I don't think torturers and secret policemen are on any side of the class struggle I'd care to be on.
Marx thought so too. Attacking the LaSallean Gotha Program, he said that it was inferior to "even vulgar democracy that sees the millennium in the democratic republic [my view] . . . towers mountains above this kind of democratism wick keeps within the limits of what is permitted by the police and not by logic." (GCP, sec IV); in the Paris Commune. Marx noted, "instead of continuing to be the agent of the Central Government, the police was at once stripped of its political attributes and turned into the responsible and at all times revocable agent of the Commune." (CWF, sec III).
Also, in classical Marxist terms, Newton was a leading figure in the bourgeois revolution, where the opposite side of the class struggle was not the not-yet-existing industrial proletariat but the reactionary feudal aristocracy, and therefore, even if one somehow imagines Felix the Chekist to be on the side of progress, he and Newton (as Master of the Mint) occupied similar positions in the class struggles of their day -- high state officials devoted to promoting (by torture and judicial killing) the economic and political interests of the progressive and revolutionary social class.
--- Charles Brown <cbrown at michiganlegal.org> wrote:
>
>
>
> Chris Doss
>
>
> My joke was, "you're not thinking of introducing
> andie
> to Sir Isaac Newton, who will make him talk by
> torturing him?"
>
> I guess you could substitute Dzerzhinsky for Newton.
> :)
>
>
> ^^^^^^
> CB: No, 'cause Dzerzhinsky was on the opposite side
> of the class struggle,
> which doesn't go away just 'cause you ignore it.
>
>
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>
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