Workers World, Vol. 13, No. 2
Are strikes by the police to be regarded approximately the same way as strikes by ordinary workers? A reading of the treatment accorded to the New York police strike by the Daily World (the paper of the CP which professes to be Marxist-Leninist) clearly conveys this impression. A column by George Morris, the Daily World’s labor analyst, waxes eloquent about the cops’ strike and says “it is in the spirit of rebellion we see everywhere today as in unions against the long entrenched bureaucracy.” He further says that the cops are “beginning to see themselves as in much the same position as other city employees and workers.” Finally, he admonishes his readers that “fire should not be blunderbussed against all on the police force.”
You see, the way to look at it is that there are good cops and bad cops, just like there are good capitalists and bad ones. We must assume then, that there are good storm troopers and bad ones, if we use the logic of George Morris. In this way Morris substitutes bourgeois morality for Marxist analysis of class antagonisms and contradictions between class groupings.
The cops’ strike is not an isolated phenomenon. There is one in progress right now in Milwaukee. Earlier there were strikes or stoppages in Detroit and Youngstown, Ohio. Strike preparations are underway in perhaps a dozen other cities throughout the country. It is therefore necessary and in the vital interests of the working class to restate the fundamental position of revolutionary Marxism on this crucial question. Should strikes of cops be treated on an equal level with workers’ strikes?
Emphatically, no! A striking worker and a striking policeman may on the surface appear to have the same immediate aims – to get higher pay and better conditions for themselves. But this is to take an extremely narrow and superficial view of their apparently similar situations. The truth, however, is that there is objectively speaking not a shred of class identity between workers and the police. The fundamental interests of the workers are diametrically opposed to that of the police and are absolutely irreconcilable with them.
SUBHEAD: Producers or parasites?
A worker is, above all, a producer. The policeman is a parasite who lives off what the worker produces. No truer word could be said! All the material wealth which is now in the possession of the capitalist class was produced by the workers. When a worker goes out on strike she is merely trying to retrieve a portion of the wealth which her labor power produced. The worker gets back in the form of wages only a portion of what he produces. The rest is what the capitalist class retains in the form of profit (really the unpaid labor of the workers).
The gross national income of the U.S. last year reached the astronomical sum of one trillion dollars. It was all produced by workers – Black, Brown, white, men and women and even children. The struggles of all the workers, insofar as their immediate demands are concerned, are merely to retrieve a larger portion of this wealth which they produced for the bosses and which the bosses keep for themselves.
SUBHEAD: Contribute nothing to social wealth
What have the cops contributed to the production of this unprecedented amount of wealth? Nothing at all. In fact, their principal function is to guard the wealth for the capitalists, protect their monopolist profits from the demands of the workers. Even as the New York cops were out on strike, their emergency crews were busily clubbing the heads of striking telephone workers. That’s the very essence of a cop – to crack the heads of strikers and practice the most inhuman brutality against the Black, Puerto Rican and Chicano communities.
A cop is a mercenary hired by the capitalist class through their agent (the city government to keep the mass of the workers and the oppressed in complete subjection. They utilize all the forces and violence at their disposal whenever the masses rise up in rebellion against the unendurable conditions imposed by the master class.
The police are the most parasitic social grouping in society. When they work – if that’s what it can possibly be called – their labor is directed against the workers and oppressed. Graft, corruption, intimate collaboration with all sorts of underworld figures and enterprises such as gambling, narcotics and a thousand other shady businesses – that’s what cops are really engaged in.
They are utterly inseparable from crime and corruption itself. One could not exist without the other. Both a nourished and supported by the nature of the capitalist system itself. To put the police on a par with the workers is to erase the difference between the persecutors and their victims.
Such incidental operations of the police as traffic control and other related useful functions for society are deliberately tacked on by the government to police control when they in reality should be separate and independent activities of workers apart from the parasitic regular police functions.
SUBHEAD: What about German ‘Social Democrat’ cops?
The police in every capitalist country are trained in the spirit of civil war against the workers and the popular masses in general. This is so even in the rare cases, like pre-war Austria and Germany, where substantial sections of the police considered themselves “socialists” or “social democrats” because a large section of the populations of these countries were either socialists or communists.
However, at the critical moment when Hitler made ready to seize power by a fascist coup, the police unanimously and cheerfully lined up with him and opened up a civil war against the workers of Austria. In Germany proper, they joined the storm troopers. They played a prime role in Hitler’s attempt to ferret out every militant worker and every progressive person and haul them off to the concentration camps. These same police systematically carried out the torture of hundreds of thousands of socialists and communists, not to speak of the unbelievable atrocities against the Jews.
In this country, who does not know that the Klan and the John Birch Society are the most intimate collaborators with the police and in some cities actually control the police?
Who does not know that almost all the strike-breaking agencies in the country work hand in glove with the police? Both are in the service of the industrialists as soon as the workers make an independent move of their own.
SUBHEAD: Army of occupation in oppressed communities
In the Black and Brown communities the police play the role of a foreign occupation army and practice a form of cruelty and brutality which differs only in degree from the U.S. occupation army in Vietnam and Cambodia. As a token of the high esteem and affection in which these communities hold the police, they have coined the word “pig” as synonym for cop and this word has passed into the universal language of the oppressed.
It is utterly false to compare the rebellion of the cops with that of the workers and oppressed people, as does Daily World columnist George Morris. Only one who has renounced Marxism would do that.
The police strikes, if they can be called that, are in the nature of pro-slavery rebellions whose ultimate effect is to strengthen the capitalist state against the masses everywhere. A victory for the cops means extra privileges for these parasites. This will embolden them and encourage them in the use of violence in future struggles against the workers. Every cent paid to the police comes out of the hides of the workers. Every cent they get is at the expense of welfare, housing, schools and other facilities that are needed by the people. And the police are now the biggest item in New York City’s budget!
Unlike workers, when police go out on strike they are not trying to retrieve money withheld from them for useful work done in behalf of society. There services are solely and exclusively in the interests of one class of society only – the ruling class. Clarity on this point is absolutely indispensable. If the police fine themselves in a controversy with the ruling class over the amount of money they should get as mercenaries, the workers should treat this as an internal struggle in the camp of the enemy, and not confuse it with a struggle of their own class.
But that’s exactly what George Morris does! His article is an affront to every worker who has ever felt the brunt of a police club.
SUBHEAD: The Boston police strike of 1919
Of course, there are exceptional cases where police strikers, in a struggle with the capitalist state, have no alternative but to turn for support to the workers. These cases are rare indeed, such as the Boston police strike of 1919, which Calvin Coolidge, then Governor of Massachusetts, broke. In such cases it is the duty of the workers’ leaders to adroitly intervene in the struggle.
In doing so, they must make clear that their intervention is not motivated by any class solidarity with the police (who on the morrow of their victory will again proceed to club the heads of striking workers) but out of motives of working class expedience – that is, to help the police undermine the capitalist state structure. The longer a police strike lasts, the more it undermines capitalist law and order. In that task, a revolutionary worker should help, while helping even more to build workers’ self-defense groups.
The various parasitic elements which constitute the capitalist state are always in conflict with each other on how to divide among themselves the juiciest portions of the city, state and federal treasuries. Like thieves, they are invariably at each other’s throats, each seeking a greater share of the loot. These parasitic elements comprise the police, detectives, prison officials, executioners, various state and local anti-subversive squads, and the judicial bureaucracies. These are not to be compared to firefighters, sanitation workers, or other workers who have been co-opted by the government into the capitalist state apparatus so as to keep their wages in check. These workers perform useful tasks and will continue to do so even in the highest form of socialist society. Morris deliberately confuses the issue when he compares police to workers.
SUBHEAD: Will there be cops when classes are gone?
One way for a Marxist to judge whether a specific social group in the present capitalist state setup is parasitic or really performs socially necessary and useful work is to ask whether such groupings would be needed in a socialist system after the abolition of all class rule. Clearly police will not be needed. With the abolition and disappearance of all vestiges of class privilege, the need for a coercive special force, even a workers militia, becomes superfluous.
However, men and women who work to make a more sanitary social environment and make it free from all sorts of hazards such as fire, will of course be needed. If even in a socialist society the need for a coercive force such as police continually diminishes as the socialist system develops to a higher and higher form, then all the less do we need police in a capitalist society. Here its fundamental function is to suppress the working class and in particular use the most brutal violence against the Black, Chicano and Puerto Rican people.
It is to be noted that the current wave of police insurgency comes after a considerable period when they have been engaged in actual civil war against the Black and Brown communities. The ruling class has felt itself more and more indebted to the police precisely because of this. Having been highly flattered for their brutal role in the recent period, the police are now demanding extra privileges and remuneration for their storm trooper role in those communities and on the college campuses as well as in the recent strike struggles throughout the whole country.
The police have also become more vociferous in denouncing the so-called lenient judges and demanding that the government take the “handcuffs off the police.” This cry is nothing but a fascist demand for the right to unrestricted use of force and violence against the civil population. It is in this context that we must view the police strikes as well as the general historical role that they play in the class struggle.
SUBHEAD: Paris Commune dispelled cops – and crime
That the working class needs no capitalist police to secure and defend them was never more clearly demonstrated than in the first great proletarian revolution more than a hundred years ago – during the Paris Commune. Scarcely had the Paris Commune been established (the first truly working class government had just begun to survey the tasks ahead of it) when the world had its first vision since the dawn of class society of what would happen to the entire capitalist police establishment on the day of the proletarian revolution.
“No more corpses at the morgue, no nocturnal burglaries, scarcely any robberies,” says Karl Marx about the Paris Commune in his celebrated book, “The Civil War in France.”
“In face, for the first time since the days of February 1848,” he remarks, “the streets of Paris were safe and without police of any kind.”
Is there a capitalist government anywhere in the world that can make such a boast even for one day? Is there any large city anywhere in the capitalist world which is free even for a single day of any crime and could do without any police of any kind as was the case with the Paris Commune? Merely to ask the question is to answer it. To put an end to crime it is first of all necessary to put an end to the thoroughly criminal rule of the bourgeoisie. It is their very existence which breeds not only crime and corruption but virulent racism, imperialist war and genocide.
To infuse the working class with a revolutionary attitude toward the police is at the same time ideological preparation for the overthrown of the capitalist class.
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Only the bosses were scared
By Mike Kane
Workers World, January 29, 1971
When you read the bosses’ press during the cops’ strike, you were led to believe that all the people in New York City had barricaded themselves behind locked doors, afraid to go out. That they were trembling and praying for an early return of the cops’ “protection.”
In the shop where I work none of this “fear” existed among the workers.
There were both remarks for and against, during the strike, such as; “They’re getting a raw deal” and “Who needs them?” But no one spoke of impending doom.
Where I work, there are over 1,000 of us in the Union. Women and men. Black, white and Spanish-speaking. Young and old. Since the cops’ strike ended there have been some good discussions, mostly in the cafeteria.
One started when Al, a white worker in his 30s, said: “I support them all the way. They have a lousy job.” He also said they have “the right to strike.”
Bill, an older white worker, said: “I think everyone has the right to strike. But remember how the cops beat our heads and escorted scabs through our picket lines during our strike.” Al got very quiet. Later in the day he said, “If those guys want my support, they go to do what every union member is supposed to do – no strike-breaking.”
Dianne, a youth Black woman (also a karate expert) said: “I’ve always felt safer with a known mugger than with a cop around.”
Linda, a young white woman from a predominately Italian-American neighborhood in Brooklyn, said: “In the neighborhood where I live most of the dope-pushers are cops. The drug addicts are more worried about this strike than anyone else.”
Paul, a Black worker, said he “felt safer with the pigs off the streets.” He continued, “As long as they are out in the suburbs looking at TV, they aren’t in my neighborhood beating heads.” (The day after the strike ended, the pigs were beating heads of Black and white students at a State Island high school.)
The bosses for the most part were very quiet. The law-and-order slogan was an embarrassment. They merely expressed a wish that the police would get back to “work” as soon as possible. “Work,” of course, meaning occupying Black and Puerto Rican communities, brutally repressing women and student demonstrators and smashing strikes.
The “fear” that the millionaire press spoke of was their own, the fear that the important “work” cops do, protecting their property, will stop. The “crisis” was a crisis for the bosses, not for my Brothers and Sisters.
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Milwaukee YAWF demonstrates: ‘No support for strikebreakers’
By S. Arthur
Workers World, January 29, 1971
Milwaukee, January 20 – Today, as hundreds of Milwaukee’s worst scum, the cops, marched around City Hall demanding more pay for strikebreaking and for occupying the Black community, a militant counter-demonstration called by Youth Against War & Fascism confronted them.
The demonstrators carried banners reading “No Support for Strikebreakers – Cops Scab on Unions” and “Arm the People, Disarm the Pigs,” and flags calling for the freedom of the Panther prisoners known as the Milwaukee 3, two of whom are serving a 30-year sentence on a frame-up charge of attempted murder. (The third is underground.) The protesters also called for freedom for Angela Davis.
This counter-demonstration was the product of agitation by YAWF against the pay increase demanded by the pigs and the whole question of whether the Police Patrolmen’s Protective Association is a real workers’ union. A leaflet put out by YAWF for mass distribution entitled “Police Rule While Pigs Strike” stated the pigs’ “...sole purpose is to protect private property, not the few things that the people own, but the great property of the bosses ... The pigs want more money. What for? They want combat pay for going into the Black community.”
The leaflet went on to describe some of the vicious pig attacks on striking workers in the past year in Milwaukee. “The pigs are the biggest strikebreakers of them all – they have no right even to call themselves workers.”
The leaflet relates the experience of the Montreal police strike. “For 16 short hours the people were free of the repressiveness of the local pigs, who not only were protecting the rich, but were acting as the agents of English domination over the Quebecois workers of Montreal. The result was a major redistribution of the capitalists’ wealth in the form of 19 major ‘holdups’ including 10 banks.”
Thus a police strike for “combat” pay is totally reactionary. This is why some bourgeois politicians approach it either with support or with cries of “we can’t pay it.” The example of Lindsay attempting to fine the pigs in the recent New York police “job action” is merely the reaction of one wing of the ruling class trying to prevent a Praetorian Guard from forming.
If the cops today were to stop brutalizing the Black community; if they were to stop breaking workers’ strikers, if they were to stop being armed agents of the racist ruling class – in short, if they were to stop acting like cops – then perhaps the workers and oppressed would view a police strike differently. But let’s not hold our breath.
Last updated: 11 May 2026