A letter to ‘Revolution Festival 2024’ attendees

On Ted Grant’s view of cops & screws as ‘fellow workers’

In October 2019, Socialist Revolution, newspaper of the International Marxist Tendency’s American section, published a wide-ranging critique of “ultraleft sectarianism” which, among other things, addressed the Marxist view of cops and screws. The polemic was occasioned by the defection of James B. from the IMT to the Internationalist Group (IG)—an organisation whose founding cadres, like our own, originated in the Spartacist League. The article posited that the “‘black and white’ and ‘one size fits all’ thinking” of sectarians was at odds with the approach of “unwavering, principled class independence on all political questions, combined with infinite tactical flexibility” the IMT claimed to share with Lenin’s Bolshevik Party. The polemic included the following accurate description of the function of police in bourgeois society:

“Without the repressive state apparatus, the capitalists could not maintain their rule for a single day. They require a special force with special powers and privileges—including the power to threaten and use lethal force—to keep the majority in line. As a social force, the police are clearly part of the ‘armed bodies of men’ which defend private property of the means of production and the personal wealth of those who hold the lion’s share of it.”

The IMT, however, cautioned against an overly “simple” view and recalled their comment during the Occupy Wall Street protests:

“Those who say the police are not on our side are correct in a sense; the police force is set up against the interests of the working class. Yet, things are not so clear and simple in reality.”

Sometimes, they observed, “the ‘armed bodies of men’ confront the ruling class and make demands upon it,” citing as an example:

“… when the police or prison guards go on strike for higher wages and/or better conditions for themselves and the prisoners they guard. In the context of the ongoing attacks on public sector workers, these struggles can have an effect on the broader working class, as was the case in the Alberta prison guards’ wildcat strike.”

To give this social-democratic position a more leftist spin the authors of the polemic asked:

“When the police withhold their labor and refuse to be used as tools for repression, are we supposed to ignore the fact that there has been a change in the situation? When cracks begin to emerge in the state apparatus, should we or should we not seek to widen those cracks and further loosen the bonds of discipline?”

There have been occasional historical episodes where sections of the police have wavered or even defected but such rare instances do not change the fact that cops function as the guardians of an inherently oppressive social order organised for the benefit of a tiny layer of exploiters. One characteristic of more politically advanced proletarian elements is the recognition that, despite their typically plebeian origins, the police are the enemies of the organised workers’ movement. Socialist Revolution rejected this attitude as “one size fits all” arguing “we support police unions linking up with the rest of the labor movement insofar as this can, in certain instances, weaken the bourgeois state” while stipulating that they opposed making “any reactionary concessions to the police unions in order for them to remain within the broader umbrella of organized labor.”

The IMT’s fraternal view of cops derived from its political adaptation to social-democratic ideology during the decades the group spent buried in the Labour Party. Ted Grant, the long-time leader of the Militant Tendency, never formally repudiated the revolutionary legacy of Trotsky’s Fourth International, but in fact his group devolved into overt reformism, claiming that socialism could be realised through Labour winning a parliamentary majority and proceeding to pass an enabling act to nationalise the “commanding heights” of the British economy. This reformist pipe dream represented an explicit repudiation of the most fundamental proposition of Marxism—one elaborated by Marx after the defeat of the 1871 Paris Commune—that the capitalist state could not be taken over and wielded as an instrument of liberation by the oppressed, but rather had to be smashed and its repressive apparatus replaced by new institutions committed to defending working-class interests. The corollary of this of course is recognising that cops and other defenders of capital are enemies, not “fellow workers.”

The authors of the 2019 Socialist Revolution polemic, rejecting such “sectarian” notions, asked:

“When the police show up and are ordered to break up a picket line, are they more likely to break discipline if they are appealed to by the striking workers as fellow union members—or if they are immediately told, ‘f*ck you, pigs! Cops out of the labor movement!’?”

Did any IMTer standing on a picket line facing imminent police attack ever attempt to address the riot squad as “fellow union members”? Doing so would doubtless have been seen by other picketers as a sign of mental illness. Countering violent police attacks requires preparation and determined resistance led by militants free of illusions about capital’s paid thugs as potential allies.

In a retrospective piece on the miners’ strike of 1984-85, Phil Mitchinson, a leading cadre of the IMT’s British section, outlined the vast mobilisation of state repression:

“Twenty years ago on March 5, 1984 the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) embarked upon the most important class struggle in Britain since the general strike of 1926. Over the following twelve months of ferocious battles billions of pounds were spent by the ruling class to crush the miners’ militancy. More than ten thousand miners were arrested; two were killed on the picket lines and countless others injured. Decades of so-called consensus were obliterated and the real and ugly face of British capitalism was exposed for all to see. The masks of Democracy and the Law, behind which the ruling class try to conceal the rule of capital, were shattered as the veil of so-called independence of the courts, the police and the media was lifted to show the real role of the state in capitalist society.”
—The lessons of the 1984-85 miners’ strike, 18 June 2018

While these vicious attacks did indeed expose “the real and ugly face of British capitalism,” this did not deter Ted Grant and the rest of the Militant Tendency’s leadership from continuing to prattle on about “democratic accountability” and winning “trade union rights for the police ranks”:

“The call for democratic accountability of the police, as part of a socialist programme, must be brought to the fore. While the need to defend trade union rights against attack will rightly be uppermost in workers’ minds, the labour movement must renew its demand for trade union rights for the police ranks.”
—“Police-state strategy used against miners”, Militant, 13 April 1984

In his initial critique, James B. correctly noted that softness on cops and screws was counterposed to “any real program for black liberation”:

“A criticism that the IMT often tries to ignore, or deny the truth of, is that it supports police and prison guard ‘unions,’ and the idea that police, prison guards, etc. are workers….

“The question of the state is the biggest separating line between revolutionary and reformist politics. This is reflected in the question of cops and prison guards (both public and private, as the repression industry keeps growing). And this is crucial for any real program for black liberation. How could Marxists raise a revolutionary position and program in mass protests against racist killings by the police and against mass incarceration if they put forward the terrible line that cops and guards are ‘workers’ and should be in the labor movement?”
—“Marxist Politics are Class Politics,” 1 March 2019

A year after James resigned from the IMT’s Minneapolis-St. Paul branch, the hideous cop murder of George Floyd sparked a tsunami of outrage with millions of youth across the US and abroad flooding the streets in protest at this particularly blatant and brutal example of the intrinsic racism of capitalist society. The IMT abruptly dropped its longstanding embrace of cops and screws as “fellow workers” and began echoing calls for police “unions” to be thrown out of the labour movement:

“As for the police ‘unions’ affiliated with the AFL-CIO, it is clear that they have long defended and covered up the rampant racism and abuse of power within their ranks. These organizations function more like rackets or cartels, using their importance to the ruling class as leverage to “defend their own”—including many racist sociopaths. As the movement to fight police brutality continues to broaden, the police unions are clearly playing an overwhelmingly reactionary role in holding back the unleashing of organized labor’s energies on the right side of history”

. . .

“But the starting point of the Marxist method is the living reality of the class struggle as it actually unfolds, not abstract formulations or one-size-fits-all positions, regardless of time and place. A tipping point has been reached, and if we are to harness the massive untapped potential of the working class, the national and local labor leaders should take action and unceremoniously show these entities [police ‘unions’] the way out the door.”
—USA: how can the working class end police terror?, 12 June 2020

The “living reality of the class struggle” in the US did not qualitatively change between 2019 and 2020. What changed was that popular outrage at murderous police brutality made catering to cops and screws a liability.

A serious Marxist group that suddenly reversed a longstanding position would provide a political accounting of why they did so and attempt to explain the roots of their error. But instead of frankly acknowledging that James and all their other “sectarian” critics had been right all along about the character of cops and screws as “fellow workers” and Ted Grant and the rest of the IMT’s historic leadership had been wrong, the rebranded “Revolutionary Communist” Militant Tendency has simply swept the whole issue under the rug.

The French section of what now calls itself the “Revolutionary Communist International” (RCI – formerly the IMT), whose members may be unaware of their tendency’s own inglorious history, did not pull any punches when they set out last year to “remind the confederal leaders of the CGT [Confédération Générale du Travail] (and France Insoumise) of some basic truths”:

“Because of its objective role under capitalism, the police are inevitably a breeding ground for hardened racists and reactionaries. Generally speaking, the bourgeois police cannot be ‘refounded’ in a progressive direction. The bourgeois police must be smashed, pulverised, at the same time as the bourgeoisie will be driven from power, its means of production will be expropriated and society will be refounded on a socialist basis. Any other perspective is reformist chatter that sows dangerous illusions in our class.”
—France: teenager murdered by police – the workers’ movement must intervene!, 3 July 2023

This description of “hardened racists and reactionaries” at the core of every capitalist police force is starkly at odds with Ted Grant’s teachings about cops and screws as “fellow workers.” Serious militants in the RCI who aspire to seeing the bourgeois police “smashed” would do well to ponder the implications of the fact that for many decades the leadership of their political organisation were sowing “dangerous illusions” with their “reformist chatter” about the armed thugs of the capitalist class.

Bolshevik Tendency