The police as workers

[consuming negativity]

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

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

[Anglo-Saxon Philistine]

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

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

[BIXX]

Seriously this debate again?

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

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

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

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

[Sinister Cultural Marxist]

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

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

How is it more complex?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[consuming negativity]

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

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

Seriously this debate again?

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

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

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

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

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

[Anglo-Saxon Philistine]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[PhoenixAsh]

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

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

[Sinister Cultural Marxist]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Ele'ill]

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

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

Let someone injure a family member

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

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

last two times this happened it was a fucking disaster

[The Intransigent Faction]

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

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

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

[bropasaran]

This is going to get me lynched by the mob, but the anti-police sloganeering, while fun to take part in, is based more in emotion than in reality.

It's seems to be a case of treating class division (in the anarchist sense of police being a sub-type of the ruling class) as identity politics.

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

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

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

[Anglo-Saxon Philistine]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[VivalaCuarta]

Sometimes a picture is worth a thousand words.

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



Which side are you on?

[VivalaCuarta]

On the topic of police strikes,

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

"Class Struggle against 'Police Unionism' in Brazil" from The Internationalist No. 7, April-May 1999.

[PhoenixAsh]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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