Why do socialists demonize the police?

C'mon, dude. :

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_attribution

I kind of take your point. A lot of what is considered deviant in current society seems fair enough to me, from making a living by nicking stuff from shops to taking amphetamines in order to be able to last your shift. But some people (including myself, I'm not making suggestions from outside) really do have problems with behaviours that they know are harming themselves, others, or both and want help getting over that. My particular problems with rather tedious mental ill health mean that I really would like people to help me monitor and modify my behaviour patterns so as to be more generally productive. That doesn't, of course, happen under capitalism much, but in a more human community I'm guessing it would. But for more 'morally questionable' types, the same very often applies. Many serial paedophiles aren't best pleased about the fact they harm children, and want help not doing so. And there's plenty of evidence supporting the claim that providing that help is the best way to stop re-offending and integrate these people back into society. Similarly, people with serious anger problems often hate the fact that they fly of the wall from time to time, and want support helping them to not do so, and to be stopped when they do. Seriously, few people are proud of the fact they beat up their family.

Of course there are reasons people do what they do, but they are not always good reasons, and sometimes the reasons are based on really irrational shit like the amount of adrenalin or serotonin produced by glands. And people are not internally consistent in the sense that they think that the things they have done are the right things to do. The people I am talking about are people whose harmful behaviours are at odds with what they normally think is ok.

The people I am not talking about are muggers, football hooligans and drug dealers. These people do not necessarily have problems relating to the world around them in ways that are consistent with their own values and self-interest. They have social pathologies, not personal behavioural pathologies (if the two can be satisfactorally separated, which is difficult). One of the aims of socialism is to overcome such social pathologies. So the extent to which your "people running around with iron sticks" continue is the extent to which socialism is not doing its job right.

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If you helped the person, well why bother calling the police then, you've done their job voluntarily. Good on you.

Oh god, you've done it now.. revol probably got a semi reading that..

Exactly, its a categorical call, because autonomy, whether individual or collective, is sovereign, it should not involve the forces of the enemy. We have to start somewhere if we wish for a non-capitalist society, and sometimes it means putting oneself in dangers way. There may be honest, ignorant God fearing compassionate, or vicious glorified sociopathic ones, but none of them should be sought for assistance, we must fight our own battles and issues without compromise, without selling out.

Police are the hall monitors of capitalism. Without them and the global police (military) Capitalism could not exist. It takes force for a minority to subdue and control the majority- the police are one of the weapons used against the masses. It's not that hard to figure out.

Crime in general is usually rooted in scarcity...not crimes of passion and sick serial killers of course but those are the minority of "criminals" that fill American prisons. Take away the false scarcity and poverty capitalism creates and the need f or police to chase down purse snatchers and such diminishes. Berkman addresses this in his ABC's of Anarchism. Obviously some sort of social hierarchy will still exist in an anarchist society so people would fight over ego and such...some violent crime would still exist no doubt and there would be perpetual attempts by some people to accumulate wealth and control others but Kropotkin addresses that in chapter 4 of Conquest Of Bread.

http://dwardmac.pitzer.edu/Anarchist_Archives/kropotkin/conquest/ch4.html

Berkmans main point was justice would take on a whole new form in an anarchist society- the "human nature" argument (saying it's human nature to plunder/murder and destroy) is bullshit. The stage is set and the actors play out their roles....if the stage is one of scarcity/poverty then "crime" is going to be a problem- provide material abundance and the prisons will mostly be empty. There would be a need of some new form of community policing, perhaps a rotating voluntary police force but the nature of the police would be drastically different. Nothing like the paramilitary goon squads we see today and any form of community policing would be directly answerable to the community itself not capitalists or the capitalist state.

I don't post much here just now but I read a lot. I don't yet have enough confidence in my beliefs and ideas to engage in much debate, or my ideas are not sufficiently formed to do so with any conviction. However I'm confident in my ability to follow an argument.

You obviously have conviction, but you rely on rhetoric which frequently comes across as patronising. Why do you rely on putting people down with exaggerated caricatures, rather than presenting a logical argument? It doesn't convince and it looks like bullying. It's a bad habit to have, because you can have your mind closed by the illusory power of your own rhetoric.

You're right, Pikel (though I wouldn't call it "patronising"): it's called "strawmanning" - falsifying another's argument in order to easily fit it into a contemptuous put-down. Doesn't revol question himself from the simple fact that yoda cites him as confirming what is essentially yoda's Leninist perspective, a State by any other name, and ideological falsification by any other name. I haven't noticed anyone who opposes the cops here claiming everyone's going to be an angel "after the revolution". Yet this is constantly claimed by those who believe that some form of specialism in keeping proletarian order is necessary. The opposition has been to specialists in order, just as an opposition to politicians is an oppostion to specialists in power. In fact, it's precisely because "power corrupts", that people are not angels, that i wouldn't trust revol, yoda or cantdocartwheels as the future anarcho-cops (nor would i want to be in such a position myself, for that matter).

Khawaga mentions an interesting and significant revolt by conscripted cops, as evidence of why we should nuance our critique of the cops. But they were conscripted - they didn't choose to become cops. Also, even some cops who choose to be cops will change sides, I hope. If those we oppose never get influenced by social movements then there's never going to be the slightest possiblity of a successful revolution. But until they do - treat them as enemies: it's not what abstractly someone "could" become but on their contribution to class society &/or to its opposition that one should judge people . And no ifs or buts (as the SPGB tries to do with its citing of the 1919 police strike in ajohnstone's link, stuck as they are in the long lost foggy past; reminds me of a Trot who'd recently converted from Catholicism to Trotskyism - he shouted to the cops as they were beating people up on the anti-Bloody Sunday march in '72 in Whitehall, "Remember the 1919 police Strike!" as if that would somehow convert them - "Right lads, down truncheons - we'll stop striking the Irish and strike ourselves instead").

Another historic event that i could have mentioned was the Winnipeg General Strike of 1919 when police demonstrated their working class loyalty by voting to strike, but were asked to continue their duties by the strike committee until the ruling class sacked them all for their pro-strike sympathies. I am sure a trawl of working class experience can provide similar examples.

Contemporary workers can learn something from historic examples, can they not, Samotaf? Or should we simply forget our past and refuse to pass it on, even it is along with ifs and buts...

Recently in Wisconsin the PIGS only stood by state workers because the PIGS pay was on the cutting block next. As far as private sector workers these PIGS have no solidarity.

I was responding to someone who was refusing to address the fundamental differences I laid out between communism and a bourgeois state, if anyone was debating in bad faith it was them.

There is nothing patronising in my post, sure I take the piss a bit with the teenage rage against your parents jibe but I think its a fair enough rhetorical device for mocking those who collapse all power and laws into state coercion.

Pikel: I don't yet have enough confidence in my beliefs and ideas to engage in much debate, or my ideas are not sufficiently formed to do so with any conviction.

Totally wrong way to look at it. You need to trust your rationality, not your knowledge. if theres wrong stuff in your head theres no better way to get rid of it then to discuss it with other people. So if you do have any ideas, sputter them out and find out if they hold against whats put against them. Because who is going to win most if your ideas are wrong? I guess that would be you! Dont treat an idea like it is your property or a part of your personality. unless it is, duh

My point was, as I am sure you understood, was that these discussions cannot be universal. There are different political (and police) cultures across the world. Too often anarchists in the western world are simply eurocentric and fail to see that a cop (or soldier) is not always a cop even though he or she is wearing the uniform. If this was a discussion taking place among Egyptian or Tunisian comrades it would look very different. They've already had popular committees taking care of security, fought conscripted cops one day and fought alongside them another day as fellow protesters.

That's a pretty spot on point Khawaga. We have to take into account the ideological and material landscape in order to properly evaluate the given situation.

Just a quick point as I been thinking about this thread for a while. I think we should be careful to distinguish police from the law (and no, this is not just semantic). Just because your highly critical of the police (as it exists right now, institutionally in say Britain, Greece or France), it doesn't necessarily mean you are against something like laws and rules per se (though these of course would have to be submitted to review, I hope most of us here know there is a difference between property law and laws against murder for instance). Now the police may have certain sanctioning under the law, but they are not the law.

How does this square with what just happened last weekend in Tunisia, for instance?

Last Sunday cops killed a 14 or 13 yr old (depending on different reports) in a demonstration. In Thala the takeover of the police station (in February, iirc) followed the cops killing people, and was launched initially by one very courageously furious young man who'd lost a close friend. There might have been some demos including conscripted cops - but, having spoken at length to a Tunisian friend about the situation there, there's certainly no more love lost between cops and the mass of the proletarian population than, say , between cops and most blacks in the States.

As for ajohnstone saying we should learn from the past - obviously, but the cops in 1919 were not at all the same as today; for one thing, i think those who went on strike (iirc) were sacked and then some of them were re-employed with contracts specifically forbidding the right to strike; the most militant were not re-employed. Moreover this strike took place in a global atmosphere of a possibly successful revolution.

An understanding of people and movements has to be based on what they do, not on what abstractly potentially they could possibly in different circumstances come round to doing maybe. For all I know, the Queen might one day agree to give up all her privileges and start throwing molotovs at Prince Phillip.

I should have made myself clear that with Tunisia I was referring to popular committees doing security; I am not aware of the composition of the official security forces. Point is that ATR there will be someone doing security/ some remaining policing functions. That we've already seen these bodies formed should bear on the content of this discussion. Now obviously, what happened in Egypt and Tunisia were far from revolutions that overturned social relations and that the security needed was against the police, thugs and certain groups of people looting (and we're not talking about the New Orleans form of "looting" which is completely different). Whether such committees would be a permanent feature in a communist society is hard to tell (and I certainly hope it wouldn't), but they wouldn't be permanent in the sense of being autonomous and separate from society. Everyone, as long as they want to, should take turns doing such security. In any case, the roles and function of such groups would be minor. The odd sociopath, perhaps guarding nuclear waste until we've figured how to deal with it properly.

I guess, in short, it seems like you didn't get why I posted the passage. This discussion has been extremely abstract; it is necessary to consider various contexts in which the police is not always the police as we know it in the West (even within the West). Too often anarchist will come with blanket statements about cops based on their local experience of them. That the police is not part of the working class in the UK (or the US or Canada and a lot of other countries) I would be in complete agreement with, but with Egypt it is completely different.

Is the conscription essential, though? I've noticed that more and more people major in "criminal justice" in the US, and the military is recruiting more and more. Even though the police and military are voluntary here, they're becoming more and more attractive as a stable place of employment in this economy.

Just to throw some more difficulty into the mix, it's important to remember that around this time of year back in 1936, mostly in Catalunya, anarchists and other revolutionaries were fighting side by side with the Republican Assault Guard (not all of them of course) to beat back the attempted coup by the military backed by the Church, the industrialists, and the large landowners. The forces arrayed against militarized reaction were diverse, and the fact that some traditional enemies of the CNT were suddenly their de facto allies threw many in the CNT and FAI into confusion (aside from the other areas of analytical confusion), often leading to tragicomic results...

it's simple, the police must be disbanded, even where they desert they en mass they must be subsumed into the proletariat's own revolutionary organs, the mistake of the CNT was to not destroy the Catalan state but instead settle for dual power, under the anarcho liberal argument that for working class organs to seize power and smash the state would constitute another state in itself.

This gets to the heart of why it's vital not to mistake bodies of enforcement, decrees, coercion and law for a state.

In recent Wisconsin strikes, the police also expressed solidarity with the struggles at various points.

But I don't think later events in Wisconsin proves much beyond the fact that unions, police and the working class together are, at times, willing to assert "the dignity of labor" or the power of the working class as a class within capitalism - ie, reactionary workerism. It's possible that the working could take a step in this direction and then jump to a more revolutionary position. But if you think this direction itself is revolutionary, you are mistaken.

Edit: Mostly removed references to the original general strike, whose exact makeup I don't know. But the contemporary struggles that receive the solidarity of the police... That's not a tendency which can extended to an attack on capitalist society in any form.

I appreciate your sentiment and I think I understand your point well. I do trust my rationality but it's just a tool, it has to have some material to work with, it also has to have time to work and effort applied in the working. Some may have more relevant material than me or have committed more time and effort than me. I can't agree with you that knowledge is not important. So I feel I am entirely sensible to take my time coming to a view before putting that view to public debate. For some things I might take longer than for others. I'm only posting in this thread at all because I feel some level of confidence in my thoughts, but I know I don't have a comprehensively worked-out basis for my opinion, it doesn't please me and I don't need anyone to point that out to me. No point putting ideas forward when I know full well where they are likely to fail and how people will highlight the failure and don't have anything in reserve once that's been done, I'm not a masochist.

Having said that, here is my opinion. I believe strongly in freedom from formal rules and enforcement. I think it's far to easy to go from making sensible rules that are clearly a positive expression of how sane people would like to live, to oppression of minorities of various kinds, and I find talk of coercion troubling. The mere act of writing rules down encourages more rules to follow because a process gets underway. A habit develops, and habits are notoriously hard to break. So while on the face of it I wouldn't mind a law against murder, which all sane people can agree with, it is firstly unnecessary (because its obvious) and secondly encourages further laws (because it's one of many steps in the process of building a body of law) which may or may not be sane.

The formalisation of social relations into laws leads to some extent to law becoming superior to social relations. We (in the UK anyway) have many insane laws which a large number of people at least tacitly agree with, not really because they are themselves insane but because the law is endowed with it's own inherent correctness and things can become morally wrong simply by being criminal. I know this because I have discussed certain behaviours with people who don't like them, who's only remaining argument (after I've shot the others down) against them is that they are illegal and therefore should not be done. I could give examples but this could fork the debate as people will not agree with me that those specific laws are insane; please try and think of some for yourselves.

I also believe that when you treat people like children there is a tendency for at least some of them to behave like children. Disallowed behaviour is enacted specifically because it is disallowed and probably more so because it is disallowed without an explanation. Additionally people neglect their duty to form their own moral views because it's already been taken care of.

I would like to think, therefore, that people can live without formal laws, because I see so many flaws in that system and I see fewer flaws in it's opposite. Where social relations are strong (not hard for them to be stronger than they are now) and people have a clear stake in a society which values them properly rather than treating them simply as workers or consumers to be exploited, then they will inevitably behave differently, because people's behaviour is a reaction to the conditions they find themselves in. It upsets me that some people feel that people won't change much, when their conditions have changed so fundamentally! Surely a fundamental change for the good in behaviour will be the necessary result of a fundamental change for the good in conditions.

@ Revol68, patronising was the wrong word, sorry, belittling would have been a better one, like your "boohoo mummy and daddy are fascists" style talk, which is aimed at getting those you disagree with to shut up because they are stupid spoiled children rather than actually attacking the idea. Note: I am a grown man, my parents were not fascists and I'm pretty sure I wasn't spoiled.

(fuck that's a long post, sorry!)

Pickel, i wasnt saying knowledge is not important, on the contrary knowledge is what your aiming for or should be as someone who wants to change something. i was trying to say that you cant trust in having the right knowledge, but you can trust in the way your brain works. trust that you will see the truth when someone makes a proper argument (of course because a proper argument teaches about something "material" and you can verify). second point was you better get rid of wrong ideas sooner then later so its always good to discuss the stuff your unsure about. if people care about the truth and not about being a proper communist they wont lay you low for having wrong ideas. i think the very little restrictive or reserved acceptance of new people with a pretty unclear picture about the world proves that it is in the interest of many members of this board to share their enlightenings.

Samotnaf

Just to clarify the history

And from Libcom

The police voted to strike, were requested by the strike committee not to, but the State demanded a loyalty pledge and when it was refused, the police were sacked en masse - a lock-out- to be replaced by imported scabs.

I was talking about the 1919 UK police strike, not one in Canada, which was the main content of the article you linked to, a "socialist" apology for cops, which merely indicates how little experience the author seems to have had of them; or else an intellectual judgment of people based on some "innate" working classness, but not based on practice, not on the working class for itself.

Samotnaf, I apologise for mis-interpreting your post since my last post was specifically about Winnipeg, i believed your later comment referred to the details of that and not the earlier link that you had already commented upon.

Also should this thread be limited to the police, what about prison wardens, bailiffs, private security guards, the military, even armament workers, civil servants, we could add to the list almost indefinitely because many workers have roles within capitalism that strengthen the state, that are anti-social, that makes them unpopular with other workers ( i have personal issues with those who work in slaughter houses and i know one union official who dreaded visiting Halls meat industry factory in Aberdeenshire since like me he found that brutality of the killing business affected the humanity of its workers to their detriment but thats neither here or there).

How should it be determined who is worthy of being called working class and deemed receptive to political ideas. Marx i think had little regard for the lumpen-proletariat

All of these are worth considering. I think there are two different questions. One is whether a given group is part of the working class and the other is whether a given group needs to give up its role if it is going participate in a revolutionary movement.

And here, the question of the process of the transformation of society appears front-and-center. If one believes the-working-class-as-exists-now will rise, and seize society while it is "intact" as the working-class-of-capitalism, then you might believe that none of these groups will be shedding their roles at that point.

The general strikes which were wound-up lead by unions that weren't revolutionary in any fashion would then be a fine model for this. If first the working class takes power, then it transforms itself, possibly over a fairly long period of time, then it makes sense for the same police to petrolling the streets are previously, possibly enforcing modified laws but with things otherwise under control.

Now, on the other hand, if one believes that from "day zero", the working class will have to begin transforming itself and forming the human community of communism, then the immediate abolition of the police, prisons and state bureaucracies would make sense. I would tend to believe that police and prison guards in particular would be the least likely to join a revolutionary contingent. But regardless of which percentage of a group joined the revolution, the function of the police and related groups would be abolished immediately and permanently.

So anyway, I'd thus say this question actually kind of turns on whether one takes a "communism, just like in 1848" position or a "communization now" position.

Cops as individuals might be good people, as all of us but when endowed with authority they transform into monsters. The Standford experiment is a good example. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZZWsFmjSi78

All that the celebrated 'Stanford experiment' proves is that if we bring up kids in a society that places emphasis on un-questioning respect for our 'betters', and get them used to not thinking critically, and to simply acting as individuals on instructions from authority figures, then when those kids become adults they'll unthinkingly carry out tasks that they are set. Nothing about 'monsters' - the whole experiment is based on liberal individualist ideology, just as you'd expect in the '60s in the USA.

If we tried the same experiment with kids educated in a Communist society, the results would be very different. We're not unhistoric, natural individuals containing a hidden 'monster', but products of a society that requires 'individuals'.

Adults used to acting after collective and critical discussion wouldn't carry out such an experiment. We don't have a society in which adults act in collective fashion, we have a society in which 'individuals' are 'entitled' to their 'own' views and 'socialisation' apparently doesn't exist.

Rejecting the label 'individual' is the real, paradoxical, starting point of 'individuality'.