As far as the class position of the police is concerned I think they are best thought of as being a contradictory strata. On the one hand they do seem to satisfy the textbook Marxian criteria for being proletarians in as much as most cops have only their labor power to sell on the market in turn for a wage. On the other it is also equally evident that they are state functionaries charged with enforcing the laws of the ruling class. This means that cops have contradictory interests. The fact that they do work for wages, form unions and even go on strike on occasion is indicative of their proletarian status which implies that they do have certain interests in common with the working class. On the other hand because of their special status as state functionaries they also have interests that bind them to the state and hence to the ruling class.
If my hypothesis that cops constitute a contradictory stratum is correct then this suggests that in a revolutionary crisis there is a real possibility that some of the police might defect to the side of the working class. Undoubtedly most will not do so but some cops particularly African-American cops might very well go over to the side of the workers' movement in such a crisis. Like Paul Rosenberg I think we should recognize that not all cops are necessarily 'class traitors' though undoubtedly most are. It certainly behooves the left IMO to work to maximize the number of cops who at such a time will weigh in on the side of the working class.
Jim Farmelant
On Sat, 29 Aug 1998 15:18:09 -0400 Louis Proyect <lnp3 at panix.com> writes:
>Yes, it's true. And I'm not sure what I should have done.
>
>I was peddling my bike up the tallest hill in Central Park when all of
>a
>sudden a beautiful African-American female cop drove up alongside me
>in one
>of those patrol carts. And when I say beautiful, I mean movie star
>beautiful.
>
>She said, "Go ahead. You can make it," referring to the long upgrade.
>Our
>eyes met as she drove slowly besides me and we both smiled. She then
>said,
>"You really look good." I nearly fell off my bike and all I could come
>up
>with was, "I'm sorry--I'm at a loss for words. Young and beautiful
>women
>intimidate me." With that she said thanks and drove on.
>
>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.
>
>So my question is whether I would have been crossing class lines if I
>asked
>for her phone number?
>
>Louis Proyect
>(http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html)
>
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