Crystallised confusion – Socialist Alternative on the State and the Police
At a demonstration in London on Saturday 26 June, our British comrades purchased the June 2021 issue of Socialist Alternative (No. 16) and were surprised to find an article entitled “The State and the Police” by Jack Yarlett of Merseyside Socialist Alternative, which presents an orthodox Marxist analysis of the role of the capitalist state apparatus, in particular the police:
“To put a long answer short, the police, and the state more widely, exist to protect and serve the interests and power of the capitalist class—to ensure that the system of ownership and profit by the wealthy few is safe from social discontent and resistance among working class people.”
Organisations that identify with the political tradition of the Militant Tendency sometimes recognise the fundamental role of the police in the abstract, but stop short of drawing the logical conclusions in the concrete.
Comrade Yarlett’s article, however, breaks with the usual reformist narrative in its concluding “What to do?” section:
“When Karl Marx wrote about the Paris Commune … one of the most important lessons he outlined was ‘the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery and wield it for its own purposes…’ That is to say, if a workers’ government came to power in a revolution it would not be able to simply direct the police in its existing form, and others that make up the capitalist state…
…
“The creation of a socialist society in order to be successful would ultimately require the dismantling of the police, as with other repressive state institutions, and their replacement with new organisations for the running and protection of society.”
—Ibid
The Socialist Alternative (SAlt) editorial team made sure to include a box entitled “What We Fight For” immediately next to Yarlett’s article which directly contradicts Marx’s perspective:
“Police forces should be brought under the direct democratic control and supervision of the working class communities they serve, represented through community groups and trade unions for example. Drive out sexist, racist, homophobic and transphobic police officers!”
This more usual reformist approach is represented in a 7 July 2021 piece on the US Socialist Alternative website describing a citywide referendum campaign for Community Control Over the Police (CCOP) launched by “Stop the Station.” At issue is the proposed relocation of a police station to the historically black working class neighbourhood of Pittsburgh. Socialist Alternative is participating in the Coordinating Committee for the referendum. The CCOP calls for:
“…a democratically-elected, civilian-led police control council with full powers to hire, fire, subpoena, set budgets and department policies, and take over the mayor’s negotiation and approval of police union contracts.
…
“A victory for CCOP would be a huge step forward for Pittsburgh’s Black and working class communities. This victory would extend to the entire BLM movement, and the millions of Black and brown youth who are hungry for real systemic change going beyond Derek Chauvin’s indictment. Most important is the foundation this campaign can set for similar organizing initiatives across the city. Building out this movement nationwide on a sustained, independent basis will be key to winning significant concessions from the two-party corporate elite, on policing as well as other key demands like taxing wealthy corporations and developers, like UPMC and Walnut Capital in Pittsburgh. If CCOP makes it to the November ballot, the movement will have to fight to not only win and defend such a victory from court challenges from the police and establishment attacks; we must also continue to organize to ensure it elects working class representatives, particularly those from the Black community, who are willing to break with the capitalist political establishment and stand with our movements.”
The “progressive” wing of the capitalist Democratic party is projected as a potential source of leadership in the class struggle:
“Attending each conference was University of Pittsburgh law professor and progressive Congressional candidate Jerry Dickinson, who volunteered to draft legislation for a new democratically-elected Civilian Police Control Council. This bill, voted upon by the movement in May, is based on the democratic will of action conference participants and working class residents we spoke with on the doors and in the streets. It’s important for progressive candidates like Dickinson and elected officials to use their offices and campaigns in this way, to help organize and empower working class-led struggles.”
—Ibid
This view of the role of “progressive” capitalist politicians contradicts the Leninist approach Yarlett outlines in his article:
“Vladimir Lenin once described the state as ‘the product and manifestation of the irreconcilability of class antagonisms.’ By this he meant that without a state, which includes the police, the courts and so on, to impose order and control it would be impossible for a capitalist society to exist without falling into the chaos of conflict between the working class and the ruling class. Without the police to repress resistance from working class and oppressed people, the capitalists could not rule society as they do now.”
—“The State and the Police”
Socialist Alternative claims to adhere to the political method of Trotsky’s Transitional Programme. This is explained in a 2006 CWI document, “The State: A Marxist Programme and Transitional Demands” which SAlt has posted on their website. We dealt with the document’s central argument in our pamphlet, “Marxism vs. ‘Militant’ Reformism”:
“In 2006, Michael W., a youth leader of the Socialist Party of England and Wales (SP), British section of the Committee for a Workers’ International (CWI), resigned from the group citing the contradiction between the CWI’s claim to uphold the teachings of the great Russian revolutionaries and its consistently reformist practice (see Appendix A1). Lynn Walsh, a leading member of the SP/CWI, responded to Michael with a lengthy document entitled ‘The State: A Marxist Programme and Transitional Demands’ (see Appendix A2):
‘There will be many struggles to recoup past gains that have been lost in the recent period. As we have always done, we will link our immediate and transitional demands to the need for the socialist transformation of society.
‘The formal or “logical” contradiction between, on the one side, demands for reforms and, on the other, spelling out the need for a socialist transformation of society reflects the very real contradiction between the objective need for socialism and the immaturity of the consciousness and organisation of the working class.’
“Walsh complained that Michael:
‘…shows no recognition of the need for a flexible transitional programme that corresponds to different periods and different situations. If we were to adopt his approach, we would be doomed to political isolation—in a period that is actually becoming more and more favourable to winning workers and young people to socialist ideas. Adherence to abstract formulas might allow individuals or small groups to comment on events—and level doctrinaire criticisms of those who do engage in struggles. But the method to which Michael has now unfortunately turned will never provide a bridge between the programme of revolution and wide layers of workers and young people. If he follows this line, Michael will certainly be in no danger of becoming a populist—but, more importantly, he will not be an effective Marxist either.’
“But the record of the CWI reveals that its ‘flexible transitional programme’ has a lot in common with the reformist Second International’s minimum programme. Comrade Walsh cites a comment by Trotsky to justify the CWI’s practice:
‘Moreover, Trotsky pointed out that the Transitional Programme was incomplete:
‘“… the end of the programme is not complete, because we don’t speak here about the social revolution, about the seizure of power by insurrection, the transformation of capitalist society into the dictatorship [of the proletariat], the dictatorship into the socialist society. This brings the reader only to the doorstep. It is a programme for action from today until the beginning of the socialist revolution. And from the practical point of view what is now most important is how can we guide the different strata of the proletariat in the direction of the socialist revolution.”
(‘Discussions With Trotsky: On the Transitional Program’, Trotsky, 7 June 1938)‘In other words, it stops short of what Michael advocates, a programme for smashing the bourgeois state and the establishment of a workers’ state, a programme for an uprising and seizure of power.’
“Walsh is exactly wrong, as is clear enough from the passage he cites. Trotsky is explaining that his intent was to provide a guideline for mobilising the masses in ways that will lead them to struggle for state power—i.e., ‘the beginning of the socialist revolution’. This is what is ‘transitional’ about the programme Trotsky put forward—it is a programme for transforming the proletariat from a class in itself into a class for itself. Trotsky repeatedly emphasised that the role of revolutionaries is to help workers ‘understand the objective task,’ i.e., the necessity for social revolution, not to adapt to backwardness:
‘We have repeated many times that the scientific character of our activity consists in the fact that we adapt our program not to political conjunctures or the thought or mood of the masses as this mood is today, but we adapt our program to the objective situation as it is represented by the economic class structure of society. The mentality can be backward; then the political task of the party is to bring the mentality into harmony with the objective facts, to make the workers understand the objective task. But we cannot adapt the program to the backward mentality of the workers, the mentality, the mood is a secondary factor—the prime factor is the objective situation. That is why we have heard these criticisms or these appreciations that some parts of the program do not conform to the situation.’
(Discussions With Trotsky: On the Transitional Program’, 7 June 1938)”
It might be argued that the blatant contradictions in the articles by SAlt comrades provide an example of Walsh’s notion of “a flexible transitional programme that corresponds to different periods and different situations.” But in fact cops play essentially the same role in every capitalist society: in the USA the most militant elements of the Black Lives Matter movement do not call for “community control” but rather for “disbanding” or “abolishing” the police. The responsibility of Marxists is not to create illusions that the capitalist police can somehow be transformed into servants of the black community but to connect the call to “disband” the racist cops to the necessity for socialist revolution (to paraphrase Trotsky). SAlt is at least consistent in its overtly reformist approach, combining illusions in community control of the police with the notion that “progressive” capitalist politicians can provide the leadership to realise this absurd fantasy.
In Britain the historic miners’ strike of 1984-85 provides a useful framework. In retrospect the CWI described the British police as having become “a paramilitary force against the miners during their titanic strike of 1984-85, a strike that had many features of a civil war in the coalfields”, yet remained resolutely committed to pushing reformist illusions about somehow implementing community control of the police.
Given that nothing fundamental has changed about policing in Britain since the miners’ strike, we are interested in whether Jack Yarlett’s article represents a throwaway, one-off, orthodox display piece designed to provide left-cover for the CWI/SAlt continuing policy of advocating dead-end “community control” reformism or might it represent a genuine step in the direction of a revolutionary break with fake-Trotskyism?