[N.W.A.’s Second Album, Track Two]
BHASKAR SUNKARA
Sean Monahan’s latest seems right up my alley. As a frequent quoter of Saul Alinsky’s plea that the left should “play the game to win” and not just yell “kill the umpire” and as an ardent critic of nihilist strains of psuedo-leftism I have openly voiced similar concerns. Concerns that have caused me some consternation due to the knee-jerk responses they would elicit. I don’t want to fill this role nor do I want to look like a contrarian by now rebutting some of Sean’s arguments. However I do think it’s important to debunk the inflammatory notion that police forces represent a part of the working class and deserve any sort of solidarity from progressive forces.
like capitalists, police are human beings, but not workers.
There is a story about the Cyclops Steel and Iron Works factory in Capital. Marx writes about a discussion between the directors of that workplace and a factory commission. The capitalists argue that boys as young as twelve should be allowed to work throughout the night. If this is prohibited they protest,
“…there would be the loss from so much expensive machinery, lying idle half the time, and to get through the amount of work which we are able to do on the present system, we should have to double our premises and plant, which would double the outlay.”
When I recant this story to insufferable, self-righteous ultra-leftists they usually proclaim their disgust at the inhumane capitalist “pigs.” But should these “pigs” really be personally blamed? It’s fair to criticize the owners relentless pursuit of surplus value, but what is their alternative? Be altruistic, rebel against their interest to maximize the rate of exploitation and be undercut and driven out of business by less amiable competition? Leave both them and their employees destitute? Individual capitalists are held hostage to a system beyond their direct control and to market forces that appear to supernaturally hover in a sphere above conscious human activity.
The truth is that most capitalists aren’t sadistic. I’m sure even most sweatshop owners in Indonesia don’t really want to see their employees suffer needlessly. So I pose the same question as Sean: “are these men enjoying themselves?” Do the directors of General Motors genuinely like having tens of thousands of laid-off workers spurn their name and suffer a recession on food stamps? I think not. Capitalists, like police officers, are small actors in a game much larger than themselves.
Sean writes:
As low-to moderate-income government employees whose livelihoods are threatened by budget cuts, police have as much of a stake in the success of the progressive movement as anyone else.
Unlike our liberal erstwhile allies, socialists don’t see class in terms of income, but rather through the lens of social function (relationship to the means of production).
The visceral hatred of law enforcement in many of America’s most marginalized communities represent a little piece lingering of class consciousness. Police are part of the “armed bodies of men” who work to defend the social and political dominance of the capitalist class. That means that they exist solely to defend present property rights, structural inequalities and everything else we oppose. Whether as individuals they joined the police force because they read too many jingoist comic books, wanted to help old ladies cross the street, had no other job opportunities, or needed to compensate for sexual inadequacy is irrelevant. The only thing that matters is their social role. (For reasons that I don’t have room to delve into it is also a serious mistake to conflate the social role of the men and women of the armed forces with those of law enforcement.)
I am aware of budget cuts hitting our community school districts, hospitals and libraries hard, but I’m unaware of it affecting the public employees I don’t care about. Namely prison guards, police officers and that one parking meter lady who use to show up on Wheeler Avenue when I was in high school, after her working hours, just to give me tickets for being awesome. But if for some illogical reason the bourgeoisie decided to let their police officers live on the same slave-wages they give to some members of the real working class, no progressive, especially a “socialist,” would be justified in aiding their struggle while they retained their corrosive (anti)social role.
Copious amounts of post-tonsillectomy codeine is keeping me from ending this article with some hyperbolic ’60s-era rhetoric. Again I’m not saying dehumanize the enemy. I’m saying recognize their social function and oppose them.
a quick note on Alinsky.
I cut and pasted the following in Evernote last month and attributed it to Chris Maisano. I can’t seem to find its origin, but I think it’s safe to assume its from our Chris Maisano and not someone else.
The biggest reason why the Alinsky organizing model doesn’t seem to have accomplished much to change power relations is because it focuses on choosing campaigns that are “winnable” and avoiding the supposed pitfalls of “ideology.” Because of this, the big issues come off the table before any activity even occurs and activists learn to continually trim their sails to accomodate to “reality,” as we have seen in the flawed strategy many liberal and “progressive” groups adopted around healthcare reform. The Alinsky approach is also completely allergic to any kind of systematic theorizing or long-term vision, and because of this groups like IAF, ACORN, and anyone else who adopts a similar method can’t tie individual struggles to a larger goal of transforming society. It’s a really frustrating point of view to deal with, and in a lot of ways it’s a perfect “left” politics in a neoliberal, postmodern period – metanarratives like Marxism are bad, local is good, radical change is impossible, etc.
I concur.
pithy conclusion.
One of Sean’s underlying points is actually fine. He is absolutely right in acknowledging that the fault lies with the system, not with these individual police officers, but by the same extension why don’t we show the same proposed solidarity with the Chamber of Commerce and our local prison guard union? Should we really go into communities of color suffering from a generations long war on drugs, systemic police brutality and advocate for public funds for police officers instead of local schools and health clinics? We don’t of course, because that would be terribly insensitive and profoundly idiotic. Sure it would tickle my warm, pinko-heart for some fine police officer’s kid to have lots of nice things underneath the Christmas tree this winter, but hey, no one said being a class warrior would be easy.
Bhaskar I think you are falling into a false dichotomy here. While you recognize both that the system is to blame for the social role played by cops and that law enforcement industry is not composed solely of sadistic and racist people, you fail to follow these insights through. Having personally been pepper sprayed and abused by police many times I can attest to the very real desire to locate the point of struggle at the very intersection of ones body and the bourgeois law, but as Marx elucidates above, it is just as much not the fault of individual cops as it is individual capitalists. I would agree that a tactic of supporting pay increases for law enforcement while not also argueing for greater public spending in other areas that would greatly aid those most oppressed, I don’t think that has to mean that the cops becaume enemy number one. They are only filling a social role necessary under an exploitative system. They are no more or less guilty of upholding the system than the high school teacher who indoctrinates a capitalist time subjectivity or who denies the role of colonialism. I guess what I am trying to say is that cops *are* workers no matter how much we disagree with their job. And, as members of the same working class that we are aiming to liberate they deserve atleast the benifit of the doubt and not a knee-jerk reaction, which may actually contribute to the ease at which they fall into thier social role.
Yeah, that was me.
well, a point of order, i guess: people in communities of color do not have a monolithic attitude toward the police. they don’t singularly fear them — though fear them they do — but at the same time, they also identify with them, want them to protect their communities and so forth. i say this as a member of Uhuru.
i agree with you that the issue isn’t about the persons who are cops — obviously, since my son is plugging away, doing his thing to become a cop. but also due to personal experience living in a poor community of color. i won’t recount the myriad personal experiences because my bitter exeperiences having done so in the past is that leftists, even the ones you think are not as repulsive as the wojteks of the world, the ones i might admire most, who really *do* get the social structural issues, will still end up coming up with a way to blame the individual for whatever happens in their encounters with the cops.
As someone who is more than a little acquainted with Indonesian sweatshop owners – and their propensity for calling in the military to disappear people – let me say that sweatshop owners are people. Disgusting people for whom an AK47 is the proper tool to use. When capitalists and their police insist upon their goodness, the proper response is that in light of this quality, we will put them against a good wall, give them a good bullet, and put them in the good earth.
“Nihilism?” Maybe, but it is at least more honest (and Marxist) than crap telling us to vote for Obama and whine why we can’t get what little he ever promised us to begin with.
Rick James: 1969 called, it wants its empty rhetoric back.
“Power comes from the barrel of a gun is an insane slogan when you know the other side has all the guns”
Hey Chris, the Girondists called, they want their schtick back – and remind you that there’s always room for a few more sellouts’ heads in their company.
I appreciate that we have a diversity of opinions and that we can have such a respectful, (hopefully) intelligent debate within the same organization. Our freedom from dogma is a great asset. Now here is my response:
I reject the orthodox Marxist notion that the state under capitalism is wholly bourgeois. The extent to which the capitalist class dominates the state and society seems to have an inverse relationship to popular empowerment. To suggest that the state and its functions serve no purpose other than to maintain the status quo and serve the capitalist class ignores any political rights and civil liberties that popular struggle has gained for us. There is some democratic oversight of the legal, judicial and law enforcement systems – though limited, there is some, and it would be a shame to trivialize or ignore.
To elaborate on an earlier point, few if any police sign up because they want to protect capital – certainly most do because they want to keep their communities safe, among other such notions of service. Of course, the realities of police work often run contrary to popular empowerment, but not always, and to ignore the individual psychology behind police actions and inactions in favor of a strict theory of class loses important nuance in describing society. How can the orthodox Marxist paradigm explain instances where police join strikers or protesters against orders, or the Wayne County, Michigan sheriff’s moratorium on foreclosures this past February. The processes behind identities, interests and decisions in society are far too complex to be reduced to class as defined by relationship to the means of production.
I don’t suggest that we devote campaigns towards improving police salaries in lieu of our traditional work, but I suggest a change in thought, attitudes and rhetoric. Cops are average people, generally low-income folks from working class backgrounds who are misled and exploited by their supervisors up the chain of command, as are workers in the private sector. As average people, their interests are the same as ours, but due to the nature of their jobs and the protection of capital, they are frequently pit against other average people. The false class consciousness of police has been overall an extraordinarily successful divide-and-conquer strategy on the part of the capitalist class, and by buying into it and using slogans like “Fuck Tha Police” we on the Left fan that flame. A non-Marxist socialist like myself would suggest that identities and interests of individuals and groups are fluid and complex, and cannot be reduced to simple classes based on relation to the means of production. Unlike capitalists, police do not have meaningful decision-making power. Unlike capitalists, police are at the bottom of their organization’s hierarchy, just pawns in a game played by others. Equating capitalists and police or any other classes as actors without choice is unreflective of reality. One major problem with Marxism (as well as most other social theories more than a few decades old) is that it treats structure as exogenous from process. Capitalism and society are constantly morphing, and the nature of this transformation is disproportionately directed by the capitalists with their disproportional sway on society. We eliminate capitalism not through a moment of revolution that changes structure but through deliberate work to change societal norms, the identities and interests of individuals and groups, and therefore intersubjective constructions such as institutions and systems. Sorry for the jargon.
One major point of strategic practicality I attempted to make in my article was that it’s important for us to fight the right-wing nativist populist movement that’s focusing on winning over the police and the military, and the best way to diffuse that threat is to connect with police, not demean and provoke them. As socialists we need to raise a strong voice for universal liberation for those victims of capitalism, including but definitely not limited to the police.
Sean brought up some excellent points. I also agree that the “intrumentalist” view of the state is bankrupt and that democratic rights mean that the state can’t be completely viewed as a vehicle for class rule. Dominant thought among Marxists in the 20th century actually rejected this notion too.
As a fan of Gramsci’s additions to the socialist tradition I won’t dispute some of your other points as well and I’ll concede that the tone that the majority of leftists adopt towards society as a whole is extremely alienating. DSA/YDS works better with “mainstream” progressives, because we are generally free of this in our day-to-day activism.
Though I’ll add that the battle for ideas and the change in consciousness that you (rightly) pine for is useless without us building organizations and structures to pose the question of power (political organizations, trade unions, etc). I’ll also agree that identities can’t merely be reduced to class (meaning that even in a society without class antagonisms, there is what Joesph Schwartz calls “the permanence of the political” and the need for pluralism).
So I basically agree with the gist of everything Sean says. I still stand by my basic point though–cops aren’t workers. I see no need to antagonize them, just like I’m not compelled to go raze hell at my local business association’s meeting. And I do have no doubt that just like police officers, business owners will benefit–in a strange way–from the triumph of democracy over capital. I just don’t see progressives getting any sort of traction with these segments of the population.
“To suggest that the state and its functions serve no purpose other than to maintain the status quo and serve the capitalist class ignores any political rights and civil liberties that popular struggle has gained for us.”
No one said anything about “serving no purpose other than…” One need only go back to Marx in “Critique of the Gotha Programme” to see mention of “social functions [that] will remain in existence there [under socialism] that are analogous to present state functions.”
Also, popular political rights and civil liberties are not innate to the capitalist state but — as you admit — concessions won through popular struggle.
The “inner secret” of the capitalist state form is not “bourgeois democracy.” It is: 1. the judicial power which interferes with the limited democracy of the legislature; 2. the deficit financing of the state through organized financial markets; 3. the monopoly of armed force held by the state, the existence of a standing army, and salaried police, which the capitalist class requires in order to protect private corporate property; 4. the fact that capital rules, not through a single state, but through an international state system, of which each national state is merely a part, each of which must be “competitive in the world market.”
Glad we’ve essentially come to an understanding… on all but who should win the World Series.