GOOD MORNING AND HOW IS THE MIND TODAY? THE POLICE : STORMTROOPERS OF THE BOURGEOISIE? I ran into a very incensed comrade I know from the 80s a few months ago who accused me of betraying my working class roots and the class struggle when I became a member of the South African Police Service. Using the Marikana issue as an example, he labelled me as a stormtrooper of the bourgeoisie whose only mission as a state institution is to protect the interests of the middle class and capitalists through iron heel social control over the working class in order to prevent militant social solidarity in class struggle from threatening dominant class interests. My accusers arguments are premised on an economic deterministic interpretation of Karl Marxs notion of the Base and Superstructure (base: class and property relations into which people enter to produce the necessities and amenities of life; /superstructure: state, political power structures, culture, etc.) relationship in society in which the base is assumed to determine the conduct and functions of the superstructure as a single causal agent. By extension, his interpretation assumes an instrumentalist relation between the police as an institution of social control, and perceived dominant class interests in South Africa. My accusers argument also discounts the reality that the State in South Africa is still primarily a contested terrain of struggle between various class forces and diverse interests who constantly engage each other and state power itself, to advance their own hegemonic influence in pursuit of their sectarian interests. The relationship between class and State institutions, in this case the police in particular, is therefore not as mechanically instrumental as assumed. However, the comrade in question asked me to prove where else in history besides in some instances in South Africa, the police behaved differently from its perceived bourgeois stormtrooper role and we discussed the following examples: * The 1918-1919 British Police strike in Liverpool and London led by socialist oriented police officers such as Inspector John Syme under the banner of the then National Union of Police and Prison Officers agains the then Police Act which barred police union membership. * The appointment of Emile Eichorn as Chief of Police in Berlin in 1918 during the German revolution after he and other officers sympathetic to the cause of the working class occupied and took over police headquarters in Berlin. At the time Emile Eichorn boldly declared - I got my job from the Revolution, and I shall give it up only to the Revolution!. * The triumphant police chief of Kharkov in then Tsarist Russia in 1917 announcing the overthrow of the Tsar and him leading his officers in protecting for workers from attacks by Tsarist counter-revolutionary forces. * The refusal of local police officers in Paris to join the militaristic riot police in repressing the student uprising in France of May 1968, resulting in several consequent reprisals for alleged mutiny. While these events by no means exhaust the history of similar police actions which do not conform to the bourgeois stormtrooper notion of a defender of class interests, it does raise questions about the perceived conservative role of the police in broader transformation in society, which might not lend itself to the usual stock deterministic answers. Perhaps it is time to re-examine our political paradigms about policing, and maybe, what a young Constable from the London Metropolitan Police said in 1977 after a protracted police strike at a meeting of the Police Federation (previously National Union of Police and Prison Officers Union of the 1918-1919 strike) might be worthy of some critical reflection:- We are no different from other workers. We may wear funny clothes and do societys dirty work for them. But we come from the same stock as other workers. We have only our labour power to sell, not capital.
Posted on: Wed, 06 Nov 2013 09:25:20 +0000
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