Defund The Police

The slogan defund the police is being taken up across the globe, as part of the Black Lives Matter movement, which is a movement and not just a moment whatever Starmer might want to believe.  In various places, reformists have already tried to draw the teeth of the demand, trying to interpret it as not really meaning defunding the police, but only as serious reform and reconstitution of police forces.  But the demand to defund the police is, in fact a serious, and necessary demand.

The police are the immediate armed fist of the capitalist state, the manifestation of its attempt to exercise a monopoly of force.  Given the increasingly rapid drift towards Bonapartist regimes, and the imposition of restrictions on liberty, egged on by the very socialists and liberals that should have been opposing such moves, under cover of the COVID19 moral panic, it is even more important, even aside from the numerous cases of violence by racist cops against members of Black and other ethnic communities.  Today, on the BBC's Politics Live, right-wing Tory, Iain Dale was even talking about imposing road blocks and further restrictions on liberty, and as citizens increasingly rail against such impositions the calls will come from the law and order brigade and Bonapartists for greater police powers to put down any such rebellions.

Of course, such road blocks and the blockading of towns and villages is not new.  The Tories did it during the 1984-5 Miners Strike, at the same time using further powers to prevent free movement across the country.  The left itself has led itself into this disaster as a result of its mindless backing of the so called lockdown in response to the COVID19 moral panic, and its desire to give all power to the capitalist state as the saviour of the people in doing so.

The example of the Miners Strike and many others such as the print workers strikes of the 1980's, show that for the working-class as well as for ethnic communities we need to defund the police as a hostile anti-working class force that acts like a dagger aimed at our hearts.  That Starmer should recoil from any such demand is, of course, no surprise, because he is not a champion of the working-class.  He is a conservative social-democrat.  His whole ideology starts from the necessity of the working-class making compromises with capital so as to remain within the confines of the capitalist system, and those compromises, along with the requirement to remain inside he confines of the capitalist system means that the interest of workers must always be subordinated to those of capital.  The police, and if they are not sufficient, as at Orgreave, the army are there to ensure that they remain within those confines.

We need to defund the police as the first step in disbanding them as an armed class force organised to defend the interest of capital as against the interests of workers.  A consistent democracy requires that the people should defend and police itself, and the large majority of the people are constituted of the working-class.  The rich have their gated communities and private security forces, as well as the police force and army to protect their interests, we should have the same rights.  The money that goes to fund the bosses' police should go instead to fund local communities to police themselves, organised via local democratic bodies on each estate.  Community policing, on a rota basis, should be a civic responsibility for every able bodied adult, in the same way as Jury Service.  Workers should get paid time off work to undertake it,, as well as for training.  We should use individual current police officers to provide immediate training and assistance, absorbing them into such organisations, where they are shown not to be themselves racists of fascists.

Defunding the police, and establishing day to day democratic bodies on each estate, able to exercise not only these kinds of community policing functions, but democratic control over estates and communities in general, is a basic element in the Marxist programme of developing workers' self activity, and self government.