Click on the title to link to the "Leftwing Criminologist" blog for an entry on the question of the Marxist attitude toward the police.
Markin comment:
Every since Karl Marx's defense of the the Paris Commune in "Civil War In France " in 1871 it has been axiomatic in the revolutionary wing of the Marxism movement (is there any other, when the deal goes down?)that when the working class takes state power it will have to create its own institutions, including for the transition period, its own police and army. The notion that, coming from the working class or not, that the police today, as police, are to be converted by gentle persuasion to our side is just a wrong proposition.
Trostky is his "History of the Russian Revolution", noted that the Bolsheviks (and other left-wing organizations) drew a distinction between the soldiers (particularly the rank and file peasant soldiers who made up the bulk of the Tsar's armies) and the hated "Pharaohs", the professional police that had a day to day presence in the neighborhoods. Try to split the army into its class components, by all means, but treat the police as sworn enemies. Cops, from the working class or not, are in the United States and Great Britain, cops of the bourgeois state. Those of us who have had occasion to defend a picket line or take part in and defend a militant demonstration are clear on that distinction, as everyone else should be.
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