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.”

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.

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.

“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.

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.