Left reformists have often talked about forming trades unions in the army and police force. Such demands ignore what these “bodies of armed men” are, in relation to the state. They are the physical means of that state breaking the heads of workers. That is the case, even though many of the individuals that comprise these organisations are workers themselves. It ignores the functions of these organisations, the class composition of their leading cadre, and the role of hierarchy, bureaucracy and discipline within them. Their function brings them into continual conflict with organised workers, and the discipline and organisational solidarity within them forces even the lower ranks to determine themselves by their opposition to other workers. We do not want that to continue, just with the forces of the state being better paid for it!!
A look at any strike, and graphically, The Battle of Orgreave, demonstrates that. An army or police trades union, does not change that, but, like craft exclusivity, only reinforces the division and separate interests of those within the organisation. French police are organised in trades unions, and strike for their own sectional interests, but it does not, at all, prevent them acting as serious battering rams of the French state against French workers.
The USC, in their general lack of class analysis, also fail to take into consideration, the class function of the Ukrainian army, when they talk about the organisation of workers within it. All armies contain a majority of workers – and in the past peasants – but that does not change their function, or the subordination of the lower ranks to the hierarchy, and its class interest, as WWI and II demonstrated. That is why revolutionaries do not propose soldiers or police trades unions, which solidarises those organisations against the rest of the workers, but, instead, propose democratic rights for soldiers and police, which helps to undermine that internal solidarity and discipline. In place of it, we propose workers defence squads, and democratically controlled workers militia.
“One would at least think that the military coup d’état of Chiang Kai-shek had finally hammered into the mind of every revolutionist the fact that trade unions separated from the army are one thing, and united workers’ and soldiers’ soviets, on the other hand, are quite another thing. Revolutionary trade unions and peasants’ committees can arouse the hatred of the enemy no less than soviets. But they are far less capable than soviets of warding off its blows.” (p 52-3)
As Trotsky wrote, at the start of WWII, if workers do not overthrow capitalism, then, there will be wars between capitalist states, and they will be fought by national armies, containing a majority of workers. To suggest otherwise, or call for peace, without coupling it to the need to overthrow the capitalist state, is just social-pacifism, and utopianism. In such conditions, revolutionaries set out this reality, and, whilst pointing to the need for them to establish soviets, as part of that task, they accept the reality that the majority of workers have not reached that level of consciousness. They, therefore, raise the demands for democratic rights, and for the best training and equipment, for workers thrown into harm's way by the capitalists' war, just as we would demand health and safety measures for other workers.
We form cells in the armed forces, to undertake such revolutionary activity, but its purpose is never to simply reform these organisations, or to present the delusion that these organisations can be used in workers' interest, as Paul Mason does in relation to NATO, and as the USC does, as indicated by its support for the Ukrainian capitalist state and NATO, and codified in the comments of Jim Denham that “OF COURSE” the Ukrainian capitalist state and imperialism are defending the Ukrainian working class. The point is to break them apart, to encourage sections of them to mutiny, and the ultimate form of that is the creation of soviets of soldiers and sailors – and today air force – bound to the workers' soviets, able, then, to turn their fire on their own ruling class.
“If we are to speak seriously of the alliance of the proletariat with the oppressed masses in the city and country – not of an “alliance” between the leaders, a semi-adulterated alliance through dubious representatives, but of a real fighting alliance built and steeled in the struggles of the masses against the enemy – then such an alliance can have no other organizational form than that of soviets. This can be denied only by those who rely more upon compromising leaders than upon the revolutionary masses below.” (p 53)
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