>What do lbo list members think should be the attitude
>of leftists in respect to cops, prison guards, National
>Guard commissioned officers, etc. Should unions allow
>prison guards in their ranks? AFSCME includes prison
>guards, including those at the infamous Pontiac Prison
>in Illinois.
I'm not trying to be a Socratic cutie-pie, as Comrade Proyect once called me, but I'm wonder if, on some level, what you're doing is calling into question the category of "worker".
I'm really not sure how I'd answer this question. There are towns (Starke, FL, for example), where prison jobs are the only ones available (other than really low paying service jobs) and most of the men in town, and their fathers, grandfathers etc... have all worked in the prison. Is that different from a mill town or a coal town? Well, I do see that they different--in coal towns you don't have a bunch of folks who live and work together who are also domestic terrorists (lotsa Klan among prison guards there) and bring their terrorist activities into the workplace, and the power held by prison guards is completely different than that held by coal miners (or cops, I think). On one hand, I want to make a differentiation between the folks who end up as prison guards because it's the only available gig and thos who choose it from an array of options. But I'm not sure about the usefulness of that differentiation. One is not less brutal than the other.
It seems that the prison guard industry is one of the more heavily unionized. At the very least, they have extremely good at having their voices heard.
Personally, I see cops and prison guards as the guard dogs of capital, but that might be my inner anarchist speaking, and that judgment might be as much a question of aesthetics as it is politics. To answer your question, I wonder if we have to ask if cops, guards etc. are a cause or a symptom. Definitely an interesting question, Carrol.
rambling, Frances