Workers in uniform
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Our position has been fairly inclusive in describing police (and prison guards and also expecting the military to reflect society) as workers in uniform. But now a year on from the killing of George Floyd can we continue to accept police as fellow-workers?
Here is an article about the campaigns to oust police unions out of the American labor movement.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/may/24/los-angeles-black-lives-matter-police-unions
Isn’t it something we support for unions under along sound lines and opposition to particular unions if they are not.
Of course, some unions are also corrupt…and has been since the labor union was born in the USA
Here is an article on the United Auto Workers
“They want to force Afro Americans to take the vaccine for “our protection” but can’t pass a law to protect us from the blue Klux Klan”
https://vm.tiktok.com/ZMe7XvdAY/
And this…
Surely as Socialists we should be engaging in our fellow workers (whether they are in uniform or not) about the need to recognise their class interests. Ousting some members will not achieve that. Unions should be pressuring the Police unions to change, rather than kicking them out.
The assumption being made is that the police unions can be influenced by being in the AFL-CIO.
There are thousands of different police forces in the USA with no central police union but as many as there are law enforcement agencies.
Has any police union, for instance, been sympathetic to the ‘defund the police’ campaigns?
We support unions because we recognise them as the necessary counter-weight to organised capital in determining wages and conditions. There is no doubt that police unions perform admirably at this. So did many of the mafia-controlled unions and the Communist Party-controlled ones.
I have offered a similar position as yourself
But I wonder if such an analysis applies today to the USA?
The police force and the military around the world they are still members of the working class.
They are employees of the capitalist state, and their main function is to defend the interests of the state and the ruling class, they are not trained in order to defend the peoples, that is only a social myth.
Some presidents are also employees of the state and their function is to defend the interest of the state and the ruling class including the presidents of the so called socialist countries.
The militias of the so called socialists countries also kill and repress members of the working class
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The armed forces around the world have killed more peoples than the police and still they are members of the working class.In the USA the police force has high salary but in others countries they live in poverty and they receive very small salaries.
The workers who build warplanes, missiles and bombs they are also members of the working class, and those artifacts are built in order to kill others workers.
In the past several leftist groups killed poor policemen to take their guns to fight for the so called peoples revolution.
We must focus ourselves in the character and the function of the state, defunding the police will not change the character of the state
In Central America the police have workers unions, and they have gone in strikes asking for the same benefits claimed by workers from others workers unions
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