So in other words, you don't have a Marxist understanding of the state. You think the organs of state terror are class neutral.
Also calling "citation needed" on your claim that the SP-USA was the only American party of which Trotsky was a member.
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So in other words, you don't have a Marxist understanding of the state. You think the organs of state terror are class neutral.
Also calling "citation needed" on your claim that the SP-USA was the only American party of which Trotsky was a member.
Intertubes came up short. Going to get some data on this Friday. I know that three days is FOREVER in Internet time, but bear with me. I promise to deliver the goods.
I'm actually surprised that Bergen didn't chime in with some of this.
HEY FRED! HELP ME OUT!
Dude, Ulysses, I am not your personal research assistant. Now, the ISO has done many opportunist things but I'm not sure if supporting cop unions was one of them. Along with most of the opportunist left, they supported the "union" campaign for campus security guards at Harvard University a couple years ago, something I would oppose.
BUT, it takes a lot of chutzpah for a supporter of David North's sinister operation to criticize leftists for crossing the class line and supporting the capitalist state! As we wrote, "David North Loves the Law" (Workers Vanguard No. 430 [12 June 1987]). North's agents sued the reformist Socialist Workers Party in the capitalist courts and tried to get a U.S. federal judge to rule on who could and could not be a member of a working class, ostensibly socialist organization!
Folks here know I have no love for Her Majesty's Right and Proper Socialists of the CWI but I consider the sinister gangsters of Healy/North to be qualitatively worse! Certainly your organization is at least as solicitous of the favor of the capitalist state's racist assassins as any section of the CWI ever was.
Then why would you want them to join you?Originally Posted by chegitz guevara
Yes but a precursor to that should be opposing the system in which they operate, either by quitting or by refusing to cooperate by "controlling" (i.e. beating and humiliating) the prisoners. Like I said, this is similar to the issue of soldiers in the military; we support them when they stand up against imperialism and not when they are a part of it.Originally Posted by Fight!
I never said they did, but many of them do, and those who are an explicit part of the prison guard staff take place in one way or another on the direct enforcement of state power.
Of course they should, but if they are keeping their job and directly supporting the state and implicitly the capitalist system then they don't actually "disagree with the capitalist establishment".
I can't believe you even brought this up. It's sort of pitiful that you're resorting to this dishonesty. Did you forget that the Russian army was conscripted?
As General Smedley Butler (winner of 2 Congressional Medals of Honor) said, "Like all the members of the military profession, I never had a thought of my own until I left the service. My mental faculties remained in suspended animation while I obeyed the orders of higher-ups. This is typical with everyone in the military service."
No doubt there are members of various intelligence agencies looking at (and even pretending to be leftists on) this web site. If I ran a capitalist-owned government, the least I would do is assign some low level intelligence interns to sites like this. So I see one of our jobs here is to put doubts in their heads - get them to question the values of their higher-ups and their command structure - cognitive dissonance. Do I expect them to all suddenly revolt against their handlers? No, not immediately anyway. But this is the stuff leaks are made of. Some agent begins to see the conflict between what he believes and his orders, and starts to leak stuff to the media or the internet. Then there are internal investigations within the intelligence agency - purges, suspicion, paranoia - maybe we can't bring them down ourselves, but we can certainly make it harder for them to function.
The key thing is that capitalist-owned media never lets our ideas be honestly discussed in public. However, in places like this, these agents may see our ideas for the first time. Exposure like this is like pulling someone out of a well, where for the first decades of his life, he could only see the little patch of sky framed by the top of the well - once outside, he can finally see the full horizon.
I just figured you kept shit like this in your bookmark folder.
I'm not a member of the ICFI, for the record. And the Gelfand Case was NOT brought by the Workers' League, it was brought by a member of the Socialist Workers' Party who was expelled for demanding answers about who was and was not a cop in the SWP. I certainly don't see the case as you do. I see it as a member of an ostensibly socialist organization seeking to expose police agents within the workers' movement, and using things like FOIA to make that happen. I find it interesting that those who oppose the Gelfand Case always side step the issue of whether or not the SWP is a cop organization or not.
Still waiting for your response on the Carleton College phenomenon. Link removed because I can't post them for another three posts.
/threadrot
Actually, the SWP constitution prohibits any member from becoming a full-time trade union official. We also argue that the armed bodies of men which comprise the coercive apparatus of the capitalist state are not workers because they do not share the same interests as the working class and have as their key role the defence of private property, so I don't think Caton would ever want to join our organization, and even if he did, I don't think he would be allowed to join.
The SWP has never done this - I don't think the same can be said of the CWI of course because the whole of their history has involved them rejecting the Marxist analysis of the state, the most obvious case of this being Militant's strategy to use an enabling act within parliament to nationalize the major monopolies and introduce socialism. Also, I don't think inviting representatives of the Chinese and North Korean states along to your meetings and receiving money from those governments (i.e. what your own party does on a regular basis) is perfectly fine or any better than flirting with the British state.
Now, I'm not saying that this is a really wrong approach. But if this man openly encouraged mutiny on active duty as a prison officer, would you still not want him in your ranks? Also do you really think the SWP would not hold even prospective meetings with him to attain his views on the matter?
Sorry but this is a gross distortion of the truth. The SWP has done this, also so have a great many other organisations in most other currents/ideologies at times, the key isn't to blatantly deny it but to learn from past mistakes.
I don't think you'll get anywhere by blatantly denying that police/army/prison officers have the potential to work against the Capitalist structure at special times of high class-struggle, with this very puritanical approach.
Well you'll have to deal without me for a bit if you're still bringing this on Friday. In the mean time the only thing that sounds sort of like what you're saying is that we supported a strike of security guards at the New School in New York, I'm not sure when.
It's an unfortunate acronym, I'll say that.
As for prison guards and police, I'm sure there are some who are sick with capitalism.
“Left wing, chicken wing, it don't make no difference to me.” - Woody Guthrie
I am sorry, comrade, but I think you are wrong. There is no need to reinforce the secterian mess that is this thread. I think the initial link did raise understandable critcism, and did so in a rather coherent manner. Sadly the same cannot be said for the rest of this thread.What? No wall of text? Disappointing JR
But I do think this is the core of the issue: what makes a proletarian? Mike Macnair takes the definition that everyone is part of the working class who is dependent on the wage fund in order to survive: workers, students, the unemployed, the pensioned. I favor this definition because of its simplicity, but it does beg the question: What about those who technically earn a wage but are able to hire and fire (managers)? What about employees that carry out the oppressive task of state rule (bureaucracy, police, army... prison officers)?
History has shown time and again that even these layers can be radicalised through the events of hightened class struggle. During revolution, it is a common sight that the state apparatus gets immobilised because of the many layers of workers that refuse to carry on. As such I think that as revolutionaries we should strive for the maximum of splits in the state apparatus.
But is this the case in SPEW here? I think not. Instead of questioning bourgeois rule, the SPEW only raises economic points (in the interview respectively: privatisation of prisons, "modernisation" schemes, union demographic, the break with Labour, prison officers' wages - all points related to neoliberal policies), never does it raise political points (for example: "why are prisons necessary in our society? what class role do they play? could we do away with (most) of them under socialism?") and Caton's "we can be left too, you know!" is less than convincing.
I think SPEW is on a wrong track here to effectively cheer for the capitalist state and call on strengthening it. I already open a discussion about it in the CWI group, but since that discussion didn't result in much, I'm happy this got opened.
For those of you that read the interview this should already be familiar:
If prison officers can't rehabilitate, all they can do is confine. That looks like what they really want us to do.
When we send those prisoners back into society under those circumstances, they will rape, rob and murder again. If we can't attempt to rehabilitate them or tackle their mental health problems, drug or alcohol problems then we're wasting our time sending them to prison.
We've said let's have an integrated system where prison officers and probation officers work together. Where non-custodial sentences deliver the same programmes as in the prisons but out in the community. But we can't do that with overcrowded prisons, filling them up with people who are mentally ill.
I think that the head of the POA has chosen to join our ranks is great news. Not only because of the labour issue involved, i e, the right to strike but because it does provide us with a man on the inside so to speak. Oh an there were jailers in the Bolsheviks aswell. The conflict between personal and political is not one most of us can afford to solve in this system. We work for companies that we dislike. Sometimes we are even state employees. Being a revolutionary is not about having the ultimate proletarian job, it is not about lifestyle. We wish to overthrow the system, you know.
Most of those that has attacked us (and really not just us, this has been a sectarian fucking flamefest. utterly boring) here don't do so because they don't think a prison officer can be a socialist but because they do not trust our socialist credentials, i e these are just secterian attacks.
"I want to say sweet, silly things." - V.I Lenin
Well, the fun of transparent platform is that sectarians just make themselves very clear to the outside world. Don't have a headache about them, as they undermine themselves really
I do think this thread has resulted in somewhat of a dynamic discussion so far though.
And this is justified criticism of the prison system of course, but it doesn't exactly undermine the capitalist causes for the need of prisons, nor does it explain the clear class character of the prison system within the role of the state within class society. These are elements that I miss entirely and that's what worries me. The above criticism can be fixed with the mild reforms also suggested above, and in many countries the prison system is working close together with probation services. Why do we need to cheer for this?
I understand the point, but it's an abstract point that, as I explained, doesn't get translated in for example the interview.
I think, thus I disagree. | Chairperson of a Socialist Party branchMarxist Internet Archive | Communistisch Platform
Working class independence - Internationalism - Democracy
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I would like to add that what I'm hoping for is that the SP can help organizing prison officers and probation officers as "workers" (i.e. those people who live from a wage) against the state they're currently working for. This would be the only correct answer to Q's concern and would make 'making the case for socialism' effective instead of something abstract.
And do you have any information regarding the Bolsheviks and prison guards?
But this is currently not possible. You cannot pospone this guy's (you know: a person, a human being - not a class) membership on such grounds.
“Where the worker is regulated bureaucratically from childhood onwards, where he believes in authority, in those set over him, the main thing is to teach him to walk by himself.” - Marx
"It is illogical and incorrect to reduce everything to the economic [socialist] revolution, for the question is: how to eliminate [political] oppression? It cannot be eliminated without an economic revolution... But to limit ourselves to this is to lapse into absurd and wretched ... Economism." - Lenin
"[During a revolution, bourgeois democratic] demands [of the working class] ... push so hard on the outer limits of capital's rule that they appear likewise as forms of transition to a proletarian dictatorship." - Luxemburg
“Well, then go forward, Tower of Bebel! [August] Bebel is one of the most brilliant representatives of scientific international socialism. His writings, speeches and works make up a great tower, a strong arsenal, from which the working class should take their weapons. We cannot recommend it enough… And if the [International] deserves to be named Tower of Bebel... well, then we are lucky to have such a Tower of Bebel with us.” - Vooruit
Apparently the French corrections workers strike recently did highlight the delplorable living conditions of France's prisons. This might just be France, though, because I certainly can't imagine prison guards in the USA striking to make life easier for prisoners.
http://www.nupge.ca/node/2266
French corrections strike highlights big prison issues
Murders, escapes, drug-dealing, overcrowding, underfunding and suicide behind unauthorized strike by thousands of correctional officers in France.
Paris (6 May 2009) - Approximately 4,000 French correctional officers have gone on strike and blocked the transfer of prisoners to protest overcrowding, insufficient funding and poor living conditions.
Approximately 120 of the country's 194 jails are affected. French prison guards are not legally entitled to strike but conditions are so serious that they have opted to walk off the job to draw national attention to their concerns.
French jails are often referred to as "the nation's shame" because of horrific living conditions, including severe overcrowding. The facilities have the highest suicide rates of all European penal institutions.
Eric Colin, a trade unionist with La CGT (Confdration gnrale du travail) describes the walkout as an initial step in an escalating campaign planned by guards in the coming days.
"We're going to block any intervention from the outside, that is, suppliers for the inmates' workshops and training as well as prison visitors," he says.
The officers say murders, prisoner escapes, drug-dealing and severe overcrowding are common occurrences inside the prisons. Inmates often sleep on floor mattresses in facilities housing a far greater number of prisoners than they are designed to accommodate.
As of April 1, French jails were housing 63,351 inmates, well above the 51,000 the prisons were built to hold.
A total of 115 suicides were reported last year. About 50 have occurred so far this year. Living and working conditions have also been blamed in some cases for suicides among prison officers.
The Sarkozy government has not addressed the core problems associated with the prisons. The problem has been exacerbated by Justice Minister Rachida Dati, who failed to deal with issues raised by the guard before the walkout occurred.
NUPGE
The National Union of Public and General Employees (NUPGE) is one of Canada's largest labour organizations with over 340,000 members. Our mission is to improve the lives of working families and to build a stronger Canada by ensuring our common wealth is used for the common good. NUPGE
You know that I know that you know that Macnair's definition of "proletarian" conflicts with my own as defined in CSR, Chapter 2.
Personally, I myself don't see individual prison officers or small groups of them as being much of a direct threat to the working class. Ideally I'd like there to exist Class-Strugglist Social Labour as well as the demographic "people's party"/front equivalent for sympathizing prison officers, self-employed, coordinators (mid-level managers, academic researches with research staff, etc.), proper lumpenproletarians, the odd small businessperson, and student yuppies.
Heck, for the prominent non-workers I'd be happy to consider giving them "honourary membership."
"A new centrist project does not have to repeat these mistakes. Nobody in this topic is advocating a carbon copy of the Second International (which again was only partly centrist)." (Tjis, class-struggle anarchist)
"A centrist strategy is based on patience, and building a movement or party or party-movement through deploying various instruments, which I think should include: workplace organising, housing struggles [...] and social services [...] and a range of other activities such as sports and culture. These are recruitment and retention tools that allow for a platform for political education." (Tim Cornelis, left-communist)
I don't think the bureaucrats of trade unions are likely to encourage their members to defy the capitalist state and go on strike. A central problem I have with the SP not just in connection with the POA but in general is that they often fail to distinguish between the rank-and-file of trade unions and the bureaucrats who control them and ultimately share the same interests as the bosses and the leaders of the capitalist state - when No2EU was launched for example they celebrated it as a case of a major trade union breaking away from New Labour and showing its commitment to a radical and anti-capitalist alternative, but what they failed to acknowledge is that No2EU did not result from RMT members demanding that their leaders join ranks with the SP, at, say, a national conference, rather it was a case of Bob Crow getting together with a few of his old mates from the CPB and starting a lackluster campaign of which the SP was a fairly small part, without much initiative from below, even at a local level. The SWP of course supports prison officers who go on strike, as shown by the POA dispute in 2007 when we argued that prison officers should be allowed to go on strike and have a union, and also pointed out at a successful strike in the prisons would be likely to give greater confidence to other workers in the public sector, in the same way that we support soldiers like Joe Glenton who defy their officers and speak out against the war, and, in the unlikely event that Caton wanted to have a meeting with us, I would see no reason to reject him, but at the end of the day I would be very dissappointed if the party let him join, as it goes against everything our tradition stands for, and neglects the fact that, as a trade union bureaucrat, and as a member of the capitalist state, Caton will almost certainly be on the opposite side of the barricades, standing alongside people like Crow, whose job it is to restrain class struggle.
I've already written on why I think prison officers are not workers in uniform in this post, if anyone's interested. Just to make it clear, I don't think I would have a problem with a prison officer joining as such, despite the reactionary role that these individuals play - my problem here is that Caton is a member of the trade union bureaucracy, which is prohibited by the party constitution, and for a good reason.
I disagree. We've done a lot of bad things, but we've never tried to use the British state as a means to win gains for the working class or introduce socialism.
"Sectarian" means putting the interests of your sect above those of the class. This thread is not sectarian, because whether it's acceptable to ally with a member of both the trade union bureaucracy and the armed wing of the capitalist state is a matter of key importance for our movement. You're the one who's being opportunist by trying to dismiss discussion of your party's decisions.
Of course I agree.I'm merely saying that if this man in particular is indeed Socialist (as he makes out by trying to join the SP), then clearly he could be a one in a million. With the power he holds, he could betray the Capitalist classes from within which would certainly be a victory for us, I haven't advocated just blindly allowing him into the party, but instead working out what his views are and what he wants, I don't think that's unfair on any level and it's what any good party should do.
Can you show me how the SWP betters them in this respect?
I think there was ultimately a half-hearted but nonetheless valiant effort at gaining grassroots support, granted it was done after that deal of organisations working together had been made.
Well, this points to what I said earlier. If you're so much better than the SP, why do you advocate unionising prison officers? They are only going to end up in the POA after all.
Indeed.
I'm not sure if you can know the full story immediately, there may be things included in him joining the SP that you do not know about, hopefully he will take a truly militant stance and act as any Socialist in his position should (what I've detailed earlier).
Hm.. bit of a strange position there if you're talking about any prison officer joining just like a normal SWP member, perhaps in some circumstances were they willing to demonstrate a true commitment to Socialism and the willingness to be militant and really agitate for militancy in their ranks..
So the SWP never said vote for New Labour in 1997? Also have a gander at this: http://www.icl-fi.org/english/wv/935/ireland.html. I don't think it's fair to deny your organisation has ever done that, instead you should admit it and move on.
Precisely, as such the attacks have not been about adressing the issue as such but attacking our organisation. i would say this has clearly been the trend as none seem to have pondered the fact that we may have recruited caton because he is a socialist. Further more, in the very interview linked, he talks about the prospects of going on strike, illegal strikes in the case of the POA.
"I want to say sweet, silly things." - V.I Lenin
[FONT=arial]Without much fanfare, the 15th September edition of [/FONT][FONT=arial]The Socialist[/FONT][FONT=arial] [/FONT][FONT=arial]announced[/FONT][FONT=arial] Brian Caton, the militant general secretary of the [/FONT][FONT=arial]Prison Officers' Association[/FONT][FONT=arial], had joined the Socialist Party. Anticipating this will prove controversial to the SP's opponents on the far left, [/FONT][FONT=arial]Stoke branch[/FONT][FONT=arial] decided to hold a discussion to clarify the traditional Marxist position on the state, what attitude socialists should have to prison officers, the police and the army and whether they should be permitted to join a revolutionary socialist party.
Brother P began with setting out a thumbnail view of the classical Marxist position of the state. He said that despite there being a wide variety of state forms, capitalist states all have something in common - be they liberal democracies, dictatorships or theocracies. And this commonality is the existence of a repressive apparatus, what Engels famously called 'armed bodies of men' that exist to defend private property and property relations. Other functions, such as the army's "humanitarian" work or the police's 'policing' are, from this viewpoint, secondary to the real reason for their existence. To emphasise these points, P read out a quote from Trotsky's [/FONT][FONT=arial]History of the Russian Revolution[/FONT][FONT=arial]:
[/FONT]
[FONT=arial]Toward the police the crowd showed ferocious hatred. They routed the mounted police with whistles, stones and pieces of ice. In a totally different way the workers approached the soldiers ... The police are fierce, implacable, hated and hating foes. To win them over is out of the question.[/FONT][FONT=arial]Do those who wear the state's uniform have a place in the struggle for socialism? Do their occupations place them in irreconcilable antagonism with that struggle?
Brother J said that, like other workers, prison officers, the police and soldiers are selling their labour power in return for a wage. This means they can be open to similar pressures as anyone else. Brother A concurred. None of these arms of the state are homogenous, nor are they immune to being contaminated by the class struggle. In some ways their organisation can prove to be especially susceptible to them. For example, there are few institutions in capitalist society where class privilege and power is as clear cut as the army, and this is the case even among the more privileged elite units. For example, the Bolsheviks were able to split and win over the Cossacks during the Russian Revolution - despite their historically being Tsarism's battering ram against the people. Similarly, the police can be won over to class struggle politics. In 1918-19 the police strike on Merseyside so frightened the ruling class that they called the army out on to Liverpool's streets to confront them. P also noted it was the sympathetic chief of Helsinki's police who hid Lenin during the [/FONT][FONT=arial]July Days[/FONT][FONT=arial].
Clearly neither are a homogenous reactionary mass, and to pretend they are - especially at moments when their interests contradict those of the state (such as the recent debacle over police pensions, or the discontent over inadequate equipment in Afghanistan) - risks driving them further away from the labour movement and firming up their support for the state. A key objective for socialists to weaken them as a defence of bourgeois interests is to establish relationships and encourage fraternisation. Generally speaking the police would find it harder to spy on, harass and batter labour movement mobilisations if their representatives had to regularly sit down with them. Furthermore, in preparation for a future period when the system is thrown into general crisis and socialism is back on the agenda it's in the interests of the labour movement that the police and army do not stand in its way. To this end socialists call for the election of officers, the right to form independent trade unions, and the right to take strike action to [/FONT][FONT=arial]break[/FONT][FONT=arial] them from their historic functions.
Brother G argued recent history of police deployment to pursue government's class struggle objectives demonstrated the uneveness of their character. It was not for nothing Thatcher drafted in police battalions from outside areas at the forefront of the miners' strike. Village coppers were too embedded in miners' communities to ever be effective as a means for repressing their families, friends and neighbours. Similarly A added the police already fraternise with a well-organised workforce everyday: the civilian back room staff you can find in any police station.
P returned to the theme of weakening the police as guarantors of capitalist property relations. He suggests no one joins the police because they want to protect the interests of the rich and powerful. While it is true some are little better than thugs in uniform, most join up out of a commitment to the ideology of the thin blue line. The SP's historic call for democratisation of the police is about limiting the purview of the police to their crime-fighting functions above high profile stunt busts and protecting the powers that be. Because it asks the police to live up to their official ideology, it's quite possible reforms and demands of this character could win support from within the force.
Rounding off the discussion, A added there is only one set of criteria that matters for any party member, and that's their commitment to building the party, the labour movement and fighting for socialism. If this is the case then membership is entirely justified, regardless of whether they're a copper, a soldier, or a screw.
Also, it turns out Medway SP were simultaneously having the same discussion. A report can be read [/FONT][FONT=arial]here[/FONT][FONT=arial].[/FONT]
What a funny use of "brother", sounds like our English comrades are in fact a church?
But an interesting read nonetheless.
I think, thus I disagree. | Chairperson of a Socialist Party branchMarxist Internet Archive | Communistisch Platform
Working class independence - Internationalism - Democracy
Educate - Agitate - Organise
