kelley wrote:
> carrol cox and yoshie tell me that everyone who doesn't own the means of
> production is working class. i agree to some extent, but point out that
> other things come into play, using a version of your position above.
Roughly, yes. All classifications outside pure mathematics have their fuzzy edges, and usually focusing on the fuzzy edges creates bad classification (just as they tell me that hard cases make bad law).
But soldiers and police both offer interesting cases, and should not be lumped together without more thought. Moreover, up to a point, their class (or non-class) status can be assessed without recourse to the subjectivities of the individuals concerned. Both groups, for the most part, *come from* the working class, and both groups, for the most part, return *to* the working class if they leave the army or the police, and that needs to be one's point of departure.
Police (all police, regardless of their own view of themselves) are de-classed. They fall under what the Chinese called "lackeys and running dogs." Rarely, moreover, do individual policemen turn traitor to their positions as lackeys and running dogs. See Doug's post of a few days ago on labor casualties. Someone *did* the shooting. And of course the figures Doug was using do not even include the many workers "informally" killed because of racial factors. Also, as an illustratory and not as proof of anything, one can look at the photographs taken after the murder of Fred Hampton and Mark Clark and published in the *Chicago Tribune*: a majority of the hitmen (cops) who carried out the murder were black. Police have no identity but that of cop no matter how individual police want to think otherwise. With some fuzzy edges, the whole of the criminal justice system, including judges, court clerks, prison guards, states attorneys and their office staff, etc. fall under this heading of lackeys and running dogs of the ruling class. The objective classification is not affected by the fact that occasionally one of the running dogs turns and bites its master.
Soldiers are a far more complex case. As a casual beginning let me suggest that a B-51 or B52 crew are conscious agents of genocide, because these planes have no non-genocidal functions. They are brothers and sisters to the command staff at Dachau. By the standards of Nuremberg North Vietnam would not have violated international law by trying and executing captured B-51 crews. (It would have been most unwise politically of course.)
But clearly (as Engels I believe even comments on in several texts), conscript armies *are* still part of the working class -- and when they do serve their masters should probably be seen as scabs. The final defeat of the U.S. invasion of Vietnam was mostly a function of the refusal of increasing numbers of drafted soldiers to perform as scabs. This does not include commissioned officers, of course -- fragging was an act of working-class loyalty (however the individual "grunts" may have seen their own actions)....................
Carrol