Friend or Foe? Marxism and the Police
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Political events regularly tend to bring the question of the role of the police in society to the fore. In the period heading up to the September 11 attack, a rash of police brutality cases throughout the world had created a situation where many important cities where rocked by protests against general police violence or individual rogue cops. Since then, under a heavy barrage of bourgeois patriotic propaganda, police have been literally promoted as self-sacrificing defenders of civilisation and every poor orphan and grandmother on the planet.

Ignore the LeftCom brain worms in the rest of the article.

The Real Function

As Marxists, we always try to base our intervention on class analysis. So in the case of the police, we must first try to situate them in the class structure of society. Again, we do not base our conclusions by analysing any one person at a time. The best way to make this analysis is to evaluate how they relate to capital. Many so-called progressives and labour fakers present the police as ordinary workers doing a dangerous job (2) with no capital at their disposal and hence a part of the working class. This begs the question of: What is the working class?

The working class is an immense group of people who must sell their labour as a means of survival. Any attempt to better its situation or even keep up in life comes into direct conflict with the interest of the capitalists who exploit them. These capitalists also constitute a class, even though it is constituted by a much smaller group of people. As Engels wrote over a hundred years ago,

society is in an insoluble contradiction with itself,

being constituted as it is by two fundamental economic classes, both having opposing economic interests. This is where the State comes in and... the police. As Marx wrote:

The State is the machine that saves the domination of a class. (3)

It is not the creation of a particular class but evolves from the absolute necessity that class society has of dealing with the class oppositions that divide it. For most people, the concept of State is associated with legislatures and politicians. This is a very partial view of its content. Besides these institutions must be added the bureaucracy, the judicial apparatus, the clergy, the media, the army, and... the police. The police are the first line of the “bodies of armed men” (4) that are intended to defend the interest of the ruling class. If their real function was to stop crime, they would arrest every capitalist on the planet, as these are the true criminals and their regime the real source of all crime.

Unlike the worker whose interest is to get rid of the boss’s rule, the existence of the police is directly tied to the maintenance of the State and capitalist property relations. In this sense, in no way can cops or prison guards be seen as members of the working class as the trade unions would want us to believe. (5) Unfortunately, the trade unions are not the sole promoters of this misconception.

The "Left" And The Cops

At many times in the past we have seen so-called progressive militants entertain the foolish notion of holding a dialogue with the police. For example in Quebec we have the social-democratic pacifists (particularly active in the schools) of Operation SalAmi who peddle the lie that the police share a common interest with the "general population". Their colleagues of the petit bourgeois ATTAC organisation push the same line. For example, at the recent founding of the German section of ATTAC, a Greenpeace representative called Sven from Wiesbaden, who was conducting the direct action workshop had this to say in his presentation:

In a demonstration, the policeman is not our enemy; he is not a beating machine but a victim of the system who, as us, has badly eaten and is missing sleep... (6)

Obviously our friend Sven must be talking of demonstrations on another planet.