> Louis Proyect writes:
>
> > What I concealed from her was my Marxist concept of the
> > role of the cops in the bourgeois society. When I was
> > studying Trotskyist politics in the late'60s, one of the
> > things that was drummed into our heads was that cops
> > were not part of the working class even if they were in
> > trade unions, worked for a wage and occasionally struck.
Yeah, so what are they then? Fucking members of the ruling class? In their dreams!
There is such a thing as a class traitor, you know. And to be a traitor, you have to be a member.
Ooops, I forgot! We're talking "drummed into our heads" here! Can't let the ideas get too complicated, or they don't go in right!
...
> More on cops. Last night I had a beer or two (don't tell my clean &
> sober living house) with a musician friend from Long Beach. He
> commented that while the LAPD is notorious, the Long Beach cops are
> equally vile. When he was 14 he was picked up after a Judas Priest
> concert (thanks to the influence of Wadada Leo Smith at Cal Arts, my
> friends musical tastes expanded, not to dis Judas Priest or anything),
> for curfew violation. In the cop car the cops were listening to Judas
> Priest and talking about how bad cops can be sometimes.
>
> When they got to the station they beat up my friend. A 14-year old, on
> curfew violation. In the cell were two black kids (my friend is a white
> guy with glasses, like myself) who were picked up for curfew, and beaten
> as well. My friend asked them what happened. They were picked up
> riding double on a bike, and the cops had said "whenever you see two
> n-words on a bike you know they're out to steal another one."
>
> But we're all familiar with these stories.
I've lived in Long Beach for 4+ years now. Thanks to my white skin privilege, I've only had one bad run-in with them. Thanks to another white male who made his presence quite conspicuous, they backed down quickly and sped off. It's this kind of "sensitivity" that LA cops have never HAD to learn which allows the Long Beach force to continue cruzing below the radar so successfully, like MOST police departments do.
That said, while police departments surely function as enemies of the working class, I can't agree that ipso facto all cops are therefore class traitors. While there have long been a quota of black cops who threw their weight around as much as their white bretheran, there have also been some who took their place to provide some measure of protection for their communities. This tradition is alive and well today, and it's part of the reason we know as much as we do about the ugly inner workings of various departments.
Of course, a goodly number from this tradition end up being ex-cops, but then, that further strengthens my point that it's too simplistic to have considered them automatically as class traitors in the first place.
-- Paul Rosenberg Reason and Democracy rad at gte.net
"Let's put the information BACK into the information age!"