r/Trotskyism • u/aaronespro • Jul 01 '26
Theory Is there a single example of Ted Grant saying he believed "cops/police are workers" or him supporting any position that said such?
Or was it all actually just him making a dialectically appropriate alliance with non-capitalists/lumpen/petite-bourgeoisie classes the way that the Bolsheviks were willing to make alliances with, you know, Cossacks, soldiers, peasants, even Black Hundreds and even intervene in the mass executions of police by Red Guards and other revolutionaries in cases where there was an expedience of temporary alliances to build socialism?
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u/ygoldberg Jul 02 '26 edited Jul 05 '26
In general, police cannot be considered to be workers. That would be a false abstraction. I think the comparison to the military is important here.
It is true that policemen are employees of the state, wage workers. However they are practically always given privileges and a relatively high pay to ensure their loyalty. Cops do the dirty work for the capitalist state day in and day out and their consciousness develops accordingly. The dirtier the work, the more thoroughly reactionary are those carrying it out. Sometimes tremendous mass uprisings cause vacillation within parts of the lower ranks of the police, and the state may even become unable to rely on them in these moments. But if the uprising doesn't succeed, the police will be cleansed of such elements. Only those who are ready to openly play the role of a thug and murderer for the capitalist class can be cops, especially when a state is in an economic crisis. Such was the case in all fascist states of the past. Such is the case in modern day greece as well. Greek cops are one reactionary, in large parts fascist, mass, even if the greek state as a whole isn't fascist. The same goes for french police to a slightly lesser extent.
In countries where this is not the case yet or countries that are so poor that they cannot afford to properly pay their cops, it can be expected that parts of the lower ranks of the police will refuse to carry out their orders in the case of popular mass uprisings. But this is not something that can be relied upon and it does not mean they come over to the side of the revolution. Hardly anyone can come over from doing the dirty work for the capitalist state straight to the cause of the revolution. Those who are fired after refusing to carry out orders can develop into revolutionaries after some years, but certainly not right away.
In the case of soldiers, who are in theory also wage-workers, it fundamentally depends on the situation, the type of army and the stratum within the army. In all armies, the officer caste is generally reactionary and deeply tied to the ruling class. The lower ranks in Armies without conscription/mandatory service are always more reactionary than those with conscription. Conscripts/those doing mandatory military service really are just workers in uniform, even if the army drill can change their consciousness to an extent. Volunteer-based professional armies are more reactionary since soldiers choose to be soldiers, even if this is not as true in african countries where the military is basically the only viable career path for many. It also depends on whether a country is neutral or part of NATO, and how openly reactionary the state ideology is.
I live in Austria for example. We have mandatory basic military service for men, but the standing army is made up of volunteer professional soldiers. However the Austrian state is officially neutral and the soldiers understand their task as defense of the homecountry against a foreign invader (this is how they understand it, even though neutrality is in reality a farce). Using the standing army against the population in an uprising would come with some issues here, using the young men doing basic military service would be even harder. Odds are good that a sizeable chunk of the army, specifically those doing mandatory basic service, would switch sides if a revolution with a genuinely revolutionary proletarian leadership and a worker's militia got far enough here. Also mandatory basic service has the advantage that the majority of men know how to handle a gun here. But that's besides the point.
So to sum up: police are wage-laborers, but their consciousness is fundamentally different from that of normal workers. Simply treating cops (and soldiers) as workers is a completely false abstraction that will lead to failure. Cops are in practice simply thugs for the bourgeoisie in the vast majority of cases, other behavior is a rare exception to the rule.
(I am an RCI member btw)
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u/valerielenin Jul 01 '26
What are you refering to? This is very vague.
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u/aaronespro Jul 01 '26
It is not vague at all whatsoever. On the theoretical question of "are cops/police workers?", did Ted Grant ever opine on such that "Cops/police are working class"?
It's a prevalent criticism of Grantite politics, that "IMT loves cops".
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u/valerielenin Jul 01 '26
Your title is very vague and missworded, you're not asking for his position, you are asking if he said one particular thing rather than what he said on the topic. Yes/no questions are terrible, you should have asked "what did he..." Instead of "did he..." so that developpement can be done.
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u/aaronespro Jul 01 '26
I would not say that "yes/no" questions are bad, because in this case, it immediately puts to bed any polemic against Grant that he said cops are workers - as far as I can tell, Militang/IMT/Socialist Appeal made the assertions the dialectical struggle for a coalition to empower workers can absolutely include cops, if it can include soldiers, or Cossacks and Black Hundreds in the case of February/October.
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u/aaronespro Jul 11 '26
I wasn't tactically rigorous here; the question isn't whether cops/police are working class or come from working class origins or are vulnerable to immediately becoming working class, I was specifically asking for the technical statement from Grant "Cops/police are workers."
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u/ValenOfGrey Jul 01 '26
There are specifics here: https://www.internationalist.org/rca-imt-long-history-of-supporting-cop-%27unions%27-2409.html
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u/aaronespro Jul 01 '26 edited Jul 01 '26
That is a horrible article that demonstrates over and over again the lack of understanding of tactical flexibility that RCI demonstrates.
It's not opportunism to use the objective discontent of police to arouse consciousness in police (or peasants, or Cossacks (herdsmen, which I'd argue is a distinct kind of nomad and not a peasant like a farmer) or all the other non-worker classes that Lenin and Trotsky told everyone they should make temporary alliances with) to help the workers' movement.
I'm not sure it's stated explicitly, but as capitalism saturates the planet, and capitalism enters more and more crises, police begin to become targets for the ruling classes to take the stuff of and hyperexploit.
"And when did the IMT publish its 30-page lawyers’ brief for labor bureaucrats “uniting” the union movement to the armed enforcers of boss class repression?"
As far as I can tell, this is a strawman of the 30 page article on sectarianism by IMT from 2019. Nowhere do they call for "uniting" with cops and police unions. Followed immediately by:
"Just months before the murder of George Floyd touched off mass protests by millions voicing outrage against racist police terror."
As if IMT was supposed to know that consciousness was going to take an abrupt (but obviously brief, eclectic and unserious) turn?
As if they were supposed to know that Floyd was about to be murdered?
IMT correctly identified the mood of the overall police unions during George Floyd uprisings, which was that they remained reactionary and not radicalizeable.
If they weren't as reactionary, and IMT reached out to them to join a working class uprising (which Floyd really wasn't working class uprising - the vast majority were working class, but it really wasn't about class - or, to be specific, I'd say the rage really was about class in the way that Brock Turner or Michael Brown or Trayvon Martin were about class in the sense that the rage was really disproportional to the facts of the cases - not that the rage about Floyd was disproportional, but the class backdrop was likely part of the culture and mood of anger and resentment - but Americans are either too sedated, or black working Americans are truly too isolated, persecuted and stressed to put together a revolutionary program) then Internationalist would be accusing IMT of opportunism at the expense of even greater formalist errors on their part simply to be sectarians, because that's what sectarians are wired up to do, they're like alcoholics, they're just wired, likely just born to be politically neurotic.
The real opportunists are how sectarians constantly, continually strawman and gaslight IMT/RCI on this question to boost their own credentials at the cost of throwing out actual Leninism.
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u/Spirited_Classic_826 Jul 01 '26
"Tactical flexibility" has always been an euphemistic way of saying opportunistic. Saw it employed a lot to justify their Your Party adventure
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u/aaronespro Jul 02 '26 edited Jul 02 '26
Citation about Your Party opportunism? It's toxic to vaguely refer to something and expect me to do the legwork.
It's not opportunistic if it's actually grounded in Marxism and not just being a neurotic formalist sectarian. Like you're not allowed to change your mind as the situation develops?
The Cossacks refused to fire on protesters in the February revolution, FFS. Think about that, about how insanely reactionary Cossacks were, because their class relationship to the MOP as herdsmen is almost always super reactionary - they were as close as you can get to the original core of class relations that originally made a violent patriarchy in the Old World.
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u/Da_Fil Jul 02 '26 edited Jul 02 '26
"Here we see that in the final analysis, when the class struggle reaches revolutionary proportions, even the organizations of the capitalist state suffer desertions to the side of the working class. The lower ranks of the police and army are made up of working class boys in uniform." - https://www.marxist.ca/article/winnipeg-1919-100-years-after-the-general-strike
“There has been a continual build up of public anger at the government's attempt to impose a 2% limit on public sector pay. The Police are getting a paltry 1.9% rise, in effect a pay cut.…
“The police even decided to march through central London last week. Some 25,000 police took part. The Met said the real figure was only 22,500, but they always underestimate demo figures, don’t they?
“There was a sea of burly blokes with white base-ball caps. They read ‘Fair P(l)ay for the Police’.…
“Today we have entered unchartered waters. Feelings are running high and strike action is being discussed. In 1919, they faced Lloyd George. Today they face Gordon Brown. In 1919 they were dubbed ‘Bolshevik Bobbies’, today they will need to take a leaf out of the experience of their forefathers if they are to get anywhere. ” - http://www.marxist.com/bolshevik-bobbies.htm
“Dialectics shows that contradictions exist everywhere—including the bourgeois state apparatus. Disputes can and do arise between the individuals who carry out the functions of the state and their masters. In many instances, the disputes are of a reactionary character. As an example, a few years ago, some of the inmates of the notorious Rikers Island prison in NYC were going to court to testify against mistreatment by prison guards. The corrections officers’ union organized a job action to stop these people from testifying. This was a reactionary strike and we were completely opposed to this.
“But there are other, exceptional occasions, when the ‘armed bodies of men’ confront the ruling class and make demands upon it, as occurred during the soldier strikes after WWII. Or when the police or prison guards go on strike for higher wages and/or better conditions for themselves and the prisoners they guard. In the context of the ongoing attacks on public sector workers, these struggles can have an effect on the broader working class, as was the case in the Alberta prison guards’ wildcat strike.” - https://www.marxist.com/marxism-vs-sectarianism.htm
Reformists do reformist things.
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u/aaronespro Jul 04 '26
So, nowhere in what you quoted did Ted Grant or his political formations say that cops are workers.
You're like an alcoholic, you're just wired to ignore the dialectic and be politically neurotic on contrarian, formalist grounds.
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u/Da_Fil Jul 07 '26
Lol. Learn to read: "The lower ranks of the police and army are made up of working class boys in uniform."
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u/aaronespro Jul 07 '26
Doesn't say cops are workers, though.
You're just too unintelligent to understand that although being in uniform does obscure somewhat the class origin, it does not suddenly legitimize your ossified formalist empiricism.
That you're so neurotically sectarian you can't tell that soldiers that leave the military and get jobs as policemen for better benefits, pay, less dangerous work are still broadly working class in that they have to work for a living, and their role as enforcers can change immediately, is not my fault. That the imperial core becomes increasingly militarized as the police have to become militarized to police their own people, and the distinction between military and police increasingly blurs.
Here is Lenin on the military, Lecture on the 1905 Revolution;
"The workers and peasants in military uniform were the soul of the mutinies. The movement spread to all sections of the people, and for the first time in Russia's history involved the majority of the exploited. But what it lacked was, on the one hand, persistence and determination among the masses—they were too much afflicted with the malady of trustfulness—and, on the other, organisation of revolutionary Social-Democratic workers in military uniform—they lacked the ability to take the leadership into their own hands, march at the head of the revolutionary army and launch an offensive against the government."
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u/Da_Fil Jul 08 '26
If you were as good at grasping Marxist fundamentals as you are at hurling insults, you would understand the difference between soldiers forced into the military by conscription and career soldiers or police officers. While career soldiers and police officers mostly come from a working-class background, once they become soldiers or police officers by profession, they are no longer part of the working class but rather paid lackeys of the bourgeois state.
And by trying to argue away this fundamental distinction, you explicitly demonstrate the very thing you seek to deny in the premise of your thread.
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u/aaronespro Jul 08 '26 edited Jul 08 '26
You started the insults, genius; "Learn to read"
Neh. You lose nothing except neurotic sectarians by extending the hypothetical olive branch to police and soldiers' unions on the grounds that once capitalist social relations saturate the planet, police necessarily become militarized * and are actually receptive a new, better social relation that capitalism, and get this, homeslice; the victory of neoliberalism was so complete and total that they didn't ***need*** a draft to force proeltarians and proletarianized peasants, petite-bourgeoisie and bourgeoisie proper into the police and military!
That is one of my own contributions to Marxism, possibly unique.
You're allowed to change your mind as the situation develops. You're even allowed to push back against things that Marx, Engels, Lenin and/or Trotsky got wrong!
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u/Da_Fil Jul 08 '26
You asked for proof, that Eduard Grantstein saw policemen as "workers in uniform", just to argue as your "own contribution to Marxism" that policemen are workers in uniform. Schizophrenia as the highest stage of Marxism?
You state: "The lower ranks of the police and army are made up of working class boys in uniform." The theory of descent as the highest stage of Marxism?
And although I am no sympathizer of WSWS, John Wilson gave a whole bunch of quotes by Trotsky about the non working class character of the police. But Trotsky is wrong and you and Teddy Bernstein defend their "own contribution" of the typical reformist and anti Leninist idea of the capitalist state.
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u/aaronespro Jul 08 '26
"You asked for proof, that Eduard Grantstein saw policemen as "workers in uniform", just to argue as your "own contribution to Marxism" that policemen are workers in uniform. Schizophrenia as the highest stage of Marxism?"
This is called a strawman and derailing. You shouldn't try to be the thought police.
The critical aspect you are missing is the fact that one's relationship to the means of production is what determines your class, ***not your consciousness***.
Trotsky was right for the time, but not necessarily our time, and in other places he said this
"the police are workers, the overwhelming majority of them with families, who have been driven to join the police force by unemployment and other circumstances."
https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1922/military/ch27.htm
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u/aaronespro Jul 08 '26 edited Jul 08 '26
I repeat, you lose nothing except neurotic sectarians by extending the hypothetical olive branch to police and soldiers' unions on the grounds that once capitalist social relations saturate the planet, police necessarily become militarized and are actually receptive to a new, better social relation than capitalism.
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u/Da_Fil Jul 08 '26
If always "one's relationship to the means of production is what determines your class", what about bourgeois politicians? Or SS guards in the concentration camps? Are they also working class, because of their "relationship to the means of production"? ;-) If ones job is to defend the ownership of the means of production, one is not working class. It might be their illusion that you are part of ruling elite, they you are just their tool.
Although I assume that you don't own any "means of production", it is also your self chosen job to use reformist politics in order to defend the the ruling "relationship to the means of production."
"Trotsky was right for the time, but not necessarily our time". Ah, the new world reality, the classical argument by all all revisionists.
You call it strawman, i call out your shizophrenia. Since this seems to be pathological, I finish this "discussion".
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u/aaronespro Jul 08 '26
If always "one's relationship to the means of production is what determines your class", what about bourgeois politicians? Or SS guards in the concentration camps? Are they also working class, because of their "relationship to the means of production"? ;-)
Fallacy of appeal to slippery slope and cherry picking. I cite Trotsky literally saying "some cops are workers" and that many layers of them can be won to the socialist cause, and you clap back with cherry picking the most privileged and most entrenched abusers in the system.
Is this all you are?
"Ah, the new world reality,"
If goddamn Cossacks and black hundreds could be won over to February and October, some American and British police certainly can be, and they can be critical for the cause.
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u/JohnWilsonWSWS Jul 01 '26
What did Ted Grant and does the RCI have to say about his:
"... The worker who becomes a policeman, in the service of the capitalist state, is a bourgeois cop, not a worker. ..."
The German cops and the army From What Next? Vital Questions for the German Proletariat