Workers World, Vol. 22, No. 27
July 1 – In recent years, municipal unions in several cities have attempted to form coalitions with the police in order to improve their bargaining position and have a stronger hand in negotiations with the city government.
In some cities, such coalitions are actually in existence. In New York City, some municipal workers have formed a coalition including the police, firefighters, correctional officers, and sanitation workers. The question raised by many workers is what attitude should be taken toward such a coalition in light of the traditional opposition of the labor movement to the police.
It should be remembered that throughout the entire history of the class struggle in the U.S., the police have played a repressive role toward the labor movement. The sole exception was the Boston police strike in 1919 which then-Governor Calvin Coolidge broke. It would be difficult to find another instance where the police played a progressive role.
Even the case-hardened and conservative labor bureaucracy of the AFL-CIO, when it was headed by George Meany, turned down an application by the police to become an affiliate of the labor federation. The grounds for the rejection are all too obvious.
The police are not a legitimate part of the labor movement. On the contrary, they are, and always have been, an integral part of the capitalist governmental machine and a very special and privileged part of it.
The police as an institution of contemporary capitalist society become enormously expanded and politically more significant beginning with the mid-1950s. their extraordinary growth numerically has been in the main the response of the ruling class to the rise and development of the liberation movement of Black people and of other oppressed nationalities.
It is on this basis, their role as a special repressive force in the struggle against the oppressed nationalities, that the police have received increased privileges, inordinate salary compensation, and applause from all sections of the ruling class.
To a lesser degree, the extraordinary support and encouragement which the ruling class has extended to the police, aside from pecuniary support, is also due to the militant anti-war and draft resistance movement during the Viet Nam War.
Nevertheless, the question still remains whether a coalition of municipal unions which includes the police should be supported.
Of course, if a group of municipal unions, or even if one union, finds itself in circumstances which make it impossible for them to conduct their struggle properly, let alone win their demands, alone, it is absolutely essential to wholeheartedly support the coalition which the municipal workers have formed despite the fact that they are allied with the police. It is never wise to throw out the baby with the bathwater.
In all cases of coalition-building with the police, it is necessary to make absolutely sure that it is the force of circumstances and the given, concrete situation in which the legitimate municipal workers find themselves, which imposes the obligation to support the coalition.
Persistent and relentless effort should be made to steer and orient the municipal workers in the direction of broadening and strengthening their coalitions with the million-fold working-class movement. This is the surest guarantee for a truly successful coalition and one which negates the need for making a bloc with the police.
In New York City, the city workers’ coalition is composed of sanitation workers, firefighters, correction officers, and the police. The legitimate municipal workers are the ones who carry out a necessary civic function and do other work which, except for the fact that the employer is the state, would be done by workers.
The police and the prison guards are repressive forces. A clear line of distinction must be borne in mind, in case the coalition is fully consummated.
The legitimate municipal workers are fighting for a living wage. They perform a useful function in any society. Their demands are demands made upon the capitalist state, which represents the ruling class, the oppressors and exploiters of all workers.
What about the police? They are fighting in their capacity as representatives of the capitalist state for a greater share of the revenue, which the capitalist government has collected from the mass of the people, in order to bolster the privileged position of the police as a specialized repressive force.
When other workers are on strike, the police act as an agent of the bosses, as every worker knows. They act as guardians of capitalist private property. They are rarely in solidarity even with those unions which are closest to them and with which they are allied.
A long and protracted period of enticing the firefighters into collaboration with the police is one of the grave harms done to the municipal workers’ cause and to the labor movement as a whole. In efforts to crush the rebellions of Black and Latin people in oppressed communities, the police have on occasion coopted the firefighters to assist them with their water hoses. This has put the latter in the role of an auxiliary repressive force. That is unfortunate, since firefighters are workers in a true and legitimate sense of that word.
It should be noted that in several instances, it is the police who have taken the initiative in forming the coalition. In reality, this amounts to a major effort by the police to penetrate on a national level the growing influence of municipal workers throughout the country.
If this trend continues it will signify a national effort to integrate the entire labor movement into the capitalist state machine and thereby tie it more securely to the chariot wheel of the ruling class. Objectively, this effort at integration of the unions with the capitalist state machine is a further development in the evolution of the fusion of the banks and industry with the capitalist state in the epoch of monopoly capitalism.
Failure to resist police infiltration of the labor movement, which is what this really amounts to, would be particularly injurious to the cause of the working class at a time when it is most urgent that the working class organize itself independently and attempt to unify itself in order to meet the developing assault of the ruling class. This is particularly true at a time when the new economic crisis is beginning to take such a huge toll on the workers.
The police differ from workers in many respects. For instance, the police, as part of their function, collaborate with the FBI and the CIA. They hold national conferences with international police organizations (such as Interpol), and have intimate relations with a variety of both private and governmental networks of informers, undercover police agents, and the most varied assortment of shady elements in the lowest depths of capitalist society.
This does not necessarily mean that all police are cut from the same cloth. A policeman who directs traffic is merely performing a job which any workers could do and which would be necessary in any society, even a classless one. There are also thousands of employees of the police department who, except for the unfortunate fact that they are overexposed to the police mentality, are ordinary clerical and other types of workers.
The police in every city have tried to appropriate extra-police functions, functions which are not necessarily repressive but which give the police the appearance of indispensability to the welfare of the community, such as having auxiliary medical and hospital facilities and working closely with the city health and hospital organizations. In each case it is necessary to separate the wheat from the chaff.
In their effort to strengthen the police forces the federal government has appropriated special funding for auxiliary police forces. These, in reality, partly arose as community projects which, except for police propaganda and racist indoctrination, would have at least a semi-working-class character were they permitted to be autonomous and free from police agitation and infiltration.
Here again, care should be taken to separate out vigilante organizations and those community-based groups which, in reality, are trying to take care of their own communities and act as a counterpoint against the police.
Finally, it should be noted that the police, like every bourgeois institution, always has a certain element which leans, or attempts to lean, in a progressive direction. These should form their own organization as a vehicle for the presentation of their views. But not as part of the trade union movement, which should be autonomous and independent of the capitalist state.
The rise of the national liberation movement and the enlivening of the class struggle make the police more and more an entrenched and unreachable force so far as the workers are concerned. So much so that in quite a number of cities, the police predominate, even over the city administration as a whole.
Even the bourgeoisie has its problems with the growing encroachment of the police force, which closely parallels the encroachment of the military in the affairs of the civilian government.
In the recent transit strike in New York City, the city administration, and in particular the mayor’s office, virtually transferred their operations to police headquarters from which the mayor conducted his strike-breaking policy.
There is rarely an investigation of the conduct of the police by a powerful governmental body on a truly sweeping scale. Even the Knapp Commission, a so-called blue-ribbon body, a group of industrialists and Wall Street lawyers (which by the way included Cyrus Vance, the recently ousted U.S. Secretary of State), failed in its attempt to carry out an investigation of either the corruption or the extent of the encroachment by the police on civic functions, or its racism. In reality, the commission, except for citing a few isolated cases of corruption, folded up without really conducting any inquiry.
Of course, if the police ever find themselves in the position where they are in a struggle against the capitalist state, and are propelled by virtue of circumstance to take a progressive position, the labor movement should of course support them critically.
The easiest way for a Marxist to test the social necessity of the police force is to recall that in a classless society they would be unnecessary and would be gradually abolished along with and as a result of the withering away of the state. The job of firefighting and sanitation, however, would not only have a function in a classless society but would continue to make a considerable contribution to it.
Last updated: 11 May 2026