Again it seems I was unclear. Marx thought that the police shouldn't be in the biz of telling people what to think, and this was a virtue of the democratic republic and of the Commune. Dzerzhinsky, Lenin, and Bolsheviks (in the main) disagreed, obviously so did Stalin and the Stalinists. It wasn't progress in the class struggle, Marx thought, to have a political police enforcing the boundaries of argument by threats of torture and death. So someone like Felix who headed up a government agency devoted to that role he would not regard as being on the workers' side in the class struggle. Marx thought that as long as there were police, they should be depoliticized, accountable to the workers, and recallable if they abused their trust. The limits of what could be said, Marx says, should be set by logic, not by hoods with badges and guns. That is the pro-democratic position that he thinks is consistent with working class interests.
--- Carrol Cox <cbcox at ilstu.edu> wrote:
> Hey -- this post is incoherent. I agree with the
> lines quoted below, but
> then it begins to lose me.
>
> Carrol
>
> andie nachgeborenen wrote:
> >
> > 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
>
>
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