he or she physically assist you? In what capacity? Or did he or she just wait and keep you company till the actual life savers came? If the latter, big deal, anyone could have done that.

Anglo-Saxon Philistine

5th June 2014, 19:17

What source do you have for saying "most workers hate cops"? SOME sectors of workers hate cops (particularly workers of color, or British coal miners from the 80s) but that hardly makes it some kind of universal disposition of the working class. Do you have polls, or is it just your anecdotal experience from going to a couple factories where you live?

The historic experience of the working-class movement, particularly in America and Britain (a subject I am interested in). I think that counts for more than those silly polls that some people like.

I don't want to deny that cops have historically fucked up striking workers, and yes in times of extreme class struggle the cops will be seen by workers as enemies, but I think the picture is much more complex than you paint it.

How is it more complex?

I don't think the ONLY job of the modern police is to secure private property. I think that is an outmoded way of looking at things.

Well, what other job do they have? They also intimidate workers and minorities, which again serves to further the interest of capital.

Also, the Cheka had pretty much all of the same problems as a police force - unaccountability, abusive practices, use of torture to gain confessions and so on, with the only difference being that sustaining the revolution replaced sustaining private property.

But with all due respect, that's like saying that, overall, a tank is the same as a PEZ dispenser, only it dispenses HE shells instead of candy.

The Cheka eventually developed into the NKVD, which ultimately became one of the most brutal apparatuses of state force outside of the fascist states and Europe's overseas colonies.

Excuse me? First of all, how many Arabs did the NKVD (which existed alongside the Ch-K and the OGPU for a period) summarily execute while being led by a former Nazi? Zero? Now, how many Arabs did the French police summarily execute while being led by a former Nazi? Quite a fucking few. I really like it when people downplay "western" brutality in order to make the Evil Soviet Empire seem bad.

Why did the police exist in Leftist police states if they only exist to preserve private property? Or do we call them something else?

These organisations might have been called "the police", "the people's police" or whatever, but if you hold - as most Trotskyists do - that private property was overthrown in the glacis states, then obviously you don't hold that they protected something that was nonexistent. So they were a different kind of state organ.

I agree with supporting cops unions - although cops going on strike can be a good opportunity for other mass movements to act. There was a recent cop strike in Argentina I believe which led to mass looting and appropriation of the commodities in the private stores.

How is mass looting going to help the proletariat to seize power?

Comrade #138672

5th June 2014, 19:18

So, one scenario, in which one cop, may have allegedly helped someone for once negates what I'm saying? How did the cop, specifically, him or herself, help you? Did he offer emergency medical assistance? Did he or she physically assist you? In what capacity? Or did he or she just wait and keep you company till the actual life savers came? If the latter, big deal, anyone could have done that.Well, anybody could have done that, but if the police does it, it helps to boost their image. On a very superficial level, it gives many people the illusion that the police is on their side. I think it is a very subtle control mechanism, which helps to solidify the capitalist hierarchy and legitimize the rule of the bourgeoisie. The police must appear to be necessary. This is also why "crime" is often exaggerated. If we do not feel unsafe enough, we might think of the police and other capitalist control mechanisms as... unnecessary, or even harmful to us.

exeexe

5th June 2014, 19:18

VoX p°PuŁï (http://www.revleft.com/vb/member.php?u=62988) http://www.revleft.com/vb/revleft/statusicon/user_online.gif

Originally Posted by Sinister Cultural Marxist http://www.revleft.com/vb/revleft/buttons/viewpost.gif (http://www.revleft.com/vb/showthread.php?p=2757542#post2757542)
I've actually been in situations where a cop helped, specifically car-related ones. I'm not defending cops but perhaps you could come up with a better argument against them than an extreme and inaccurate generalization.

So, one scenario, in which one cop, may have allegedly helped someone for once negates what I'm saying? How did the cop, specifically, him or herself, help you? Did he offer emergency medical assistance? Did he or she physically assist you? In what capacity? Or did he or she just wait and keep you company till the actual life savers came? If the latter, big deal, anyone could have done that.

Better yet, the cop took fingerprints to make sure he wasnt involved in any illegal activities and helping him to get the status of "free to go".

consuming negativity

5th June 2014, 19:40

I haven't seen you respond to the assertion that they do not actually take part in commodity production which is the general Marxist view of cops. Unless I missed it

How can someone protect private property rights but be considered outside of the productive process? To exclude the police you'd have to exclude the entire service sector and basically anyone who isn't actually manufacturing something on an assembly line. Are security guards also not part of the production process? What about teachers, what objects do they produce? The 1800s was over a century ago, y'all need to get with the program. :unsure:

Trap Queen Voxxy

5th June 2014, 19:48

How can someone protect private property rights but be considered outside of the productive process? To exclude the police you'd have to exclude the entire service sector and basically anyone who isn't actually manufacturing something on an assembly line. Are security guards also not part of the production process? What about teachers, what objects do they produce? The 1800s was over a century ago, y'all need to get with the program. :unsure:

What? If you're speaking of the Americas, manufacturing and production based jobs are dead. It's a service based economy, really and correct me if I am wrong, a service worker helping me get fit or have faster internet is not the same as a cop. Like apples and oranges as you would say.

Anglo-Saxon Philistine

5th June 2014, 19:50

How can someone protect private property rights but be considered outside of the productive process? To exclude the police you'd have to exclude the entire service sector and basically anyone who isn't actually manufacturing something on an assembly line. Are security guards also not part of the production process? What about teachers, what objects do they produce? The 1800s was over a century ago, y'all need to get with the program. :unsure:

Commodities aren't necessarily objects. A commodity is anything with an exchange-value, and numerous student slogans aside, an education is such a thing. But remove cops, and commodities would still be produced.

consuming negativity

5th June 2014, 19:53

Commodities aren't necessarily objects. A commodity is anything with an exchange-value, and numerous student slogans aside, an education is such a thing. But remove cops, and commodities would still be produced.

You don't foresee any potential changes in the mode of production in a world where all cops have vanished?

Anglo-Saxon Philistine

5th June 2014, 19:58

You don't foresee any potential changes in the mode of production in a world where all cops have vanished?

That's a bizarre question. There are always potential changes, but what does that prove? If the bourgeoisie all disappeared, there would also be potential changes in the mode of production, but the bourgeoisie are not producers.

BIXX

5th June 2014, 20:04

Seriously this debate again?

Fuck cops, I don't give a single shit if they are workers.

Also I do believe it's possible to go without calling the cops, just not easy. It helps to have friends that you can get help from. Anyway... Cops almost always come after the "crime" has been committed. They don't prevent crime, they respond to it. Seriously if someone is robbing you're house is calling the cops a valid option anymore? A much better option is a bullet.

And regarding the cops being workers: stop supporting workers just because they are workers. That is ridiculous moralism.

Sorry I had no direction in this post I'm just sick and tired, and I hate cops.

Sinister Cultural Marxist

5th June 2014, 20:13

The historic experience of the working-class movement, particularly in America and Britain (a subject I am interested in). I think that counts for more than those silly polls that some people like.

I am interested in this experience too, but unfortunately many of those lessons have been forgotten. You were speaking to how workers feel today, not how workers striking over coal mines getting shut in the 80s felt.

How is it more complex?I think because the media has done a lot to improve the image of the police, especially among middle class workers who make a "decent" income, have some amount of personal safety and have a certain amount of political agency, and want all that protected.

Well, what other job do they have? They also intimidate workers and minorities, which again serves to further the interest of capital.Well, for one, dealing with the psychologically disturbed who our society has largely failed. These folks may not actually threaten anyone's property or the system of property as such. Targeting sex workers too does not preserve anyone's capital, nor does clamping down on the drug trade. Also, the harassing or deportation of immigrant workers does not serve the interests of capital so much as relieve the populist fears of folks who lack class consciousness (on the contrary, capital loves the amount of value they can exploit from hard working, poorly paid migrant workers). I think the portfolio of the police is different in the US and Western Europe than it was 100 years ago, or is still in many parts of the 3rd world. Of course, it still relates to preserving the Capitalist system, but this means that its relationship to preserving property as such is more indirect.

But with all due respect, that's like saying that, overall, a tank is the same as a PEZ dispenser, only it dispenses HE shells instead of candy.Except if you're getting tortured by a bourgeois cop or by a chekist for spraying anarchist graffiti, you're still just as tortured.

Excuse me? First of all, how many Arabs did the NKVD (which existed alongside the Ch-K and the OGPU for a period) summarily execute while being led by a former Nazi? Zero? Now, how many Arabs did the French police summarily execute while being led by a former Nazi? Quite a fucking few. I really like it when people downplay "western" brutality in order to make the Evil Soviet Empire seem bad.I guess your emotions blurred your reading skills. I said that they were the worst OUTSIDE of the fascist states and the colonial world, as in, colonial police were as bad if not worse, as in I was not minimizing the crimes of French colonial authorities. In fact I only mentioned that to point out the fact that European colonial authorities were just as bad if not worse, to show how I am NOT defending liberalism. Don't strawman me, you're too smart for that (or at least I think you are).

The casualty rates of Tatars and Chechens forcefully deported from their homes by Soviet police speak for themselves. I'm not saying the French were any better, that's not really what is being debated. It is that Soviet police routinely targeted people who did not threaten anyone but were seen as "problematic" by the state for a host of reasons, regardless of their class, and that great brutality was used in this process.

These organisations might have been called "the police", "the people's police" or whatever, but if you hold - as most Trotskyists do - that private property was overthrown in the glacis states, then obviously you don't hold that they protected something that was nonexistent. So they were a different kind of state organ.Their effect on minimizing the ability of social movements to organize, workers to strike and lumpen proletarians to survive is similar. I think the kind of police brutality shown by the Soviet state, to the point where a substantial portion of the old Bolsheviks themselves were arrested and executed under the weight of truly ridiculous charges, goes to show that there were institutional interests which were being actively preserved through the use of state violence.

Moreover, I think any materialist analysis of why the Soviet Union became a police state centered around a military elite and economic bureaucracy alienated from the workers must look at the impact the police state had on popular, mass movements. How could it be that the state under Stalin stole food from peasants, often to sell on international markets, if not for the unaccountable violence of those organs of state power? How could it be that movement from town to village and from village to town became restricted? How was such an organ not preserving the material interests of the state and bureaucracy over peasants, industrial workers and agricultural workers?

How is mass looting going to help the proletariat to seize power? Fair point, but presumably any radical occupation or storming of civic authority would be similarly easier without police on duty. I do think cops not doing their jobs is a useful circumstance for any revolutionary.

Commodities aren't necessarily objects. A commodity is anything with an exchange-value, and numerous student slogans aside, an education is such a thing. But remove cops, and commodities would still be produced.

The existence of security guards indicates that security is something which can be valued. If I own a small business, I can get more value from my wares if I know they are less likely to be stolen. If I own a house, I know I can sell it for more if it is in a "safe neighborhood".

So, one scenario, in which one cop, may have allegedly helped someone for once negates what I'm saying? How did the cop, specifically, him or herself, help you? Did he offer emergency medical assistance? Did he or she physically assist you? In what capacity? Or did he or she just wait and keep you company till the actual life savers came? If the latter, big deal, anyone could have done that.

For the sake of preserving anonymity, I won't go into details, but it wasn't something that "just anyone" can do.

consuming negativity

5th June 2014, 20:21

That's a bizarre question. There are always potential changes, but what does that prove? If the bourgeoisie all disappeared, there would also be potential changes in the mode of production, but the bourgeoisie are not producers.

I've been up for 23 hours so this may come off as me being a shithead, but I feel like you're just trying to be dense for the sake of it. The police play a part in the production process if they exist to protect the institution of private property. They do not own means of production, but rather offer their services as police/protectors of products for a wage. Just like security guards or bank tellers or lifeguards or any other number of service sector jobs that exist because of our institutions.

Seriously this debate again?

Fuck cops, I don't give a single shit if they are workers.

Also I do believe it's possible to go without calling the cops, just not easy. It helps to have friends that you can get help from. Anyway... Cops almost always come after the "crime" has been committed. They don't prevent crime, they respond to it. Seriously if someone is robbing you're house is calling the cops a valid option anymore? A much better option is a bullet.

And regarding the cops being workers: stop supporting workers just because they are workers. That is ridiculous moralism.

Sorry I had no direction in this post I'm just sick and tired, and I hate cops.

The "don't ever call the cops" stuff is much more compelling when you live in a society in which the police are not a cornerstone. In an anarchist situation that we would describe as anarchist, people can develop separate non-police ways to handle any reason you would need to call the cops, but that's not what we have now, and calling the police is sometimes necessary. Say "don't call the police" when you've just walked in on a rape of some kind. Let someone injure a family member or steal your car and see if you still don't want to get the police involved. I get the passion and the resentment of authorities such as the police but blind idealism is useless.

Anglo-Saxon Philistine

5th June 2014, 20:42

I am interested in this experience too, but unfortunately many of those lessons have been forgotten. You were speaking to how workers feel today, not how workers striking over coal mines getting shut in the 80s felt.

As was I. I mean, labour history doesn't stop in the eighties.

I think because the media has done a lot to improve the image of the police, especially among middle class workers who make a "decent" income, have some amount of personal safety and have a certain amount of political agency, and want all that protected.

These people make up a tiny stratum "on the top" of the proletariat, and most of them are bought off by imperialism anyway, so I fail to see the point.

Well, for one, dealing with the psychologically disturbed who our society has largely failed. These folks may not actually threaten anyone's property or the system of property as such. Targeting sex workers too does not preserve anyone's capital, nor does clamping down on the drug trade. Also, the harassing or deportation of immigrant workers does not serve the interests of capital so much as relieve the populist fears of folks who lack class consciousness (on the contrary, capital loves the amount of value they can exploit from hard working, poorly paid migrant workers). I think the portfolio of the police is different in the US and Western Europe than it was 100 years ago, or is still in many parts of the 3rd world. Of course, it still relates to preserving the Capitalist system, but this means that its relationship to preserving property as such is more indirect.

But I never said that directly protecting private property is all that police do. Obviously they do other things - for example, harass immigrants so that the price of their labour drops (if the immigrants were not in danger of being deported the price of their labour would go up), and so on. But "protecting the citizens" or whatever nonsense cop apologists peddle is not part of their job description.

Except if you're getting tortured by a bourgeois cop or by a chekist for spraying anarchist graffiti, you're still just as tortured.

So, can you name one case of someone being tortured by a chekist for spraying anarchist graffiti? Or, scrawling anarchist graffiti since I suppose paint sprays weren't as popular when Iron Felix was alive.

I guess your emotions blurred your reading skills. I said that they were the worst OUTSIDE of the fascist states and the colonial world, as in, colonial police were as bad if not worse, as in I was not minimizing the crimes of French colonial authorities. In fact I only mentioned that to point out the fact that European colonial authorities were just as bad if not worse, to show how I am NOT defending liberalism. Don't strawman me, you're too smart for that (or at least I think you are).

Except the events I referenced - the massacre in 1961 - happened under a democratic government, in Paris, which wasn't a colony of France the last time I checked. The problem is that you seem to think that the European democracies were peaceful and nice, at least outside the colonies, whereas the glacis states were "police states", "totalitarian" and so on. I recognise that line; it was advanced by Burnham and Shachtman and it led them right into the arms of the bourgeoisie. Incidentally they found a lot of adherents in France. Not one of which protested the massacre in 1961.

The casualty rates of Tatars and Chechens forcefully deported from their homes by Soviet police speak for themselves. I'm not saying the French were any better, that's not really what is being debated. It is that Soviet police routinely targeted people who did not threaten anyone but were seen as "problematic" by the state for a host of reasons, regardless of their class, and that great brutality was used in this process.

The deportations of Chechens and Tatars were military operations, carried out in the wartime. And although they were prime examples of bureaucratic stupidity, the tail wagging the dog, they were not without military logic.

Their effect on minimizing the ability of social movements to organize, workers to strike and lumpen proletarians to survive is similar. I think the kind of police brutality shown by the Soviet state, to the point where a substantial portion of the old Bolsheviks themselves were arrested and executed under the weight of truly ridiculous charges, goes to show that there were institutional interests which were being actively preserved through the use of state violence.

Of course. But were those interests those of private property? Only if you think the glacis states were bourgeois-capitalist states.

Moreover, I think any materialist analysis of why the Soviet Union became a police state centered around a military elite and economic bureaucracy alienated from the workers must look at the impact the police state had on popular, mass movements. How could it be that the state under Stalin stole food from peasants, often to sell on international markets, if not for the unaccountable violence of those organs of state power? How could it be that movement from town to village and from village to town became restricted? How was such an organ not preserving the material interests of the state and bureaucracy over peasants, industrial workers and agricultural workers?

Surely you mean "under Lenin", not "under Stalin", because the "stealing of food" - requisition, the food dictatorship and Military Communism - date to the Lenin period. And they were clearly in the interest of the proletariat, which had to be fed in wartime and during the crisis that brought on the Ural-Siberian method. As for peasants, they are an alien class.

Fair point, but presumably any radical occupation or storming of civic authority would be similarly easier without police on duty. I do think cops not doing their jobs is a useful circumstance for any revolutionary.

I honestly think that it takes a great deal of naivete to assume that the proletariat can sneak to power through the back door. If anything threatens the state, the police will break their strike.

The existence of security guards indicates that security is something which can be valued. If I own a small business, I can get more value from my wares if I know they are less likely to be stolen.

Not really - you get the same price for them, no matter how secure they are. Otherwise you would be ejected from the market for overpricing your goods.

If I own a house, I know I can sell it for more if it is in a "safe neighborhood".

But the fact is, the police do not make "safe neighborhoods", these are made by racist zoning regulations, collusion among property developers, and the state apparatus through development projects.

I've been up for 23 hours so this may come off as me being a shithead, but I feel like you're just trying to be dense for the sake of it. The police play a part in the production process if they exist to protect the institution of private property. They do not own means of production, but rather offer their services as police/protectors of products for a wage. Just like security guards or bank tellers or lifeguards or any other number of service sector jobs that exist because of our institutions.

Security guards are private cop-like creatures, so...

Policemen are part of the special apparatus that provides the framework in which commodity production happens, but they do not participate in commodity production because they do not add value to objects or processes, nor is their job indispensable for the production of any single commodity. If the number of secretaries in a company falls, production suffers. If the number of cops falls, commodity production is not affected.

PhoenixAsh

5th June 2014, 21:24

Police doesn't exist to protect people. Its origins can historically be found in the need to protect either the ruling class or in protecting the unhindered continuation of economic activity....protecting individuals and providing services of varying kind of quality to the general public are incidental and only in service of the first two tasks.

So actually it is still problematic when the police capture a rapist and when the police arrest somebody who is drunk driving past a school. We simply do not mind as much. Why? First the police merely enforces ruling/dominant class rules and serve to mop up the excesses resulting from their economic interests and will do their job in this context of socio economic reality (including patriarchal structures) We simply do not mind them doing so in some cases....but lets not be completely ignorant of the fact that they are just as responsible for the treatment of rape victims; the fact that they more often arrest the drunk driver in rich neighborhoods or in immigrant neighborhoods...and the fact that they will focus their efforts more aggressively depending class relations of a suspect...not to mention that their inefficient blundering will more often than not be responsible for charges dropped against a suspected rapist or convictions being thrown out based on bungled investigations.

Sinister Cultural Marxist

5th June 2014, 22:32

These people make up a tiny stratum "on the top" of the proletariat, and most of them are bought off by imperialism anyway, so I fail to see the point.

They don't make up such a tiny stratum in the US, though with the housing crisis many did return to the bottom.

But I never said that directly protecting private property is all that police do. Obviously they do other things - for example, harass immigrants so that the price of their labour drops (if the immigrants were not in danger of being deported the price of their labour would go up), and so on. But "protecting the citizens" or whatever nonsense cop apologists peddle is not part of their job description.
OK, although one could say a sense of protection itself protects private property if we make such a broad claim - the larger, systemic problem is that people are being protected from the failures of the system itself.

Except the events I referenced - the massacre in 1961 - happened under a democratic government, in Paris, which wasn't a colony of France the last time I checked. The problem is that you seem to think that the European democracies were peaceful and nice, at least outside the colonies, whereas the glacis states were "police states", "totalitarian" and so on. I recognise that line; it was advanced by Burnham and Shachtman and it led them right into the arms of the bourgeoisie. Incidentally they found a lot of adherents in France. Not one of which protested the massacre in 1961.Quote me where I said European democracies were "nice". It is the case though that European democracies exported the severity of oppression and brutality to their colonies so that they could reduce the pressures on their own citizens. It's not that France, the UK and Britain did not have brutal police forces at home, but if you look at the numbers their relative brutality abroad was greater and more consistent.

The deportations of Chechens and Tatars were military operations, carried out in the wartime. And although they were prime examples of bureaucratic stupidity, the tail wagging the dog, they were not without military logic.Those "military operations" were cases of brutal ethnic cleansing done by the military and secret police. It was done to hurt the Tatars of ALL classes and ended up being used to benefit the Russians who ended up getting free homes, while the Tatars remained to rot away in Uzbekistan until the 80s, unable to move home. The truth is that the USSR used police and military force to control its people. It's not alone in that, and every regime has done so too, but the police of the Soviet Union were just as brutal at many points in their history. Instead of denying that, I think the working class would find it more convincing if lessons were learned.

Of course. But were those interests those of private property? Only if you think the glacis states were bourgeois-capitalist states. I think it was in the interests of a calcified, unaccountable and alien bureaucracy. Based on the experience of the USSR, we can see that socio-economic control of such a bureaucracy didn't end any better. Especially for proletarians of ethnic groups targeted by the state which claimed to represent them.

Surely you mean "under Lenin", not "under Stalin", because the "stealing of food" - requisition, the food dictatorship and Military Communism - date to the Lenin period. And they were clearly in the interest of the proletariat, which had to be fed in wartime and during the crisis that brought on the Ural-Siberian method. As for peasants, they are an alien class.I referenced the food requisition under Stalin because of the large number of people who died, and it was not just for the sake of feeding a starving proletariat but gaining more capital for the state. Lenin had the argument that Russian workers were on the brink of starvation, while Stalin did not. Moreover, many of the victims could be called members of an "agricultural proletariat" and not the "peasant" class.

Also, the reasoning that led the USSR to use the organs of state power to starve peasants to preserve proletarians is one of the reasons why I'm not a Trotskyist (not that I'm entirely unsympathetic to Trots, Lenin and Trotsky on many issues) so the whole "peasants are an alien class" is unconvincing to me (the lumpen are an "alien class" yet police brutality against them should be widely condemned too). Not every peasant was a Kulak and there has always been constant movement between rural peasants and urban proletarians (the proletariat itself came from peasantry who lost their land and when proletarians lost their jobs and couldn't find food in the cities like in the Russian revolution or when they are immigrant labor deported by ICE in the US, they return to their status as peasants. Many illegal immigrants getting stopped at the border are Central American peasants looking to become proletarians after loosing their land or their market. They are hardly "alien classes" in the same way as the bourgeois and the proletariat are - the peasantry is just an anachronistic class which emerged during another era).

I honestly think that it takes a great deal of naivete to assume that the proletariat can sneak to power through the back door. If anything threatens the state, the police will break their strike.It's not "sneaking power through the back door" it's that the worse cops are at their job, the more opportunity there is for revolutionaries.

Not really - you get the same price for them, no matter how secure they are. Otherwise you would be ejected from the market for overpricing your goods.
If I know my goods won't be stolen, I can sell them for less but effectively get more money from them.

But the fact is, the police do not make "safe neighborhoods", these are made by racist zoning regulations, collusion among property developers, and the state apparatus through development projects.
Keeping the homeless out and simply having a "cop presence" does drive up property values, as does keeping crime rates down. Why else would low crime, uppity bourgeois areas have cops whose job it is to tell the kids of yuppies to turn their music down? Why else do gentrifying communities demand (and usually get) more cops on the beat? People with money want to move into a neighborhood where their economic value is not threatened and where their family feels "safe"

Ele'ill

6th June 2014, 02:24

Say "don't call the police" when you've just walked in on a rape of some kind.

Cops not taking rape seriously and cop rapists are both a pretty common thing.

Let someone injure a family member

you call the police and then other family arriving at the scene are held at gun point and cuffed and searched while a barrage of excuses are given for why they aren't going after the person who injured the family member because criminal history

or steal your car and see if you still don't want to get the police involved.

last two times this happened it was a fucking disaster

The Intransigent Faction

6th June 2014, 04:38

OP, I sympathize. Two of my high school teachers were former cops. One of them was my law teacher, but he had an amazing sense of humor and his class was just always enjoyable. That said, whether someone is a nice person out of the context of a given job is not really relevant to which class's interests they serve in that context. It's best to keep those things separated.

Obviously, there are some downright terrible crimes cops enforce the laws against which revolutionaries also recognize as terrible. However, we shouldn't lose sight of the fact that a significant part of the crime against which cops enforce laws is perpetuated by the very system which those cops serve. Even crimes rooted in pathological behaviours or mental illness which anyone would abhor are clearly not effectively dealt with in the current system, nor does society need a privileged group of enforcers to deal with them appropriately.

Just as an interesting side note, the union for Ontario's police recently released "attack ads" against the Conservative leader running for Premier, suggesting he will not respect their collective agreement. Then there's of course Toronto Mayor Rob Ford, who, aside from tensions driven by his own shady personal life, had austerity-driven motives to cut the police budget and attempted at one point to do so. So the point is that the bourgeoisie, naturally, have as mercenary an attitude toward their enforcers as to anyone else. I wouldn't say that means the police are potential allies of the revolutionary proletariat. I'm not exactly sure how far that contradiction of bourgeois interests between austerity and funding an institution designed to maintain bourgeois order will go, though.

bropasaran

6th June 2014, 04:51

This is going to get me lynched by the mob, but the anti-police sloganeering, while fun to take part in, is based more in emotion than in reality.
It's seems to be a case of treating class division (in the anarchist sense of police being a sub-type of the ruling class) as identity politics.

My reasoning is that the police are, just like all other people, mostly determined by their institutional role and thereby by the position of their institution. Like for example when a mass of people organizes and asks for some reform that is in it's benefit, the politicians will comply, even though their institutional role is to work in their own and the interest of the capitalists, and they comply because the position of their institution changes, relative to the power of the working class. I think it's a similar situation with the police (and even the army). It should maybe be more true of the police, they are not indoctrinated to the level the politicians are, and the indoctrination that they internalize differs and includes in most cases some sense that they should serve the people, so I would hold that when the working people organizes and goes into action thereby bringing into effect it's power, thus making the power of the police relatively diminish, most of police should act responsivelly and support the mass of the working people.

It's my impression that this does happen, that in political revolutions where the mass of people rises up to overturn the government, the police usually joins them and they succeed, and if neither the police nor the army supports the people, it ends in massacre and suppression, and also that often the turning point during large revolts in when some special unit of the police refuses to follow orders to shoot at the people. I think I remember reading somewhere that during the Spanish Revolution a lot of state employees in the anarchist territories joined the people, and that there were some numbers of even nationalist soldiers deserting from other territories and going over. And also that in the '56 Hungarian Revolution there was something like workers' councils of civil servants which coordinated with other workers' councils.

Although I have to say, I've been just thinking, it's just a musing, not really an argumented position, I didn't read and research that much about it to take a definitive stand.

Anglo-Saxon Philistine

7th June 2014, 11:05

They don't make up such a tiny stratum in the US, though with the housing crisis many did return to the bottom.

I've noticed that some of the people on this site have an extremely odd notion of who is proletarian - they consider everyone except the bourgeoisie to be part of the proletariat, claiming that the working class is literally "99%" of society (not all go this far, of course, given how laughably easy to disprove this claim is). So I suppose that, if you think the police, all of the government officials, managers, foremen, other members of the middle strata, perhaps even the petite bourgeoisie, if you think all of these are proletarian, then yes, the layer of proletarians who have a secure existence and an investment in the present system is huge, instead of being a tiny parasitic excrescence. But this just shows that your notion of the proletariat is dangerously broad.

OK, although one could say a sense of protection itself protects private property if we make such a broad claim - the larger, systemic problem is that people are being protected from the failures of the system itself.

But the police protect private property through material, structural violence. "A sense of protection" is some subjective impression. The tendency of leftists to conflate the two is certainly not doing us a lot of good, particularly when discussions about power relations in society are replaced with meticulous dissections of words, statements, impressions etc.

Second, what does "people being protected from the failures of the system itself" mean?

Quote me where I said European democracies were "nice". It is the case though that European democracies exported the severity of oppression and brutality to their colonies so that they could reduce the pressures on their own citizens. It's not that France, the UK and Britain did not have brutal police forces at home, but if you look at the numbers their relative brutality abroad was greater and more consistent.

And their brutality, both "at home" and in the colonies, was much greater and more consistent than that in the Soviet Union and the glacis states.

You called the Eastern Bloc states "police states", whereas you obviously do not consider Western democracies to be "police states", which implies something that is simply not true - that state violence was greater east of the Berlin Wall. "Police state", like "totalitarianism", is also a term that was used widely by the Shachtmanites and other Cold War social-democrats.

Those "military operations" were cases of brutal ethnic cleansing done by the military and secret police. It was done to hurt the Tatars of ALL classes and ended up being used to benefit the Russians who ended up getting free homes, while the Tatars remained to rot away in Uzbekistan until the 80s, unable to move home. The truth is that the USSR used police and military force to control its people. It's not alone in that, and every regime has done so too, but the police of the Soviet Union were just as brutal at many points in their history. Instead of denying that, I think the working class would find it more convincing if lessons were learned.

It was done because Soviet military authorities were concerned - not without cause - about Tatar collaborators endangering the military effort in the strategically crucial southern Ukraine area. And, of course, Western democracies did similar things - the only difference is that, for example, America was not being invaded by the Hitlerite forces who planned to exterminate most of the population.

I think it was in the interests of a calcified, unaccountable and alien bureaucracy. Based on the experience of the USSR, we can see that socio-economic control of such a bureaucracy didn't end any better. Especially for proletarians of ethnic groups targeted by the state which claimed to represent them.

Ethnic transfers happened in the Eastern Bloc for two reasons. First, during wartime, populations that the military authorities were concerned about were removed, if this was feasible. As I said, this was simple bureaucratic stupidity, placing the convenience of the authorities above the workers. But it needs to placed in the context of a genocidal war that was being waged in Soviet territory.

Second, after the war, groups that received preferential treatment from the fascist authorities were expelled. This was, while not the best solution, probably the second or third best solution, and the only one that was actually possible at that point. Do you think the workers of the areas that were occupied by fascist powers had any kind feelings for the Germans, the Hungarians etc.? When the deportations were stalled in Poland, massacres of the Germans by the local population ensued.

I referenced the food requisition under Stalin because of the large number of people who died, and it was not just for the sake of feeding a starving proletariat but gaining more capital for the state. Lenin had the argument that Russian workers were on the brink of starvation, while Stalin did not. Moreover, many of the victims could be called members of an "agricultural proletariat" and not the "peasant" class.

Actually, as a consequence of the land reform, the agricultural proletariat in Russia was minuscule - the employees of the state agricultural enterprises and the hired help of the kulaks rarely made up a small minority of the agricultural population.

And the requisition of food - the Ural-Siberian method - was introduced because of a drastic rise in agricultural prices that threatened starvation in the cities. The Soviet leadership was forced to implement the policy even through they polemicised against it in earlier periods, when the Left Opposition suggested a return to non-market mechanisms in agriculture.

Also, the reasoning that led the USSR to use the organs of state power to starve peasants to preserve proletarians is one of the reasons why I'm not a Trotskyist (not that I'm entirely unsympathetic to Trots, Lenin and Trotsky on many issues) so the whole "peasants are an alien class" is unconvincing to me (the lumpen are an "alien class" yet police brutality against them should be widely condemned too). Not every peasant was a Kulak and there has always been constant movement between rural peasants and urban proletarians (the proletariat itself came from peasantry who lost their land and when proletarians lost their jobs and couldn't find food in the cities like in the Russian revolution or when they are immigrant labor deported by ICE in the US, they return to their status as peasants. Many illegal immigrants getting stopped at the border are Central American peasants looking to become proletarians after loosing their land or their market. They are hardly "alien classes" in the same way as the bourgeois and the proletariat are - the peasantry is just an anachronistic class which emerged during another era).

The point is that relations between classes are not the same in a bourgeois and in a proletarian dictatorship. Precisely because the peasantry is an anachronistic class it will resist the socialisation of economy - it resists the increasingly social nature of production under capitalism already. In Russia, the peasantry was an enemy of the proletarian state almost from the beginning.

It's not "sneaking power through the back door" it's that the worse cops are at their job, the more opportunity there is for revolutionaries.

Interestingly, I remember hearing the same "argument" from defenders of the Workers' League support for the NY cop strike. And it didn't make sense then and it doesn't make sense now. Cops strike for higher pay, more weapons, less consequences when their actions are made public etc. They strike in order to be a more effective police force. If you want cops to be worse at their jobs, you don't support pig strikes, you oppose them and you oppose the unions giving any support to them.

If I know my goods won't be stolen, I can sell them for less but effectively get more money from them.

Perhaps, but that is besides the point. In Marxist theory, exchange value is realised at the point of the transaction. If you sell your goods for 10 dollars and after that 7 of those dollars are stolen or lost or spontaneously combust, the exchange value of the goods you sold is around the labour-time equivalent of 10 dollars. Not 3.

Keeping the homeless out and simply having a "cop presence" does drive up property values, as does keeping crime rates down. Why else would low crime, uppity bourgeois areas have cops whose job it is to tell the kids of yuppies to turn their music down? Why else do gentrifying communities demand (and usually get) more cops on the beat? People with money want to move into a neighborhood where their economic value is not threatened and where their family feels "safe"

Now compare the number of cops in gentrified areas with the number of cops in the ghettos and other low-income areas.

The presence of cops in an area might drive the price of real estate up - real estate is such a pathological sector - but so does the presence of celebrities, ministers, presidents and monarchs, and these esteemed ladies and gentlement are not workers, even if they receive a salary. They do not produce surplus value. Someone produces surplus value when they consciously expend their labour-power, according to some definite social form (explicit wage-labour, household labour), though a significant period, in order to create or add to existing exchange values. Cops don't do that.

VivalaCuarta

8th June 2014, 01:19

Sometimes a picture is worth a thousand words.

The subway workers (metroviários) of São Paolo, Brazil are on strike right now.

http://www.internationalist.org/grevemetrospa140605.jpg

Which side are you on?

VivalaCuarta

8th June 2014, 01:27

On the topic of police strikes,

Here's an old article from the Trotskyists that shows (in words and pictures) how police "unions" that were on strike in Brazil -- with the support of much of the Brazilian left -- suspended their strike in order to break a strike by workers at General Motors!

"Class Struggle against 'Police Unionism' in Brazil (http://www.internationalist.org/zubatovism.html)" from The Internationalist No. 7 (http://www.internationalist.org/int7toc.html), April-May 1999.

PhoenixAsh

8th June 2014, 02:26

The state exists to facilitate the economic model of society and the continued interests of the ruling/dominant class. This economic model, like capitalism, put severe strain on the exploited classes. This stress threatens to interfere with the uninterrupted continuation of trade, commerce and economic production. So the state, as an exponent of the dominant class, needs to maintain order to keep the exploited class in line and protect the dominant class itself. The police is tasked with maintaining this order. This is the historical origin of law enforcement and it is still its main task today.

Crime is mostly an exponent of the consequences of the economic exploitation of the working class so it is logical the police force is tasked with "fighting crime" and "protecting the innocents". Not because they care, not because it is their main task...but because high crime, riots and strikes threaten property values, property rights and the continuation of the economy.

Reality is that we are perfectly capable of dealing with crime but we are not allowed forming militia's to this effect is forbidden in most countries. The state has, and protects violently, its monopoly on the use of force. The tools they use to ensure their monopoly on violence is the cops. They do not operate in the interests of the "people" (who ever they may be) but in the interests of the state and the dominant class. They use violence to maintain these interests and they are not accountable.

It sickens me that some people think since individual cops are "nice" or "are people too" or have a working class background this means the left should consider these people allies to the working class and that cops will eventually see the error of being the tools of the bourgeois.

Fuck that. I am sure Hitler was a perfectly nice person too. I know a few CEO's of large companies and multinationals...those are nice people to. They are NOT on the side of the working class. They are our enemies. Cops are traitors to the working class. Pure and simple.

We have seen throughout history and more recently in the Student protests in London, the occupy movement, the Arab spring revolts, the Ukrainian crisis and the globalization protests that cops are not our allies. They act counter to the interest of the working class and their own interest lies with the continuation and perpetuation of the dominant class. They are not some force that merely needs persuasion but they are the willing tools, and violent ones at that, of the bourgeois.

And they use excessive violence to ensure subjugation and continuation of repression and exploitation.