Splitting the state, the role of the police in a revolutionary period

[CyM]

This came up previously, and I think the debate was started off in the wrong way. Instead of attempting administrative action against leftists we disagree with, we should be seeking a political, theoretical debate on the issues.

The point of these debates is not some petty "victory" or point scoring, but to educate ourselves and the younger comrades, to be better prepared for the period of revolutions and counterrevolutions the world has entered into. We have to be ready for the tasks ahead of us, and that means learning from the rich history of labour struggles and revolutions, and generalizing that experience into a theoretical guide to action.

In that spirit, I would like to begin this with a quick run down of the Marxist theory of the state.

The state, according to Engels, is in the final analysis armed bodies of men in defence of the property of the ruling class. I'm paraphrasing here. But it is important of course to note "in the final analysis". Before we get down to the naked gun, there is a whole series of more "soft" organs of the state. So the courts, which work on the threat of the gun, the media, the schools, the churches, etc...

In capitalist society, the role of all of these parts of the state is to convince the working class to accept its role, and to accept "the way things are". In normal periods in history, the roles of the teacher, the priest, the member of parliament, are all more important than the role of the police officer or the soldier in maintaining the status quo.

The bourgeois rely more on the ideological support for their regime than the barrel of the gun at home normally. The gun is used in exceptional circumstances, usually reserved for isolated sectors of the working class, particularly the doubly oppressed minorities and immigrants.

In periods of crisis, these "democratic" methods burst at the seams. The working class is not willing to accept austerity without end, wars for profit, etc... The attacks drive it onto the road of struggle, and the "ideological" methods of convincing the workers to go home no longer work. The riot police, and in extreme circumstances even the national guard or the regular army, are called to save capitalism from the organized working class. Battles in the streets become necessary for the simple every day functioning of the social system. The workers' strike, reaching general proportions, threatens to shut down the entire system, and their picket lines must be crushed. At first, court orders, back to work laws, and legislated contracts are enough to send the weak leaders running to their members with a recommendation to end the strike. But as the crisis develops and those leaders are replaced by more radical representatives who reflect the new mood, the baton becomes an essential armament in the arsenal of capital.

It is at this point that our debate becomes important.

What is the attitude to the baton of the capitalist class?

What is this baton? Again, armed bodies of men and women at the service of the capitalist class. Being composed of people, this tool is not just a dumb machine. It is not immune to the crisis in society. The army, and the police, reflect indirectly the same political crisis. The army, being trained to "defend the homeland", tends to be badly fitted to the job of smashing the workers. Every use of the army at home, tends to produce crises in the ranks.

The average soldier is drawn from the working class with the promise of free education, a job, and pride. He buys wholeheartedly into the myth of his country and what it is doing in the world. But use him at home, and the myth is shattered. This is what has happened in many revolutions in history. The navy is even more prone to revolts, because of its nature as a series of factories on the ocean.

The gap between the soldiers in the canteen and the generals in their air conditioned offices opens into a real gulf in periods of crisis. "Fragging", a term that many youth find useful when playing video games, actually comes from the revolt of the American soldiers stationed in Vietnam. They would chuck a fragmentation grenade into their officers' tents. This epidemic of fragging officers spread across Vietnam, and was ultimately very important in forcing US imperialism to withdraw. The army was slipping out of their hands.

In the Russian revolution, not only did the army play a fundamental role in the revolution itself, but the skillful propaganda of the Bolsheviks demoralized the German, British and French armies. Germany opted to end world war I, because its soldiers were revolting. The british opted to end intervention against the russian revolution. When questioned by his opposition in parliament, the British prime minister explained that they withdrew the army to save it from the botulism of revolution. They risked losing the entire army sent to Russia. The french fleet revolted.

This all to say, the "state" needs to be approached with a cool head. We need to understand our tasks, and how they have been achieved in the past.

There is also the role of the Cossacks for example. The cossacks are closer to riot police. Mounted riders, they were hated for their whips and the way they would ride over protesters.

History of the russian revolution by Trotsky, chapter about the february revolution:

In the State Duma that day they were telling how an enormous mass of people had flooded Znamensky Square and all Nevsky Prospect, and the adjoining streets and that a totally unprecedented phenomenon was observed: the Cossacks and the regiments with bands were being greeted by revolutionary and not patriotic crowds with shouts of "Hurrah!" To the question, "What does it all mean? the first person accosted in the crowd answered the deputy: A policeman struck a woman with a knout; the Cossacks stepped in and drove away the police." Whether it happened in this way or another, will never be verified. But the crowd believed that it was so, that this was possible. The belief had not fallen out of the sky; it arose from previous experience, and was therefore to become an earnest of victory.

The workers at the Erikson, one of the foremost mills in the Vyborg district, after a morning meeting came out on the Sampsonievsky Prospect, a whole mass, 2,500 of them, and in a narrow place ran into the Cossacks. Cutting their way with the breasts of their horses, the officers first charged through the crowd. Behind them, filling the whole width of the Prospect galloped the Cossacks. Decisive moment! But the horsemen, cautiously, in a long ribbon, rode through the corridor just made by the officers. "Some of them smiled," Kayurov recalls, "and one of them gave the workers a good wink" This wink was not without meaning. The workers were emboldened with a friendly, not hostile, kind of assurance, and slightly infected the Cossacks with it. The one who winked found imitators. In spite of renewed eff6rts from the officers, the Cossacks, without openly breaking discipline, failed to force the crowd to disperse, but flowed through it in streams. This was repeated three or four times and brought the two sides even closer together. Individual Cossacks began to reply to the workers' questions and even to enter into momentary conversations with them. Of discipline there remained but a thin transparent shell that threatened to break through any second. The officers hastened to separate their patrol from the workers, and, abandoning the idea of dispersing them, lined the Cossacks out across the street as a barrier to prevent the demonstrators from getting to the centre. But even this did not help: standing stock-still in perfect discipline, the Cossacks did not hinder the workers from "diving" under their horses. The revolution does not choose its paths: it made its first steps toward victory under the belly of a Cossack's horse. A remarkable incident! And remarkable the eye of its narrator-an eye which took an impression of every bend in the process. No wonder, for the narrator was a leader; he was at the head of over two thousand men. The eye of a commander watching for enemy whips and bullets looks sharp.

This adequately expresses the contradictions within the armed forces of the state, and the floodgates that are opened by these cracks in a revolutionary situation.

Similar sights can be seen in the Egyptian and Tunisian revolutions. Egypt, where the soldiers had fraternized with the people in Tahrir square and were no longer fit to be used by Mubarak. On the night of the camels, the soldiers in the square were disarmed by the high command, signifying that they did not trust the soldiers not to shoot at Mubarak's reactionaries on horses and camels. In Tunisia, there were plenty of examples of police officers refusing orders to shoot and then joining the crowd. One officer was shot by his commander for refusing orders.

Many of these officers, whatever role they play in the state, join because they believe whatever it is they are told about the police upholding "justice". A huge amount of pressure exists of course, to become the biggest bastard. But that does not mean that there do not exist some useful idiots in the police forces who are "generally honest" agents of the bourgeoisie.

More importantly than their honesty however, is their class background. I don't think anyone is under any illusion that the soldiers who took up arms against the bourgeoisie in the russian revolution were "untainted". They had fought, and killed, in the service of capital.

They were the murderous servants of capital, risen up against their masters. Should we have rejected their support because they had killed our working class brothers and sisters?

Or should we accept that the entire working class maintains the class rule of the bourgeoisie so long as it does not actively understand it and the need to overthrow it. The workers at Pratt & Whitney, who make the fighter jet engines? The workers at SNC Lavalin, who make NATO's bullets? The workers who sell the iPhones made by other workers so exploited they had to install a net around the building to prevent suicides?

Approaching the class struggle from a moral perspective is worse than useless, it will prevent us from achieving our goals.

We are not interested in guilt or otherwise. What we are interested in is the fact that the entire state and its workforce, is riven from top to bottom with class contradictions. In the teachers' unions, we find a fighting section of the working class. They were once the most reactionary agents of the bourgeoisie.

When police are facing job cuts in the same austerity attacks as the rest of the working class, to not attempt to skillfully use that to draw them into the struggle against the austerity is sheer stupidity.

Do police officers own the means of production? For the most part, no. Do they come from a social background of bourgeois owners? Only a minority does. The majority of the police, like the majority of the armed forces, come directly from working class families and neighborhoods, and work only for a wage. The ranks and file are workers, no less than soldiers are. The higher officers come almost exclusively from bourgeois social backgrounds. The class division is reproduced even within this most essential arm of the state.

"Fuck the police" and "all cops are bastards" are nice slogans, but do nothing to disarm the ruling class. Splitting the state, ranks against higher officers, does. It is clear that this does not happen easily, hard enough with the army, harder still with the police. But even they can split in half in the end.

I will leave you with a final historical example, in the hope that we can have a real honest debate, and focus on the politics.

The Winnipeg 1919 General Strike in Canada, was a revolutionary General Strike. The strike committee shut the city down, and then began to issue permission for specific services. Ambulances, coal, etc... anything that was essential to the workers themselves would be allowed, and displayed a little sign that said "Operating by permission of the Strike Committee".

In other words, Winnipeg was governed by a soviet, an organ of working class rule.

Most importantly, the Winnipeg police went on strike and applied for membership in the strike committee. They refused to fire on the workers. The bosses' organization, the chamber of commerce, was forced to organize a paramilitary militia, a "committee of order" of sorts. Made up of war vets, shopkeepers, rich students, it was a protofascist gang that went around beating strikers.

But the reality is, power was in the hands of the strikers. The federal government had to intervene. For the first time in Canadian history, the RCMP was sent into a city to restore order, since they could not rely on the Winnipeg police to do it.

Before the strike was crushed, the RCMP and the Winnipeg police fought running street battles.

This, comrades, is the real fact we have to take into account when talking about how to approach the police.

We are not in a revolutionary situation now of course, but we must never forget that this is what revolution means. Not yelling louder than anyone else how much we hate the police, but knowing how to break it as an institution, by skillfully using every division and turning it against the ruling class.

[Red_Banner]

The police should be abolished and replaced with a peoples' militia.

http://www.marxists.org/archive/leni...17/apr/20b.htm

http://www.marxists.org/archive/leni...miliprog/i.htm

http://www.marxists.org/archive/leni...17/may/05b.htm

http://www.marxists.org/archive/trot...itary/ch26.htm

[CyM]

You have completely missed the point of the discussion. Please read the post before replying. There is no question that a worker's militia must take the place of the police. This is completely irrelevant to the question of their current role, how to approach it, and how to hasten the revolutionary victory.

Not to mention that splitting the state means gaining workers who are armed and trained, who can help organize, arm, and train those future militias.

Please try to stay on point, and I ask that members wishing to discuss your point start a separate thread.

[The Garbage Disposal Unit]

Alright - so there are some interesting examples in your post, but I think they're pretty historically contingent.

The Cossacks, for example, weren't just a particular wing of the state's armed forces. They were an ethnic minority, with a particular tradition of autonomy and resistance. They were, at various points, in league with and against the Tsarist state. Contemporary police in Canada, on the other hand, are grossly disproportionately white - part of a racial category structured at its base by a historically de jure and ongoing de facto privileged relationship to the state. Consequently, the odds of cops pulling a Cossack is slim to nil.

Moving forward a few years to the Winnipeg General Strike, you've got some skewed history. The police didn't go on strike, and in fact, "union officers stated they would never go on strike or sympathize." On the contrary, they were fired en masse for refusing to leave their union and sign an oath of allegiance; noble in a self-serving way, but hardly the type of class solidarity that you imply. In any case, they were promptly replaced with Special Constables. After the general strike was over, the police were generally allowed to rejoin the force (excluding those "whose conduct during the strike was such that they were not to be rehired"), on the condition that they accept the earlier terms (no union, oath of allegiance), which the vast majority did. Enough said about that.

Finally, in the case of the Vietnam war, we were dealing with an army of conscripts (which police are decidedly not), fighting in a war to which their was a militant popular opposition. Interestingly, one of the popular underground GI papers produced by conscripts was called "FTA" - Fuck The Army! Is there any indication that a similar culture exists in any contemporary police departments?

Anyway, drawing from the most contemporary of these examples, which factor was more crucial to the development of the other: the resilience of the Viet Cong against American Imperialism, or the dissension in the U$ Army? The answer is obvious. Doesn't it follow that dividing the police is best premised on a militant popular opposition to them? Is it really so unreasonable to uphold "Fuck the police!" as a slogan that could serve to demoralize and divide them? Who should we be looking to - the folk who are fighting for survival against the police and prison industrial complex, or to the police?

[Jimmie Higgins]

This came up previously, and I think the debate was started off in the wrong way. Instead of attempting administrative action against leftists we disagree with, we should be seeking a political, theoretical debate on the issues.

i appreciate the focus on trying to have a productive, clarifying debate on this.

There are a lot of good arguments in there, however, I think that it's wrong to conflate the police with low ranking volunteers or conscripts. While it's true that individuals are thinking beings and so might suddenly realize that they are on the wrong side of something, I also think there's a reason that historically you tend to see mutinies and revolts from whole sections of a military, whereas police generally seem to only switch sides as individuals.

The fundamental role of enlisted and conscripts is to be a body of armed men trained to fight. Who and how actually doesn't matter in function and so capitalists direct this force through hierarchy and discipline. The people who make up this group are generally there for money or to learn skills and will return to a life outside the military at some point (if this is different now in the modern u.s. military, that's a different debate). They can potentially revolt and switch to being a democratic body of armed fighters. The police might switch by disintegrating, but the cops can't turn around and suddenly start pulling over rich people and harassing them or breaking up mass movements of the 1%.

Police are much different. Their fundamental role is not to fight, but to control large groups of people and keep order in populated areas. The people who make up the force part of this force are generally careerists, and they aren't there for a short set amount of time or specific conflict. Their lives are improved materially if the state has more power and so if a cop has a problem with his job they quit long before a revolt happens because their daily job is class warfare. So rather than revolt and side with the workers, military officers and cops, unlike enlistes or conscripts, tend to side with reaction. While you don't often see whole sections of police mutiny, you do see them support fascist movements like in Athens or the long-standing connections in the u.s. between cops and hate groups.

I've overstated things a bit, in real life things can be more fuzzy and varied. But overall I think that the general tendency has been that while mutinies have happened in times of crisis for the military, social crisis tends to increase the brutality of the police.

"Fuck the police" is a nice slogan when appropriate (like not to make yourself feel tough, but when there is legitimate general outrage so that the slogan becomes a rallying cry) and I really care more about rallying people who are currently outraged by the police than trying to appeal to cops who may be confused by their role. By all means conflicted cops should be encouraged to quit, cop-whistleblowers are welcome and I'd buy one a drink.

[Os Cangaceiros]

You have a waaaaaaay too optimistic view of the consequences of using troops in the "homeland", I think. US troops have been used successfully several times to put down unrest with brutal force in the USA and there has never been a truly significant rupture in discipline. Yes there were some instances of "fragging" in Vietnam, and bad morale in general, but there was never any sabotage or resistance in the ranks that prevented even one operation from being prosecuted in that country, even after 50,000 soldiers were put into the meat grinder of war. Incidentally "fragging" and mutiny have occurred in just about every war, from Vietnam to Korea to WW2. The US military is mostly comprised of people who come from relatively comfortable 'middle class' backgrounds (contrary to popular left-wing beliefs), and they're not a bunch of conscripts who may have loyalties that run contra to the state (whether those loyalties are ethnic, religious, clan, etc). One looks back in history mostly in vain to find many instances of military insurrection in direct opposition to the wishes of military brass (who usually represent some sort of section of the ruling class or up-and-coming prospective bourgeoisie).

And forget the police, LOL. Their only job during an major insurrection or revolution is running & hiding.

[Jimmie Higgins]

You have a waaaaaaay too optimistic view of the consequences of using troops in the "homeland", I think. US troops have been used successfully several times to put down unrest with brutal force in the USA and there has never been a truly significant rupture in discipline. Yes there were some instances of "fragging" in Vietnam, and bad morale in general, but there was never any sabotage or resistance in the ranks that prevented even one operation from being prosecuted in that country, even after 50,000 soldiers were put into the meat grinder of war. Incidentally "fragging" and mutiny have occurred in just about every war, from Vietnam to Korea to WW2. The US military is mostly comprised of people who come from relatively comfortable 'middle class' backgrounds (contrary to popular left-wing beliefs), and they're not a bunch of conscripts who may have loyalties that run contra to the state (whether those loyalties are ethnic, religious, clan, etc). One looks back in history mostly in vain to find many instances of military insurrection in direct opposition to the wishes of military brass (who usually represent some sort of section of the ruling class or up-and-coming prospective bourgeoisie).

While it wasn't 1917, I think this downplays how widespread this was and how much it corroded the military and impacted u.s. imperialism. Enlistees and conscripts revolted, had counter cultural publications, there were military prison strikes and a general breakdown. A ship mutinied and the u.s. had to end their ground war because of the resistance to the military but also because of breakdowns within. It wasn't a straight up revolt in the ranks, but I think it reveals the fault lines and potential that exists to some level in any capitalist army. I think today, the us military has gone to great lengths to restructure and prevent a repeat. It doesn't mean that the contradictions no longer exist, but factors may be different now.

[Os Cangaceiros]

I'm actually amazed that there wasn't MORE mutiny and revolt, considering that Vietnam was a decades-long military engagement involving 50,000 soldiers getting shot down like partridges in a jungle halfway around the world, for what most have seemed like a completely pointless campaign to the average soldier. If anything it's a testament against the notion that the US military can be easily incited into revolt.

[Popular Front of Judea]

I'm actually amazed that there wasn't MORE mutiny and revolt, considering that Vietnam was a decades-long military engagement involving 50,000 soldiers getting shot down like partridges in a jungle halfway around the world, for what most have seemed like a completely pointless campaign to the average soldier. If anything it's a testament against the notion that the US military can be easily incited into revolt.

THE MORALE, DISCIPLINE and battleworthiness of the U.S. Armed Forces are, with a few salient exceptions, lower and worse than at anytime in this century and possibly in the history of the United States.

By every conceivable indicator, our army that now remains in Vietnam is in a state approaching collapse, with individual units avoiding or having _refused_ combat, murdering their officers and non commissioned officers, drug-ridden, and dispirited where not near mutinous.

Elsewhere than Vietnam, the situation is nearly as serious.

All the foregoing facts – and mean more dire indicators of the worse kind of military trouble – point to widespread conditions among American forces in Vietnam that have only been exceeded in this century by the French Army’s Nivelle mutinies of 1917 and the collapse of the Tsarist armies in 1916 and 1917.

THE COLLAPSE OF THE ARMED FORCES | Col. Robert D. Heinl, Jr.
Armed Forces Journal, 7 June 1971

[Os Cangaceiros]

^I'm aware of that, read it on libcom. Doesn't change my opinion at all.

[Workers-Control-Over-Prod]

You have a waaaaaaay too optimistic view of the consequences of using troops in the "homeland", I think. US troops have been used successfully several times to put down unrest with brutal force in the USA and there has never been a truly significant rupture in discipline. Yes there were some instances of "fragging" in Vietnam, and bad morale in general, but there was never any sabotage or resistance in the ranks that prevented even one operation from being prosecuted in that country, even after 50,000 soldiers were put into the meat grinder of war. Incidentally "fragging" and mutiny have occurred in just about every war, from Vietnam to Korea to WW2. The US military is mostly comprised of people who come from relatively comfortable 'middle class' backgrounds (contrary to popular left-wing beliefs), and they're not a bunch of conscripts who may have loyalties that run contra to the state (whether those loyalties are ethnic, religious, clan, etc). One looks back in history mostly in vain to find many instances of military insurrection in direct opposition to the wishes of military brass (who usually represent some sort of section of the ruling class or up-and-coming prospective bourgeoisie).

And forget the police, LOL. Their only job during an major insurrection or revolution is running & hiding.

I agree that that was the case in the '70s US Army, but if you see the economic developments leading back to 19th century class division in society and a mass of struggling working class families, loyalty by US soldiers to the bourgeois State is steadily declining. I talk with US Army soldiers, and every single one of them is open to and respectful of me being a communist, I'd say even more so than any other persons.

Point is, we are at a point where demands for democracy within the bourgeois state would seem like no problem for soldiers. You'd be supeised how critical and dissatisfied a lot of low level US soldiers are about the current order of things.

[Workers-Control-Over-Prod]

Originally posted by CyM:
But the reality is, power was in the hands of the strikers. The federal government had to intervene

Hah! Some power the strikers had, eh?!

I guess it's good for maintaining the anarchistic propaganda to ignore the reality that workers need political organization and leadership to actually hold power.

[Os Cangaceiros]

I agree that that was the case in the '70s US Army, but if you see the economic developments leading back to 19th century class division in society and a mass of struggling working class families, loyalty by US soldiers to the bourgeois State is steadily declining. I talk with US Army soldiers, and every single one of them is open to and respectful of me being a communist, I'd say even more so than any other persons.

Point is, we are at a point where demands for democracy within the bourgeois state would seem like no problem for soldiers. You'd be supeised how critical and dissatisfied a lot of low level US soldiers are about the current order of things.

I'd be surprised? I know plenty of veterans and I live a stone's throw away from several major military forts/installations. I'm aware that different soldiers have different viewpoints just like individuals in any large institution do, but lets just say that my experience is that the majority of service people I've interacted with...their dissatisfaction is not based even remotely on any sort of progressive or potentially radical view of the situation. Lately veterans seem to be dealing with it all by directing it inward, blowing their brains out etc.

As far as the class composition of the US military in the present day, my info regarding modern day US service men & women is based on modern data, not data from the 60's and 70's. I'd be surprised if the military was as stratified by class now as it was back then because of the draft etc, as I'm pretty sure that pulled in a higher rate of the lower income strata then there might have been otherwise.

[Popular Front of Judea]

I guess it's good for maintaining the anarchistic propaganda to ignore the reality that workers need political organization and leadership to actually hold power.

Seattle also had a general strike in 1919. A well organized one in fact. But at the end of the day both Winnipeg and Seattle were just two isolated cities in countries that had neither lost a war or experienced mass desertion of their army.

[Brotto Rühle]

The police, as an organization, have no role in the proletarian dictatorship. The armed workers themselves will handle things -- a militia -- not a police.

The police, as people, are another story. I understand the role that police may very well join the proletariat, but it's much more likely, as we see from police response to such non-threats as OWS, that the police are much different today.

[CyM]

Alright - so there are some interesting examples in your post, but I think they're pretty historically contingent.

The Cossacks, for example, weren't just a particular wing of the state's armed forces. They were an ethnic minority, with a particular tradition of autonomy and resistance. They were, at various points, in league with and against the Tsarist state. Contemporary police in Canada, on the other hand, are grossly disproportionately white - part of a racial category structured at its base by a historically de jure and ongoing de facto privileged relationship to the state. Consequently, the odds of cops pulling a Cossack is slim to nil.

I think your implication that the cossacks were an oppressed minority is questionable. The cossacks were very well rewarded for their services. Furthermore, your argument about race is flimsy in my opinion. I think you have blinders on if you think that the armed men and women at the service of the ruling class only revolt if they happen to be of a different race.

Moving forward a few years to the Winnipeg General Strike, you've got some skewed history. The police didn't go on strike, and in fact, "union officers stated they would never go on strike or sympathize." On the contrary, they were fired en masse for refusing to leave their union and sign an oath of allegiance; noble in a self-serving way, but hardly the type of class solidarity that you imply. In any case, they were promptly replaced with Special Constables. After the general strike was over, the police were generally allowed to rejoin the force (excluding those "whose conduct during the strike was such that they were not to be rehired"), on the condition that they accept the earlier terms (no union, oath of allegiance), which the vast majority did. Enough said about that.

You quoted the Winnipeg police department, who have every reason to whitewash their history. And refusing to leave their union in the middle of a general strike, refusing the orders of the bourgeois state, is an insurrectionary act. It is absolutely unprecedented for the bourgeoisie to fire an entire police force over a labour dispute. You are belittling what is quite clearly an open break between the bourgeoisie and the armed men and women who make up the state. This cannot be considered anything less than a revolutionary crisis.

Furthermore, you ignore that these police officers fired live rounds against the RCMP who came to crush the strike, and openly resisted the attempt to break it. One of the biggest mistakes made in Winnipeg, was the refusal by the strike committee to take advantage of the situation, they did not want to be seen to be insurrectionists. It is the refusal to recognize that the police could easily be incorporated into the strike committee and brought into a plan to arm the striking workers and organize them into a militia, the basis of a workers' state, which ultimately guaranteed defeat. Your attitude towards the police openly breaking with the bourgeois would guarantee the exact same defeat.

And finally, when such a defeat occurs, it is perfectly natural for the missed opportunity to drive people back into the "normal flow of things". The police being rehired under oath and abandoning their union is the logical consequence of the unions getting their hopes up, getting them to sacrifice in a struggle which ended in disappointment. In these periods, if the excited hopes are not met, people swing back in the other direction en masse. Not only do they "go back to normal", but can go very far to the opposite side, becoming extremely reactionary. The further the swing towards revolution, the deeper the reaction after the defeat. German revolution leads to Nazi counterrevolution, etc...

So quoting how they acted after they were defeated is petty and pointless. Its like saying someone was never pregnant in the first place because they had a miscarriage, so effectively, there was never a fetus. They were defeated after they rose up.

Finally, in the case of the Vietnam war, we were dealing with an army of conscripts (which police are decidedly not), fighting in a war to which their was a militant popular opposition. Interestingly, one of the popular underground GI papers produced by conscripts was called "FTA" - Fuck The Army! Is there any indication that a similar culture exists in any contemporary police departments?

No, that is not the point I was making, we are not in a revolutionary situation now. The American army in Vietnam was clearly in complete disarray and very close to open revolt. But your attitude is basically "I won't keep open the possibility that such a revolt can happen until it has already happened. Has it happened yet? No? Then it's not going to happen."

Anyway, drawing from the most contemporary of these examples, which factor was more crucial to the development of the other: the resilience of the Viet Cong against American Imperialism, or the dissension in the U$ Army? The answer is obvious. Doesn't it follow that dividing the police is best premised on a militant popular opposition to them? Is it really so unreasonable to uphold "Fuck the police!" as a slogan that could serve to demoralize and divide them? Who should we be looking to - the folk who are fighting for survival against the police and prison industrial complex, or to the police?

I think there is a misunderstanding over what I am putting forward, my fault. I am not saying that we should not resist the police, of course we should. Our first duty is to fight against the repression of the bourgeois state. That being said, we need to do it with the perspective that our eventual goal is to paralyze and split it. That does mean slogans such as "fuck the police" are useless. What is necessary is an understanding of the oppression, slogans that protest that, but not slogans that encourage pointless one on one battles.

I think black bloc tactics for example, are effectively the tactics of the undercover police. A slogan like "fuck the police" makes us think that is our direct and immediate goal, to just "fuck them up", and encourages newer activists to waste themselves in pointless activities which make us all targets for state repression. We need to have a more rational attitude on the question, and we need to instill patience and a long-term perspective in the activists.

i appreciate the focus on trying to have a productive, clarifying debate on this.

There are a lot of good arguments in there, however, I think that it's wrong to conflate the police with low ranking volunteers or conscripts. While it's true that individuals are thinking beings and so might suddenly realize that they are on the wrong side of something, I also think there's a reason that historically you tend to see mutinies and revolts from whole sections of a military, whereas police generally seem to only switch sides as individuals.

The fundamental role of enlisted and conscripts is to be a body of armed men trained to fight. Who and how actually doesn't matter in function and so capitalists direct this force through hierarchy and discipline. The people who make up this group are generally there for money or to learn skills and will return to a life outside the military at some point (if this is different now in the modern u.s. military, that's a different debate). They can potentially revolt and switch to being a democratic body of armed fighters. The police might switch by disintegrating, but the cops can't turn around and suddenly start pulling over rich people and harassing them or breaking up mass movements of the 1%.

Police are much different. Their fundamental role is not to fight, but to control large groups of people and keep order in populated areas. The people who make up the force part of this force are generally careerists, and they aren't there for a short set amount of time or specific conflict. Their lives are improved materially if the state has more power and so if a cop has a problem with his job they quit long before a revolt happens because their daily job is class warfare. So rather than revolt and side with the workers, military officers and cops, unlike enlistes or conscripts, tend to side with reaction. While you don't often see whole sections of police mutiny, you do see them support fascist movements like in Athens or the long-standing connections in the u.s. between cops and hate groups.

I've overstated things a bit, in real life things can be more fuzzy and varied. But overall I think that the general tendency has been that while mutinies have happened in times of crisis for the military, social crisis tends to increase the brutality of the police.

"Fuck the police" is a nice slogan when appropriate (like not to make yourself feel tough, but when there is legitimate general outrage so that the slogan becomes a rallying cry) and I really care more about rallying people who are currently outraged by the police than trying to appeal to cops who may be confused by their role. By all means conflicted cops should be encouraged to quit, cop-whistleblowers are welcome and I'd buy one a drink.

I have bent the stick a bit, in order to explain the possibilities to the comrades. It is clear that the police are an enemy force, and we must resist all of their brutality. It is clear that our first duty is to victims of that brutality.

We must also defend ourselves. But we must have a long-term perspective of how to split the state.

Hah! Some power the strikers had, eh?!

I guess it's good for maintaining the anarchistic propaganda to ignore the reality that workers need political organization and leadership to actually hold power.

They lost. Part of the reason they lost, is they did not have a leadership that understood they held the power in their hands. Much like the Paris Commune.

----------------------

Very good discussion comrades.

I would now like to nuance my first post, since I seem to have gotten across the original point. So I wanted to focus on the possibility and need to split the state. I think everyone understands that perspective now, and also understands that someone who holds it is not a "police sympathizer", so my original goal has been achieved.

Now I need to balance that out by explaining a bit how. Clearly, we are not going to take beatings lying down, call on people to avoid resisting in the hopes that some day the police will side with us. That would be naive, and counterrevolutionary. The reality is, when the forces of the state have split, it has been under the intense forces of class struggle. Propaganda and agitation alone will not win these jugheads over. The mass movement (not individual masked superheros), will need to defend itself against attack. Encircling their demonstrations with a ring of responsible, elected stewards, armed with the basic instrument of the picketline: the wooden sticks of their picket signs. This organized defence would both defend against charges into the demonstration, and against undercover police officers or their unconscious agents attempting to draw the crowd into pointless battles which give a veneer of legitimacy to the repression. As the repression intensifies, this mass, organized, democratic defence intensifies. In Spain, the miners last year brought metal shields and other implements from the work place. This ferocious resistance gives pause to the individual police officer. The questions about the orders he is given are reinforced by blows from the movement.

This pressure, balanced against the pressure of the bourgeois state behind him, is what allows him to ask the question "can this movement win?". It is that question which opens the door to "should this movement win?" and "should I be shooting at this movement". It is the skillful combination of democratic mass (and not individualistic) resistance, along with slogans and agitation that express the reality that the police officer is being used, that will lead to a break in the ranks.

Of course, as others have pointed out, the army is far more likely to split, and tends to split far earlier. The police, due to their training, and their role being placed against the population day in and day out, tend to be the last to split.

Regardless, I think it would be quite futile and petty to refuse to take advantage of a police strike to further drive a wedge in preparation for the coming battles.

[Workers-Control-Over-Prod]

Originally posted by CyM:
They lost. Part of the reason they lost, is they did not have a leadership that understood they held the power in their hands. Much like the Paris Commune.

...And much like even the KPD under Eugen Levine which took power to form the Bavarian Soviet Republic in the same year, 1919. But the typical argument which East and West German scholars have given, and the same one that you repeat here (i.e. that they did not have a leadership which understood that the workers' soviet actually held coercive social powers), displays a significant lack of creativity and political will.

Even if the workers of Wellington would have gone one, two and even three steps further, as the Bavarian colleagues did: that is 1) having genuinely proletarian political representation (the KPD) 2) having their own arms, and 3) the workers armed forces succeeding in actually disarming all bourgeois armed forces, making all old institutions of class rule defunct and replacing them with the complete rule of the workers Red Army under leadership of the Communist Party, as was the case in Munich.. Even if!
Even if, all this would still prove to be irrelevant if the governing policy making organization (the Communist Party) is a small apparatus, did not manage to become a mass organization before taking power, needs and is forced to rely on and integrate non-educated elements into the party apparatus to implement its policies of government. The Revolutionary 'coup' in Munich, although it was on paper just as successful in creating a proletarian dictatorship in Bavaria's biggest cities as Lenin's and Trotsky's St. Petersburg 1917 or Castro's Havana 1959, it was an order standing on no such stable political/institutional basis as the Communist Parties and revolutionary coalitions of Russia or Cuba.

The communist "leadership" of Bavaria was fully aware of the coercive 'power' that the Munich soviet had. But they had no power, you understand?

To me it's really quite amazing that you can write this long and fairly interesting and relevant revolutionary article without once, not a single sentence mentioning the need for political party building. Power, this is what is needed to change things. And we all know, power is so close. The working class has all the weapons it could wish for, the coercive social power of the strike and available fire arms. Yet, in order to actually utilize the rich resources which individual workers have today, they need to be united. Marx and Engels were quite clear about this, did you miss it, 'Workers of the World Unite'?

Communist Manifesto:
Now and then the workers are victorious, but only for a time. The real fruit of their battles lies, not in the immediate result, but in the ever expanding union of the workers. This union is helped on by the improved means of communication that are created by modern industry, and that place the workers of different localities in contact with one another. It was just this contact that was needed to centralise the numerous local struggles, all of the same character, into one national struggle between classes. But every class struggle is a political struggle. And that union, to attain which the burghers of the Middle Ages, with their miserable highways, required centuries, the modern proletarian, thanks to railways, achieve in a few years.

This organisation of the proletarians into a class, and, consequently into a political party, is continually being upset again by the competition between the workers themselves. But it ever rises up again, stronger, firmer, mightier. It compels legislative recognition of particular interests of the workers, by taking advantage of the divisions among the bourgeoisie itself. Thus, the ten-hours’ bill in England was carried.

Without first building a harmonious (democratic, free, lively) apparatus to foster the creation of a capable political/military/economic leadership which can harmoniously and cooperatively create policy to govern a whole country and a mass educated worker base which will equally capably carry them out, all this r-r-r-revolutionary talk is just that, talk.

Not only is the "strategy of patience", the creation of a mass Communist Party movement, necessary in terms of building a capable policy making apparatus for eventual government (conscious "leadership") - it is absolutely vital in gaining social and political hegemony under capitalism, as well as winning strategic concessions from Capital that strengthen the economic, social, military and hence political position of the workers against the class enemy and all people not yet in the mass party of workers and on the vehicle to Revolution and human liberation.

[CyM]

Comrade, I have zero disagreement with you, I'm not sure why you are insisting on trying to find one.

Of course I think the building of a revolutionary party is an essential prerequisite to victory. Of course it must be one with deep roots in the working class and an understanding of its tasks and the way to capture and hold power. This must happen before the revolutionary crisis so we can be sufficiently prepared to take advantage of the rare opportunity provided in such a situation.

I did not go into this, because that is not the point of this thread. The point of this thread is to theoretically arm communist activists with the right ideas, activists who, I hope, will be a part of that leadership. We must understand how revolutions unfold, and how the state breaks apart. It is this which in fact leaves us with a long history of revolutions which have fallen into the lap of the workers' leaders, as if by accident. Power was in their hands, the lack of will, or lack of preparation prevented them from either recognizing it, or from making use of it, thereby letting the moment slip. Once the opportunity is lost, the bourgeois gather their wits, and their forces, and move onto the counter offensive to take it back.

The working class can find itself spontaneously with power in its hands, but it cannot spontaneously hold it.

But this is a separate issue.

I was attempting to speak of the way the state itself breaks under the force of these events.

[Yuppie Grinder]

We must abolish the prison-industrial complex.