Are cops and security guards workers?

[NorthStarRepublicML]

would you place security guard in the service industry?

edit: because thats what i selected ...

[Nothing Human Is Alien]

would you place security guard in the service industry?

No. Security guards are protectors of capital and those that control it, in line (though usually to a lesser degree today) with police and prison guards.

Security guards are not proletarians.

[NorthStarRepublicML]

Security guards are not proletarians.

bullshit! i work a wage, and i sell my labor power to survive .... what is your definition of proletarians?

[Nothing Human Is Alien]

i work a wage, and i sell my labor power to survive

So do police. They still aren't proletarians.


what is your definition of proletarians?

A proletarian (not to "me," but objectively) is "(1) synonymous with “modern working class”, (2) proletarians have no means of support other than selling their labour power, (3) their position makes them dependent upon capital, (4) it is the expansion of capital, as opposed to servicing the personal or administrative needs of capitalists, which is the defining role of the proletariat, (4) proletarians sell themselves as opposed to selling products like the petty-bourgeoisie and capitalists, (5) they sell themselves “piecemeal” as opposed to slaves who may be sold as a whole and become the property of someone else, (6) although the term “labourers” carries the connotation of manual labour, elsewhere Marx makes it clear that the labourer with the head is as much a proletarian as the labourer with the hand, and finally (7) the proletariat is a class." - Source (http://marx.org/glossary/terms/p/r.htm#proletariat).

Security guards, like police and prison guards, do not expand capital, they "service the personal or administrative needs of capitalists."

[NorthStarRepublicML]

Security guards, like police and prison guards, do not expand capital, they "service the personal or administrative needs of capitalists."

so that includes the service industry as well? (edit: rather assistants and others that do not produce consumable products directly or indirectly)

security guards allow for the the expansion of capital, their labor allows production to continue where it otherwise would not ... like hostile or high crime areas ...

what class would you say police, prision , and security guards are in?

oh and why are so many people here unemployed? how do you get by without a job? or do you live with your parents or something?

[Nothing Human Is Alien]

No, it doesn't include the service industry.


what class would you say police, prision , and security guards are in?

It's a question of 'what I say,' but of objective reality. All those mentioned, along with bouncers, bailiffs, etc., belong to the oppressive bourgeois apparatus.


security guards allow for the the expansion of capital, their labor allows production to continue where it otherwise would not ... like hostile or high crime areas ...

No they don't "allow for the expansion of capital". They are unproductive workers in that they create no surplus value, nor do they assist in the realization of said surplus value. Their role is to defend capitalists' private property (mostly from the lumpen, but also workers -- especially the unemployed).

[NorthStarRepublicML]

It's a question of 'what I say,' but of objective reality.

whatever, i know some MIM comrades that would place teachers alongside your so-called "opressive bourgeois apparatus" ... so please don't claim to have an objective definition ... this point is easily refuted ... ideological concepts such as social class are subjective to a large degree ...


the oppressive bourgeois apparatus.

so are you saying that this is a class unto itself?

how about some citations or sources? excuse me if i don't just take your word for it ...


i was fired for not making quota,

just curious ... were you a canvasser?

[Nothing Human Is Alien]

whatever, i know some MIM comrades that would place teachers alongside your so-called "opressive [sic] bourgeois apparatus" ... so please don't claim to have an objective definition ... this point is easily refuted ... ideological concepts such as social class are subjective to a large degree ...

1. MIMites aren't "comrades." They are a miniscule, internet-based sect with an insane scab-line that has nothing to do with communism.

2. Class is not an "ideological concept," it is a description -- with a material basis -- of a group of people that have in common their relations to the means of production (the deciding factor under class society).

You need to work to leave your relativist thinking behind if you're serious about understanding the world with the purpose of changing it. We're not dealing with 'opinions' and 'unknowable things' here, we're dealing with objective reality, which can be properly understood.


so are you saying that this is a class unto itself?

how about some citations or sources? excuse me if i don't just take your word for it ...

Communism is not a religion. Communists don't need to back up their every analysis and assertion with a quote from the Holy Writ (i.e. the writings of one or more comrades from the 19th or 20th centuries).

I've explained to you why security guards don't belong to the working class. They don't expand -- or assist in the expansion -- of capital. They are unproductive workers who belong to the bourgeoisie's oppressive apparatus along with (though to a lesser extent) police, prison guards, etc.

They are a section of the petty-bourgeoisie that has replaced the traditional 'shop keepers' (who themselves have/are loosing their independent position in society, just as was predicted by Marx and Engels).

This is basic communist ideology which is spoken too in none other than The Communist Manifesto! (http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/ch03.htm)

"In countries where modern civilisation has become fully developed, a new class of petty bourgeois has been formed, fluctuating between proletariat and bourgeoisie, and ever renewing itself as a supplementary part of bourgeois society. The individual members of this class, however, are being constantly hurled down into the proletariat by the action of competition, and, as modern industry develops, they even see the moment approaching when they will completely disappear as an independent section of modern society, to be replaced in manufactures, agriculture and commerce, by overlookers, bailiffs and shopmen." (emphasis mine).

What was meant by 'bailiffs' was the exact things being talked about here, i.e. security guards, bouncers, etc.

[apathy maybe]

In countries where modern civilisation has become fully developed, a new class of petty bourgeois has been formed, fluctuating between proletariat and bourgeoisie, and ever renewing itself as a supplementary part of bourgeois society. The individual members of this class, however, are being constantly hurled down into the proletariat by the action of competition, and, as modern industry develops, they even see the moment approaching when they will completely disappear as an independent section of modern society, to be replaced in manufactures, agriculture and commerce, by overlookers, bailiffs and shopmen. [emphasis mine]
They aren't fucking any sort of bourgeois (petty, petit or plain old haute)!

Anyway... So CdL, are hairdressers part of the proletariat? Or are they part of the lumpen-proletariat? Or are they too part of the "bourgeoisie's oppressive apparatus" (which doesn't really constitute a class at all...)? Or perhaps they belong to another class which I haven't heard of?

I have this basic understanding of Marxism. Yet it seems what I understand Marxism to be is constantly challenged by people on this board. This is normally a good thing, learning is good. But sometimes... (such as just now), there are people who claim things that I haven't read anywhere else (in Marx's writings or on academic writings on Marx). It could well be that my understanding of Marx is flawed in this regard, except that I can't hardly be expected to understand it better if you people don't point me to where it is that I can read further about your (seemingly strange) ideas.

[Nothing Human Is Alien]

Anyway... So CdL, are hairdressers part of the proletariat?

It depends. Are they self-employed or do they work for someone else?


I have this basic understanding of Marxism. Yet it seems what I understand Marxism to be is constantly challenged by people on this board. This is normally a good thing, learning is good. But sometimes... (such as just now), there are people who claim things that I haven't read anywhere else (in Marx's writings or on academic writings on Marx). It could well be that my understanding of Marx is flawed in this regard, except that I can't hardly be expected to understand it better if you people don't point me to where it is that I can read further about your (seemingly strange) ideas.

Look, if you don't understand surplus value, historical materialism and basic class distinctions, then you you don't have "a basic grasp of Marxism."

The Communist Manifesto, the most famous of the works of Marx & Engels, clearly explains class. I just quoted from it to point out what Marx & Engels said about "overlookers, bailiffs and shopmen."

These aren't "strange ideas," but rather core planks of communist theory. Communists have long asserted that police and the like don't belong to the working class. I explained why.

"A lot of union bureaucrats favorably view police and prison guards as their fastest-growing dues base. We say that the guardians of the racist capitalist system have no place at all in the labor movement. Cops out of the unions! " - Source (http://www.spartacist.org/english/wv/archives/oldsite/2005/Mumia-846.html)

"This is a disgusting case of the union bureaucracy acting as deputy sheriffs for the machinery of capitalist state repression. It recalls how in the late 1970s the Italian Communist Party acted as finger men for the bourgeoisie against the Red Brigades and union militants in the factories. This is a graphic expression of what the “popular front” means in practice: the reformist, pro-capitalist left acting as guard dogs for the ruling class. This is the logic of organizing “unions” of police, the armed fist of the bourgeoisie. In contrast, revolutionaries demand: Cops out of the unions! "- Source (http://www.internationalist.org/franceanticperepression0604.html)

[NorthStarRepublicML]

You need to work to leave your relativist thinking behind if you're serious about understanding the world with the purpose of changing it. We're not dealing with 'opinions' and 'unknowable things' here, we're dealing with objective reality, which can be properly understood.

wrong, as i pointed out MIM has some different ideas as to what occupations are placed inside what social class .... your definition may be accepted by several others but its is not the "objective material reality" or whatever that you claim ....

here is a comprehensive document that looks at social class in the United States, it places guards within the Service Worker strata : http://www.mltranslations.org/US/Rpo/classes/classes2.htm



Communism is not a religion. Communists don't need to back up their every analysis and assertion with a quote from the Holy Writ (i.e. the writings of one or more comrades from the 19th or 20th centuries).

exactly, because communism is not a religion we need to cite sources and debate matters ... yes you do need to back up your opinions ... don't expect us to just blindly "have faith" that you or anyone else has the answers ..... you obviously do not.

The proletariat as a class carries out nearly all of the productive labor in society. This does not mean that all sectors of the proletariat are engaged in productive labor, or that productive labor is limited to the proletariat.




"With the development of the specifically capitalist mode of production, in which many labourers work together in the production of the same commodity, the direct relation which their labour bears to the object produced naturally varies greatly. For example the unskilled labourers in a factory referred to earlier have nothing directly to do with the working up of the raw material. The workmen who function as overseers of those directly engaged in working up the raw material are one step further away; the works engineer has yet another relation and in the main works only with his brain, and so on....

"It is indeed the characteristic feature of the capitalist mode of production that it separates the various kinds of labour from each other, therefore also mental and manual labour – or kinds of labour in which one or another predominates – and distributes them among different people. This however does not prevent the material product from being the common product of these persons, or their common product embodied in material wealth; any more than on the other hand it prevents or in any way alters the relation of each one of these persons to capital being that of wage-labourer and in this pre-eminent sense being that of productive labourer. All these persons are not only directly engaged in the production of material wealth, but they exchange their labour directly for money as capital, and consequently directly reproduce, in addition to their wages a surplus value for the capitalist." (Karl Marx, Theories of Surplus Value, Part I, p. 412)


the sources that you provided have more to do with anti-worker unions, not police officers, and nothing to do with their place within the working class .... just some ACAB bullshit ...


Anyway... So CdL, are hairdressers part of the proletariat? Or are they part of the lumpen-proletariat? Or are they too part of the "bourgeoisie's oppressive apparatus" (which doesn't really constitute a class at all...)? Or perhaps they belong to another class which I haven't heard of?

i would really like you to address this point, because you seem to be side stepping the issue: if you believe police and guards to not be a part of the working class then what class are they placed within ....

oh and placing them in the petit bourgeois is utter stupidity for a number of reasons, first and foremost being that they are wage earners (not self employed) and do not employ others for capitalist profit.

so what class are they in?



What was meant by 'bailiffs' was the exact things being talked about here, i.e. security guards, bouncers, etc.

wrong, bailiffs in marx's time were unofficial protectors of church properties who often seized the properties which they were protecting, they used this influence to extend their power to the heights of upper nobility ... this continues today as bailiffs are empowered to seize property and enforce landlord-tenant evictions ....

so if you think bailiffs are the same as police officers, bouncers, and security guards, you are mistaken ....


These aren't "strange ideas," but rather core planks of communist
theory.

the quote you provided from the Manifesto does not address the place of police, bouncers, and guards in society ... it merely mentions bailiffs (which are not the same thing)


Communists have long asserted that police and the like don't belong to the working class.

which communists? or are do you mean yourself?

[Sabocat]

Originally posted by [email protected] 10, 2007 12:41 pm

You need to work to leave your relativist thinking behind if you're serious about understanding the world with the purpose of changing it. We're not dealing with 'opinions' and 'unknowable things' here, we're dealing with objective reality, which can be properly understood.

wrong, as i pointed out MIM has some different ideas as to what occupations are placed inside what social class .... your definition may be accepted by several others but its is not the "objective material reality" or whatever that you claim ....

here is a comprehensive document that looks at social class in the United States, it places guards within the Service Worker strata : http://www.mltranslations.org/US/Rpo/classes/classes2.htm



Communism is not a religion. Communists don't need to back up their every analysis and assertion with a quote from the Holy Writ (i.e. the writings of one or more comrades from the 19th or 20th centuries).

exactly, because communism is not a religion we need to cite sources and debate matters ... yes you do need to back up your opinions ... don't expect us to just blindly "have faith" that you or anyone else has the answers ..... you obviously do not.

The proletariat as a class carries out nearly all of the productive labor in society. This does not mean that all sectors of the proletariat are engaged in productive labor, or that productive labor is limited to the proletariat.




"With the development of the specifically capitalist mode of production, in which many labourers work together in the production of the same commodity, the direct relation which their labour bears to the object produced naturally varies greatly. For example the unskilled labourers in a factory referred to earlier have nothing directly to do with the working up of the raw material. The workmen who function as overseers of those directly engaged in working up the raw material are one step further away; the works engineer has yet another relation and in the main works only with his brain, and so on....

"It is indeed the characteristic feature of the capitalist mode of production that it separates the various kinds of labour from each other, therefore also mental and manual labour – or kinds of labour in which one or another predominates – and distributes them among different people. This however does not prevent the material product from being the common product of these persons, or their common product embodied in material wealth; any more than on the other hand it prevents or in any way alters the relation of each one of these persons to capital being that of wage-labourer and in this pre-eminent sense being that of productive labourer. All these persons are not only directly engaged in the production of material wealth, but they exchange their labour directly for money as capital, and consequently directly reproduce, in addition to their wages a surplus value for the capitalist." (Karl Marx, Theories of Surplus Value, Part I, p. 412)


the sources that you provided have more to do with anti-worker unions, not police officers, and nothing to do with their place within the working class .... just some ACAB bullshit ...


Anyway... So CdL, are hairdressers part of the proletariat? Or are they part of the lumpen-proletariat? Or are they too part of the "bourgeoisie's oppressive apparatus" (which doesn't really constitute a class at all...)? Or perhaps they belong to another class which I haven't heard of?

i would really like you to address this point, because you seem to be side stepping the issue: if you believe police and guards to not be a part of the working class then what class are they placed within ....

oh and placing them in the petit bourgeois is utter stupidity for a number of reasons, first and foremost being that they are wage earners (not self employed) and do not employ others for capitalist profit.

so what class are they in?



What was meant by 'bailiffs' was the exact things being talked about here, i.e. security guards, bouncers, etc.

wrong, bailiffs in marx's time were unofficial protectors of church properties who often seized the properties which they were protecting, they used this influence to extend their power to the heights of upper nobility ... this continues today as bailiffs are empowered to seize property and enforce landlord-tenant evictions ....

so if you think bailiffs are the same as police officers, bouncers, and security guards, you are mistaken ....


These aren't "strange ideas," but rather core planks of communist
theory.

the quote you provided from the Manifesto does not address the place of police, bouncers, and guards in society ... it merely mentions bailiffs (which are not the same thing)


Communists have long asserted that police and the like don't belong to the working class.

which communists? or are do you mean yourself?
Hey asswipe.....


When there is a strike at a factory, mill, hospital or whatever....


Which side of the picket line do the "stains" (sorry, I mean security guards) stand? I've seen my share of picket lines and strikes and have yet to see a guard join in solidarity with the strikers.

Sometime when you're not busy, try looking into the history of another famous security company Wells Fargo and see what a great bunch of guys they were.

[bcbm]

Police, etc may fit the general criteria for being "working class," but they are class traitors as they defend the bourgeoisie against their own, therefore rejecting their own class position to serve as lapdogs of our enemies. That makes their "class" irrelevant for our purposes. They side with and actively defend our enemies, the end.

[Nothing Human Is Alien]

Sometime when you're not busy, try looking into the history of another famous security company Wells Fargo and see what a great bunch of guys they were.


Or how about Pinkerton?

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/3/34/Pinkerton_escorts_hocking_valley_leslies.jpg/800px-Pinkerton_escorts_hocking_valley_leslies.jpg

Solidarity forever.....


wrong, as i pointed out MIM has some different ideas as to what occupations are placed inside what social class .... your definition may be accepted by several others but its is not the "objective material reality" or whatever that you claim ....

Again, you're not looking at this as a materialist.

Objective fact is objective fact. Because a handful of nuts calling themselves "communists" says something denies fact doesn't mean the fact doesn't exist.

It's relativist to say 'some different people have some different opinions, so there must not be any real answer.'


here is a comprehensive document that looks at social class in the United States, it places guards within the Service Worker strata : http://www.mltranslations.org/US/Rpo/classes/classes2.htm

Unless I'm missing something, that link is worthless to this discussion. It doesn't prove that security guards contribute to the expansion of capital, it just has a table in which it lists "guards." You'll have to do better than that.

I mean, the page quotes Marx where he says "The same kind of labour can be productive or unproductive.... A singer who sells her song for her own account is an unproductive. labourer. But the same singer commissioned by an entrepreneur to sing in order to made money for him is a productive labourer; for she produces capital."

Security guards don't make money; they protect it.


exactly, because communism is not a religion we need to cite sources and debate matters ... yes you do need to back up your opinions ... don't expect us to just blindly "have faith" that you or anyone else has the answers .....

Um.. I didn't expect anyone to "have faith". I argued the communist position earlier. I explained why security guards are not proles (they don't participate in the expansion of capital). You are the one demanding that I find a relevant scripture in the Holy Book of Communism.


you obviously do not.

But MIM and RPO(M-L) do? :lol:


The proletariat as a class carries out nearly all of the productive labor in society. This does not mean that all sectors of the proletariat are engaged in productive labor, or that productive labor is limited to the proletariat.

You copy and pasted that directly from the page you linked to. Did you think I wouldn't notice? Don't post something from another work as your own, it's dishonest.

Anyway, the statement is incorrect. All proles are engaged in the expansion of capital. That page goes to quote Marx explaining that, "It is indeed the characteristic feature of the capitalist mode of production that it separates the various kinds of labour from each other, therefore also mental and manual labour – or kinds of labour in which one or another predominates – and distributes them among different people. This however does not prevent the material product from being the common product of these persons, or their common product embodied in material wealth; any more than on the other hand it prevents or in any way alters the relation of each one of these persons to capital being that of wage-labourer and in this pre-eminent sense being that of productive labourer. All these persons are not only directly engaged in the production of material wealth, but they exchange their labour directly for money as capital, and consequently directly reproduce, in addition to their wages a surplus value for the capitalist."

So, for instance, retail workers are proles because they assist in the expansion of capital, they're tied up in the process of gathering raw materials, turning them into products, and selling the products (that's where they come in).


the sources that you provided have more to do with anti-worker unions, not police officers, and nothing to do with their place within the working class .... just some ACAB bullshit ...

I posted links from different communist groups calling for cops to get out unions (because they are not proles). I did this to demonstrate that communist have long known that cops (and the like) aren't proles.

As the comrade said, if you were ever on the prole side of a serious strike, this wouldn't even be a question for you.


wrong, bailiffs in marx's time were unofficial protectors of church properties who often seized the properties which they were protecting, they used this influence to extend their power to the heights of upper nobility ... this continues today as bailiffs are empowered to seize property and enforce landlord-tenant evictions ....

so if you think bailiffs are the same as police officers, bouncers, and security guards, you are mistaken ....

Sorry, you're the one who's wrong here.

The Manifesto was written in German, Marx and Engel's native language. In the original text, the word "Vogt" was used. Vogt is translated to bailiff in the English versions (a legal officer to whom some degree of authority, care or jurisdiction is committed. Bailiffs are of various kinds and their offices and duties vary greatly - source (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bailiff)), but in German it has a very specific meaning.

"Vogt is probably derived from Old High German vogeten, "to protect". Originally, it referred in medieval German-speaking areas to the guardianship or military protection executed by an overlord over ecclesiastical institutions and their territory... The range of social status and degrees of responsibility of persons so titled varied greatly, from the humble — the equivalents of the English reeve or bailiff — to the very elevated... The concept of the Vogt was related to the Old German idea of the Munt, or guardian, but also included some ideas of physical defence and legal representation (whence the connection with advocatus or advocate)." Source (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vogt)


i would really like you to address this point, because you seem to be side stepping the issue: if you believe police and guards to not be a part of the working class then what class are they placed within ....

No side stepping. I told you before "They are a section of the petty-bourgeoisie that has replaced the traditional 'shop keepers' (who themselves have/are loosing their independent position in society, just as was predicted by Marx and Engels)."


oh and placing them in the petit bourgeois is utter stupidity for a number of reasons, first and foremost being that they are wage earners (not self employed) and do not employ others for capitalist profit.

Again, this is basic communist theory. If you expect anyone to take you seriously, you should at least try to have a basic grasp of what you're talking about. Otherwise, you just look silly.

The petty bourgeoisie is not only made up of self-employed shop owners. It's also made up of "wage earners" like managers. Marx and Engels alluded to what we now know to be a fact: the petty bourgeoisie is becoming more and more made up of these sorts and not shopkeepers. That's stated in the Manifesto (see the piece I quoted earlier), for example.

Even the site you linked to early states the very fact when it says "Out of some 96,000,000 wage and salary workers in the United States, more than 68,000,000, or 71 %, are proletarians" (that's one thing it got right).


the quote you provided from the Manifesto does not address the place of police, bouncers, and guards in society ... it merely mentions bailiffs (which are not the same thing)

See above.


which communists? or are do you mean yourself?

I mean the millions of genuine communists that have existed since Marx, myself included.

[Nothing Human Is Alien]

Police, etc may fit the general criteria for being "working class,"

No, they don't. They do not "expand capital."

[NorthStarRepublicML]

Which side of the picket line do the "stains" (sorry, I mean security guards) stand? I've seen my share of picket lines and strikes and have yet to see a guard join in solidarity with the strikers.

i'm a security guard and have been to my fair share of protests, not that participation in protests somehow determine your class status .... anyway if your criteria for being a member of the working class is working class consciousness then the vast majority of the working class does not fit your narrow definition.


Sometime when you're not busy, try looking into the history of another famous security company Wells Fargo and see what a great bunch of guys they were.

yeah, so what?

obviously the ruling class does not oppress the working class itself, through its influence over society it hires elements of the working class to preserve itself .... this does not mean that security forces are somehow detached from their class only that their class consciousness is not developed .... which is very common in society today as it has been throughout history ....


Police, etc may fit the general criteria for being "working class," but they are class traitors as they defend the bourgeoisie against their own, therefore rejecting their own class position to serve as lapdogs of our enemies.

can you be a class traitor if you are unaware of your class status?


That makes their "class" irrelevant for our purposes.

successful revolutions often depend on a class conscious armed forces often drawn from the states police and military as seen in the foundation of the Red Army (as well as others):


The founder of the Red Army is often seen as Leon Trotsky, the People's Commissar for War from 1918 to 1924, who deserves much credit for creating a disciplined military force from the early motley volunteers. Trotsky decided to provide officers for the fledgling force by allowing former officers and NCOs of the army of Imperial Russia to join. The Bolshevik authorities set up a special commission chaired by Lev Glezarov, and by mid August 1920 had drafted about 48,000 ex-officers, 10,300 administration staff, and 214,000 ex-NCOs. Most held the position of "military specialist". A number of prominent Soviet Army commanders had previously served as Imperial Russian generals. Another important move was the unification of the Bolshevik military effort from several former organisations with the formation of the Revolutionary Military Council or Revvoensoviet, established on 6 September, 1918. Trotsky became president of the Revvoensoviet, while under him Ioakhim Vatsetis, a Latvian ex-Colonel of the Imperial army, became first Soviet Commander-in-Chief. Trotsky then had to make considerable efforts to root out the 'military anarchism' of the first chaotic months of the Red Army, adopting the slogan of 'exhortion, organisation, and reprisals', and in some cases having to resort to firing squads to punish deserters. To ensure the loyalty of the ex-Imperial military specialists, and to bind the disparate elements of the new Red Army together, the military commissars were introduced.
(my emphasis)

source:
John Erickson, The Soviet High Command - A Military-Political History 1918–41, MacMillan, London, 1962.

if you think you won't security, military, police, and others or that they are "irrelevant for your purposes" (which i assume is revolution) then you are an idiot with no understanding of actual revolutionary conditions. the end.

again more ACAB bullshit ....

try refuting my statements instead of mouthing off like children

[NorthStarRepublicML]

Edit: could a moderator please split the portions of this thread dealing with the class status of guards, police, and bouncers ....



Objective fact is objective fact.

but only when it comes from you right?



Because a handful of nuts calling themselves "communists" says something denies fact doesn't mean the fact doesn't exist.

so basically your argument is: "i'm right and have the true communist definition, they are wrong they are not communists" ?



Um.. I didn't expect anyone to "have faith". I argued the communist position earlier.

don't pretend to speak for all communists


No, they don't. They do not "expand capital."

they do allow work to continue in locations where it otherwise would not, such as high crime areas or hostile territory ... thus they contribute to the expansion of capital


Don't post something from another work as your own, it's dishonest.

the source was citied retard, look with your eyes next time


Um.. I didn't expect anyone to "have faith".

um... remember when you said this um....


Communists don't need to back up their every analysis and assertion

yes they do, thats part of being scientific, don't expect people to just take your word for it especially when you are full of ACAB shit ....


So, for instance, retail workers are proles because they assist in the expansion of capital, they're tied up in the process of gathering raw materials, turning them into products, and selling the products (that's where they come in).

ok so take that further and assume that guards prevent the destruction or seizure of materials and products as well as protect workers producing and gathering resources, thus they assist in the production of goods and the gathering of raw materials by ensuring that production and gathering run smoothly ....


The range of social status and degrees of responsibility of persons so titled varied greatly, from the humble — the equivalents of the English reeve or bailiff — to the very elevated.

ok so ....how are Marx's bailiffs the same as police, bouncers, and security guards ...? this is pretty much a long winded quote that confirms what i said in the previous post ... that they are not the same as guards and police officers ....


The petty bourgeoisie is not only made up of self-employed shop owners.

obviously, i just have a problem seeing why myself as a security guard who makes 11.50 an hour working 11pm-7am guarding people (residents) and a building downtown is a member of the petit bourgeois ... i don't work for myself and i don't employ anyone, i don't even have people working under me ....

[Sabocat]

Originally posted by [email protected] 10, 2007 02:26 pm

i'm a security guard and have been to my fair share of protests, not that participation in protests somehow determine your class status .... anyway if your criteria for being a member of the working class is working class consciousness then the vast majority of the working class does not fit your narrow definition.




That's all very nice, but completely avoids the question. During a worker action and/or strike at a facility that has security guards, do the guards line up with the workers, or do they line up to protect the interests of the capitalists? Simple question.

My definition of being a member of the working class includes not being a shill for the ruling class. I'm sorry you find that narrow.

[NorthStarRepublicML]

That's all very nice, but completely avoids the question. During a worker action and/or strike at a facility that has security guards, do the guards line up with the workers, or do they line up to protect the interests of the capitalists? Simple question.

the question is invalid, participation in protests does not have a bearing on what social class you belong to .... that is the issue being addressed here not ACAB bullshit ...

[Sabocat]

I love when cops, prison guards and fucking security guards try to warp an ideology to fit their pathetic leach jobs.

You are a class enemy. I've seen it on picket lines a dozen times. Your lot ALWAYS works for the ruling class, against the working class. ALWAYS. Whether or not guards consider themselves working class or not is not my problem. You're not.

This is the reason that when dealing with security guards (and cops for that matter) during worker actions and strikes, whenever you have the chance, it's best just to kick the ever loving fuck out of them and be done with it.

[NorthStarRepublicML]

I love when cops, prison guards and fucking security guards try to warp an ideology to fit their pathetic leach jobs.

you are really going to sit there on your computer and call me a leech, wow, you really seem to be working to advance the cause ... more like you are just spewing ACAB bullshit like a pathetic child, babbling nonsense like i give a fuck.

you don't know shit about me kid. fuck off.


You are a class enemy.

keep talking asshole ....


Your lot ALWAYS works for the ruling class, against the working class. ALWAYS.

i suppose the work i and others with my profession do with the RCP, the northwest airlines strikes, immigrant solidarity actions in St.Paul, AWOL, SDS, Socialist Alternative, as well as a host of other groups and activities doesn't count huh?

i suppose my participation in Seattle WTO and the Anti-War protests in San Fransisco don't mean shit either ....

you don't know shit about me kid. fuck off.


This is the reason that when dealing with security guards (and cops for that matter) during worker actions and strikes, whenever you have the chance, it's best just to kick the ever loving fuck out of them and be done with it.

spare me the tough talk, you want to kick my ass for putting food on the table?

i suppose its easy for you, leeching off mommy and daddy, to talk shit about someone who actually has to work for a living....

making threats on the internet is just about as cowardly as you can be .... instead let me know when you are in Minneapolis we'll arrange a time and you can make threats like this personally, like my dad always said "don't talk about it be about it"

in closing, you don't know shit about me kid. fuck off.


edit: just noticed you were born in the 60's .... wow ... are you really that old? better watch it ... don't want some working class security guards to break your hip ...

oh btw if you want to continue to act like a rapid fool, do it here: http://www.revleft.com/index.php?showtopic=68244

[Nothing Human Is Alien]

but only when it comes from you right?

Objective facts, by definition, don't "come from" anyone.


so basically your argument is: "i'm right and have the true communist definition, they are wrong they are not communists" ?

No, my argument is Security Guards are not proles but a part of the bourgeoisie's repressive apparatus which do not expand capital and line up against workers. This is fact, not "communist definition," and it remains a fact whether or not some fringe sect 'has a different opinion' or not.

The fact that the nuts in MIM are not communists is a side..


ok so take that further and assume that guards prevent the destruction or seizure of materials and products as well as protect workers producing and gathering resources, thus they assist in the production of goods and the gathering of raw materials by ensuring that production and gathering run smoothly ....

Sorry, that's not how it works.

Security guards do not participate in production, transportation or sale. They protect capitalist private property. And who do they protect it from?? Other capitalists?!? I don't think so. They protect it from the oppressed and lower classes, the unemployed, youths, 'radical workers', 'bomb throwing anarchists,' etc.


they do allow work to continue in locations where it otherwise would not, such as high crime areas or hostile territory ... thus they contribute to the expansion of capital

Again, that's not how it works.

A worker who collects raw materials, a worker who processes those materials into goods, a worker who transports those goods to a store, and a worker who sell it in the store have a common product. The security guard in the store that is there to look after the capitalist's private property does not participate in the creation or sale of that product; he does not assist in the creation or realization of value; he does not expand capital.

I'm not going to keep saying this over and over, as it's basic communist theory. You can look through Marx and Engels if you're interested.


the source was citied retard, look with your eyes next time

Not really. You're being dishonest again. You linked to the source earlier in the post, but you made no indication that those lines came from there. Instead, you tried to pawn it off as your own, as if no one would notice.

And please don't use "retard" in a derogatory manner, it's against the forum rules (and very uncommunist).


ok so ....how are Marx's bailiffs the same as police, bouncers, and security guards ...? this is pretty much a long winded quote that confirms what i said in the previous post ... that they are not the same as guards and police officers ....

Interesting that you ignored the real content of my response and quoted only one line. Well, not really "interesting," unprincipled is more like it.

If you want to take pieces of the quote, do in a way that's honest, like this:

"The Manifesto was written in German, Marx and Engel's native language. In the original text, the word "Vogt" was used... "Vogt is probably derived from Old High German vogeten, "to protect"... The concept of the Vogt was related to the Old German idea of the Munt, or guardian..."

Question answered; again.


yes they do, thats part of being scientific, don't expect people to just take your word for it especially when you are full of ACAB shit ....

Wow! How dishonest. You cut something I said in half to change its entire meaning, and then try to refute it? Unbelievable. It's not like my original post isn't in this very thread for people to see.

I never said "Communists don't need to back up their every analysis and assertion." I said "Communists don't need to back up their every analysis and assertion with a quote from the Holy Writ (i.e. the writings of one or more comrades from the 19th or 20th centuries). "

And that was several posts back! You already responded to that post.

Do you expect anyone to take you seriously when you "debate" like this?


try refuting my statements instead of mouthing off like children


Maybe you should take your own advice, here, 'comrade'.


if you think you won't security, military, police, and others or that they are "irrelevant for your purposes" (which i assume is revolution) then you are an idiot with no understanding of actual revolutionary conditions. the end.

Well I guess that says it all.

...

Not really.

Sections of the police (though not often any more), security guards and soldiers have come over to the workers' side at different times (usually as a direct result of the working class backgrounds many of them have). But that doesn't change their class character, as a whole.

Engel's came over from the bourgeoisie, that doesn't mean 'we have to win over the bourgeoisie!!'

And the police (and security guards) are not 'workers in uniform' like the conscript army was in Russia.

Finally, the passage you posted is irrelevant to this discussion. The Soviet state incorporated 'specialists' into its ranks because a large section of the advanced workers were killed in the civil war! If you notice, even the bulk of those were Non-commissioned officers (NCOs). And those ex-officers (i.e. no longer officers in the army) drafted were done so because the Red Army was a "fledgling force" (from your source). It was a tactical / survival question, not a part of a revolutionary program!

You're really grasping at straws here.


obviously, i just have a problem seeing why myself as a security guard who makes 11.50 an hour working 11pm-7am guarding people (residents) and a building downtown is a member of the petit bourgeois ... i don't work for myself and i don't employ anyone, i don't even have people working under me ....

What you make and the hours you work don't determine your class. Police are some of the lowest paid people, but they still aren't proles. And again, the petty bourgeoisie are not just shop owners or managers. There are other members of the class.


spare me the tough talk, you want to kick my ass for putting food on the table?

You're a master of falsification... or at least you try to be. He didn't directly threaten you (but you did directly threaten him in response!). He said it's a good idea to get shots in on cops and security guards during industrial action because cops and security guards line up with the bosses against workers. I know your type tend to back each other up, but there's no need to take it as far as inviting people to fist fights.


you don't know shit about me kid. fuck off.

i suppose its easy for you, leeching off mommy and daddy, to talk shit about someone who actually has to work for a living....

:lol: You may not know Sabocat, but I do. I assure you he's a prole that doesn't leech off of "mommy and daddy."

All we (can) know about you is what you tell us; and you've told us that you're a security guard.

Don't get upset (and try to bend communist ideology) because you don't belong to the proletariat. Get a real job and join us!

* * *

The rest of your posts contain nothing but poor attempts at personal attacks and squirming that don't deserve any attention.

[Nothing Human Is Alien]

the question is invalid, participation in protests does not have a bearing on what social class you belong to .... that is the issue being addressed here not ACAB bullshit ...

I missed this gem earlier.

Strikes are not the same as protests. All sorts of people participate in protests, including petty bourgeois liberals and even members and representatives of the bourgeoisie.

Strikes are a different story.

[NorthStarRepublicML]

Objective facts, by definition, don't "come from" anyone.

an objective fact would be "this computer is in front of me" ... a subjective opinion would be "Vogt translates to security guard or MIM is not communist or security guards and cops are members of the petit bourgeoisie"

don't claim to have the one perfect definition because i have already provided at least one definition to the contrary ....


The security guard in the store that is there to look after the capitalist's private property does not participate in the creation or sale of that product; he does not assist in the creation or realization of value; he does not expand capital.

ok, then would you say that a security guard protects a product from being devalued? does he not ensure that the product makes it way to the hands of consumers without incident? does he not ensure that consumers are safe to purchase the product?


he does not expand capital.

does he allow for capital to be expanded by providing security in places where the expansion of capital would not be allowed to take place without the presence of security, like a hostile war zone or a high crime area?

its a simple question please answer it .... you have avoided it thus far ....


Question answered; again.

hardly .... how does this concept refer to security guards as opposed to semi-feudal landlords or court officials?


And the police (and security guards) are not 'workers in uniform' like the conscript army was in Russia.

it has been shown that most members of the armed forces (at least in the USA) come from lower income backgrounds and while they may not have been drafted through conscription they have been called "economic draftees" who because of limited economic options have been pushed into military service, many former military persons, because of their military skills, assume jobs such as my own or law enforcement upon their release from federal service.


Non-commissioned officers

do you even know what that means? and even if you do what are you trying to say by putting it in bold?


It was a tactical / survival question, not a part of a revolutionary program!

more like an adaption of a revolutionary program to reflect the realities on the ground, meaning: worker militias unskilled in combat could not defeat the elite without soldiers and police forces to train and equip them with the necessary skills and numbers.

you should learn these lessons instead of scoff


he does not assist in the creation or realization of value; he does not expand capital.

if this is true please explain how guards or police are members of the petit bourgeoisie ....


I assure you he's a prole that doesn't leech off of "mommy and daddy."

i assure you he's a shitheel


try to bend communist ideology

you seem intent on bending communist ideology by placing workers into an opposing class, the petit bourgeoisie .....


Get a real job and join us!

again you need to look at the reality on the ground and get your head out of a book, i got people that depend on me, thats something people like you don't seem to understand about security guards and police officers.

[Nothing Human Is Alien]

an objective fact would be "this computer is in front of me" ... a subjective opinion would be "Vogt translates to security guard or MIM is not communist or security guards and cops are members of the petit bourgeoisie"

Where is that quote from? Certainly not me..

You tried to say bailiffs were something completely separate from security guards and police officers. I pointed out that Marx and Engels used the word Vogt in the original German version, and that the word means guard / guardian / protector.

Both of those things are facts.


don't claim to have the one perfect definition because i have already provided at least one definition to the contrary ....

If there are opposing definitions, at least one is wrong. You can't define something with two opposing definitions. You cannot say "Water is wet" and "Water is dry." One is right and one is wrong.

Relativism leads us nowhere.


ok, then would you say that a security guard protects a product from being devalued?

None of this has anything to do with communist theory. "Protecting a product from being devalued?" What does that even mean? It's a bad attempt at bourgeois "economics" at best.

Have you read Capital (at least V. 1)? How about Value, Price and Profit or Wage Labor and Capital? Check them out. The last two are short reads.


does he not ensure that the product makes it way to the hands of consumers without incident?

Sure, like when they work to crush "incidents" like strikes, which could prevent products from getting from a factory to a store.


does he not ensure that consumers are safe to purchase the product?

Safe from who?


does he allow for capital to be expanded by providing security in places where the expansion of capital would not be allowed to take place without the presence of security, like a hostile war zone or a high crime area?

Allowing "the expansion of capital .. to take place" is not the same as actively participating in the expansion of capital.

And you allude to my point when you say "a war zone or a high crime area." A security guard in those cases protects private property; prevents things from being stolen. But who would do the stealing? Other capitalists?? The petty bourgeoisie?? No, it would be working people, the unemployed, youths, etc., who would take the products from the capitalists if there was nothing preventing it.

So, whose interests do security guards serve when they "allow .. the expansion of capital" in "a war zone or a high crime area"?


it has been shown that most members of the armed forces (at least in the USA) come from lower income backgrounds and while they may not have been drafted through conscription they have been called "economic draftees" who because of limited economic options have been pushed into military service, many former military persons, because of their military skills, assume jobs such as my own or law enforcement upon their release from federal service.

From your own source (http://www.mltranslations.org/US/Rpo/classes/classes3.htm):

"The exploiting classes have always maintained a special cadre of military officers, government administrators, intellectuals, clerics, etc. who were drawn not only from the exploiting classes but from other classes as well, and who carried out functions similar to the modern-day petty bourgeois employees" who are defined as "management and supervisory personnel, sales representatives, professional and upper-level technical workers and military and police officers."

Emphasis added.


i got people that depend on me

Yes, the bourgeoisie.

Look, I'm not going to keep answering the same questions and keep addressing the same points over and over.

If you want to continue this, address these points:


Security guards do not participate in production, transportation or sale. They protect capitalist private property. And who do they protect it from?? Other capitalists?!? I don't think so. They protect it from the oppressed and lower classes, the unemployed, youths, 'radical workers', 'bomb throwing anarchists,' etc.


What you make and the hours you work don't determine your class. Police are some of the lowest paid people, but they still aren't proles. And again, the petty bourgeoisie are not just shop owners or managers. There are other members of the class.


You're being dishonest again. You linked to the source earlier in the post, but you made no indication that those lines came from there. Instead, you tried to pawn it off as your own, as if no one would notice.

And please don't use "retard" in a derogatory manner, it's against the forum rules (and very uncommunist).


Wow! How dishonest. You cut something I said in half to change its entire meaning, and then try to refute it? Unbelievable. It's not like my original post isn't in this very thread for people to see.

I never said "Communists don't need to back up their every analysis and assertion." I said "Communists don't need to back up their every analysis and assertion with a quote from the Holy Writ (i.e. the writings of one or more comrades from the 19th or 20th centuries). "

And that was several posts back! You already responded to that post.

Do you expect anyone to take you seriously when you "debate" like this?

[bcbm]

Originally posted by Compañ[email protected] 10, 2007 12:06 pm

Police, etc may fit the general criteria for being "working class,"

No, they don't. They do not "expand capital."
I used "working class" and not "proletarian" for a reason.


-----


can you be a class traitor if you are unaware of your class status?

Yes.


successful revolutions often depend on a class conscious armed forces often drawn from the states police and military as seen in the foundation of the Red Army (as well as others):

The military generally sides with the revolutionaries, no surprise. The police are usually a different story. In either case, though, I'm not interested in working with them while they maintain their role as enforcers for the state.


if you think you won't security, military, police, and others or that they are "irrelevant for your purposes" (which i assume is revolution) then you are an idiot with no understanding of actual revolutionary conditions. the end.

If you think a cop or other enforcer for the rich can remain as such and still be a revolutionary, I don't think I'm the idiot here. Its a conflict of interests, plain and simple.


again more ACAB bullshit

Sorry, but all cops are bastards: that is their institutional role in capitalist society.

[NorthStarRepublicML]

If you think a cop or other enforcer for the rich can remain as such and still be a revolutionary, I don't think I'm the idiot here. Its a conflict of interests, plain and simple.

if they were aware of their class status it would be in their best interests to be revolutionaries no matter their ties to the state ... disagree?

[NorthStarRepublicML]

If you want to continue this, address these points:

i don't actually, this is a pointless argument because nothing short of me quitting my job is going to convince you of my class status .... that is not going to happen especially to settle some ideological dispute with a bookworm like you ....

besides there are plenty of others who will require the assistance of persons such as myself when our utility becomes apparent ....

peace out ...

[Nothing Human Is Alien]

If you can't back up your own arguments, then don't expect people to take you seriously. Resorting to personal attacks like "book worm*" aren't going to cut it.

Accept defeat gracefully, it shows more character.

* I've worked in retail, fast food, transportation, construction, commercial insulation, and as a clerical worker; and I'm currently a teamster. Believe it or not, we proles read books too!

[Kropotkin Has a Posse]

Sure, security guards and cops are lackeys o' capital, but ask yourself why they become so.


It's not out of pure maliciousness or hatred of their fellow proletarians, it's because of economic necessity. Ask yourself why there are no middle-class people doing that job. Because it's boring at best, frightening at worst, and only the very desperate would willingly do it. They are products of capitalism.

[bcbm]

if they were aware of their class status it would be in their best interests to be revolutionaries no matter their ties to the state ... disagree?


If they were aware of their class status and recognized the need for revolution, they would no longer maintain said ties to the states.


It's not out of pure maliciousness or hatred of their fellow proletarians, it's because of economic necessity. Ask yourself why there are no middle-class people doing that job. Because it's boring at best, frightening at worst, and only the very desperate would willingly do it.

Many people become cops and guards for reasons having nothing to do with economics, and you're absolutely wrong that "only the desperate" would do it. Some people like power, some people they're helping others, some see good benefits, some just want to play with guns. There are many reasons. I doubt most cops come from backgrounds of absolute desperation- those are the sort of people who usually detest the police.

[Coggeh]

Anyone who associates security workers and cops with the bourgeois are just perfectionist leftists . Basing it on marxism determination of social classes then police are apart of the proletariat , have to work for a living and don't own any means of production .Its just your typical radicalized idiot talk of "oh cops are evil their tools of oppression " their not,their the working class in a blue union and a hat put out to do the orders of the bourgeois for a living and some people may think that constitutes them as bourgeois or reactionary but its heir job to enforce the law , they don't make the laws. They'll lose their job if they don't do that and their for they'll have no source of income and end up on welfare -that constitutes a worker .

[syndicat]

i think there are a variety of categories of workers who are in situations where they can act to protect capitalist interests. an example would be a social worker who denies someone benefits, or a schoolteacher who teaches bourgeois economics and a conservative interpretation of history.

the Pinkertons were not just security guards in the contemporary sense. they were professional strike breakers/scab herders.

there do exist unions of security guards in the U.S. at one company where i worked a security guard who was president of the local union of security guards was an anti-capitalist revolutionary. i know there are also police "unions" -- more like gangs in my opinion, and of prison guards also, but i'm not sure i have as low an opinion of security guards as of those other two, because they don't have the same degree of power -- and class is about power, remember.

security guards nowadays are also often paid very low wages. this is the fastest growing occupation among black men in the USA.

security guards don't have the same degree of power as police -- even if some individual guards like to think of themselves as would-be cops or cops-in-training. i tend to think of police as akin to supervisors, sort of the supervisors of the streets, on behalf of the system. security guards don't always play this same sort of role. it's true that the growth of security guards in the USA is part of the trend towards privatization, privatization of security, in this case. when they are employed at a housing complex or university, their responsibility is protection of the students, residents, employees, and of course also of the property.

there isn't always a clear cut answer to the question of whether a certain job is in the working class or not. that's because class boundaries are sometimes fuzzy. but the degree of restriction on a guard's authority and their low pay etc. suggest their situation is closer to the working class than that of cops.

[chimx]

Originally posted by CDL
I've worked in retail

And what are retail employees required to do when they catch shoplifters?

[Nothing Human Is Alien]

Who knows. I was never told anything. I wouldn't have done anything anyway.

Once, I was working a cash register and a co-worker pointed out someone walking out of the store with a huge box (it was was of those inflatable snow domes for your front yard, they go for about $100). We laughed. Later a manager was complaining that they kept getting stolen, and the co-worker (who wasn't a 'leftist' or anything) said 'why should we care, it's not like they stole it from us'.

But I guess you're trying to some how pretend that retail workers are like security guards? Not so.

I think this was already pointed out in this thread.

One part of a retail workers job (which is mainly to assist in the realization of profit), may be to watch out for people stealing things, whereas a security guard's entire job is to protect capitalist private property.

[chimx]

Originally posted by CDL+--> (CDL)Once, I was working a cash register and a co-worker pointed out someone walking out of the store with a huge box (it was was of those inflatable snow domes for your front yard, they go for about $100). We laughed. Later a manager was complaining that they kept getting stolen, and the co-worker (who wasn't a 'leftist' or anything) said 'why should we care, it's not like they stole it from us'.[/b]

And I had a friend who worked as a security guard for a while, and never actually told homeless people to get out of construction buildings. He spent most of his time reading books instead of doing what he was paid to do. But not doing your job properly doesn't change the nature of the job, does it?


CDL
One part of a retail workers job (which is mainly to assist in the realization of profit), may be to watch out for people stealing things, whereas a security guard's entire job is to protect capitalist private property.

Well earlier in this thread you said, "security guards are protectors of capital and those that control it . . . [and therefore] are not proletarians."

If that is the case, are retail workers only "part" proletarian? If not, what percentage of your job has to be dedicated to "protecting capital" before you aren't considered a proletarian?

[Nothing Human Is Alien]

And I had a friend who worked as a security guard for a while, and never actually told homeless people to get out of construction buildings. He spent most of his time reading books instead of doing what he was paid to do. But not doing your job properly doesn't change the nature of the job, does it?

Nope, not as a whole. But there's a difference between not doing what you're supposed to, and not being supposed to do it at all.

I've worked in retail three times (super market, craft store, small market) and I was never told anything about preventing 'shop lifting.' None of my coworkers, who I talked to pretty regularly ever mentioned it, it was never mentioned in 'training,' and I never saw anyone stop anyone from stealing.

That's my experience, anyway. But even if retail workers were supposed to stop theft, it wouldn't matter, as I said above. That's only a small part of their job, the main purpose of their job is to assist in the realization of profits.


Well earlier in this thread you said, "security guards are protectors of capital and those that control it . . . [and therefore] are not proletarians."

If that is the case, are retail workers only "part" proletarian? If not, what percentage of your job has to be dedicated to "protecting capital" before you aren't considered a proletarian?

In your usual way, you try to play 'devil's advocate' here, but it's not working.

The reason for a retail workers' existence is to assist in the realization of capital. If they weren't needed to do that, the job wouldn't exist; they'd be security guards. Anything else is just a side.

The reason for a security guard's existence is to protect private property. If they weren't needed to protect private property, they wouldn't exist.

With a quick search on google, I found a thread on Libcom (http://libcom.org/forums/thought/police-challenge-marxism) that sort of discusses this.

Someone asked, "How is it that people, who sell their labor power for relatively low wages, who do not have hiring/firing power, and who do not usually derive an income from capital, nontheless consistently maintain, uphold and reproduce a consciousness that is almost diametrically opposed to working-class consciousness? I am talking, of course, about police officers.... For example, I, and others who work in retail, are expected to enforce private property laws, by assisting in dissuading customers from theft, again in direct contradiction to our alleged class interests," to which a member, 'Alf', replied: "There are many jobs where you get caught up in minor 'policing' functions, but being a shop worker who when minding the till has to look out for shoplifters is not the same as being a policeman whose entire role involves directly reinforcing the system."

The same poster also said "Apart from the SPGB, marxists have always argued that the police are not part of the working class. The definition of class is in general based on the criteria Tree puts forward, but it's not a tick-boxing exercise. If your job is founded on the repression of the working class, you're not part of it.," btw.

I think Alf is an ultra-leftist, inline with Leo, though I might be mistaken. Either way, he's right on this question.

[chimx]

In your usual way, you try to play 'devil's advocate' here, but it's not working.

Well that's certainly a step in the right direction away from just calling me a troll. I appreciate that at least.

As I was alluding to in the previous post was that it simply strikes me as silly to make broad generalizations about a specific workforce and their class alliances. I don't get a job for ideological reasons like "defending capital" or advancing socialism. It's to get money, and I'm sure police aren't an exception here. Because of the complex cultural background of the workforce, to make such a generalization simply strikes me as extremely unfair.

During the Russian Revolution, the army and police took up arms against the Czars authority. The revolt in the army was actually extremely important for the overall success of the revolution. Just because forced conscription is over with (though some still argue that a poverty draft exists), I don't think it is wise to alienate such a massive group who could most certainly be supportive of capital's demise.

There are some retail workers that will jump at the opportunity to catch a shoplifter and send 'em to the courts. And as NorthStarRepublic shows, there are security guards that will be just as prone to jump at the opportunity to squash capitalism.

[Nothing Human Is Alien]

There are always individual exceptions, but materialists look at things broadly, analyze trends, etc. We have to look at what class one belongs to, and the nature of that class.

Workers on strike often try to break individuals away from the police and onto their side; and sometimes that even works. But that doesn't change the character of police as a whole.

That thread I linked to talks about all of that.

Sure a lot of police come from working class backgrounds. I mentioned that earlier with quote from the piece NSR linked to. "The exploiting classes have always maintained a special cadre of military officers, government administrators, intellectuals, clerics, etc. who were drawn not only from the exploiting classes but from other classes as well..."

But just because you were a proletarian at one point doesn't mean you have to be for life. If you get a job oppressing the proletariat, you can no longer belong to it. It doesn't matter why you took the job (surely some do for financial reasons, but it takes 'a special kind of person' to want to be a police officer in the U.S. for example)...

And we really need to reject the relativist trend that says you can't definitely determine one's class by examining their relation to the means of production. The class one belongs to is object fact. It's not based on opinion or bourgeois classifications. If we don't know who belongs to the proletariat and who doesn't, how could we ever have a proletarian revolution?

[Luís Henrique]

Security guards - and policemen, and soldiers - are working class.

The working class is not a group of saints, nor is it defined by moral issues.

The working class is also not homogeneous. There are deep differences within our class.

The attempts to deny that run in the direction of the MIMite line. Either we understand that our class is effectively the vast majority of the population, and that our task is to break the petty bourgeois prejudices that divide it, or we fall into theorisation of defeat: excluding pieces of the class of the definition, to explain our repeated disgraces, instead of understanding our collective responsibility for such mishappenings.

When you ask to which class a person belongs, you have to understand that social classes are social classes, not economical cathegories. See what kind of people security guards and policemen relate to. Do you think the security guard marries the hairdresser or the banker's daughter? That the policeman is best friends with the welder or with the stock market speculator? Do they live in proletarian neighbourhoods or in bourgeois quarters?

A different issue is the nature of their jobs. Those are repressive jobs - especially those of policemen. They are hired to impose bourgeois political order against the lower classes, and if they don't do it, they will be fired. So their social role is openly reactionary, and as it is difficult - very difficult - to attain a proletarian class conscience while exerting a reactionary social role, they will be, as a social group, always among the least class conscious layer of the working class, among those least organised, those who have more difficulty to show solidarity to other workers, and so on.

But this is a matter of degree. Other groups of workers also have repressive social roles - teachers come to mind, traffic controllers, environmental guards, and, of course, all workers with overlooking tasks - engineers, supervisors, bosses, chiefs of staff, etc. It is just that their repressive tasks are a lesser part of their job than it's the case of policemen. Also, it is probably not unnecessary to remind that the police is also far from homogeneous. There is a difference between the street cop whose task is mainly to see that noone is pocketpicking or overspeeding, and the FBI infiltrator in the workers' movements (or, to say otherwise, there are tasks of political police that usually correspond to a separate body of even more specialised policemen).

And finally, something more should be clear. Whatever the position of an individual within the class system, his or hers political position cannot be deducted more geometricum from their class situation. Thus you may have - and you certainly have - reactionary welders or teamsters; and you also may have - though it is certainly much more difficult - revolutionary policemen.

Luís Henrique

[syndicat]

During the Russian Revolution, the army and police took up arms against the Czars authority.

not the police. in the St. Petersburg area there were about 3,000 czarist police and once the army refused to back them up -- the revolt of the army is what allowed the February revolution to overthrow the regime -- the police were attacked throughout the city and to avoid being lynched the police took off their uniforms and snuck away. they didn't support the revolution.

offhand the only police who supported a mass revolutionary rising i can think of were the Republican Assault Guard in the Spanish revolution in 1936. but that was a special police force created by the liberal/socialist politicians in 1931 because they didn't trust the regular police who had supported a military coup in 1923. many members of the Republican Assault Guard were socialists. so they were a special case.

[Die Neue Zeit]

Originally posted by Compañ[email protected] 07, 2007 10:19 am
(4) it is the expansion of capital, as opposed to servicing the personal or administrative needs of capitalists, which is the defining role of the proletariat
So soldiers, firefighters, office workers, secretaries, cashiers, etc. aren&#39;t proletarians? <_<

They merely service the personal and/or administrative needs of the capitalists as part of a cost center (that&#39;s the business terminology for a corporate "head office"), not expand it.




The working class is not a group of saints, nor is it defined by moral issues.

Bingo&#33; In all my job experiences so far, I&#39;ve merely "serviced the personal and admin needs" (whether in an office or at the "back" of the building) of the capitalists. The matter of the police historically has merely been an issue of "divide and conquer."

[La Comédie Noire]

I think if a mass movement of workers began ceasing their places of work security guards would side with them. Not nessicarily because of sympathy but because they&#39;d be scared out of their wits.

I wouldnt want to be caught wearing the badge of the oppressor around hundreds of empowered workers.

I mean ow&#33; :o

Well it&#39;s more of a :) for me but for the security guards it&#39;s a :o or maybe even a :( .

[rouchambeau]

CDL, do you count cashiers as proles? Their only function is to take money and facilitate exchange. I would hardly call that "expanding capital".

[Nothing Human Is Alien]

Retail workers? I already explained that earlier in this thread. Take another look.


Security guards - and policemen, and soldiers - are working class.

If police are proletarians then whip crackin&#39; overseers were slaves.

RevLeft is a really bizarre place sometimes; you run into all sorts of things you almost never encounter in &#39;real life&#39;.

Cops are proles? As someone once remarked, "If Marx were alive today, he&#39;d be rolling over in his grave."


Anyone who associates security workers and cops with the bourgeois are just perfectionist leftists .

What does "associates with the bourgeois" mean?


Basing it on marxism determination of social classes then police are apart of the proletariat , have to work for a living and don&#39;t own any means of production.

By that measure, all sorts of people are proletarians, from managers to foremen.

What you&#39;re saying here has nothing to do with Marx.

This is basic stuff.

"In proportion as the bourgeoisie, i.e., capital, is developed, in the same proportion is the proletariat, the modern working class, developed — a class of labourers, who live only so long as they find work, and who find work only so long as their labour increases capital." - The Communist Manifesto.


Its just your typical radicalized idiot talk of "oh cops are evil their tools of oppression " their not,their the working class in a blue union and a hat put out to do the orders of the bourgeois for a living and some people may think that constitutes them as bourgeois or reactionary but its heir job to enforce the law , they don&#39;t make the laws. They&#39;ll lose their job if they don&#39;t do that and their for they&#39;ll have no source of income and end up on welfare -that constitutes a worker .

"Their job" is to maintain capitalist society, to defend capitalist private property, and hence, to oppress the proletariat. They are a part of the oppressive apparatus, not the class they oppress.

Really, there are few &#39;Marxists&#39; who claim otherwise.

See:

"The PBA and other cop “unions” are not part of the workers movement. The cops are enemies of working people and minorities and are duty bound to safeguard the bosses’ profit system, which includes smashing strikes. Cops, security guards out of the unions&#33;" "Trotskyists" (http://www.icl-fi.org/english/wv/869/twu.html) (and in their program: "We are unalterably opposed to organizing security guards, prison guards and cops—strikebreaking henchmen of the bourgeoisie—into the labor movement and demand and work for their ouster from the unions.")

"marxists [sic] have always argued that the police are not part of the working class. The definition of class is in general based on the criteria Tree puts forward, but it&#39;s not a tick-boxing exercise. If your job is founded on the repression of the working class, you&#39;re not part of it." - Ultra-leftists (http://anonym.to/?http://libcom.org/forums/thought/police-challenge-marxism)

"The petty bourgeois section of the wage-earning population, so-called because of its intermediary position between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, is composed of several broad groups of employees. First, there are the management personnel employed by the capitalists, including the administrators of the bourgeois state. Among this group are included the capitalists&#39; sales representatives, and all supervisors and foremen. Second, and closely related to the first group, there are the officers of the repressive apparatus of the bourgeois state (military officers, police officers, etc.)." "Anti-Revisionists" (http://www.mltranslations.org/US/Rpo/classes/classes2.htm)

"The U.S. bourgeoisie, for all its democratic rhetoric, exercises a ruthless dictatorship. Their machinery of dictatorship runs from the executive branch and bureaucracy of government to the hundreds of thousands of cops and immigration agents to the courts and the bursting prisons, from the CIA and FBI to their murderous armed forces. This dictatorship is aimed at viciously suppressing any threat to the rule of capital." "Maoists" (http://rwor.org/margorp/progpart1-e.htm)

Etc.

One group that does consider cops proles are the anti-communist Shachtmanites of the ISO -- the same people that support using capitalist courts to sue unions&#33;


there do exist unions of security guards in the U.S. at one company where i worked a security guard who was president of the local union of security guards was an anti-capitalist revolutionary.

And David North is a communist and exploiter of the workers at the same time. What does that mean?

I already talked about this earlier. Materialists look at things in a broad scope. You can always find exceptions.

You have to look at the overall role of the police, etc. and their relation to the means of production.


because they don&#39;t have the same degree of power -- and class is about power, remember.

No, it&#39;s "about" relations to the means of production. Your relations to these means of production determine your power, not the other way around.


security guards don&#39;t have the same degree of power as police -- even if some individual guards like to think of themselves as would-be cops or cops-in-training. i tend to think of police as akin to supervisors, sort of the supervisors of the streets, on behalf of the system. security guards don&#39;t always play this same sort of role. it&#39;s true that the growth of security guards in the USA is part of the trend towards privatization, privatization of security, in this case. when they are employed at a housing complex or university, their responsibility is protection of the students, residents, employees, and of course also of the property.

Of course the property&#33; That&#39;s their primary rule. They "protect (from what -- other capitalists?? this still hasn&#39;t been answered).. students (yeah right), residents, employees" etc. to ensure that the capitalists can keep making money&#33; They "protect residents" in an apartment to make sure the capitalist can keep collecting rent. They "protect" students (usually by breaking up demonstrations and parties, preventing people from distributing literature and the like) to make sure nothing gets in the way of that school&#39;s functioning, etc.


that&#39;s because class boundaries are sometimes fuzzy.

If you understand class, and what determines it, it&#39;s not really as "fuzzy" as a lot of people here would have you believe.


there isn&#39;t always a clear cut answer to the question of whether a certain job is in the working class or not. but the degree of restriction on a guard&#39;s authority and their low pay etc. suggest their situation is closer to the working class than that of cops.

Low pay doesn&#39;t mean one belongs to the working class. Pay doesn&#39;t determine class.

Security guards work for a wage and don&#39;t own or control means of production or other workers, but they also don&#39;t assist in the expansion of capital, and their main role is to defend capitalist private property.


When you ask to which class a person belongs, you have to understand that social classes are social classes, not economical cathegories. See what kind of people security guards and policemen relate to. Do you think the security guard marries the hairdresser or the banker&#39;s daughter? That the policeman is best friends with the welder or with the stock market speculator? Do they live in proletarian neighbourhoods or in bourgeois quarters?

When police come around do working people: (a) feel safe and comfortable (b) feel scared and "straighten up"?


And finally, something more should be clear. Whatever the position of an individual within the class system, his or hers political position cannot be deducted more geometricum from their class situation. Thus you may have - and you certainly have - reactionary welders or teamsters; and you also may have - though it is certainly much more difficult - revolutionary policemen.

I made that clear before, several times. Even you admit that its unlikely to have a revolution cop... being determines consciousness, so why don&#39;t you tell me why that is?

When workers are reactionary, it&#39;s because bourgeois ideology predominates; when cops are, it&#39;s because that&#39;s what they get paid for.

* * *

I know at least one non-"Marxist" (http://www.mp3lyrics.org/k/krs-one/sound-of-da-police/) who seems to understand this question better than a lot of our own members:

Now here&#39;s a likkle truth
Open up your eye
While you&#39;re checking out the
boom-bap, check the exercise
Take the word "overseer," like a sample
Repeat it very quickly in a crew for example
Overseer
Overseer
Overseer
Overseer
Officer, Officer, Officer, Officer&#33;
Yeah, officer from overseer
You need a little clarity?
Check the similarity&#33;
The overseer rode around the plantation
The officer is off patroling all the nation
The overseer could stop you what you&#39;re doing
The officer will pull you over
just when he&#39;s pursuing
The overseer had the right to get ill
And if you fought back, the
overseer had the right to kill
The officer has the right to arrest
And if you fight back they put
a hole in your chest&#33;
(Woop&#33;) They both ride horses
After 400 years, I&#39;ve _got_ no choices&#33;
The police them have a little gun
So when I&#39;m on the streets, I walk
around with a bigger one
(Woop-woop&#33;) I hear it all day
Just so they can run the light
and be upon their way

[VukBZ2005]

Originally posted by Compañ[email protected] 13, 2007 11:34 am
Cops are proles? As someone once remarked, "If Marx were alive today, he&#39;d be rolling over in his grave."

They are working and they are selling their labor power man. I&#39;m serious, to deny the fact that police officers are workers is to deny that you have no basic understanding of class from a Marxian perspective. The only difference between the police man and the normal worker is that he is an arm of the state and that as he is an arm of the state, while still being a worker, he is a class traitor.

[syndicat]

Transit systems lose money nowadays. so bus drivers and mechanics aren&#39;t directly "expanding capital." But it would be ridiculous to say they weren&#39;t proletarian. They sell their labor ability for a wage, do not manage other workers, and are subject to intense supervision.

The capitalist system has various forms of work that are required to keep the social order intact, which do not make immediate profits for the capitalists. Getting workers to their jobs and to the stores to shop is needed to assist capitalist profit making. Compact downtowns have real estate with immense value in part due to the accessibility from being at the center of transit systems. Without the transit system, those buildings and department stores etc would lose value. That&#39;s the sense in which the transit workers contribute to profit-making, indirectly. Without the cops, how would the capitalists&#39; property be defended?

but merely expanding capital through sale of one&#39;s labor power is not sufficient to be part of the working class. that&#39;s because there are people who sell their labor power but are hired as overseers, to manage the work of the laboring population, to doing planning and other elite work in corporations and the state. These people are part of an intermediate class between labor and capital.

Cops are part of this overseer role. it&#39;s true that often they are drawn from the working and can be regarded as "class traitors" if you wish, but a sizeable fraction of others in the middle layers are from the working class, because this is one of the few areas of upward mobility that is actually within reach of people from the working class. owning tiny businesses is another such area of escape from the proletarian condition. there&#39;s no point to being moralistic about this. people will pursue opportunities that seem available to them. it&#39;s our task to suggest that collective struggle against the bosses is a better path than individualist pursuit of upward mobility which only leaves an oppressive system intact.

[Nothing Human Is Alien]

They are working and they are selling their labor power man. I&#39;m serious, to deny the fact that police officers are workers is to deny that you have no basic understanding of class from a Marxian perspective.

I guess all the groups I listed above ("Trotskyists", "Maoists", "Anti-Revisionists," Ultra-leftists) -- not to mention Marx and Engels&#33; -- have/had "no basic understanding of class from a Marxian perspective.

You&#39;re just repeating the same thing that others have said.

If you want to go back and address any of the points I made, feel free, but just saying "They&#39;re workers&#33;" over and over isn&#39;t getting at the question.


Transit systems lose money nowadays.

Oh yeah? The MTA just had a &#036;1 billion surplus (http://freepeoplesmovement.org/fpm/page.php?131)&#33;

Some transportation systems are loosing money, and that&#39;s why there&#39;s a big push for privatization; but there are forces protecting against that to different degrees.

Anyway, to address the main point..


The capitalist system has various forms of work that are required to keep the social order intact, which do not make immediate profits for the capitalists. Getting workers to their jobs and to the stores to shop is needed to assist capitalist profit making. Compact downtowns have real estate with immense value in part due to the accessibility from being at the center of transit systems. Without the transit system, those buildings and department stores etc would lose value. That&#39;s the sense in which the transit workers contribute to profit-making, indirectly.

This is basically the same argument that already been given numerous times here. There are productive and unproductive workers whose work consists "merely of intermediate operations connected partly with calculating values, partly with realizing them and partly with re-converting the realized money into means of production" (Marx); and there are people whose entire job is to oppress the proletariat and protect capitalist private property. Some, like cops and prison guards are a part of the state (along with prisons, courts, etc.). Others, like security guards, protect capitalist private property from proles (especially those falling on hard times, like the unemployed), "radicals" and lumpen.


Without the cops, how would the capitalists&#39; property be defended?

It wouldn&#39;t... You really make my point here. The cops are a part of the capitalist state.

Obviously, bus drivers are not.

* * *

It&#39;s not something to get bent out of shape about.

Not everyone is a worker. If they were, we wouldn&#39;t be living under capitalism.

We have the majority without the pigs, managers, foremen, etc.

I really don&#39;t get why some people are so attached to the police as brothers and sisters. I have to wonder how much experience you have in the class struggle, in organizing... even in day to day life.

If you went up to most of the people on my block and asked them if cops were friend or foe, they&#39;d let you know. It&#39;s no secret where they stand and what they do.

I have a feeling some of this comes from a general view of "the people" as a revolutionary body; and the refusal to make class distinctions that comes with it.

I&#39;ve gotta wonder what class you folks think members of the CIA and FBI are.

[syndicat]

me: "Transit systems lose money nowadays. "




Oh yeah? The MTA just had a &#036;1 billion surplus&#33;

your argument is silly. the New York subway system pays only 80% of its operating costs thru fare revenues (selling its commodity). the operating losses of the other modes are even worse. moreover, New York MTA has gotten that high an operating ratio only thru very high fares. Most transit systems in the USA lose far more money than the New York MTA. the L.A. MTA, for example, only obtains about a fourth of its operating costs from fares. And SF Muni in San Francisoc also only obtains a fourth of its operating costs from muni.

for example, in 2005, latest year for which data are available, NYMTA had operating expenses of &#036;4.7 billion and fare revenue of &#036;2.6 billion. see:

http://www.ntdprogram.gov/ntdprogram/pubs/...ofiles/2008.pdf (http://www.ntdprogram.gov/ntdprogram/pubs/top_profiles/2005/agency_profiles/2008.pdf)

Cops and transit workers both are employees of the state. being an employee of the state does not make one not a part of the working class. the reason cops are not a part of the working class has to do with the power they wield, and thus sharing or not sharing a structurally similar situation that can potentially lead to solidarity in struggle.

[syndicat]

actually the statistic i quoted for NY MTA revenue and expenses is only for New York City transit, bus and subway. also, according to that 2005 data, the subway was only paying 67% of its operating costs from fares (sale of its commodity). Metro North and the Long Island Railroad and suburban bus systems are likely to have an even worse financial situation as far as percent of costs covered from fares.

Transit subsidies are a part of what is called the "social wage." This is a concession from the dominating class to the working class, obtained through past struggles. this includes various aspects of state services, incuding affordable housing subsidies, Medicare, transit subsidies, etc. Workers who provide these services are very much a part of the working class.

[Nothing Human Is Alien]

Cops and transit workers both are employees of the state. being an employee of the state does not make one not a part of the working class.

Not always.. but anyway, I said a part of the state, not an employee of the state. Big difference&#33;


the reason cops are not a part of the working class has to do with the power they wield, and thus sharing or not sharing a structurally similar situation that can potentially lead to solidarity in struggle.

This is non-sense. They wield that power because they&#39;re not a part of the working class (i.e. they don&#39;t have the same relation to the means of production as proles). It&#39;s not the other way around&#33;

Bus drivers work the means of production; cops protect them (in their current form as private property). It&#39;s not very difficult to understand.

[Nothing Human Is Alien]

As for transportation, I already said (in reference to workers in areas where transit doesn&#39;t turn a profit -- at least officially, the higher ups are taking home big stacks regardless): "There are productive and unproductive workers".

[syndicat]

Not always.. but anyway, I said a part of the state, not an employee of the state. Big difference&#33;

and what is that difference? how does a person become a "part" of the state?

me: "the reason cops are not a part of the working class has to do with the power they wield, and thus sharing or not sharing a structurally similar situation that can potentially lead to solidarity in struggle."


This is non-sense. They wield that power because they&#39;re not a part of the working class (i.e. they don&#39;t have the same relation to the means of production as proles). It&#39;s not the other way around&#33;

Class is a social power relationship. It is a relationship between groups of people, not just "a relation to the means of production." It is based on structures in society that give people some level of power over the process of social production, not just "the means of production". Ownership of means of production is one major structure that gives people power over social production, by forcing the working class to submit to them to live.

Thus it is in virtue of the power that capitalists have, in virtue of the ownership, that they are not part of the working class but have antagonistic relations to it. And it is in virtue of the power of people who have a relative monopoly over decision-making authority, like managers, that managers are not part of the working class, but have power over workers.

Thus it is you who have things backwards. Cops are not a part of the working class precisely because of the authority they wield on a daily basis over the working class.

the business about who is "productive" and "unproductive" isn&#39;t what differentiates being a part of the working class or not. Lawyers, finance officers, middle managers, industrial engineers may contribute in some way to the process of production, but it is their relative monopolization of authority over the working class that makes them a separate class, even if, in virtue of their not being owners of the means of production, they aren&#39;t capitalists and are hired employees. this is true irrespective of whether we&#39;re talking about these folks in the state or in the corporations.

according to the Marxist definition housewives are not a part of the working class because they don&#39;t produce profit. but they work to rear the next generation of workers. their work is equally necessary to social production. social production also includes the production of people, that is, the educating and rearing of a new generation and keeping them going.

[Nothing Human Is Alien]

and what is that difference?

You really don&#39;t know? That says a lot.


how does a person become a "part" of the state?

By joining the police, becoming a judge or state prosecutor, becoming a prison guard, etc.

Do you know what the state is? It&#39;s not an imaginary force that hovers over us. It&#39;s the repressive forces the capitalist class uses to maintain its dictatorship. Cops belong to those repressive forces. Bus drivers don&#39;t.


Thus it is you who have things backwards. Cops are not a part of the working class precisely because of the authority they wield on a daily basis over the working class.

Standing Hegel back on his head?

Where does that authority come from?? What is the material basis for it??


the business about who is "productive" and "unproductive" isn&#39;t what differentiates being a part of the working class or not.

Right. I never said it was. I specifically said "There are productive and unproductive workers".. twice.

Being unproductive doesn&#39;t necessarily mean one&#39;s not a prole, just like receiving a wage doesn&#39;t necessarily mean one is.

[LSD]

would you place security guard in the service industry?

Yes.

But that does&#39;t really answer your question, does it?

&#39;Cause what you&#39;re asking isn&#39;t really whether or not security guards are servicers, it&#39;s whether or not they&#39;re proletarian, a much more complicated and layered answer.

My answer to that question also happnes to be yes ...for the most part. But it&#39;s with a number of disclaimers and a good deal of explanation.

First of all its important that you understand what CdL is tryinbg to tell you, &#39;cause he&#39;s got it almost right. Class is an objective property, and one determined not out of inome or "suffering" but out of cold hard relations to the means of produduction.

Obviously those means of production have changed over the years but what&#39;s remained constant is that all workers must by definition create surplus value through their work. It is this value which the capitalists expropriate to fuel their enterprises.

A car is worth more than the raw materials of which it is composed because of the labour required to put it together. That&#39;s economics 101.

Same course: a shack which is guarded is worth more than a shack which is not. Why? Because of the additional value of the labour added to guard it.

All areas of business require human labour, it is not surprising that that includes security as well. Indeed if workers were not involved in the field it would suggest the emergence of an entirely new class-systemic dynamic.

That is, someone has to guard the doors and walk the dogs, it sure as hell isn&#39;t going to be the capitalists. Who else will they use but the workers?

To extend the metaphor further, imagine yourself in a hypothetical socialist future, or quasi-socialist transitional period. Even after the workers have siezed the factories, they&#39;re still going to have to guard them at night; i.e., they&#39;re going to have to act as security guards in defense of socialist property&#33;

You see? Even in hyothetical-utopia land we can&#39;t eliminate the security, so essential are they to the functioning of any modern society. Ultimately, of course, our aim is to create an economy in which no one need specialize in security because security is not an issue, but even so, I would imagine that there would still be some who would be motivated to look into it, and a good thing too since we&#39;ll need them when the inevitable psychopath runs loose.

And back in the present context, security guards are without a doubt our fellow workers. Whether they chose to acknowledge this fact or not is their choice, and there can be no doubt that the peculiarities of that particular profession lend themselves towards an affinity to bourgeois liberalism.

But that&#39;s the nature of living in this capitalist world of ours.


Police, etc may fit the general criteria for being "working class," but they are class traitors as they defend the bourgeoisie against their own, therefore rejecting their own class position to serve as lapdogs of our enemies.

The police, of course, are an entirely different matter since they exist not as mere agents of surplus value but of legislative execution.

Insofar as they are people who work for a wage and earn a pay, yes, I suppose cops are workers, but because their occupation is predominently concerned with dispensing adjudications and issuing comandments, that nescessarily places them in a managerial position.

One who spend&#39;s one&#39;s day telling other people what to do with theirs is not a wiorker and, for the most part, that&#39;s what a cop&#39;s job consists of.

Which, actually, differentiates him rather strongly from the average security guard or watchman who is merely paid to walk a path and make sure all is right. For whereas the guard is merely employed to ensure security, the police are there to shoot the "bad guy".

A security guard&#39;s class is defined by his function, he inceases value by his pesence; a police officer&#39;s class is defined by his agency, he enforces and commands.

So while the former can be our ally, the latter cannot.

[Rawthentic]

"If Marx were alive today, he&#39;d be rolling over in his grave."
Haha, Miles said that in one of the RCP threads. :lol:

[syndicat]

me: "and what is that difference?



You really don&#39;t know? That says a lot.

i was asking you to explain your view, not inviting you to be an ass.

me: "how does a person become a "part" of the state?



By joining the police, becoming a judge or state prosecutor, becoming a prison guard, etc.

Do you know what the state is? It&#39;s not an imaginary force that hovers over us. It&#39;s the repressive forces the capitalist class uses to maintain its dictatorship. Cops belong to those repressive forces. Bus drivers don&#39;t.


so you finally answer my question, sort of. but i disagree with your theory of the state. The state isn&#39;t just "the repressive forces". Nor are the existence of forces that can repress anti-social criminal behavior and protect a particular social arrangement sufficient to make a state. What&#39;s required is that there be an institution that articulates and defends the basic rules of a social order, and which is separate from conrol by the mass of the people. Engels correctly emphasizes this feature of separation in "Origin of Private Property, Family and the State". in pre-class hunter/gatherer societies, there was a governance structure of sorts, a way the tribe or band was run, made rules, divided fruits of the hunt etc but there was no separate professional administrative layer separated from the mass of the people, and backed up by bodies of armed men it could call on.

Secondly, protection of a social order in which there is a dominating and exploiting class on top is not all there is to the modern state. To be able to govern and thus carry out its protective function for the dominating class, it must also maintain legitimacy for itself and the existing system. This is why there are things like elections. And this is also why the state brokers concessions in periods of mass protest and class struggle. and that&#39;s how you get social services like public transit provided by the state, and other transport services, like road maintenance.

People employed to carry out these social services are just as much a part of the state as are cops or legislative aides or judges.

Moreover, even if we look only at the purely political functions of the state, its governance role, it doesn&#39;t include only the repressive bodies, like prisons, cops, military. It also includes legislators, politicians, and things like municipal judges, and much of their activity isn&#39;t directly involved in "repression" on behalf of the elite classes. One of the things the state does is adjudicate disputes of all sorts that arise, between different individuals, contending parties. again, this is part of the more general role of sustaining the existing social order.

part of this is also sustaining the other structures of oppression, such as the race and gender inequalities in society.

thus the state has a more complex set of functions that you allow in your simplistic definition.

me: "Thus it is you who have things backwards. Cops are not a part of the working class precisely because of the authority they wield on a daily basis over the working class."



Standing Hegel back on his head?

Where does that authority come from?? What is the material basis for it??

what do you think "material basis" means?

for Marx, the material base of society is the "forces of production" and the "social relations of production". What are "the social relations of production"? They are in fact power relations, structures that give certain groups power over social production, and thus over the means of life.

One of the sources of power over society -- part of the "material base" -- are in addition to the "forces of production" also the "forces of destruction". the forces of destruction are the armed bodies of the state. they are also essential to control over society and thus over the process of social production.

similarly, there are also "social relations of reproduction" as we find in the family. rearing the next generation is just as essential to human survival as work in a factory.

the power of the cops and other armed bodies in the state isn&#39;t an "idea" so your reference to Hegel is meaningless. their power is real, and this is shown when groups use control of the state to become or generate a new class power.

[Severian]

^^I think Syndicat&#39;s right there. Class and even property are social relations, relations between people.

Security guards are a bit of a gray area. When it comes to the minimum-wage door-guarding type, it often does seem more practical to treat them as fellow workers than anything else. I&#39;ve even known a few fairly class-conscious workers who have moonlighted as security guards; but then I&#39;ve known types who see it as a stepping-stone to the police force.

&#39;Course there are also various professional strikebreaking security guards and whatnot. And cases where security guards have beaten and even killed alleged shoplifters, etc., which have to be treated essentially as police brutality cases. There is a reason they&#39;re called rent-a-cops.

I think it&#39;s best not to take these things as pure, abstract sociology excercises, but to consider &#39;em as practical problems in the class struggle.

About whether cops are workers, of course not, and this was just answered pretty well in another thread: here (http://www.revleft.com/index.php?showtopic=68244&st=25)

[Vinny Rafarino]

Originally posted by [email protected] 05, 2007 08:04 pm
would you place security guard in the service industry?

edit: because thats what i selected ...
That depends on what you&#39;re "securing". I would hardly put the pimply faced 18 year old kid and the 84 year old grand father that work in the mall in the role of "non proletarian oppressors" like CDL does.

Other types, well that&#39;s debatable.

Cops however are a different story.

[Nothing Human Is Alien]

Yea, it&#39;s all "gray" and "debatable".. nothing can be known for certain.. relativism is where it&#39;s at..

Unless you&#39;re a worker...


[On July 2, 2007] Waste Management locked out the Teamsters two days after their contract expired, demanding a no-strike clause that also would have outlawed honoring other unions’ picket lines as well as harsh disciplinary measures with which to harass and fire unionists for supposed “safety” violations. The workers faced a reported &#036;600,000-a-day union-busting operation prepared well in advance by North America’s largest private waste hauling firm, a Fortune 500 company with 2006 profits of over &#036;1 billion. The company flew in hundreds of professional strikebreakers known as the “Green Team” from non-union locations throughout the country. To escort the scab-operated trucks, the company mobilized a battalion of security vans that sent at least two picketers to the hospital in hit-and-runs. - Pact Ends Bay Area Sanitation Lockout: Workers Beware&#33; (http://www.icl-fi.org/english/wv/896/bayareasanitation.html)

“Scabs and private gunmen in factory plants are the basic nuclei of the fascist army." - Trotsky


Class and even property are social relations, relations between people.

I didn&#39;t say otherwise. But what determines these relations between people? One&#39;s relation to the means of production&#33;

* * *

I&#39;m not going to respond to some of the other empty 1 and 2 line responses that just make assertions and don&#39;t address the issue at all (i.e. the relationship of security guards to the means of production, their role in society, what they protect and from whom, etc.)

[Nothing Human Is Alien]

Haha, Miles said that in one of the RCP threads.

It comes from Randy Newman.

[Nothing Human Is Alien]

Same course: a shack which is guarded is worth more than a shack which is not. Why? Because of the additional value of the labour added to guard it.

Sorry, that&#39;s not how it works with real estate. That&#39;s a more complicated issue than what you put forward here.

A security guard only guards a shack because its worth something... it&#39;s not the other way around.

And productive workers transform raw materials into something worth more (i.e. with your car example) or provide a service that can be bought/used (i.e. a hair cut, bringing food to a table, etc). Security guards do neither. They protect capitalist private property; and not from other capitalists (so who&#39;s left? -- I&#39;m still waiting for an answer on this).


Which, actually, differentiates him rather strongly from the average security guard or watchman who is merely paid to walk a path and make sure all is right.

What does "make sure all is right" mean? Make sure what is alright, and for whom? See above for what "making sure all is right" [for the capitalists] looks like in practice.


That is, someone has to guard the doors and walk the dogs, it sure as hell isn&#39;t going to be the capitalists. Who else will they use but the workers?

So, because someone has a working class background, they must be working class forever? I don&#39;t think so. Again, what about a worker that joins the CIA. Are they still a worker?


People employed to carry out these social services are just as much a part of the state as are cops or legislative aides or judges.

Really? A welfare case worker is a part of the "institution of organised violence which is used by the ruling class of a country to maintain the conditions of its rule"???

I don&#39;t think you have any idea what the state actually is.


the power of the cops and other armed bodies in the state isn&#39;t an "idea" so your reference to Hegel is meaningless.

No, it&#39;s not. You see the power cops have as a cause itself, instead of seeing that it&#39;s the cops&#39; relationship to the means of production that give them that power. In other words, you see the result determining being, and not the other way around.

And again, this is not something anyone should be crying about. "To be a productive laborer is, therefore, not a piece of luck, but a misfortune." - Marx

[syndicat]

me: "People employed to carry out these social services are just as much a part of the state as are cops or legislative aides or judges."


CdeL:

Really? A welfare case worker is a part of the "institution of organised violence which is used by the ruling class of a country to maintain the conditions of its rule"???

I don&#39;t think you have any idea what the state actually is.

I already provided a theory of what the state is. you can try to refute it if you like. It&#39;s not just "organized violence used by the ruling class of a country to maintain the conditions of its rule." tho that is a necessary part of a state that isn&#39;t all there is to it. a state must be able to also sustain the legitimacy of the social order in which the dominating class holds sway.

me:
"the power of the cops and other armed bodies in the state isn&#39;t an "idea" so your reference to Hegel is meaningless."



No, it&#39;s not. You see the power cops have as a cause itself, instead of seeing that it&#39;s the cops&#39; relationship to the means of production that give them that power. In other words, you see the result determining being, and not the other way around.

the cops have guns, they have organizational cohesion via a command structure. that does give them a certain amount of power. the means of destruction are as much a part of the material base of society as the means of production. your last sentence above is gibberish. what does it mean to "determine being?"

power in relation to social production is what determines class. that&#39;s because society is structured in ways, e.g. via a property system, that give certain people power over the system of social production. but class is not the only thing that gives material advantage or disadvantage. if you live in the USA and have a white skin that gives material advantage. class is not a relation just to "the means of production" but between groups of people. that&#39;s why it is a "social relation of production". calling the relation "social" is because it relates groups of people.

controlling the dominant force in society is also a material advantage. to say the armed bodies of the state, police and military, don&#39;t have any power in themselves is absurd, just as it would be absurd to say that a power plant has no power. both are material forces in that they can affect what happens in the world. the power that the power plant has is what Marx would call a "force of production" and he thus considered these part of the material base of society. but there is as much reason to consider the forces of destruction as also part of the material base of society. how do you think imperialism works? it works partly thru market exchange but also partly thru superiority in forces of destruction.

[LSD]

Sorry, that&#39;s not how it works with real estate. That&#39;s a more complicated issue than what you put forward here.

A security guard only guards a shack because its worth something... it&#39;s not the other way around.

Actually it&#39;s both.

You&#39;re right, no one is going to hire a guard to protect something worthless, but that&#39;s an issue of practicality not economics. The economic reality is that any piece of property will increase in value in correlation to any increase in security.

And while that secutity could take the form of walls or alarm systems or any other manner of concrete property, it can just as well take the form of a human security guard.

That&#39;s why homes within "gated communities" are worth more than those without. It&#39;s also why American presidential nominees properties tend to dramatically increase in value upon their nomination; having a round the clock secret service guard is worth a great deal.

The point of Marxian economics is not to make disconnected assertions about theory, but to describe and explain how the real world works; and in the real world, security guards do generate surplus value, value which is in turn funneled into the hands of the capitalists.

By any reasonble definition, that makes them workers.

Now, you can rightfully point out that security guards insofar as the protect physical capital play a role in the maintanance of the capitalist state and economy, but that is equally true with many other occupations, some uncontrovertably proletarian.

The nature of developed economies is that they are fundamentally interconnected, the bourgeoisie&#39;s ability to keep the lights on and to hold a monopoly on violence is far more important to their continued rule than their ability to guard a Wal-Mart.

And yet no one would contend that a reactor operator or a Lockheed assemblyman is anything but a worker.

I think what you don&#39;t like here is that security guards often wear uniforms and/or carry weapons. That is, they seem to be police officers light and this is often reflected in their behaviour and occupational culture.

And while that is a valid observation, the same can unfortunately be said for many other "conservative" but nonetheless proletarian jobs.


And productive workers transform raw materials into something worth more (i.e. with your car example) or provide a service that can be bought/used (i.e. a hair cut, bringing food to a table, etc).

It&#39;s good that you added that second part there &#39;cause otherwise you&#39;d be forced to assert that janitors and flight attendants aren&#39;t workers. But despite your concession to the "unproductive" proletariat, you still seemed to be trapped in a "tranformative" paradigm.

It&#39;s not unlike how Severian has asserted in the past that sex workers "don&#39;t count" as workers since they don&#39;t "make" anything.

But "making something more" is not and never has been the essential quality of the proletariat. Lots of people "make things", Louis IV liked to make keys, that didn&#39;t in any way, shape, or form make him a worker.

No, what distinguishes a worker is their relationship to the means of economic production; that is their capacity to produce surplus profit and the expropriation in turn of that profit by the bourgeois rulling class.

And like it not, security guards fit that definition perfectly. Excluding them from the proletariat would require that we also exclude all manner of similarly "unproductive" workers such as parking attendants or bank tellers.


Security guards do neither. They protect capitalist private property

Which is a service, one that can be, to use your words, "bought" and "used".

And just to clarify, security guards don&#39;t "protect private property", they protect one specific piece of private property, sometimes not even that. Security guards protect people almost as often as they do things.

Certainly you&#39;re not claiming that a bodyguard is in the business of "preserving capital"?

And even those guards who do protect physical concrete capital, they do so not in the service of the capitalist system itself, but in the service of their one particular capitalist master. A master who wouldn&#39;t give a flying fuck if the integrity of his neighbour&#39;s property were violated.

This distinguishes the security quite quite definitively from the police officer who&#39;s job is to protect the institution of property itself. A cop enforces the system of propertied relations, punnishing any infraction of the doctrine of "property rights".

A security guard, by contrast, is merely paid to make sure that no harm comes to one individual person or thing, much like how a janitor might be paid to keep that thing running and looking clean.

There is a world of difference between the extrajudicial institutional authority of the policeman and the functional charge of the nightwatchman, and to conflate the two is to drastically misunderstand just what it is that makes cops so dangerous.


What does "make sure all is right" mean? Make sure what is alright, and for whom?

For the bourgeoisie, of course, just like in every other job under capitalism.

A security guard is typically paid a wage to keep something or someone secure because some capitalist somewhere has an interest in that thing or person remaining unharmed. Either because they own it or care about it themselves, or because they derive profit from its being protected.

It&#39;s no different from why an auto mechanic repairs a car or why a gun maker helps construct an AR-15.

Far from proving their non-proletarian status, the fact that security guards&#39; work bennefits the bourgeoisie is just more evidence that they are in fact workers. All work helps the bourgeoisie, that&#39;s what it means to live under capitalism&#33;


So, because someone has a working class background, they must be working class forever?

No, but then I wasn&#39;t speaking individually. The question wasn&#39;t what kind of person would the bourgeoisie hire to protect their property, it was what class would they hire. And the evidence is overwhelming that when they have manual labour to be done, the bosses turn to the workers to do their ditrty work.

That doesn&#39;t in and of itself prove that security guards must be working class, of course; you&#39;re absolutely correct, changes in material conditions can change class relations. But in order to contend that by virtue of their becoming a guard, a worker automatically switches class, you must prove that there is something innate to being a guard that makes one no longer a worker.

So far, you have not been able to do that.

Rather you&#39;ve made vague assertions regarding "services" and "transformation" that sum up to mean pretty much nothing at all.

The undeniable facts here are that a security guard does generate surplus value, does work for a wage, and is socially and economically indistinct from any other service worker.

So, again, unless you propose that no tertiary employee is proletarian, you&#39;re forced to concede that, like him or not, your friendly nightwatchman is every bit the worker you are.


Really? A welfare case worker is a part of the "institution of organised violence which is used by the ruling class of a country to maintain the conditions of its rule"???

I don&#39;t think you have any idea what the state actually is.

Actually I just think it means he doesn&#39;t share your definition of the state, one which I might add you&#39;ve failed on numerous occasions to back up with anything more than appeals to the supreme authority of Karl Marx.

A welfare case worker is a part of the instutional government which forms the physical state of the modern bourgeois republic. In doing his job, he maintains the forms and regulations of that state, and carries out the policies of his governmental masters.

When a social worker takes a child away from an abusive parent, we may congradulate the results, but we cannot deny that that is an example of the state excersizing its monopoly on violence.

Similarly, when a welfare case worker cuts off support because the recipient is deemed to be no longer qualified, that is the physical manifesation of the bourgeoisie&#39;s mechanism of control.

The reason that some poor single mother is forced to go out and search for a job, the reason that she must now sell her labour to the capitalists is that her case worker refused to mail a checque.

It isn&#39;t their "fault" to be sure, they&#39;re just a tiny part of a massive system. But that system is the state and to deny that they form a part of it, however small, is patently ludicrous.

And the fact that you would consider a government bureaucrat more working class than a nightwatchman or lobby desk clerk reveals just how warped your supposedly "objective" analysis of class dynamics really is.

[Dr. Rosenpenis]

(1) What&#39;s the essential difference between being a "part" of the state and being an "employee" of the state? Both carry out functions of the state. The function carried out by a public school teacher may not be as directly linked to the express interest of the state of protecting itself, but both a cop and a teacher are nonetheless payed to carry out a core function of the state. Teachers and a great number of people who work in the public sector do not produce surplus value. Your definition&#39;s exclusion of all people who serve the administrative and personal needs of capitalists is also extremely impractical for excluding so many workers.

(2) My reading comprehension seems to have gone to shit, because it looks to me like Marx was saying that the petty bourgeoisie would disappear because they would have been replaced by overlookers, bailiffs and shopmen. How do any of these occupations replace the role of the petty bourgeoisie? Or did he mean that their "petty capital" would have been replaced with occupations as overlookers, bailiffs and shopmen? In that case, then Marx is only talking about the class origins of the people who occupy these positions, but I somehow doubt this hypothesis. Maybe I&#39;m just being remarkably stupid and am failing to see something obvious. Or maybe he was talking about a specific section of the petty bourgeoisie who would have been replaced with overlookers, bailiffs and shopmen, or whose jobs were replace with those of overlookers, bailiffs and shopmen. But that seems unlikely, since the passage quoted in its context in the book doesn&#39;t suggest that.

[Bad Grrrl Agro]

Originally posted by black coffee black [email protected] 10, 2007 05:30 pm
Police, etc may fit the general criteria for being "working class," but they are class traitors as they defend the bourgeoisie against their own, therefore rejecting their own class position to serve as lapdogs of our enemies. That makes their "class" irrelevant for our purposes. They side with and actively defend our enemies, the end.
cops in cuba are fuckin&#39; awesome.

[Comrade Rage]

I don&#39;t consider security (most) guards part of the state at all. As a matter of fact I, like other young men in America&#39;s inner-cities have few options as far as well-paying general labor jobs. I have considered becoming a security guard, and once I am qualified-I probably will become a security guard to put myself through school.

If you&#39;ve ever talked to a security guard as I have many times you&#39;ll know most of these guys are working class people who are just trying to survive. Most of them sit behind desks all day or drive along the grounds of their workplace.

On the other hand police have arrest powers, and plenty of opportunity to make activists&#39; lives hell.


Also a non-sequitor - I also plan to drive a public bus too. Don&#39;t be hard on those guys - they have to deal with a lot of shit.

[The-Spark]

Originally posted by COMRADE [email protected] 15, 2007 10:27 pm
I don&#39;t consider security (most) guards part of the state at all. As a matter of fact I, like other young men in America&#39;s inner-cities have few options as far as well-paying general labor jobs. I have considered becoming a security guard, and once I am qualified-I probably will become a security guard to put myself through school.

If you&#39;ve ever talked to a security guard as I have many times you&#39;ll know most of these guys are working class people who are just trying to survive. Most of them sit behind desks all day or drive along the grounds of their workplace.

On the other hand police have arrest powers, and plenty of opportunity to make activists&#39; lives hell.


Also a non-sequitor - I also plan to drive a public bus too. Don&#39;t be hard on those guys - they have to deal with a lot of shit.
Public bus drivers do deal with alotta shit, its true. But sercurity guards do need to sell their labour to survive its true. Yet, there really isnt any product to their labour, they arnt really exploited cuz they protect, they dont produce.

[chimx]

If they identify themselves as workers, and align themselves to worker struggles and movements, than what the hell does it even matter?

[Anarchovampire]

I am late, but I will inject this one thought:

Anyone who simpathizes with the worker, is a worker. If they work from 7 to 5, every weekday, and sometimes weekends to feed their families, clothe themselves, and put a roof over their home, and go into debt or spend every last penny on keeping these things for their family, they are a Proletariate.

If a cop or guard or a soldier ever goes into the field thinking "Hell yeah, I get to wield authority and opress people" they are fascists. But if a cop or guard or soldier walks out into the field and says "This is so I can feed my kids" or "I want to make my city safer so people can move forward" they are on our side.

Unless someone is obviously bourgeoisie, they can not to lumped. It comes to individual politicks, maybe the guard doesn&#39;t want to protect capital, maybe the soldier doesn&#39;t want to kill other soldiers, maybe the cop doesn&#39;t want to hurt people... maybe they all want to make a better life for their families... like the rest of us.

[RedHal]

cops and security guards are different in social status. Cops are a high status profession, and require a college education. So it&#39;s not out of economic need that ppl become cops, but out of secure job and authority granted by the system.
Low level security guards fall in the social status as factory workers, but I wouldn&#39;t call them proletariates because they are protecting the interest of the capitalist class. However, low level security guards have more revolutionary potential than cops because a cop&#39;s job is to protect the system and in return they benefit greatly from it.

[Anarchovampire]

I don&#39;t like that generalization that college educated people are not proletariates... I mean... there are Community Colleges here in the US... very, very cheap, anyone can get in (applicants are 99.9% accepted)... get a degree...

[RedHal]

Originally posted by [email protected] 16, 2007 05:50 am
I don&#39;t like that generalization that college educated people are not proletariates... I mean... there are Community Colleges here in the US... very, very cheap, anyone can get in (applicants are 99.9% accepted)... get a degree...
that&#39;s not what I meant. Someone on this thread stated that ppl take security jobs or become cops because of economic necessity. But being a cop is not an easy job to get, you need a college education and then go through training. So an unemployed person without a college education can&#39;t become a cop but they can become security guards. A person who becomes a cop pretty much had their politics set, ie protecting the state.

[Nothing Human Is Alien]

cops in cuba are fuckin&#39; awesome.

They&#39;re a part of a workers&#39; state. Cops in the U.S., UK, etc., are a part of a bourgeois state. Huge difference.


I already provided a theory of what the state is. you can try to refute it if you like. It&#39;s not just "organized violence used by the ruling class of a country to maintain the conditions of its rule." tho that is a necessary part of a state that isn&#39;t all there is to it. a state must be able to also sustain the legitimacy of the social order in which the dominating class holds sway.

A state (organized violence used by the ruling class of a country to maintain the conditions of its rule) is not the same thing as a bourgeois government, in its entirety (including all of public services workers have won and the entire bureaucracy).

Again, communism 101 (though I know you&#39;re not communist).


the cops have guns, they have organizational cohesion via a command structure. that does give them a certain amount of power.

Okay. So If I form a group, and we have guns, and organizational cohesion via a command structure, we&#39;ll have the same power as the police?

Sorry.

The position of the police in society is directly related to their class (as is everyone else&#39;s position in society). Their class is determined by their relation to the means of production.

Materialism 101.

You can&#39;t just will yourself into a certain position. To suggest otherwise is ridiculous.

Which leads us to the next point..


what does it mean to "determine being?"

One&#39;s conscious is determined by their being, i.e. their relation to the means of production and their position in society.

"The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness." - Marx, Critique of Political Economy

This is really basic stuff. I&#39;m sure you know it. I think you&#39;re just playing games here.


to say the armed bodies of the state, police and military, don&#39;t have any power in themselves is absurd,

They have power because they&#39;re armed bodies of the state&#33; If an entire police force was fired, for whatever reason, its individual members would no longer have the same power they now do. Their power is a feature of their position in society, which is based upon their relation (i.e. as protectors of, the privates ownership of, and the private owners of) the means of production.


just as it would be absurd to say that a power plant has no power

If you take away the fuel and workers, it doesn&#39;t.


how do you think imperialism works? it works partly thru market exchange but also partly thru superiority in forces of destruction.

But that "superiority in forces of destruction" is based on the imperialists&#39; superior capital&#33; You can&#39;t build better weapons than someone that has 50,000 x more funds than you; and even if you could, those weapons wouldn&#39;t allow you to force them into a dependent relationship&#33;


The economic reality is that any piece of property will increase in value in correlation to any increase in security.

Nah. The steel mill I used to work at isn&#39;t worth more because there&#39;s some rent-a-cop in the booth at the gate. Instead, that rent-a-cop is there because the steel mill is already worth something.

Similarly, the security guard who harasses customers leaving the dollar store a few blocks up from here (i.e. checking their bags, asking to see receipts and products, etc.) isn&#39;t adding any value to the dollar store or its products. Instead, he&#39;s protecting the capitalist owners&#39; products from working people who would possibly take them.

Security guards are used to defend capitalist private property. They don&#39;t increase value.


That&#39;s why homes within "gated communities" are worth more than those without.

Now, you could be getting into something else all together. If you&#39;re talking about private guards who are hired to provide security to individuals, then you&#39;re definitely talking about people who are petty-bourgeoisie. Labor/services provided as a commodity is done by the petty-bourgeoisie.

Marx wrote, "The man who takes the cloth I supplied to him and makes me an article of clothing out of it gives me a use value. But instead of giving it directly in objective form, he gives it in the form of activity. I give him a completed use value; he completes another for me. The difference between previous, objectified labour and living, present labour here appears as a merely formal difference between the different tenses of labour, at one time in the perfect and at another in the present. It appears in fact as a merely formal difference, a difference mediated by division of labour and by exchange, whether B himself produces the necessaries on which he has to subsist, or whether he obtains them from A and, instead of producing the necessaries himself, produces an article of clothing, in exchange for which he obtains them from A. In both cases he can take possession of the use value possessed by A only by giving him an equivalent for it; which, in the last analysis, always resolves itself into his own living labour, regardless of the objective form it may adopt, whether before the exchange is concluded, or as a consequence of it. Now, the article of clothing not only contains a specific, form-giving labour --a specific form of usefulness imparted to the cloth by the movement of labour -- but it contains also a certain quantity of labour -- hence not only use value, but value generally, value as such. But this value does not exist for A, since he consumes the article, and is not a clothes-dealer. He has therefore bought the labour not as value-positing labour, but as an activity which creates utility, use value. In the case of personal services, this use value is consumed as such without making the transition from the form of movement into the form of the object [Sache]. If, as is frequently the case in simple relations, the performer of the service does not obtain money, but direct use values themselves, then it no longer even seems as if value were being dealt in on one or the other side; merely use values. But even given that A pays money for the service, this is not a transformation of his money into capital, but rather the positing of his money as mere medium of circulation, in order to obtain an object for consumption, a specific use value. This act is for that reason not an act which produces wealth, but the opposite, one which consumes wealth." (from Grundrisse, Some emphasis added).

On the question of the gated community itself (assuming we&#39;re talking about wage-working security guards hired in mass by a landowner of the whole &#39;gated community&#39; for example)... again, the security guard (like the gate&#33;) is there because there are things of worth to be protected (from working people, mostly.. certainly not from other capitalists and members of the petty-bourgeoisie; and that still hasn&#39;t been addressed by anyone arguing this ridiculous line).


[b]It&#39;s also why American presidential nominees properties tend to dramatically increase in value upon their nomination; having a round the clock secret service guard is worth a great deal.

Nah, &#39;secret service guards&#39; [sic] are there because there&#39;s a guy there important (to to whatever degree) to the bourgeois government and its political circus. And the value of the real estate would go up because of multiple issues (none of them being the presence of Secret Service members after the fact&#33;), like I said before. It&#39;s a bit more complicated than you&#39;re saying... still.


Now, you can rightfully point out that security guards insofar as the protect physical capital play a role in the maintanance [sic] of the capitalist state and economy, but that is equally true with many other occupations, some uncontrovertably [sic] proletarian.

That&#39;s already been address. Have you read the thread?

"This is basically the same argument that already been given numerous times here. There are productive and unproductive workers whose work consists "merely of intermediate operations connected partly with calculating values, partly with realizing them and partly with re-converting the realized money into means of production" (Marx); and there are people whose entire job is to oppress the proletariat and protect capitalist private property. Some, like cops and prison guards are a part of the state (along with prisons, courts, etc.). Others, like security guards, protect capitalist private property from proles (especially those falling on hard times, like the unemployed), "radicals" and lumpen." - me (on page 2, repeating myself the first time).


And yet no one would contend that a reactor operator or a Lockheed assemblyman is anything but a worker.

MIM, Heiro and ComradeMarcel apparently would.. but those aren&#39;t comparable to police at all. They create surplus value (in the form of a &#39;shared product&#39;).

A reactor owner creates surplus value for the owner of the reactor, who sells the electricity created by it, and the Lockheed assemblyman turns raw materials into things (believe it or not&#33;) that owners of Lockheed sell for more than they paid for the materialist themselves.

Basic stuff (that has nothing to do with police or security guards).


I think what you don&#39;t like here is that security guards often wear uniforms and/or carry weapons. That is, they seem to be police officers light and this is often reflected in their behaviour and occupational culture.

It&#39;s not about what I do or don&#39;t like. I don&#39;t like every prole or dislike everyone who&#39;s not one. What I&#39;ve done here is explain why security guards objectively aren&#39;t proletarians, sans personal feelings or opinions.


It&#39;s good that you added that second part there &#39;cause otherwise you&#39;d be forced to assert that janitors and flight attendants aren&#39;t workers. But despite your concession to the "unproductive" proletariat, you still seemed to be trapped in a "tranformative" paradigm.

I see that this shit works with some other people on the board (who probably just grow tired of dealing with your incredibly long and drawn out posts much of the time), but it won&#39;t work with me. You can&#39;t just make some assertions (based on the "authority" your post count?) and throw in some italics and bolds and expect me to roll over.

What you said here is a baseless claim, that has nothing to do with my politics, or communist politics more generally.

Communists have never said that you have to make a physical product to be a proletarian. Marx was very specific in this (and I already explained this earlier&#33;):

"Certain services, or the use-values, resulting from certain forms of activity or labour are embodied in commodities; others on the contrary leave no tangible result existing apart from the persons themselves who perform them; in other words, their result is not a vendible commodity." - Marx (Theories of Surplus Value, emphasis added)


And like it not, security guards fit that definition perfectly.

Sorry LSD, just because you claim they do doesn&#39;t mean they actually do.


Excluding them from the proletariat would require that we also exclude all manner of similarly "unproductive" workers such as parking attendants or bank tellers.

What are you talking about?

How many times can I address the same things?

I already said that being an unproductive worker didn&#39;t mean you weren&#39;t a proletarian, necessarily. I already provided a quote from Marx, where he directly addressed the question of people like bank tellers: "It is in the nature of things that labor consisting merely of intermediate operations connected partly with calculating values, partly with realizing them and partly with re-converting the realized money into means of production, is labour whose magnitude therefore depends on the quantity of the produced values that have to be realized, and does not act as a cause, like directly productive labour, but rather as an effect, of the relative magnitudes and masses of these values.... The capitalist increases the number of these labourers whenever he has more value and profits to realize. The increase of this labour is always a result, never a cause of more surplus value" (Capital, V.3).


Which is a service, one that can be, to use your words, "bought" and "used".

No, you&#39;re confused here. Not everyone who provides a service is a prole (see above Marx quote on the petty-bourgeois taylor). If I hire you to come watch my house, and pay you x an hour, you&#39;re not creating a surplus value (nor are you playing a role necessary in capitalist finance, like say, a bank teller does).

So those individual security guards (like &#39;body guards&#39;) are plainly petty-bourgeois.. but they don&#39;t make up the large part of the totality of security guards.

More work directly for capitalists, for a wage, and protect their private property. They are petty-bourgeois employees.


And just to clarify, security guards don&#39;t "protect private property", they protect one specific piece of private property, sometimes not even that. Security guards protect people almost as often as they do things.

Yes, they do. Protecting a single piece of private property is still protecting private property. I never said they protected the institution of private property.

I can say "Bill make sandwiches." That doesn&#39;t mean he makes all sandwiches in existence.

Stop trying to trip me up over petty things like this (which you were mistaken about anyway), and address the real issues here.


Certainly you&#39;re not claiming that a bodyguard is in the business of "preserving capital"?

See above.


And even those guards who do protect physical concrete capital, they do so not in the service of the capitalist system itself, but in the service of their one particular capitalist master. A master who wouldn&#39;t give a flying fuck if the integrity of his neighbour&#39;s property were violated.

Right. Security guards aren&#39;t cops. I established this a while ago.

What does this have to do with your assertion that security guards are proles?

You&#39;re not arguing that they must be workers because a capitalist hires them, right? Capitalists hire petty-bourgeois employees like managers all the time.


For the bourgeoisie, of course, just like in every other job under capitalism.

No, "every other job under capitalism" doesn&#39;t specifically protect a capitalist&#39;s private property.


A security guard is typically paid a wage to keep something or someone secure because some capitalist somewhere has an interest in that thing or person remaining unharmed. Either because they own it or care about it themselves, or because they derive profit from its being protected.

Okay. Here, you almost come around and admit I&#39;m correct about this; but you do it in a sneaky kind of way in which you don&#39;t actually have to admit anything.

Before you said security guards create surplus value, now you say they are hired to protect things that already have worth... which is what I&#39;ve been saying all through this thread.

Now you just have to tell me who they protect them from and we&#39;ll be closer to settling this once and for all.


It&#39;s no different from why an auto mechanic repairs a car or why a gun maker helps construct an AR-15.

If the auto mechanic or gun maker is self-employed, then you&#39;re right. NOt everyone who provides a service is a prole. See above.


There is a world of difference between the extrajudicial institutional authority of the policeman and the functional charge of the nightwatchman, and to conflate the two is to drastically misunderstand just what it is that makes cops so dangerous.

Whew&#33; Good thing I never did that&#33; I specifically stated, several times, that police were a part of the state, and security guards were a whole different animal. Neither are proles, though.


No, but then I wasn&#39;t speaking individually. The question wasn&#39;t what kind of person would the bourgeoisie hire to protect their property, it was what class would they hire. And the evidence is overwhelming that when they have manual labour to be done, the bosses turn to the workers to do their ditrty work.

That question was answered a long time ago.. on page 1.

Again, I gotta ask if you read the thread at all.

"Sure a lot of police come from working class backgrounds. I mentioned that earlier with quote from the piece NSR linked to. &#39;The exploiting classes have always maintained a special cadre of military officers, government administrators, intellectuals, clerics, etc. who were drawn not only from the exploiting classes but from other classes as well...&#39;"

Oh, and if you think being a security guard is &#39;manual labor,&#39; you should crawl into the back of a 90 degree semi and unloaded boxes with me for a few hours someday. Maybe that way you&#39;ll be able to tell the difference.


But in order to contend that by virtue of their becoming a guard, a worker automatically switches class, you must prove that there is something innate to being a guard that makes one no longer a worker.

Their class changes pretty quickly, but of course that doesn&#39;t mean their consciousness does. If you work as a coal miner for 20 years and then become a security guard at the portal, you won&#39;t immediately take on the repressive/petty-bourgeois mindset..

It&#39;s no different than a worker who becomes a manager or a cop. One&#39;s class changes when their relation to the means of production does.


The undeniable facts here are that a security guard does generate surplus value, does work for a wage, and is socially and economically indistinct from any other service worker.

You forgot to add, "this is the word of our Lord, amen."

At least that would have had some more authority than the baseless assertion you just made.


So, again, unless you propose that no tertiary employee is proletarian, you&#39;re forced to concede that, like him or not, your friendly nightwatchman is every bit the worker you are.

Yeah, you&#39;re right. The woman who sits in a chair at the warehouse I work at, getting up only to search every worker that leaves, because -- and I quote -- "we live in a dishonest society" -- definitely has the same role in society as my co-workers and I, who ensure that your latest order from Amazon arrives in your mail box. :lol:

Oh wait.. she got up another time too, according to co-workers who have been there longer than me, to &#39;try to help scab trucks get in and out&#39; during the last national strike.


Actually I just think it means he doesn&#39;t share your definition of the state, one which I might add you&#39;ve failed on numerous occasions to back up with anything more than appeals to the supreme authority of Karl Marx.

Where are these &#39;numerous occasions&#39;? Could you be a pal and point them out to me?

If anything, I don&#39;t have the time or energy to debate long-established facts (what&#39;s next, are we going to ask NoXion to reprove gravity, without appeals to any previous scientists?), with everything else I&#39;m doing.

And with you, any kind of response turns into a project. Your posts are like pamphlets, even (and almost always) when they don&#39;t need to be.

Besides, who can prove anything in this relativist hellhole? Nothing has an objective meaning or properties, according to some folks here. Everything is &#39;my definition,&#39; &#39;your definition,&#39; &#39;Marx&#39;s definition.&#39; You really can&#39;t get anywhere with that kind of bullshit. It&#39;s like trying to build a house on quicksand.


A welfare case worker is a part of the instutional [sic] government which forms the physical state of the modern bourgeois republic. In doing his job, he maintains the forms and regulations of that state, and carries out the policies of his governmental masters.

See above on the state and "bourgeois government, in its entirety (including all of public services workers have won and the entire bureaucracy)".


And the fact that you would consider a government bureaucrat more working class than a nightwatchman or lobby desk clerk reveals just how warped your supposedly "objective" analysis of class dynamics really is.

The fact that you don&#39;t (I&#39;ll stick with security guards here, &#39;lobby desk clerk&#39; could be a whole other issue, and all kinds of questions would have t be answered before a classification could be made), shows how out of touch with reality, and established fact, you really are.

common (conscript) soldier, "exchanges the performance of his services not for capital, but for the revenue of the state." (Marx, Grundrisse).


What&#39;s the essential difference between being a "part" of the state and being an "employee" of the state?

Do I really have to explain the difference between paid by the bourgeois to carry out bureaucratic services and public services (which were won by workers) and being a part of the capitalist&#39;s institution of organized violence which is used to maintain the conditions of its rule?


Both carry out functions of the state. The function carried out by a public school teacher may not be as directly linked to the express interest of the state of protecting itself, but both a cop and a teacher are nonetheless payed to carry out a core function of the state. Teachers and a great number of people who work in the public sector do not produce surplus value.

Not all proles directly produce surplus value.

Some teachers do produce surplus value ("a schoolteacher is a productive labourer, when, in addition to belabouring the heads of their scholars, they work like a horse to enrich the school proprietor. That the latter has laid out their capital in a teaching factory, instead of in a sausage factory, does not alter the relation" - from Capital), and some don&#39;t.

But even unproductive teachers aren&#39;t a part of the capitalist&#39;s institution of organized violence. Their job isn&#39;t specifically to protect the institution of private property and the capitalist rulers. They are a necessary part of the capitalist system, though, as it progresses. Capitalists needed more skilled workers, and workers were demanding public education, so out of that came public schools.


Your definition&#39;s exclusion of all people who serve the administrative and personal needs of capitalists is also extremely impractical for excluding so many workers.

More relativist nonsense? It&#39;s not &#39;my definition.&#39; I don&#39;t own it, I didn&#39;t make it up. It&#39;s the definition of a proletarian. Any other &#39;definition&#39; is incorrect, and in fact is no definition at all.

Now, to address the main point, I specifically said that not all proles are productive. Check back through the thread.


My reading comprehension seems to have gone to shit, because it looks to me like Marx was saying that the petty bourgeoisie would disappear because they would have been replaced by overlookers, bailiffs and shopmen. How do any of these occupations replace the role of the petty bourgeoisie?

Marx was correct. The number of members of the traditional petty-bourgeoisie have continually fallen. They make up a small fraction of total population in say, the U.S. today. They have been replaced (in a way) by the &#39;overlookers, bailiffs, et al&#39;, (who hold a similar position in society -- between the capitalists and the proles -- and can have a similar consciousness).

The process was explained in the Manifesto:

"In countries where modern civilisation has become fully developed*, a new class of petty bourgeois has been formed, fluctuating between proletariat and bourgeoisie, and ever renewing itself as a supplementary part of bourgeois society. The individual members of this class, however, are being constantly hurled down into the proletariat by the action of competition, and, as modern industry develops, they even see the moment approaching when they will completely disappear as an independent section of modern society, to be replaced in manufactures, agriculture and commerce, by overlookers, bailiffs and shopmen."

* As the process stated in the Manifesto, listed here, progresses... "Modern Industry has converted the little workshop of the patriarchal master into the great factory of the industrial capitalist. Masses of labourers, crowded into the factory, are organised like soldiers. As privates of the industrial army they are placed under the command of a perfect hierarchy of officers and sergeants. Not only are they slaves of the bourgeois class, and of the bourgeois State; they are daily and hourly enslaved by the machine, by the overlooker, and, above all, by the individual bourgeois manufacturer himself."


On the other hand police have arrest powers, and plenty of opportunity to make activists&#39; lives hell.

Comrade, the fundamental divide in society is between classes, not &#39;activists&#39; and &#39;the man&#39; and &#39;cops&#39;. You have to understand how society works, and progresses, if your serious about changing it.

Security guards are, by their nature, opposed to proletarians. See the example I listed above, of them beating up two striking workers while escorting scab vehicles. This isn&#39;t the Homestead Strike I&#39;m talking about.. this just happened&#33;


If they identify themselves as workers, and align themselves to worker struggles and movements, than what the hell does it even matter?

I guess class doesn&#39;t matter at all. It&#39;s all about what people &#39;identify&#39; as, and &#39;align themselves with&#39;, right? That&#39;s the motor for social change. We just need to get everyone to &#39;identify&#39; as workers (even those who oppress us), and we&#39;ll be set&#33;

This goes back to materialist view of things, which looks at history broadly, not at individual cases of &#39;this one security guard I know who&#39;s cool&#33;&#39;


Anyone who simpathizes with the worker, is a worker.

David North, who is a CEO and makes a living from the exploitation of workers is a leader of the Socialist Equality Party, and considers himself a communist. Surely he &#39;sympathizes with the worker,&#39; right? He must be a worker then&#33;

There you have it. Right before your very eyes, a CEO has been transformed into a proletarian&#33;


If they work from 7 to 5, every weekday, and sometimes weekends to feed their families, clothe themselves, and put a roof over their home, and go into debt or spend every last penny on keeping these things for their family, they are a Proletariate.

I guess a lot of managers and shop owners are proletarians then.

Let me ask you this: who belongs to the enemy class? Who must be overthrown, and what must be taken down and apart, for us to create a classless society?

Let&#39;s identify this group (if we can find any with some of the criteria listed here&#33;) so we can convince them to &#39;identify as workers&#39;&#33; :lol:


I don&#39;t consider security (most) guards part of the state at all.

Who said security guards are a part of the state?? I don&#39;t think anyone is that wacked out (though you never know, here).

I specifically said otherwise on page two:

Some, like cops and prison guards are a part of the state (along with prisons, courts, etc.). Others, like security guards, protect capitalist private property from proles (especially those falling on hard times, like the unemployed), "radicals" and lumpen."

[Karl Marx's Camel]

They&#39;re a part of a workers&#39; state.

^ An opinion.

[syndicat]

me: "the cops have guns, they have organizational cohesion via a command structure. that does give them a certain amount of power."


Okay. So If I form a group, and we have guns, and organizational cohesion via a command structure, we&#39;ll have the same power as the police?

Maybe. Think guerrilla army. If the cops and their guns and command structure aren&#39;t a material force, why would the elite classes want to have one?



The position of the police in society is directly related to their class (as is everyone else&#39;s position in society). Their class is determined by their relation to the means of production.

Materialism 101.

You can&#39;t just will yourself into a certain position. To suggest otherwise is ridiculous.

It&#39;s not a question of "will". The point is that the organization cohesion, command
structure, training, guns of the police are in fact a material force. But this power isn&#39;t the same thing as their position in the system of social relations.

This akin to confusing the "forces of production" with the "social relations of production."

That&#39;s Materialism 101, as you would say.

me: "what does it mean to "determine being?" "



One&#39;s conscious is determined by their being, i.e. their relation to the means of production and their position in society.

"The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness." - Marx, Critique of Political Economy


This is what is called "vulgar Marxism", which was characteristic of Stalinism. The class structure of a society is, from the point of view of explaining what goes on, merely a tendency or causal structure. It can&#39;t determine anything by itself. Thus a person&#39;s class position will tend to influence or make likely certain attitudes or beliefs but is not sufficient to determine them. That&#39;s because events in their life can lead them another way. Think Frederick Engels. A class structure gives certain people certain powers, puts them in a certain position, but the actual course of events also depends upon contingencies or conjunctures in the world, and in people&#39;s experiences.

Why is this relevant this thread anyway?

me: "to say the armed bodies of the state, police and military, don&#39;t have any power in themselves is absurd, "



They have power because they&#39;re armed bodies of the state&#33; If an entire police force was fired, for whatever reason, its individual members would no longer have the same power they now do. Their power is a feature of their position in society, which is based upon their relation (i.e. as protectors of, the privates ownership of, and the private owners of) the means of production.

if the entire police force were fired they might try to overthrow the government. why would they have a chance to do that? can you explain that? It&#39;s their guns, skills and organizational cohesion.

again, your confusion is akin to confusing the "forces of production" with the "social relations of production."

Workers are a "force of production" in virtue of their working abilities but they stand in a certain "social relation of production" to the classes that dominate them. the distinction applies to the police.

me: "just as it would be absurd to say that a power plant has no power"



If you take away the fuel and workers, it doesn&#39;t.

The ability of the equipment to produce electricity remains even if you shut it off. That is why that equipment is a "force of production", even when idle.

me: "how do you think imperialism works? it works partly thru market exchange but also partly thru superiority in forces of destruction. "



But that "superiority in forces of destruction" is based on the imperialists&#39; superior capital&#33; You can&#39;t build better weapons than someone that has 50,000 x more funds than you; and even if you could, those weapons wouldn&#39;t allow you to force them into a dependent relationship&#33;

And here your confusion is quite clear. The capitalists&#39; capital is a social relation of production, it is their power to command labor and resources. The weapons and the military personnel are "forces of destruction", just as we distinguish the capitalists&#39; social position as possessor of capital from the forces of production they command, which includes workers as well as equipment. You&#39;re refusing to acknowledge a basic Marxist distinction.

[Saint Street Revolution]

Perhaps they are "Proletariat" in terms of their conditions at home, their income, all that.

But they are Class Traitors for they defend the Bourgeoise(cops) or the Bourgeoise&#39;s property (Security Guards).

Most cops live in middle class, nice homes anyway. I dunno about security guard&#39;s income, but I stand with my view that they are Class Traitors.

Perhaps not intentionally, mind you, but I wouldn&#39;t regard them as Proles regardless.

[Rawthentic]

Perhaps they are "Proletariat" in terms of their conditions at home, their income, all that.
But that does not determine class, ones relationship to the means of production does. There relation is that of protecting capitalist private property. They are not "class traitors", they are fulfilling the role that their social being is assigned to.

[Tower of Bebel]

I consider them workers. But they totally differ from the industrial workers. But I don&#39;t blame security guards or cops totally for having such a job. Look at the workers, they work to ensure that the capitalists have their profit. The cops must make sure that these profits are protected.

[Labor Shall Rule]

I haven&#39;t been paying attention to the past pages of this thread, so forgive my ignorance, but aren&#39;t police officers employed by the state?

If the capitalist class truly has their own institution of organized violence which is used to maintain the conditions of its rule, they will employ armed bodies of individuals that are defined as police officers to do their bidding. While workers are seen as the expansion of capital, police officers and security guards mend to the personal and administrative needs of the capitalists.

[Nothing Human Is Alien]

If comrades are just going to make baseless assertions, (or ignore the previous 3 pages of the thread), they shouldn&#39;t expect anyone to take them seriously or take the time to reply to them.

[Tower of Bebel]

It&#39;s not important whether security guards and police men are workers or not. All of them have to liberated from capitalism.

[Nothing Human Is Alien]

Yeah, it doesn&#39;t matter who belongs to which class. We don&#39;t need to know who our friends and enemies are, who has &#39;nothing to lose but their chains&#39; and who is actually capable of abolishing capitalism.

We&#39;ll just all get together around the campfire and sing songs and everything will be great.

[chimx]

Do cops and security guards own any means of production?

What&#39;s that? No?

Then they&#39;re not part of the bourgeoisie. That&#39;s what bourgeoisie means: a capitalist who owns means of social production and/or an employer of wage laborers.

The point is that they aren&#39;t very class conscious proletarians because of the nature of their job, as Luis has already made perfectly clear.

Your argumentation is absurd. Because they act in the interests of the bourgeoisie, they are bourgeois themselves? We all act in the interest of the bourgeois by fuckin&#39; working and allow bosses to exploit our labor so that they can increase the size of their bank accounts.

Is my foreman not a proletariat because he tries to keep working running smoothly and organized?

I ran a construction crew a few times. When I was in charge of a crew, did I become bourgeois? Of course not, because I don&#39;t own the business, tools, or any other production means.

Cops are workers, period. There is no Marxian analysis that could possibly suggest otherwise.

[Tower of Bebel]

Originally posted by Compañ[email protected] 17, 2007 04:43 pm
Yeah, it doesn&#39;t matter who belongs to which class. We don&#39;t need to know who our friends and enemies are, who has &#39;nothing to lose but their chains&#39; and who is actually capable of abolishing capitalism.

We&#39;ll just all get together around the campfire and sing songs and everything will be great.
Don&#39;t be rediculous. I don&#39;t know why you find it so important to distinguish cops from workers. They do not own the means of production, which makes them not our priority.

[Dr. Rosenpenis]

Originally posted by Compañ[email protected] 16, 2007 03:43 pm
The position of the police in society is directly related to their class (as is everyone else&#39;s position in society). Their class is determined by their relation to the means of production.
How is the police&#39;s relation to the means of production comparable to that of the bourgeoisie?


Security guards are used to defend capitalist private property. They don&#39;t increase value.

The enforcement of laws against shoplifting exists expressly for allowing commerce to take place and surplus value to be created.


Do I really have to explain the difference between paid by the bourgeois to carry out bureaucratic services and public services (which were won by workers) and being a part of the capitalist&#39;s institution of organized violence which is used to maintain the conditions of its rule?

One uses violence, the other doesn&#39;t. That&#39;s the only difference.
If bureaucratic and public services didn&#39;t serve to "maintain the conditions of rule", then they wouldn&#39;t exist. Same for the police. They have the same ultimate goals. The difference in the means used to carry out the goals of the state makes no difference.


But even unproductive teachers aren&#39;t a part of the capitalist&#39;s institution of organized violence. Their job isn&#39;t specifically to protect the institution of private property and the capitalist rulers.

The bourgeois government hires teachers because public schools are an intrinsic part of liberal democracies. i.e. They exist to protect and uphold the interests of the ruling class. Kind of like cops.


As the process stated in the Manifesto, listed here, progresses... "[b]Modern Industry has converted the little workshop of the patriarchal master into the great factory of the industrial capitalist. Masses of labourers, crowded into the factory, are organised like soldiers. As privates of the industrial army they are placed under the command of a perfect hierarchy of officers and sergeants. Not only are they slaves of the bourgeois class, and of the bourgeois State; they are daily and hourly enslaved by the machine, by the overlooker, and, above all, by the individual bourgeois manufacturer himself."

hmm... that makes a lot of sense, actually.

[BeLikeChe]

Compliance with bourgeoisie does not bougeoisie make

[Rawthentic]

It is true that cops are not bourgeois, everyone knows that, but they are neither proletarian. Cops do not create surplus value, thats the crux of the matter.

Cops make up what is the petty-bourgeoisie, the enforcers and "middle-men" of the system.

[chimx]

You don&#39;t know what petty bourgeoisie means. It means little capitalist. As in 19th century artisans that owned their own tools and shops, but only employed themselves or an apprentice or two.

If you are getting rid of everybody that directly creates surplus value, than you are getting rid of a lot of people. Marx never talk about this, you are just making shit up so you can have an excuse to hate police. Probably due to some naive youth adventurism.

[Rawthentic]

Probably due to some naive youth adventurism.
Oh yeah, I hate cops not because my parents are immigrants and have been harassed by pigs, but because I&#39;m just naive. :angry:

[chimx]

but because I&#39;m just naive.

Yes. To think that because some police are assholes, that some out makes them small capitalist is at the very least misguided.

[Coggeh]

Originally posted by Voz de la Gente [email protected] 17, 2007 09:33 pm
It is true that cops are not bourgeois, everyone knows that, but they are neither proletarian. Cops do not create surplus value, thats the crux of the matter.

Cops make up what is the petty-bourgeoisie, the enforcers and "middle-men" of the system.
Not all proletarians create surplus value . Their working class not because they directly make money for the bourgeois but because they sell their labour in order to make an income . Like Teachers etc

Alot of workplaces act directly in the interests of the bourgeois . Just because some of you have the great dream image in your head of kicking some pigs skull in because thats what you see as the oppressors doesn&#39;t make them bourgeois . It just makes you a middle class mamas boy who fail at theorizing the situation and just get off on thinking about fighting the cops .

[Nothing Human Is Alien]

You don&#39;t know what petty bourgeoisie means. It means little capitalist. As in 19th century artisans that owned their own tools and shops, but only employed themselves or an apprentice or two.

Yeah, that&#39;s where the class has its origins, but as Marx and Engels predicted, its role as individual shop keepers and craftsman has been largely faded out (though not completely) and replaced with "overseers, bailiffs, etc."


If you are getting rid of everybody that directly creates surplus value, than you are getting rid of a lot of people.

Who&#39;s talking about "getting rid"(?) of everyone that "doesn&#39;t directly create surplus value" (which is what I think you meant to say, you left the word "doesn&#39;t" out)?&#33;? Where is that said in this thread?


Marx never talk about this

I pointed out already in this thread that not every prole directly produces surplus value. I also showed where Marx, et. al. talked about members of the petty bourgeoisie like the "perfect hierarchy of officers and sergeants" / "overlookers".


How is the police&#39;s relation to the means of production comparable to that of the bourgeoisie?

It&#39;s not. Who said it was? I said their position in society is created by their relation to the means of production.

The bourgeoisie controls the means of production.

The police protect those means, their owners, the ownership of the means, and suppresses the working class so it won&#39;t take them over.


One uses violence, the other doesn&#39;t. That&#39;s the only difference.

One is the body of the violence, used for the suppression of the working class. The other is a worker.

You can see Marx on teachers. At one time, most schools were private, and the teachers created surplus value for the school owners. Workers won the right to a public education -- they opened up many of the private schools so they could be utilized by all.

[Dr. Rosenpenis]

If we&#39;re talking about the interests of workers within the capitalist system, I think that we can easily affirm that the police enforces a handful of laws favorable to workers and laws "won" by workers. The police, for instance, (sometimes) protects us from crime and violence. They (sometimes) investigate corruption and white collar crime. They (sometimes) defend members of certain ethnic groups from racist persecution by skinheads.

Do they do this because workers "won" the police to defend laws? Is it because the police are benevolent?

I still see no reason for discriminating those who carry out government duties with violence from those who do so with no violence.

[chimx]

It&#39;s not. Who said it was? I said their position in society is created by their relation to the means of production.

The bourgeoisie controls the means of production.

The police protect those means, their owners, the ownership of the means, and suppresses the working class so it won&#39;t take them over.

That is not the sole job. Cops also are responsible for traffic regulation, bringing stray dogs to humane societies, mediating in domestic disturbance cases, etc.

[Rhino Thunder Pants]

Cops are just a tool used by the rich to opress the working class. Howften do u see adverts about tax dodgers who all happen to be working class but funnily enough the rich don&#39;t wanna pay taxes so they get there little friends in the nice blue uniform to look the other way becuase we woulnd&#39;t want equality know would we.


There job description might aswell be dont let those bloody council estatse chavs get near my palace the stupid bloody toffe nosed wankers

[Coggeh]

Originally posted by Dr. [email protected] 20, 2007 11:43 pm
If we&#39;re talking about the interests of workers within the capitalist system, I think that we can easily affirm that the police enforces a handful of laws favorable to workers and laws "won" by workers. The police, for instance, (sometimes) protects us from crime and violence. They (sometimes) investigate corruption and white collar crime. They (sometimes) defend members of certain ethnic groups from racist persecution by skinheads.

Do they do this because workers "won" the police to defend laws? Is it because the police are benevolent?

I still see no reason for discriminating those who carry out government duties with violence from those who do so with no violence.
Excellent post .

[Nothing Human Is Alien]

It&#39;s really bananas to see "leftists" defending cops as fellow workers&#33; I&#39;m still waiting to hear if CIA and FBI agents are workers too.

When folks start calling the determining of a groups&#39; class in society &#39;discrimination&#39; I have to walk away.

Cops protect private property and capitalist rule. They (along with a few other choice groups) are the state. That&#39;s their main role. All the other stuff is secondary and is treated that way (or plays into maintaining bourgeois rule in some way.. the presence of cops on the street, getting people used to following their orders.. arresting sections of the &#39;army of the unemployed&#39; to be put to work on slave wages in prisons.. etc.).

Teachers don&#39;t break strikes. It&#39;s not even a part of their job.

If you don&#39;t think that cops are a part of the state, then you don&#39;t know what the state is. It&#39;s as plain as that. I&#39;d suggest reading some Marx and select pieces from Lenin on the question.

* * *

Since you won&#39;t be convinced by reasoned arguments, explanations based on cops&#39; role in society and their relation to the means of production, Marx, history, etc., I guess the only thing I can tell you is that if you ever go on strike, and it challenges the bosses&#39; system even one iota, you&#39;ll see where the cops stand... or ask the Miners&#39; in Harlan County.

[Led Zeppelin]

BOZG, the member on this forum, used to work as a security guard; I know him and I know he&#39;s a good revolutionary....so what does that prove?

EDIT: I&#39;m not saying cops or security guards aren&#39;t reactionary, I&#39;m just making room for exceptions to the rule.

[Rhino Thunder Pants]

Zeppelin that proves absolutely nothing apart from that your friends politcal views contradict that of his job

[Led Zeppelin]

Exactly, which is my point; individuals may be Marxists while still having such a job, however the rule is that they are a reactionary institution.

[chimx]

Originally posted by CDL
It&#39;s really bananas to see "leftists" defending cops as fellow workers&#33; I&#39;m still waiting to hear if CIA and FBI agents are workers too.

When folks start calling the determining of a groups&#39; class in society &#39;discrimination&#39; I have to walk away.

I don&#39;t think anyone here is really defending police actions, especially when directed towards those in poverty, politically minded, people of color, etc.

What we are discussing is Marxism. The whole appeal of Marxism is that it is a holistic political philosophy that spans the ages. We are given concrete examples of class relations directing social change throughout history.

But what you are suggesting is that we ignore these class relationships and instead focus in on what Marx called the superstructure. According to Marx, upon production relationships is built the superstructure, which includes the state, religion, bureaucracy, etc. It is the superstructure that tends to be directed by the dominant social class given its overall organization, but you can not confuse the bourgeoisie, or whatever dominant class, within the superstructure itself.

Ultimately the state&#39;s historic role is to defend the common and long-term interests of the dominant class -- and more particularly to promote the conditions in which production can reproduce into future generations -- as this is what ensures class hegemony. But because of this, the state is also in conflict with the short-term interests of the bourgeoisie, or other dominant classes.

Laws are created which defend the poor at times, the superstructure acts both benevolently at times, but also fiercely to protect this production relationships.

Police can become involved in policing for any of these reasons, from benevolence to sadistic. To judge this diverse group of wage-workers solely on their relationship to the social superstructure is an extremely short-sited analysis. Again, as Luis said, they may be a difficult group of proletarians to encourage class consciousness -- because some part of their job is to ensure the dominant class&#39; hegemony -- but in the end they still sell their labor power to the capitalist class for a living. That makes them proletarians, regardless of their relationship to the superstructure or their class consciousness.

Lets not throw all of Marxism out the window just because you want an excuse to hate cops. One can loathe law enforcement within the confines of Marxist analysis.

[Karl Marx's Camel]

The point is that they aren&#39;t very class conscious proletarians because of the nature of their job, as Luis has already made perfectly clear.

If not for a lack of class consciousness they wouldn&#39;t have taken the job in the first place. It&#39;s not their job that made them lose class consciousness; Chances are, they never were class conscious in the first place.

A small but not entirely trivial point either, I think.

[chimx]

I don&#39;t think that is necessarily true. No doubt a lot of people get involved in policing because they think that by doing so they can "make a difference" in their community. Perhaps they may not be a politically mature individual, but there is the motivation to improve the quality of life of poor people.

[Karl Marx's Camel]

Well, I base my understanding from talkin with people who have considered working as a police officer. One of the similarities of these people I have talked to are that they are not class conscious *.

When they consider writing and application or join the police, they are filled with the usual crap that the capitalist status quo indoctrinate people with.

Trying to "make a difference" does not neccesarily make one class consciousness.

------------
* When I mention class consciousness in these posts in this thread I mean class consciousness in favor of the proletariat and its allies; Some people are class concious and side with the capitalist class even though they are workers, others are class conscious capitalists (Warren Buffet, Leona Helmsley etc.), though people with such a class bakground rarely do not enter the police force, I think.

[Nothing Human Is Alien]

Zeppelin that proves absolutely nothing apart from that your friends politcal views contradict that of his job

Yeah, the anecdotal argument has already been refuted several times in this thread if you read it.

We have to be materialists and look at things in general, overall movements and groupings and classes, broad sweeps of history, etc.

[Nothing Human Is Alien]

So are CIA and FBI agents? Still waiting.


but in the end they still sell their labor power to the capitalist class for a living. That makes them proletarians, regardless of their relationship to the superstructure or their class consciousness.

No it doesn&#39;t. I&#39;m not going to keep playing this game. Elementary materialism tells us that not everyone who works for a wage and doesn&#39;t own means of production is a proletarian.

Whip-cracking overseers were not slaves. Foremen are not proles. Managers are not proles. Judges are not proles. U.S. Marshals are not proles. Cops are not proles. Most lawyers are not proles.

[Led Zeppelin]

Originally posted by Compañ[email protected] 21, 2007 07:49 pm

Zeppelin that proves absolutely nothing apart from that your friends politcal views contradict that of his job

Yeah, the anecdotal argument has already been refuted several times in this thread if you read it.

We have to be materialists and look at things in general, overall movements and groupings and classes, broad sweeps of history, etc.
Being dogmatic and applying Marxism mechanically does not equal being a materialist, it equals being a dogmatic Marxist with a rigid view of social development.

It is indeed important to see such things as a whole, but to ignore the individual in the process is to forget Marxism while pretending to apply it.

If you do not deny the fact that some individuals may be Marxist and still have a job as a cop, a security guard, or a soldier, then what is the problem?

I&#39;m not arguing for the fact that the group as a whole, in general, is not reactionary, I&#39;m just leaving room for individual cases.

That is being materialist moreso than just lumping them all together onto one heap.

[syndicat]

chimx:
Again, as Luis said, they may be a difficult group of proletarians to encourage class consciousness -- because some part of their job is to ensure the dominant class&#39; hegemony -- but in the end they still sell their labor power to the capitalist class for a living. That makes them proletarians, regardless of their relationship to the superstructure or their class consciousness.

no it does not. there are other classes that sell their labor power. managers and top professionals like corporate lawyers, engineers, and finance officers are hired by corporations. they sell their labor power. but they also preside over the working class, workers are subject to their control. the bosses workers deal with day to day are of this professional/managerial or "coordinator" class. in the "Communist" countries the dominating class was made up of this class since they&#39;d gotten rid of the capitalists. but workers were still a subjugated, exploited class.

[chimx]

Whip-cracking overseers were not slaves.
No, they were wage laboring proletarians.


Foremen are not proles. Managers are not proles. Judges are not proles. U.S. Marshals are not proles. Cops are not proles. Most lawyers are not proles.

Yes they are. Especially construction foreman, who do just as much work as any other worker -- if not more.


there are other classes that sell their labor power. managers and top professionals like corporate lawyers, engineers, and finance officers are hired by corporations.

Yes, they are proletarians because they sell their labor power and do not own the means of production. They help compose the labor aristocracy. They receive larger wages because it is in the interest of the capitalist system to keep the superstructure intact.

If you don&#39;t think they are proletariats, than lets figure out what they actually are. They aren&#39;t bourgeois, they aren&#39;t lumpen-proletarians, they aren&#39;t petty-bourgeois. If they aren&#39;t proletarians too, then the only thing else I can think that they are is figments of my imagination.

[Dr. Rosenpenis]

Originally posted by Compañ[email protected] 21, 2007 12:31 pm
It&#39;s really bananas to see "leftists" defending cops as fellow workers&#33; I&#39;m still waiting to hear if CIA and FBI agents are workers too.
I&#39;m having this discussion with you because I want to further my understanding of the class struggle. I think that&#39;s why we&#39;re all here. It&#39;s not my fault that you can&#39;t convince me.

I&#39;ve already conceded that overlookers aren&#39;t on our side. Frankly, neither is the police. But these people are still undeniably workers. Perhaps it would be most accurate to label them as class traitors, rather than simply not members of our class. The latter is a falsehood.


When folks start calling the determining of a groups&#39; class in society &#39;discrimination&#39; I have to walk away.

To discriminate means simply to distinguish. I posted nothing implying a comparison to institutionalized racial or social marginalization.


Cops protect private property and capitalist rule. They (along with a few other choice groups) are the state. That&#39;s their main role. All the other stuff is secondary and is treated that way (or plays into maintaining bourgeois rule in some way.. the presence of cops on the street, getting people used to following their orders.. arresting sections of the &#39;army of the unemployed&#39; to be put to work on slave wages in prisons.. etc.).

Teachers indoctrinate their pupils.


If you don&#39;t that cops are a part of the state, then you don&#39;t know what the state is. It&#39;s as plain as that. I&#39;d suggest reading some Marx and select pieces from Lenin on the question.

links?
But first, I never denied that cops are part of the state. My argument states that one organ of the state cannot be said to be more guilty of upholding it than another.


Since you won&#39;t be convinced by reasoned arguments, explanations based on cops&#39; role in society and their relation to the means of production, Marx, history, etc., I guess the only thing I can tell you is that if you ever go on strike, and it challenges the bosses&#39; system even one iota, you&#39;ll see where the cops stand... or ask the Miners&#39; in Harlan County.

I&#39;ve been chased by cops, tear-gassed by cops, shot at with rubber bullets by cops (bad aim, fortunately), received citations from cops, shouted at and intimidated by cops, almost busted for weed possessions by cops, my mother has been persecuted by cops, beaten by cops, arrested several times for nothing, shoplifting, drunk driving, driving w/o a license, etc. I&#39;ve seen where the cops stand.

[LSD]

Nah. The steel mill I used to work at isn&#39;t worth more because there&#39;s some rent-a-cop in the booth at the gate.

Actually, yes it is.

Absent that "rent-a-cop" the mill would be less secure and hence less valuable. The fact that you insist on denying this basic fact of economics would be laughable if it didn&#39;t reveal such a sickness in the left.

The point of Marxism is not to make blind assertions about the universe, it&#39;s to explain and understand. If your particular brand of Marxism teaches you that a mill with a guard attatched is not worth more than one without, then I would suggest that you aquire a new brand of Marxism, &#39;cause the one you&#39;ve got isn&#39;t worth shit.

Politics may tell you that a guard "couldn&#39;t possibly" be a "fellow prole", but to ignore economic reality to stretch an ideological message is the worst kind of hyporisy.

If you want to keep running around calling yourselves "scientific socialists" you&#39;ve got to start adding a little science to your socialism. And that means recognizing the objective reality around you.

The above applies in more places than this dispute, of course -- specifically I would point to the repeated failures of the "workers&#39; state" paradigm -- but this thread provides a perfect example all on its lonesome.

Real estate fact tells us that houses with guards are worth more than ones without... and yet you deny it. That means that either the facts are lying, or your ideology is.

I think you know which on I tend to trust...


Similarly, the security guard who harasses customers leaving the dollar store a few blocks up from here (i.e. checking their bags, asking to see receipts and products, etc.) isn&#39;t adding any value to the dollar store or its products.

Of course he is. He isn&#39;t adding value to the products, obviously, since they&#39;re already produced. But he&#39;s certainly adding value to the store.

You&#39;re correct in that the mere action of checking bags/receipts/etc... does not generate value. And if that were all that the security guard did, you would be correct in dismissing his function as non-proletarian. But because he also provides security labour, he does in fact increase the surplus value generated by the store itself.

His job has certain mangerial qualities to it and that does lend itself towards a petty-bourgeois mindset, which again I suspect is what&#39;s really at the root of this campaign for you, but the function of his work is nonetheless still proletarian.



On the question of the gated community itself (assuming we&#39;re talking about wage-working security guards hired in mass by a landowner of the whole &#39;gated community&#39; for example)... again, the security guard (like the gate&#33;) is there because there are things of worth to be protected

It&#39;s interesting that you would compare the security guard to the gate since you&#39;re entirely correct in surmising that they preform similar functions.

However, while I would imagine that you would accept without hesistation the proposition that adding a secure gate around a property would increase its value, for some reason you have trouble accepting that the same is true for the guard.

And yet both still preform the same function.

Obviously no one is going to place a guard outside of a worthless property; but if, hypothetically, one were to, that property would increase in value. That is, if I tooke a shack somewhere in the middle of nowhere and hired a million dollars worth of security to protect it, that shack would skyrocket in value.

Why? Because suddenly people would be interested in it. I may not have anything important in it, but all that security means that it would be perfect for someone who does have important stuff to keep and nowhere to put it.

Really just look at this logically. Why are South Africans paying millions of dollars to live in guarded private gated communities? That is, why are those properties worth so much more than their ungated neighbours?

The plumbing? The Tiling? Or could it be the security??? Security that as often takes the form of a human guard as it does some technilogical marvel.


And the value of the real estate would go up because of multiple issues (none of them being the presence of Secret Service members after the fact&#33;)

That is objectively and demonstrably false. A house with a hellipad is obviously worth more than one without, as is one with a towering guard post fitted with towering federal guardsmen.


No, you&#39;re confused here. Not everyone who provides a service is a prole

No, but everyone who produces surplus value is.


Yes, they do. Protecting a single piece of private property is still protecting private property

No, it&#39;s protecting a single piece and while that difference may be purely smantical to you, it has an enormous practical difference. That difference being while a security guard will chase you off his employers property, he doesn&#39;t have the legal authority to capture you, beat you, and imprison you against your will; cops do.

That&#39;s what it really means to "protect private property", to have the judicial authority to force the wheels of capital to keep spinning. And while a security guard can play at that game, in the end he&#39;s got no more power than you or I. Certainly, he&#39;s in no greater control over the means of production.

I understand that the distinction can be somewhat subtle, but do try to understand because it&#39;s quite important. Protecting a single implement of an institution is vastly different from protecting the very existance of that institution itself.

After all, like it or not, you are engaged in the business of protecting private property. That is, while I know very little about you I suspect that there are things in this world that you own and that you would not be too pleased should someone take them without your permisssion.

But no one, not even the most ardent whack-job MIM nutter would claim that a worker cedes his proletarian status when he chases a robber out of his home.


Before you said security guards create surplus value, now you say they are hired to protect things that already have worth...

That&#39;s rich, trying to accuse me of contradicting myself when I explicitly stated that security guards both generate value and protect already valuable things.

But in case your memory is failing you, allow me to repeat myself:

Originally posted by me
Actually it&#39;s both.

You&#39;re right, no one is going to hire a guard to protect something worthless, but that&#39;s an issue of practicality not economics. The economic reality is that any piece of property will increase in value in correlation to any increase in security.

And while that secutity could take the form of walls or alarm systems or any other manner of concrete property, it can just as well take the form of a human security guard.

That&#39;s why homes within "gated communities" are worth more than those without. It&#39;s also why American presidential nominees properties tend to dramatically increase in value upon their nomination; having a round the clock secret service guard is worth a great deal.

The point of Marxian economics is not to make disconnected assertions about theory, but to describe and explain how the real world works; and in the real world, security guards do generate surplus value, value which is in turn funneled into the hands of the capitalists.

By any reasonble definition, that makes them workers.

Now, you can rightfully point out that security guards insofar as the protect physical capital play a role in the maintanance of the capitalist state and economy, but that is equally true with many other occupations, some uncontrovertably proletarian.

The nature of developed economies is that they are fundamentally interconnected, the bourgeoisie&#39;s ability to keep the lights on and to hold a monopoly on violence is far more important to their continued rule than their ability to guard a Wal-Mart.

And yet no one would contend that a reactor operator or a Lockheed assemblyman is anything but a worker.


Oh, and if you think being a security guard is &#39;manual labor,&#39; you should crawl into the back of a 90 degree semi and unloaded boxes with me for a few hours someday.

...and when I was a kid I had to walk to school barefoot in the snow, uphill, both ways. :rolleyes:

If this thread is going to turn into another insufferable prole-off, let me know now, &#39;cause that shit is so incredibly fucking tired.

And as for your "argument", I don&#39;t think it really even needs serious refuting. I mean you&#39;re smart enough to know that "hardness" is not a criterion for what defines a worker.

Fucking is undeniably easier than mining, but that doesn&#39;t make a prostitute any less of a worker than a miner. Neither does the relative ease to which you (debatably&#33;) ascribe to guarding make a security guard not a worker.

But then you knew that, you just wanted an opportunity to flex your "worker" muscles since that&#39;s all that justifies your fetishistic existence.


Yeah, you&#39;re right. The woman who sits in a chair at the warehouse I work at, getting up only to search every worker that leaves, because -- and I quote -- "we live in a dishonest society" -- definitely has the same role in society as my co-workers and I, who ensure that your latest order from Amazon arrives in your mail box.

I don&#39;t know what you mean by "role" in that context, but if you mean that you are both workers, you&#39;re entirely correct.

And, by the way, scabs are workers too. They&#39;re not particularly human workers, but to deny that they are economically proletariat is absurd. Just as absurd, in fact, as claiming that "the woman" mentioned above is not a worker.


I see that this shit works with some other people on the board (who probably just grow tired of dealing with your incredibly long and drawn out posts much of the time), but it won&#39;t work with me. You can&#39;t just make some assertions (based on the "authority" your post count?) and throw in some italics and bolds and expect me to roll over.

:lol:

[syndicat]

me: "there are other classes that sell their labor power. managers and top professionals like corporate lawyers, engineers, and finance officers are hired by corporations."

chimx:

Yes, they are proletarians because they sell their labor power and do not own the means of production. They help compose the labor aristocracy. They receive larger wages because it is in the interest of the capitalist system to keep the superstructure intact.

If you don&#39;t think they are proletariats, than lets figure out what they actually are. They aren&#39;t bourgeois, they aren&#39;t lumpen-proletarians, they aren&#39;t petty-bourgeois. If they aren&#39;t proletarians too, then the only thing else I can think that they are is figments of my imagination.

in capitalism there are three main classes. there is the capitalist class who own the means of production. this structure of ownership gives them a great deal of power, to accumulate wealth because proletarians can be forced to seek work in their firms.

however, the owners wouldn&#39;t make anything if the workers fuck off or work at whatever pace they want. so there is a third structure of power, the relative monopolization of the conceptualization, planning work and decision-making authority in a third class, the coordinator class. this includes the managers and the top professionals who also have a lot of influence over how firms or the state are run, such as lawyers, engineers, finance officers.

within capitalism this class is in an intermediate position, subordinate to the capitalists, but has a realm of power over the workers. the coordinators are the bosses we deal with day to day.

there is also the small business class, a fraction of the capitalists who have to do their own management and business planning because of lack of resources.

in extreme circumstances there can be a coordinator class that is the top class in society. this is exactly what happened in all the socalled "Communist" countries. the coordinator class became the ruling class. in the "Communist" countries the capitalists had been expropriated but the working class was not in power. it was the coordinator class that ended up in control. workers remained a subordinated and exploited class.

the coordinator class hadn&#39;t differentiated itself and grown sufficiently in Marx&#39;s lifetime for him to have developed a theory of this class, of the basis of its class position.

[Die Neue Zeit]

Since Voz, Companero, and others here have brought up the relationship to production, I&#39;ll ask this: what about kindergarten and elementary-school teachers?

They do squat to expand capital (unless one really stretches the concept of a "long-term investment"), just like security guards, cops, AND FIREFIGHTERS.

[RNK]

But they do form part of the machinery that, from birth, engineers us to be good little labourers for capitalism&#39;s use.

[The Author]

Cops and security guards are not workers. They are a part of the state apparatus, which seeks to keep the proletariat under shackles. They are valued for such a purpose, for "security."

CompañeroDeLibertad is correct. To add to his quotations on Marx, I&#39;ve reproduced a Babelfished translation of the article on "Police" from the Great Soviet Encyclopedia, Third Edition, Russian Language.


Police
(Ger. Polizei, from the Greek. polit1.ia - management of state, administration), in the exploiter states the system of the special organs of supervision and coercion, and also punitive troops of internal designation, which guard the existing social system by the direct and open suppression. K. Marx noted that P. - one of that most early designating is indicative state; for example, in ancient Athens "... the public authority initially existed only as the police, which is so old as state... " (Marx K. and Engels F., works, 2 publ., Vol. 21, s. 118). For the averages it is age-long characteristically greatest development p., especially under the conditions of police state the epoch of absolutism. The bourgeoisie, after conquering the authority, preserved and improved p., which similar to army became the stronghold of bourgeois state. Being one of the main instruments of state, it in the exploiter society is always isolated from the people and is hostile to it.

In Russia p. as independent organization it was founded by Peter I into 1718 and were divided into the general, that controlled the order (its criminal-investigation departments they conducted investigations according to the criminal cases), and political (information and guarding departments). There were also special services p. (palace, port, fair , etc.). Management p. achieved the Ministry of Internal Affairs, where there was a special department of the police. Urban police administrations headed by police chief entered into its system; police parts and the sections, which were being headed by the particular and district police officers (overseers); neighborhoods and low component - posts of policemen. In the county cities and the districts the organs p. entered into the police administrations (headed by district police officer), which were being subordinated to governor. This entire hierarchical system was allotted by wide authorities, in connection with how V. i. Lenin it noted that the "tsarist autocracy is an autocracy of the police" (complete meeting works, 5 publ., Vol. 7, s. 137).

In the modern capitalist states p. it is used mainly in the fight against the revolutionary and working class movement, against the democratic progressive forces. There are 2 forms of the national police systems: centralized (Austria, France, Finland and other.) and decentralized (Great Britain, THE FRG, etc.). In the basic directions of activity p. conditionally it is possible to isolate: P. of control; P. of safety; criminal p.; administrative (office) p.; political (secret) p.; military p. in THE USA federal p. it consists of the FBI (FBI) and of number of other police departments, which form part of different ministries; P. of states is subordinated, as a rule, directly to governor; local, p., most numerous, consists of the police services of counties and urban municipalities. P. of Great Britain enters into the system of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, its operational staff - London administration of criminal investigation (Skotlend yard). In the cities and the counties functions P. formal&#39;no&#39;s local autonomous police systems there exist in Scotland and North Ireland. In France police establishments are subordinated to general board national p., which forms part the Ministry of Internal Affairs (on the special position it is located the prefecture p. of Paris).

In the bourgeois states is located particular p., which guards large industrial, transport, bank and other objects, and also achieving a particular criminal search.

Military p., police service in ground forces of the armed forces of some foreign states (in THE USA, Great Britain, FRG, etc.). On it are laid control of the motion on the highways, the detention of soldiers, who remained their parts, which arbitrarily left part, deserters and of other, the protection concluded soldiers, averting and investigation of crimes, the evacuation of prisoners of war and the like of subdivision and part military p. are used also as troops of internal designation. P. existed in the Russ. army into 17 - the beginning of 19 substances, into 1815 it was substituted with field gendarmery.

Term "P." it adapts also in some socialist states (for example, people p. in GDR); however, in these states p. is the instrument of the protection of the basic interests of workers, fulfills the same functions as the police in THE USSR.

4. M. bel&#39;son.

[Nothing Human Is Alien]

I&#39;m not going to respond to most of this. A lot of it is just crazy. All sorts of stuff emerges here on RevLeft that is so far out of the &#39;norm&#39; of even any semblance of the left... You&#39;ll notice that many posters--including some of the better ones here--just give up after a while, because they can&#39;t be bothered with responding to tedious, drawn out posts and people that simply reassert falsehoods over and over in a hundred different ways.

If anyone with a basic grasp of class relations wants to dig through the muck in this thread and post, I welcome them.

I&#39;ll just suggest that interested comrades read over this thread and Marx, Engels, Lenin, etc.


Teachers indoctrinate their pupils.

They also make them better educated and increase their ability to produce. When they work for private schools and universities, they make money for the owners.


I&#39;m not arguing for the fact that the group as a whole, in general, is not reactionary, I&#39;m just leaving room for individual cases.

Okay. But why? That goes without saying.. or sometimes, as in the case of this thread. with saying, several times.


If you do not deny the fact that some individuals may be Marxist and still have a job as a cop, a security guard, or a soldier, then what is the problem?

The problem would be figuring out why they would be &#39;a Marxist&#39;? Why would someone support a revolution that would be against their immediate interests? This is something you have to address.


links?

The State and Revolution, The Communist Manifesto, The Paris Commune, etc.


But first, I never denied that cops are part of the state. My argument states that one organ of the state cannot be said to be more guilty of upholding it than another.

If cops are a part of the state, they cannot be workers. The capitalist state is not made up proletarians. Teachers don&#39;t break strikes and imprison people for a living. They educate them.


I&#39;ve already conceded that overlookers aren&#39;t on our side. Frankly, neither is the police. But these people are still undeniably workers. Perhaps it would be most accurate to label them as class traitors, rather than simply not members of our class. The latter is a falsehood.

Even if I had zero independent understanding of class relations, I would tend to defer to Marx, Engels, et al over you.

I&#39;m afraid your assertions, themselves based on a misunderstanding of the very theories of Marx, Engels, et al, aren&#39;t superior.


what about kindergarten and elementary-school teachers?

They teach children about basic social relations, adding, subtracting, etc. Things that make more productive workers later on, establish the basis for some to go on to become petty-bourgeois employees, etc.

In private schools they create surplus value for the owners.

They&#39;re no different from other workers.


Actually, yes it is.

Well, there you have it. It&#39;s true because LSD the guru says so. He used bold, so it must be true.


You&#39;re correct in that the mere action of checking bags/receipts/etc... does not generate value. And if that were all that the security guard did, you would be correct in dismissing his function as non-proletarian. But because he also provides security labour, he does in fact increase the surplus value generated by the store itself.

That is all does. He does nothing more. Other security guards play a very similar role.


However, while I would imagine that you would accept without hesistation the proposition that adding a secure gate around a property would increase its value, for some reason you have trouble accepting that the same is true for the guard.

So, a gate is a proletarian too? Or can non-proletarians and even objects create surplus value now? You said that "but everyone who produces surplus value is [a prole]," so let me know how this works.

They may sound like crazy questions, but in a thread where people are saying cops, security guards, foremen, managers, overseers of chattel slaves, etc. are workers, I gotta ask.. if only to see what people say.

I think really, you accept what I said earlier that real estate doesn&#39;t work like everything else. The gate is put there because the property has value. The property doesn&#39;t have value because there&#39;s a gate.

And no one puts &#036;1 million worth of security outside of a shack. It doesn&#39;t happen. Your hypothesis is bogus.

Otherwise, that would be the easiest way to grow infinitely rich, right? You could just keep buying worthless property and putting security guards on it, and then sell it for much more. You could do this forever, until you surpassed Bill Gates and Slim Helu. Why hasn&#39;t Greenspan thought of this?&#33;? :lol:


Really just look at this logically. Why are South Africans paying millions of dollars to live in guarded private gated communities? That is, why are those properties worth so much more than their ungated neighbours?

Because they have things that are worth money that they want protected from the masses of poor people. If you transplanted one of the numerous shacks full of tattered clothes into one of these gated/guarded communities, they would still be shacks. It sure wouldn&#39;t become transformed into an expensive house full of precious gems from &#39;security labor.&#39;


No, but everyone who produces surplus value is.

Right. And water is wet. I guess if you just state a fact after a quote it makes it look like you won a debate....


No, it&#39;s protecting a single piece and while that difference may be purely smantical to you, it has an enormous practical difference. That difference being while a security guard will chase you off his employers property, he doesn&#39;t have the legal authority to capture you, beat you, and imprison you against your will; cops do.

At this point I&#39;m not sure if you are really just misunderstanding me or purposely trying to cause confusion.

Obviously the jobs of protecting the institution of private property and protecting a single piece of private property are different. No one said otherwise.

I originally said that security guards protect private property. You said I was wrong because they don&#39;t protect all private property. I said that someone who protects a single of piece of private property can still be said to be protecting private property. If I said my wife sails ships, that doesn&#39;t mean she sails every ship on earth. If a farmer sees you on his land and says &#39;this is private property,&#39; he doesn&#39;t mean that his farm is all private property.

Basic stuff, and it&#39;s really a distraction from the questions at hand, I just wanted to clarify.


After all, like it or not, you are engaged in the business of protecting private property.

No, sorry, I&#39;m not.


That is, while I know very little about you I suspect that there are things in this world that you own and that you would not be too pleased should someone take them without your permisssion.

Personal possessions are not the same as private property in the sense that communists use the term. I&#39;m pretty sure you know that.


But no one, not even the most ardent whack-job MIM nutter would claim that a worker cedes his proletarian status when he chases a robber out of his home.

Great. What does that have to do with this discussion??


If this thread is going to turn into another insufferable prole-off, let me know now, &#39;cause that shit is so incredibly fucking tired.

Especially for people who have never worked a day in their lives.

Have you ever worked? That&#39;s a serious question. I&#39;m curious.


But then you knew that, you just wanted an opportunity to flex your "worker" muscles since that&#39;s all that justifies your fetishistic existence.

No, I simply wanted to clarify that sitting in a chair is not &#39;manual labor&#39;. Sorting mail, building houses, mining, etc., are. I&#39;d imagine it would be hard to find even a security guard who would say otherwise. It seems to me that only a person who never did either would have trouble understanding the difference.

...

LSD goes on to reassert a lot of the same old things over and over.

He turns things on their head. Security guards aren&#39;t placed in places with value, they actually create the value.

A rich person in a mansion doesn&#39;t hire a security guard for their home because its a mansion, with all sorts of expensive things in it that need to be &#39;protected&#39; from all the poor people, rather, they hire them to make the mansion worth more&#33;

The coke produced by workers in a coke mill wouldn&#39;t be worth as much if there wasn&#39;t a guy with a flash light in a booth a mile away from the actual process&#33;

He tries to use theories laid down by Marx and Engels (although unsuccessfully) to support some of his arguments, before later attacking a key tenet of those vary theories (i.e. the need for a workers&#39; state, which he asserts has proved a failure, as opposed to the immensely successful anarchist project, of course).

From this, we get ridiculous things like "Fucking is undeniably easier than mining, but that doesn&#39;t make a prostitute any less of a worker than a miner." Well, many (most?) prostitutes are self-employed and provide a service. They are petty-bourgeois. There aren&#39;t a lot of self-employed miners.

* * *

I just have a few questions for the people still holding on to some of these insane claims. I&#39;ve asked a few before:

1. Are CIA and FBI members proles (still waiting)? Why or why not?

2. Is the President of the U.S. a prole (he&#39;s paid a salary after all)? Why or why not?

3. Who are our (for those of us who are proles) class enemies? Is everyone on our side, or are there actually people that are opposed to our interests? Who has to be defeated in a revolution?

4. Does class matter at all? Why?

[Luís Henrique]

Originally posted by Live for the [email protected] 17, 2007 04:05 am
But that does not determine class, ones relationship to the means of production does. There relation is that of protecting capitalist private property.
And the relation of welders is that of creating capitalist private property?

No. The relation of both welders and cops is to be not proprietary of means of production.

Luís Henrique

[Leo]

The police institutions are obviously repressive, there is no discussion about this.

However there is a significant room of discussion regarding individual police officers. A police officer might beat you at a demonstration, might come into your house and arrest you for your politics, might torture you while interrogating you, might even end up killing you in torture. However, a police officer also might prevent you from being beaten up in a demonstration, help you get away if police raid your house for your politics, prevent torture while you are in the police station or at least prevent others from torturing you to death. It is obviously a much, much smaller possibility, it is not something to rely on, but it is possible.

In the 70ies there were about 15.000 police officers in Turkey who would consider themselves as "revolutionaries" and "socialists", who organized boycotted classes at the police academies, who declared they didn&#39;t want to be the police of the state, who made posters, who discussed socialistic ideas in their magazines etc. There is little doubt that the leaders of their organization was corrupt but their base tried to save left-wing students from being beaten in the streets and from being tortured in prisons. They paid this with being exiled or even being imprisoned themselves during the coup which came in 1980.

More importantly, history has shown us that police officers can go on strike. In England, after last time they went on strike, the state made it illegal for police officers to go on strike. In fact there has been strong police strikes in England since 1918. In the Winnipeg General Strike of 1919 in Canada, virtually the entire working population of Winnipeg went on strike, the police officers went on strike with them. America also saw huge police strikes, one example being the famous Boston Police Strike of 1919 which started because of demands for higher pay and better working conditions. There was a similar strike in Australia in 1923 called Victorian Police strike, for similar demands. They had a petition which was headed "Comrades and Fellow Workers". All those big struggles happened, in different parts of the world, during a time in which the proletariat of the world had pushed for the revolution, a period of immense class struggle.

Now, lets get to do the bottom of this.

Obviously no one would support a police officer when being attacked.

Yet when the police comes a strike which you are involved in, do you talk with the police officers first and try to convince them?

When the police officers are on strike, do you support them?

[Nothing Human Is Alien]

Those are exceptions to the rule, which were already allowed along time ago in this discussion.


Yet when the police comes a strike which you are involved in, do you talk with the police officers first and try to convince them?

Of course, as long as they don&#39;t start beating people or pushing back the line to let scabs in from jump street.


When the police officers are on strike, do you support them?

No.

[Leo]

Those are exceptions to the rule

It is rare enough to be something surprising in many places but common enough as general phenomenon to prevent being classified as an exception.

Had it been one or two cases, you could call it an exception. When it&#39;s dozens of cases, you can&#39;t call it exceptional.


Of course, as long as they don&#39;t start beating people or pushing back the line to let scabs in from jump street.

Well, let&#39;s see facts here. You think that ordinary police officers are agents of capital and have no common interests with the proletariat, so you are either going to lie to them, or you will be honest and talking with them will have absolutely no point at all.



When the police officers are on strike, do you support them?

No.

Clear enough.

[Nothing Human Is Alien]

Cases of police killing, arresting, beating, and otherwise oppressing working people outnumber the cases such as those you spoke of 1,000,000 to 1. Therefor, they are exceptions.

"Engels elucidates the concept of the “power” which is called the state, a power which arose from society but places itself above it and alienates itself more and more from it. What does this power mainly consist of? It consists of special bodies of armed men having prisons, etc., at their command." - Lenin

[Saint Street Revolution]

When police officers are on strike, do you support them?


No.

As a protector of the Bourgeoise, he is a classtrading rich man&#39;s whore. But say he quit his job and was on the other side of the protest. I would support him, myself.

[Leo]

Cases of police killing, arresting, beating, and otherwise oppressing working people outnumber the cases such as those you spoke of 1,000,000 to 1. Therefor, they are exceptions.

Cases of military killing, arresting, beating, and otherwise oppressing working people outnumber the cases of soldiers uprisings of 1,000,000 to 1. Would you classify soldiers uprisings as "exceptions"? The days in which a worker is working in the factory outnumbers the days a worker is on strike of 1,000,000 to 1. Are strikes exceptions?


As a protector of the Bourgeoise, he is a classtrading rich man&#39;s whore.

Why do you think someone becomes a police officer?

[Luís Henrique]

Originally posted by Compañ[email protected] 04, 2007 01:27 am
"Engels elucidates the concept of the “power” which is called the state, a power which arose from society but places itself above it and alienates itself more and more from it. What does this power mainly consist of? It consists of special bodies of armed men having prisons, etc., at their command." - Lenin
Surely. That&#39;s why policemen have a double nature. They are workers for their class extraction, they are a weapon against the working class for the nature of the institution they work for. In any "normal" situation, the institution (and its strictly hierarchical rules) will prevail over the class extraction, and leftist policemen, striking policemen, even policemen with some comprehension of class society will be exceptional. In an "abnormal" situation - a State crisis, then class extraction may become prevalent.

To a certain extent, it is true of all workers. "Normally" we work for the bourgeoisie, and don&#39;t ask (many) questions - and even help making the working place a apathetic environment. It is when the questions pose themselves that we become aware of what we are. Policemen are just way much more protected from reality than the average worker.

And, again. There are policemen and policemen. A common traffic guard is much different from a special anti-riot unit cop (who will be certainly much more impermeable to class struggle).

Luís Henrique

[Dr. Rosenpenis]

Originally posted by Compañ[email protected] 02, 2007 06:46 pm
If cops are a part of the state, they cannot be workers. The capitalist state is not made up [of] proletarians. Teachers don&#39;t break strikes and imprison people for a living. They educate them.
Like I&#39;ve posted already in this thread, both the police and public school teachers can be said to carry out some government functions "acquired by workers". If public education is a civil right conquered through class struggle, then so is the state protection of citizens from violence, crime, the enforcement of the judicial system, and the enforcement of any law. I recall you lauding the new law enacted in the city of São Paulo a few weeks ago which bans commercial advertisements in public spaces. Do you know who&#39;s enforcing this new legislation? Cops. I don&#39;t understand why they&#39;re any less so members of the proletariat than teachers. I was almost coming around to your argument that the bourgeois state cannot be our class ally, but I simply can&#39;t grasp your double standard in which teachers are workers but cops aren&#39;t.

If you&#39;re defending a practical dissection of society according to professions and whether they tend to stand with us or against us, then you have to assume the fact that this is not linked to class in the traditional Marxist sense of one&#39;s relation to the means of production.

[Die Neue Zeit]

^^^ Right on. Let me add another example: government staff in administration (office work). Are they not workers, too?


If you&#39;re defending a practical dissection of society according to professions and whether they tend to stand with us or against us, then you have to assume the fact that this is not linked to class in the traditional Marxist sense of one&#39;s relation to the means of production.

I believe that Companero and others here quoted more from Lenin than from Marx. While I don&#39;t mind that, the relationship to the means of production doesn&#39;t have a "perfect correlation" (statistically speaking) to the relationship to the socialist revolution.

[Saint Street Revolution]

Originally posted by Dr. Rosenpenis+September 04, 2007 09:52 pm--> (Dr. Rosenpenis @ September 04, 2007 09:52 pm)
Compañ[email protected] 02, 2007 06:46 pm
If cops are a part of the state, they cannot be workers. The capitalist state is not made up [of] proletarians. Teachers don&#39;t break strikes and imprison people for a living. They educate them.
Like I&#39;ve posted already in this thread, both the police and public school teachers can be said to carry out some government functions "acquired by workers". If public education is a civil right conquered through class struggle, then so is the state protection of citizens from violence, crime, the enforcement of the judicial system, and the enforcement of any law. I recall you lauding the new law enacted in the city of São Paulo a few weeks ago which bans commercial advertisements in public spaces. Do you know who&#39;s enforcing this new legislation? Cops. I don&#39;t understand why they&#39;re any less so members of the proletariat than teachers. I was almost coming around to your argument that the bourgeois state cannot be our class ally, but I simply can&#39;t grasp your double standard in which teachers are workers but cops aren&#39;t.

If you&#39;re defending a practical dissection of society according to professions and whether they tend to stand with us or against us, then you have to assume the fact that this is not linked to class in the traditional Marxist sense of one&#39;s relation to the means of production. [/b]
Teachers do not protect the bourgeoise or their property. This is the main reason cops and sec. guards are considered non-workers. And teachers are generally exploited. Schools are very hierarchal, despite the importance of the teacher&#39;s work.

[Dr. Rosenpenis]

Teachers may not be quite as crucial to the bourgeois state as cops, but they&#39;re very close. And cops are indeed exploited.

[Rawthentic]

Teachers are part of the bourgeois state but in a different form; they are there to instill a bourgeois consciousness and the ideas of the ruling class.

[Saint Street Revolution]

Perhaps it is because I am a brainwashed slave, but I&#39;ve never witnessed obscene propoganda in my school curiculum.

[Dr. Rosenpenis]

You obviously haven&#39;t been looking hard enough.

[Saint Street Revolution]

Originally posted by Dr. [email protected] 06, 2007 12:32 am
You obviously haven&#39;t been looking hard enough.
I do see a bit bias in textbooks on Communism, now that I&#39;m looking through the history book I just got today...well school just started here, I suppose I&#39;ll look around for bourgeoise lies.

[Dr. Rosenpenis]

Try to find out the political persuasion of your teachers, of course without asking them directly. Only inferring form what they say. You&#39;ll find that probably all are right-wingers of the conservative or liberal varieties, unashamedly. You&#39;ll surely find the same general opinions among the students. No doubt a result of the influence suffered by reactionary "educators". And irresponsible parents. But also the former.

The bourgeois consciousness, as Live for the people put it, can be acquired in a myriad of different ways. Many of them very subtle. Nearly all media, to cite an important example, enforces bourgeois values. School is no different. Especially in the United States, where in my experience, liberalism and the United States are widely treated like infallible bastions of goodness.

Anyways, that&#39;s not the point.

[Nothing Human Is Alien]

Right. Teachers don&#39;t break strikes. They don&#39;t throw people in prison. They don&#39;t guard scabs. They don&#39;t physically destroy workers&#39; organizations. They are not "armed bodies." Only someone with a complete lack of understand of what a state is would think that teachers are a part of it.

The state is the "institution of organised violence which is used by the ruling class of a country to maintain the conditions of its rule." That&#39;s a long established truth..

Lenin wrote "the state is an organ of class rule, an organ for the oppression of one class by another." Teachers aren&#39;t parts of an organ for the oppression of one class by another. To make it even more clear, Lenin wrote: "A standing army and police are the chief instruments of state power."

Marx wrote "the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery, and wield it for its own purposes." In that same piece he said, "The centralized state power, with its ubiquitous organs of standing army, police, bureaucracy, clergy, and judicature..."

He didn&#39;t say anything about teachers..

On them, he wrote "...a schoolteacher is a productive labourer, when, in addition to belabouring the heads of their scholars, they work like a horse to enrich the school proprietor. That the latter has laid out their capital in a teaching factory, instead of in a sausage factory, does not alter the relation," and "If I buy the service of a teacher not to develop my faculties but to acquire some skill with which I can earn money—or if others buy this teacher for me—and if I really learn something (which in itself is quite independent of the payment for the service), then these costs of education, just as the costs of my maintenance, belong to the costs of production of my labour-power."

That confirms what I said earlier in the thread, namely: "Some teachers do produce surplus value, and some don&#39;t" & "unproductive teachers ... are a necessary part of the capitalist system, though, as it progresses. Capitalists needed more skilled workers, and workers were demanding public education, so out of that came public schools."

I already explained the reasons for all of this. If you don&#39;t want to accept them, there&#39;s not a lot I can do.. but just don&#39;t go around claiming to be a communist if you&#39;re going to reject basic tenets of the ideology.

[Nothing Human Is Alien]

And yeah, teachers&#39; ideological outlooks have nothing to do with determining their class. Even if your completely unscientific guess that all teachers "probably all are right-wingers" was true, it doesn&#39;t show whether or not they belong to the state.

Most auto workers in the U.S. are liberals, are you going to tell me that means they belong to the state? Maybe they do, since they impart "the bourgeois consciousness" into their children&#33; :lol:

[Die Neue Zeit]

Originally posted by Compañ[email protected] 05, 2007 05:52 pm
Lenin wrote "the state is an organ of class rule, an organ for the oppression of one class by another." Teachers aren&#39;t parts of an organ for the oppression of one class by another. To make it even more clear, Lenin wrote: "A standing army and police are the chief instruments of state power."

Marx wrote "the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery, and wield it for its own purposes." In that same piece he said, "The centralized state power, with its ubiquitous organs of standing army, police, bureaucracy, clergy, and judicature..."
Again, you quote more Lenin than Marx. Now, on to "bureaucracy," which you quoted: you didn&#39;t answer my question regarding "government staff in administration (office work)."

[Nothing Human Is Alien]

No, I quoted Marx much more than Lenin. Maybe you should reread the post. And why does that matter? Both had a correct understanding of the state.

And by the bureaucracy Marx mostly meant the bourgeois politicians of his day. He didn&#39;t mean, for example, a secretary in the office of a local politician in Wisconsin. Again, don&#39;t confuse being a part of the state with being employed by the state.

[Die Neue Zeit]

Perhaps Luis above said it best, then:


That&#39;s why policemen have a double nature. They are workers for their class extraction, they are a weapon against the working class for the nature of the institution they work for. In any "normal" situation, the institution (and its strictly hierarchical rules) will prevail over the class extraction, and leftist policemen, striking policemen, even policemen with some comprehension of class society will be exceptional. In an "abnormal" situation - a State crisis, then class extraction may become prevalent.

To a certain extent, it is true of all workers. "Normally" we work for the bourgeoisie, and don&#39;t ask (many) questions - and even help making the working place a apathetic environment. It is when the questions pose themselves that we become aware of what we are. Policemen are just way much more protected from reality than the average worker.

And, again. There are policemen and policemen. A common traffic guard is much different from a special anti-riot unit cop (who will be certainly much more impermeable to class struggle).

Thanks for clearing the mist a bit. :)

[Dr. Rosenpenis]

Originally posted by Compañ[email protected] 05, 2007 09:52 pm
The state is the "institution of organised violence which is used by the ruling class of a country to maintain the conditions of its rule." That&#39;s a long established truth..
Fair enough... I&#39;ll gladly alter my lexical choices to fit this definition.
Regardless, if public school teachers are not part of the state for not using violence, then they&#39;re still an institution used by the ruling class of a country to maintain the conditions of its rule.


"A standing army and police are the chief instruments of state power."

I don&#39;t disagree with this at all. There&#39;s no doubt that the military and the police are the crux of the defense of the state, but that doesn&#39;t mean that other organs cannot also carry out this function. Namely everyone who works for the government, who is unarguably in a way contributing directly to its perpetuation.

[apathy maybe]

I&#39;m really confused how some people read Marx around here. You get people claiming that managers are small capitalists, then you get people claiming that cops and such filth aren&#39;t part of the proletariat (they certainly don&#39;t own capital do they?).

My understanding of Marx&#39;s state is not that it is apart from the class struggle (with those who are part of it similarly apart), but rather, it is an instrument of class rule. Those who are part of the state (politicians, cops etc.) thus belong to a class. The question is which one.

Sure cops are tools of the state (and thus the capitalists), sure they are not on the side of the majority of workers, but neither of these makes them any more capitalist (part of the bourgeois). Their reliance on working to earn a living surely puts them squarely in the proletariat (regardless of their actual class allegiance).

OK, so I&#39;ll read the whole thread and respond.

Originally posted by CdL+--> (CdL)Security guards, like police and prison guards, do not expand capital, they "service the personal or administrative needs of capitalists."[/b]By this definition of course, hairdressers are not part of the proletariat. Interesting... Of course, you sidestepped this earlier, claiming it depended on who they worked for. In fact, I haven&#39;t seen a clear answer as to which class hairdressers are part of, or manicurists (who would I imagine only service the rich, but only a fraction would actually own the business, the most being employed).


Originally posted by [email protected]
It&#39;s a question of &#39;what I say,&#39; but of objective reality. All those mentioned, along with bouncers, bailiffs, etc., belong to the oppressive bourgeois apparatus.But surely they belong to a class at the same time, after all, the state is not apart from classes... So, which class do they belong to? I think you would claim the small capitalists (petit-bourgeois), yet that is based on reading "replaced" as "become" in a single piece (or at least that is all you have quoted) of work. Strange...


In countries where modern civilisation has become fully developed, a new class of petty bourgeois has been formed, fluctuating between proletariat and bourgeoisie, and ever renewing itself as a supplementary part of bourgeois society. The individual members of this class, however, are being constantly hurled down into the proletariat by the action of competition, and, as modern industry develops, they even see the moment approaching when they will completely disappear as an independent section of modern society, to be replaced in manufactures, agriculture and commerce, by overlookers, bailiffs and shopmen.
I wonder what "disappear" and "replaced" mean in this context? I wonder...


CdL
1. Are CIA and FBI members proles (still waiting)? Why or why not?
2. Is the President of the U.S. a prole (he&#39;s paid a salary after all)? Why or why not?
Well, what is their relation to the means of production?(&#33;) Do they own any capital? Are they forced to sell their labour to survive? Their relation to the state surely has nothing to do with the matter, within a Marxian analysis. I think chimx has put the matter well...

Of course, it is my opinion that this entire discussion highlights some of the flaws of Marxian analysis&#33; Where do those who hold power but aren&#39;t obviously part of one of the traditional Marxian classes fit? (For example.)

Though, if you separate those who work for the state into another class (apart from the bourgeois and the proletariat), then perhaps you might be onto something. Cops, judges, and so on, they are part of the "state class", they don&#39;t own any means of production (which is what Marxian analysis is all about...), yet they protect it. Not traditional, but it could work.

It is a pity that no Marxist will actually come out and so something like that.

[Die Neue Zeit]

Originally posted by apathy [email protected] 07, 2007 07:01 am
Of course, it is my opinion that this entire discussion highlights some of the flaws of Marxian analysis&#33; Where do those who hold power but aren&#39;t obviously part of one of the traditional Marxian classes fit? (For example.)

Though, if you separate those who work for the state into another class (apart from the bourgeois and the proletariat), then perhaps you might be onto something. Cops, judges, and so on, they are part of the "state class", they don&#39;t own any means of production (which is what Marxian analysis is all about...), yet they protect it. Not traditional, but it could work.

It is a pity that no Marxist will actually come out and so something like that.
^^^ Um, I&#39;m sorta open to that possibility. <_<

Marx listed AT LEAST four classes (petit bourgeoisie and lumpenproletariat). I&#39;d like to pose whether perhaps the police can be considered "legalized" lumpenproles. Lumpenproles do not enhance capital, but simply protect it (gangsters preying on proles, beggars simply begging, etc.).

On the other hand, they also earn a wage.

[Vargha Poralli]

Originally posted by Hammer
I&#39;d like to pose whether perhaps the police can be considered "legalized" lumpenproles. Lumpenproles do not enhance capital, but simply protect it (gangsters preying on proles, beggars simply begging, etc.).

On the other hand, they also earn a wage.

In India we generally call them "Criminals in Uniform". So what you says fit the police in India at the very least.

[Dr. Rosenpenis]

By this definition of course, hairdressers are not part of the proletariat. Interesting... Of course, you sidestepped this earlier, claiming it depended on who they worked for. In fact, I haven&#39;t seen a clear answer as to which class hairdressers are part of, or manicurists (who would I imagine only service the rich, but only a fraction would actually own the business, the most being employed).

lol
If a hairdresser is an employee of a beauty parlor or whatever, then s/he is producing surplus value. If they&#39;re selling their service directly, then they&#39;re self-employed and can be said to be petit bourgeois, but then again that type of work relation isn&#39;t typical of capitalism.

[Die Neue Zeit]

Originally posted by g.ram+September 07, 2007 08:10 am--> (g.ram @ September 07, 2007 08:10 am)
Hammer
I&#39;d like to pose whether perhaps the police can be considered "legalized" lumpenproles. Lumpenproles do not enhance capital, but simply protect it (gangsters preying on proles, beggars simply begging, etc.).

On the other hand, they also earn a wage.

In India we generally call them "Criminals in Uniform". So what you say fit the police in India at the very least. [/b]
That neither Marx nor Lenin really classified the police is a shame. They earn wages and/or salary, but they&#39;re "part of the state apparatus." Unless one explicitly redefines the term "bourgeois," but that would do against the so-called "simplification of class relations" under capitalism.

So, there&#39;s only one other option, since one other class explicitly protects capital and does nothing else (in terms of enhancement).

Lumpenproletariat:

Any riot police
Potentially any special-ops military units (like the spetsnaz)
Political police agents in general

[apathy maybe]

Originally posted by Dr. [email protected] 07, 2007 07:45 pm

By this definition of course, hairdressers are not part of the proletariat. Interesting... Of course, you sidestepped this earlier, claiming it depended on who they worked for. In fact, I haven&#39;t seen a clear answer as to which class hairdressers are part of, or manicurists (who would I imagine only service the rich, but only a fraction would actually own the business, the most being employed).

lol
If a hairdresser is an employee of a beauty parlor or whatever, then s/he is producing surplus value. If they&#39;re selling their service directly, then they&#39;re self-employed and can be said to be petit bourgeois, but then again that type of work relation isn&#39;t typical of capitalism.
They don&#39;t expand capital, but rather they "service the personal or administrative needs of capitalists."

Tell me what a hairdresser actually produces? There is a reason why they are considered part of the service sector... Sure they produce a profit, but that wasn&#39;t part of the definition given...

[Luís Henrique]

Originally posted by [email protected] 07, 2007 02:49 pm
Marx listed AT LEAST four classes (petit bourgeoisie and lumpenproletariat).
Bourgeoisie, landed oligarchy, petty bourgeoisie, peasantry, proletariat, lumpenproletariat - that would be at least six.

Though it is arguable that he saw the landed oligarchy as merging into the bourgeoisie, the peasantry as a sector of the petty bourgeoisie, and the lumpenproletariat as a sector of the proletariat. Thus we would be back to three.


I&#39;d like to pose whether perhaps the police can be considered "legalized" lumpenproles. Lumpenproles do not enhance capital, but simply protect it (gangsters preying on proles, beggars simply begging, etc.).

I don&#39;t think that lumpens, as a whole, "protect" capital. They are rather parasites. But, yes, a considerable part of police, in any capitalist society, is firmly tied into the lumpenproletariat. After all, they exist "to fight against crime"; if crime didn&#39;t exist any more, there would be no reason for the existence of police. So it is in the interest of the police, as an institution, that crime is not wiped out.


On the other hand, they also earn a wage.

But this is just a juridical relation. We should understand that social classes are social classes, not juridical classes. A person can be a member of the bourgeoisie without formally owning any means of production (by being hired as a CEO, by being married, related, etc, to someone who owns them, by being an army general, a Justice, a high rank State officer, etc). Also a person can be a proletarian without receiving a wage (wives and children of workers, unemployed workers, people who are "informally" employed, etc).

The point about policemen is that, for good and bad, they live working class lives - they dwell in proletarian neighbourhoods, they buy popular commodities (fast food and cheap housing, not French restaurants and suburban mansions - which, at least in films, are part of the job description of a CIA agent), they intermarry with other working class people. Evidently, there is an hierarchy within the police; within each corporation, with higher ranking officers in each precinct, who effectively give orders to the rank-and-file policemen; and between different corporations: we shouldn&#39;t think that an FBI agent is the same as an NYPD cop, or that the SWAT is the same as the Louisiana police.

Luís Henrique

[Luís Henrique]

Originally posted by Compañ[email protected] 06, 2007 12:52 am
Right. Teachers don&#39;t break strikes. They don&#39;t throw people in prison. They don&#39;t guard scabs. They don&#39;t physically destroy workers&#39; organizations. They are not "armed bodies."
No. They teach children to obey orders, to prepare them to receive orders from capitalists, police and bosses. They teach children to "behave well" according to the bourgeois standards of behaviour. They teach children to stay quiet and sit while someone else speaks. They teach children to spend their time in an environment similar to a capitalist factory or office.

It is obvious that the role of teachers is not as directly repressive as that of policemen. It is also clear that their role is, to a great extent, a repressive one. It is true, also, that teachers&#39; role is not exclusively repressive - they do teach useful knowledge, they do transmit civilisation. Of course the police&#39;s role is much more close to exclusively repressive: they do help old women to cross the streets, and they do help to find missing children, but that is much less central to their role than transmitting knowledge is to teachers&#39;.


Only someone with a complete lack of understand of what a state is would think that teachers are a part of it.

Or someone who has read too much Althusser.

But, seriously, you are working with a quasi-Weberian definition of State that also isn&#39;t helpful:


The state is the "institution of organised violence which is used by the ruling class of a country to maintain the conditions of its rule." That&#39;s a long established truth..

The first problem being, the "conditions of the rule" of the ruling class cannot be maintained - at least in a capitalist society - exclusively through violence; and a huge part of the non-violent maintenance of its "conditions of rule" are also a task of the State - Social Welfare and Security, education, public health, traffic, etc.

The second, and more serious problem (with reveals the liberal limitations of the definition you are using), is that it assumes a bourgeois definition of violence. Of course we would agree with the bourgeoisie that beating demonstrators - a task the State alone can perform - is violence; but the bourgeoisie does not think that firing a worker from his job is violence - even if it is done clearly as a punishment. This definition of State is so blind to the violence of specifically capitalist exploitation, which it considers "normal" and "non-violent". But we would have to go back into agreeing with the bourgeois that a capitalist factory is not a part of the State; not even Althusser dared going that far.


Lenin wrote "the state is an organ of class rule, an organ for the oppression of one class by another." Teachers aren&#39;t parts of an organ for the oppression of one class by another.

Of course they are. They teach working class children how to be working class adults, and that is an oppressive task, carried out by a State organ - the public education system.


To make it even more clear, Lenin wrote: "A standing army and police are the chief instruments of state power."

Which, correctly read, means that he thought that there were other instruments of State power. Police and Army being the chief ones, not the only ones.


Marx wrote "the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery, and wield it for its own purposes." In that same piece he said, "The centralized state power, with its ubiquitous organs of standing army, police, bureaucracy, clergy, and judicature..."

He didn&#39;t say anything about teachers..

No, he didn&#39;t. Now, was there a body of public teachers working for the State when he wrote that, or were schools mainly private at his time?

He also doesn&#39;t mention orphanages or "mental health" institutions, though I am sure that in his time those were repressive institutions - or have I misread Dickens? So I am not sure that he intended to be exhaustive in his listing of State repressive organs, or if he was just listing the main ones - the chief ones, to use Lenin&#39;s terms.


On them, he wrote "...a schoolteacher is a productive labourer, when, in addition to belabouring the heads of their scholars, they work like a horse to enrich the school proprietor. That the latter has laid out their capital in a teaching factory, instead of in a sausage factory, does not alter the relation," and "If I buy the service of a teacher not to develop my faculties but to acquire some skill with which I can earn money—or if others buy this teacher for me—and if I really learn something (which in itself is quite independent of the payment for the service), then these costs of education, just as the costs of my maintenance, belong to the costs of production of my labour-power."

Sure.


That confirms what I said earlier in the thread, namely: "Some teachers do produce surplus value, and some don&#39;t" & "unproductive teachers ... are a necessary part of the capitalist system, though, as it progresses. Capitalists needed more skilled workers, and workers were demanding public education, so out of that came public schools."

Exactly. So whether one produces surplus value or not depends of the nature of his/her employer. Now I am sure that a teacher doesn&#39;t change social classes when s/he changes job from a private school into a public one, or vice-versa. This would again be an Althusserian confusion. Whatever the working class is, it is not limited by the nature of the jobs its individual members take.


I already explained the reasons for all of this. If you don&#39;t want to accept them, there&#39;s not a lot I can do.. but just don&#39;t go around claiming to be a communist if you&#39;re going to reject basic tenets of the ideology.

If by this you mean the definition of State you provided, I don&#39;t agree it is a basic tenet of Communism. Rather it seems deeply tainted by bourgeois ideology, as explained above.

Luís Henrique

[Die Neue Zeit]

Originally posted by Luís Henrique+September 09, 2007 06:53 am--> (Luís Henrique &#064; September 09, 2007 06:53 am)
[email protected] 07, 2007 02:49 pm
Marx listed AT LEAST four classes (petit bourgeoisie and lumpenproletariat).
Bourgeoisie, landed oligarchy, petty bourgeoisie, peasantry, proletariat, lumpenproletariat - that would be at least six.

Though it is arguable that he saw the landed oligarchy as merging into the bourgeoisie, the peasantry as a sector of the petit bourgeoisie, and the lumpenproletariat as a sector of the proletariat. Thus we would be back to three. [/b]
I always thought he lumped the peasantry in with the petty-bourgeois. :huh:

[That&#39;s the feeling I got from reading Lenin&#39;s writings, anyhow.]

And a "landed oligarchy"? :huh: Aren&#39;t they lumped in with the bourgeoisie nowadays (ie, "landlords and capitalists")? Oh well, thanks for the other clarifications in your post.

[Barry]

I believe that cops and guards are workers, although they do break up strikes they also have supported workers strikes and revolutions in some countries in history. They are almost brainwashed to support the capitalist system, yet they too disagree with the government on certain issues and can aid strikes. A worker is some one who sells their labour dont they do this, are they not exploited too by the capitalist system?

[LSD]

Well, there you have it. It&#39;s true because LSD the guru says so. He used bold, so it must be true.

You know, CdeL, if you&#39;re going to accuse others of being arrogant, you might want to try being less so yourself. Otherwise it just reads like snarky hypocrisy.


The gate is put there because the property has value. The property doesn&#39;t have value because there&#39;s a gate.

At this point I don&#39;t know if you&#39;re being dense on purpose or you genuinely aren&#39;t understanding me.

But for the fourth time now, security guards both protect things already of value and generate value. Why this concept is so difficult for you to grasp I really don&#39;t know. It&#39;s no different from how a car mechanic generally only works on cars that already have value (no one fixes a worthless car), but also adds value to that car by fixing it.



However, while I would imagine that you would accept without hesistation the proposition that adding a secure gate around a property would increase its value, for some reason you have trouble accepting that the same is true for the guard.

So, a gate is a proletarian too? Or can non-proletarians and even objects create surplus value now?

Of course objectcs can create value, I&#39;m honestly astonished that you had to ask that question.

I think you may be overreading the labour theory of value here. Even Marx never proposed that all value emerges directly from labour, merely that labour is at the source of all produced labour. Meaning that while someone ultimately had to labour to create a security fence, that fence is still capable of producing value all on its own once created.

There seems to be a problem among certain self-declared "Marxists" on this board with putting the proverbial horse well before the cart. The point of all these political and economic theories is to describe and explain the real world, not to construct a fantasy house of cards.

Meaning that if your particular theoretical paradigm does not match with the real world, it&#39;s time to get a new theory. And in the real world, objects create value&#33; How else do you explain the last two hundred years of industrialization?

If a robot were not capable of producing the same surplus value (if not more) than the worker it replaced, the bosses wouldn&#39;t be replacing workers with robots.

The reason that that robot is not proletarian is that it&#39;s not human, and hence cannot be exploited, but it&#39;s nonetheless a generator of capital.

***

And I notice that for all your rhetorical questioning, you&#39;ve managed to not actually address the point I was making: namely, that a security gate does increase property value.

That for all your instance that security only guards pre-existing capital, the empircal reality is that a house with a gate (or a security system, or a guard, etc...) is worth more than one without.

Again, that&#39;s why homes within gated communities sell for more than ones without. Because there is economic value in security, whether that security is generated by human or non-human means.

You can dodge this fact as long as you want, but it won&#39;t go away. Your theory does not match reality.


Otherwise, that would be the easiest way to grow infinitely rich, right? You could just keep buying worthless property and putting security guards on it, and then sell it for much more. You could do this forever, until you surpassed Bill Gates and Slim Helu. Why hasn&#39;t Greenspan thought of this?&#33;?

I know you think you&#39;re being particularly clever, but you&#39;re actually just not making sense.

Security guards add value, but they don&#39;t add infinite value, just like with any other proletarian. It&#39;s called the law of diminishing returns, something which an "expert" like yourself should be cognizant of.

Look, if I hire a painter to paint my house, it will increase the value of that house. Depending on the specifics of the paint, the house, and the painter, that increase could range from a little to a lot.

I could then, theoretically, turn around and sell my newly painted house for a profit. That, again, depends on the circumstances involved. But what&#39;s certain is that it would not be economical to now hire a second painter to paint the house all over again.

Why? Becasue the value of another painting would not be equal to the labour cost.

In exactly the same way, hiring more security guards rapidly becomes uneconomical since the value provided diminishes sharply with numbers.


If you transplanted one of the numerous shacks full of tattered clothes into one of these gated/guarded communities, they would still be shacks. It sure wouldn&#39;t become transformed into an expensive house full of precious gems from &#39;security labor.&#39;

No, they would still be shacks, but they&#39;d be more expensive shacks. And if you were to sell that shack if would be for more money than if it were not protected by a gate and a guard.


Obviously the jobs of protecting the institution of private property and protecting a single piece of private property are different. No one said otherwise.

I originally said that security guards protect private property. You said I was wrong because they don&#39;t protect all private property. I said that someone who protects a single of piece of private property can still be said to be protecting private property.

You skipped an important part of that exchange, that being the part where you not only stated that security guards protect private property but also pointed out that cops protect private property; your intention undoubtably being to compare the two.

And while you never stated directly that that made security guards "like" cops, that was clearly what you were trying to imply.

My point was merely that there is a significant difference between what a guard does (protect one single piece of property) and what a cop does (protect the institution of private property) and that the semantic similarlity should not be construed to be a political one.

So that whereas a cop&#39;s function not only requires him to enforce the rules of propertied relations but also gives him extrajudicial authority to do so, a security guard, ultimately, is nothing more than a pair of eyes and ears, providing safety and security to a given place or thing.

Therefore, while a cop is an active agent of the bourgeois state, a guard (or a doorman or a nightwatchman or a "greeter") is just a worker. The fact that the value he&#39;s generating happens to be in security is wholly irrelevent to his class status.


Personal possessions are not the same as private property in the sense that communists use the term. I&#39;m pretty sure you know that.

Yes I do, but I wasn&#39;t talking about personal propety.

I was talking about what happens when you chase someone off of your lawn, a lawn that you don&#39;t nescessarily own, mind you, but that you&#39;re living on. What you are doing is, primarily, protecting yourself and your home; but as such you&#39;re also nescessarily protecting private property.

Most people don&#39;t have security guards, and so they are forced to act as their own security.

The same goes for employees at smaller businesses. If a cashier sees someone attempting to shoplift, in most stores, they are obliged to stop that person or, at the very least, inform someone about it.

So either at home or at work, most of us at one point in our lives will be engaged in the business of protecting private property. That&#39;s not a "bad thing", however, that&#39;s just how capitalism works. We are all forced to participate, like it or not.

Which is why your attempt to make "protecting property" into a pejoritive function is so bizarre.

There&#39;s nothing either oppressive or unique in what a security guard does; rather it&#39;s something that, again, we all do in our daily lives&#33; It&#39;s just that a guard does it more specialized.

Again, that&#39;s how modern capitalism works.



If this thread is going to turn into another insufferable prole-off, let me know now, &#39;cause that shit is so incredibly fucking tired.

Especially for people who have never worked a day in their lives.

Have you ever worked? That&#39;s a serious question. I&#39;m curious.

No you&#39;re not. You&#39;re just looking for an opportunity to flex your "prole" credentials. Something which is doubly pathetic when you&#39;re communicating via an intrinsically anonymous medium since there&#39;s no way for anyone to verify anything you or I say.

But since you&#39;ll make an issue out of it if I don&#39;t respond; yes. I&#39;ve worked. I&#39;ve been paid a wage, I&#39;ve been an employee, and I&#39;ve been a member of a union.

Not, of course, that you have any means of confirming a word of that. Which is why all of this "look how proletarian I am" shit is so completely worthless...


No, I simply wanted to clarify that sitting in a chair is not &#39;manual labor&#39;. Sorting mail, building houses, mining, etc., are. I&#39;d imagine it would be hard to find even a security guard who would say otherwise. It seems to me that only a person who never did either would have trouble understanding the difference.

And it seems to be me that only someone who&#39;s fetishized the romantic image of a 1930s coal miner would think that "manual labour" was at all related to the question at hand&#33;

The issue here is not whether being a security guard is hard or even whether it&#39;s particularly manual. The question is whether it constitutes proletarian labour and, as someone who quotes Marx as much as you do should know, that has nothing to do with whether or not it&#39;s "hard work".

Again, fucking is not particularly strenuous labour, certainly not when compared with mining. But prostitutes are still workers. So are teachers and bus drivers and all manner of other workers who spend most of their working day sitting in a chair.

It&#39;s not the degree of difficulty which defines proletarian labour, it&#39;s its economic profile. The fact that you&#39;re spending so much time talking about "manual labour" instead of the means of production only indicates just how warped your understanding truly is.


The coke produced by workers in a coke mill wouldn&#39;t be worth as much if there wasn&#39;t a guy with a flash light in a booth a mile away from the actual process&#33;

No, the coke produced would be worth just as much; but the factory would be worth substantially less.


From this, we get ridiculous things like "Fucking is undeniably easier than mining, but that doesn&#39;t make a prostitute any less of a worker than a miner." Well, many (most?) prostitutes are self-employed and provide a service. They are petty-bourgeois. There aren&#39;t a lot of self-employed miners.

"Ridiculous"? It&#39;s "ridiculous" to state that most prostitutes are workers? :o

Most prostitutes are self-employed? On what planet are you living??? Have you never heard the word "pimp"? Or the phrase "escort agency? Are you seriously so deluded that you think that all prostitutes are high-class call-girls running their own businesses?

You&#39;re damn right that prostitutes provide a service and they do so, almost universally, for a boss who extracts surplus value from their labour to derive profit.

If that formula sounds vaguely familiar, it&#39;s because the economic relationship it describes is that of capitalist and proletarian; the prostitute being the latter.

Again, despite your amazing arrogance and seemingly inexhaustible supply of Marx and Lenin quotes, your actual understanding would appear to be pretty fucking close to nil.


I just have a few questions for the people still holding on to some of these insane claims. I&#39;ve asked a few before:

1. Are CIA and FBI members proles (still waiting)? Why or why not?

2. Is the President of the U.S. a prole (he&#39;s paid a salary after all)? Why or why not?

1. No, for the same reason that cops aren&#39;t. (see above)

2. No. (see above)

The fact that you think that either of these groups bear any similarity to security guards or other workers in the security field is only more evidence that you have absolutely no idea of what you speak.

[RNK]

Originally posted by [email protected] 09, 2007 09:44 pm
I believe that cops and guards are workers, although they do break up strikes they also have supported workers strikes and revolutions in some countries in history. They are almost brainwashed to support the capitalist system, yet they too disagree with the government on certain issues and can aid strikes. A worker is some one who sells their labour dont they do this, are they not exploited too by the capitalist system?
Individually, a cop may adopt the principles of proletarian revolution, and may take up the proletarian as his "class suit" or however you want to put it, but as a whole, as a reflection of the entire police organization itself, it is a tool of the bourgeoisie.

[Sky]

In exploiter states, the police is a system of special bodies of supervision and coercion, as well as domestic punitive troops that protect the existing social system by means of direct and overt suppression. Marx noted that the police was one of the first hallmarks of a state. In ancient Athens "public authority existed only in the form of the police, which is just as old as the state." As one of the chief instruments of the state, the police in an exploiter society is always separated from and inimical to the people. Lenin observed, "tsarist autocracy is the autocracy of the police." In modern capitalist states the police are used primarily in the struggle against the revolutionary and working-class movement--against progressive democratic forces.

[apathy maybe]

The police are part of the state apparatus. But unless you use a useless limiting definition of "worker", they are still workers.

They need to work to survive, they draw a wage, etc.

Just because the job is a shit one, doesn&#39;t mean that the worker is any less of a worker.



How about people who work in tank factories. They are directly employed to produce the tools that the state uses to oppress everyone. Are they not a worker because of this?

How about people who work in the civil service (perhaps Centrelink (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centrelink))? In the lower parts of the hierarchy (as a receptionist maybe)? They are directly employed by the state to further the state&#39;s aims.

Legal aid lawyers?

Just because the job is abhorrent, or part of the state, unless the individual has a position of authority (has power) in the state apparatus I would still class them as a worker.


I would, however, still fight them on the streets if they were on the wrong (state) side. I would even call them "class traitors" if I thought it meant anything.

[Black Dagger]

Police, etc may fit the general criteria for being "working class," but they are class traitors as they defend the bourgeoisie against their own, therefore rejecting their own class position to serve as lapdogs of our enemies. That makes their "class" irrelevant for our purposes. They side with and actively defend our enemies, the end.

You said 'police etc.' so i assume you are including security guards in that?

I dunno about the US, but in oz many security guards are just poor migrants, many of whom can't get their skills etc. recognised here. To become a security guard takes little training, the work is regular and the pay is ok so it's an attractive option if one needs some economic stability or to put food on the table (perhaps whilst purusing other avenues).

As LSD has explained below their role is different to that of police and so i would not group them together - nor exclude them from communist organisation (my bold):


You skipped an important part of that exchange, that being the part where you not only stated that security guards protect private property but also pointed out that cops protect private property; your intention undoubtably being to compare the two.

And while you never stated directly that that made security guards "like" cops, that was clearly what you were trying to imply.

My point was merely that there is a significant difference between what a guard does (protect one single piece of property) and what a cop does (protect the institution of private property) and that the semantic similarlity should not be construed to be a political one.

So that whereas a cop's function not only requires him to enforce the rules of propertied relations but also gives him extrajudicial authority to do so, a security guard, ultimately, is nothing more than a pair of eyes and ears, providing safety and security to a given place or thing.

Therefore, while a cop is an active agent of the bourgeois state, a guard (or a doorman or a nightwatchman or a "greeter") is just a worker. The fact that the value he's generating happens to be in security is wholly irrelevent to his class status.