this post was submitted on 03 Sep 2024
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Look, I hate police unions as much as you do, but cops don't stop being workers just because you hate them. Do unionized Trump voters and racists and guys who beat their wives stop being workers, too?
I might argue that cops are political apparatchiks and cronies. A lot of the work is functionally a sinecure. Police can and regularly do simply skip their shifts or stand around doing nothing of consequence, while collecting a paycheck. The stated role of the police - protecting human life and community property - routinely goes unfulfilled. The functional role they fill is to discipline labor - guarding the properties of the idle rich, harassing minority communities and the unemployed/unhoused, hunting and assaulting enemies of the state, surveilling political and social opposition.
I don't think its fair to say that policing isn't real labor, because there's definitely a craft to it and even the most anti-cop society eventually recognizes the need for professionalized security. But the police as we know them today? Would you consider a pimp a member of the proletariat? What if he was a pimp-for-hire?
I guess we get to have some discourse over whether Mark Janus is a member of the proletariat, next?
I would argue that when your job consists of propagandizing against worker solidarity or physically intimidating people seeking economic independence, you're not doing productive work. Whether you're voting for Trump or Harris or RFK doesn't really matter. If you're beating up your spouse in order to extort more free labor? Absolutely the fuck not. That's textbook petite bourgeois behavior.
You're mixing two things here. In a private firm unions are needed because they balance the power. (Simplifying) Employer wants to exploit workers, union keeps them in check. (ofc employers don't need to be exploitative for unions to be needed etc etc etc)
But when the employer is completely dysfunctional the unions become dysfunctional too. I don't really know how the US government justifies paying for police doing nothing, but it's the core of the problem. If there's no expectation to work then unions have nothing to do and become something weird.
The solution is not to take unions away, but rather to stop pouring money for no work and restore that employer-union power balance.
So defund the police, I guess?
The purpose of the union is to operate as a check on the employer. If unions can't rein in the worst impulses of their employers, they aren't functioning in the interests of the people they supposedly represent.
A corrupt union leadership isn't part of the proletariat, either. A corrupt union membership - particularly one that's financially wedded to political insiders - isn't operating as a bargaining unit for the benefit of itself. These organizations are extractionary. A union of loan sharks or extortionary arsonists isn't part of the proletariat, either.
The solution is to dissolve the corrupt institution and reincorporate it with a membership that represents the interests of the community at large. But a cop that's spent their entire career in a corrupt bureaucracy can't be trusted to guard the neighborhood any more than a fox can be trusted to guard the hen house. Once you've got a taste, you're ruined. Nothing to do but sort you into a different profession.
Call it restructuring.
Job title: racist wife beater and cop.
Is the Crown a worker too? The reason Responders and military are not workers is because they serve the rich. They are not the proles, they are on the other side of class.
I bet King George didn't stop "working."
You think there is a "benign" "small" "local" government as opposed to a big bad one? Have you ever heard of Fusion Centers? Do you know the IDF military trains US cops often? Do you know big parts of local government were in the military before they became a department? You don't just stop being a former Pentagon collateral murderer.
Wow. When people say "beggaring the question", this is what they mean.
No question is begged. I don't think you understand that idiom. Explain. "Is" is a typo though.
Don't we all serve the rich in one way or another? Government workers at least provide services that benefit all of us, even if they do benefit the rich more than most.
In a capitalist pseudo-democracy where corporations are people with unlimited free speech and the richer candidates win the election 95% of the time, yes. https://capitolhillcitizen.com
If we had a true democracy of worker cooperatives, the workers would be the bosses and wealth would be distributed more equally. https://www.democracyatwork.info/
Teachers unions, logistics unions, the trades, librarians, nurses, the service industry--these are true unions that serve the community and contribute constructive benefits that improve the lives of many. The military, FD, PD, and carceral organizations put people down and surveil and jail them. It is not right to collectivize what harms the community. They don't need the help anyway. They have the biggest budgets, intergovernmental reinforcements, and all the weapons and walls on their side.
They're not labour. They are the state.
The state is a power structure. I don't become a corporation when I get a job at McDonalds.
So you understand how labour and management are not the same thing, right? Police have the authority of the state. They literally rule us. That is not labour.
Labour is the class that produces value. Police don't produce value, they implement the will of the state by doing violence against citizen of that same state. Labour theory is just not meaningful when applied to the police.