Police Association Quits Trades Hall in Victoria

Cops, Prison Guards Out of the Unions!

In early July, the Police Association (TPA) in Victoria announced its disaffiliation from the state’s peak union body, the Victorian Trades Hall Council (VTHC), citing a “divergence of views.” That the VTHC had allowed these armed thugs of the capitalist state to affiliate in the first place was a class betrayal. Cops and prison guards are not workers and their organisations are not unions. As part of the core of the capitalist state apparatus, the role of the police is to enforce the continued rule of the capitalist class, in particular through repressing the struggles of the working class. This is repeatedly demonstrated around the capitalist world, from the brutal massacre of striking South African platinum miners in August to the vicious attack on the union blockade of Grocon’s Emporium building site in Melbourne later that month. We of the International Communist League say: Cops, screws out of the unions!

Prior to quitting the VTHC, the Police Association had tried to prevent the reformist left group, Socialist Alternative (SAlt), from holding a meeting on “Racism and police violence” at Melbourne’s Trades Hall. When Trades Hall outrageously cancelled SAlt’s room booking at the behest of TPA, 150 people reportedly turned up and they began the event in the foyer instead. Shortly afterwards, purportedly for “health and safety reasons,” Trades Hall unlocked the original room and the meeting went ahead as planned. We welcome this defeat of the Police Association’s intrusion into the left and labour movement.

This is not the first time the Laborite VTHC tops have cravenly done the cops’ bidding and tried to ban a leftist meeting at Trades Hall. In March 2004, following the outpouring of anger in the Sydney suburb of Redfern that was sparked by the cop killing of Aboriginal youth TJ Hickey, then-VTHC secretary Leigh Hubbard banned a Spartacist League (SL) meeting opposing racist cop terror against Aborigines. The cops reportedly slandered meetings at Trades Hall on the Redfern events as promoting illegal activities. Arguing from the principle that the police have no place in the workers movement, we waged an aggressive political campaign amongst unionists and leftists to protest this provocation. The ban was overturned and we successfully held our meeting, “Defend Redfern Aborigines—Mobilise Union Power!” at Trades Hall. In fighting against the attempted VTHC/cop censorship, we wrote:

“The smearing of leftist organisations by the police is a sinister pretext for censorship, disruption and repression against all those that would oppose the racist capitalist status quo and constitutes a threat against the multiracial working people....

“As part of the armed fist of the capitalist state, which exists to defend the rule of the capitalist exploiters, the police are the deadly class enemies of the workers movement and oppressed minorities.”

—Spartacist League statement, 20 March 2004

Down With Racist Cop Terror!

There are certainly good reasons to protest against racist police violence. Following an outbreak of fascistic and murderous attacks on Indian students in 2009, Victorian police officers were caught out circulating an email containing a video showing the electrocution of a train passenger in India along with vile racist comments suggesting that “this might be a way to fix the Indian student problem” (Herald Sun, 9 October 2010). In Victoria, police harassment, intimidation, and violence towards North African youth, targeted as “gangs,” is well documented. In May this year confidential settlements were reached between the state’s police force and four African-born men and an Afghan whose claims of cop brutality included racial abuse, beatings and false imprisonment.

From the horrifying death of Aboriginal man, Kwementyaye Briscoe, in the police watch-house at Alice Springs in January, to the tasering and brutal death of 21-year-old Brazilian student, Roberto Laudisio Curti, in downtown Sydney in March, to the shooting of Aboriginal teenagers in Kings Cross in April, to raids on the homes of Muslim people in the dead of night in the name of “war on terror,” the police have been waging an unremitting racist war against immigrants and Aborigines. We stand for mobilising the organised working class in a class-struggle fight against racist state terror. “Anti-terror” laws, along with “law and order” campaigns, whip up fear and serve to foster division amongst workers. Above all they are aimed at strengthening the repressive apparatus of the bourgeois state.

The Police Association affiliated to the VTHC in 1998 in the wake of the bitter nationwide waterfront struggle, which the Laborite union misleaders sold out in the bosses’ courts. In response to TPA’s recent decision to disaffiliate, the VTHC secretary, Brian Boyd, declared he was “disappointed,” adding that “the 14 years in which it was affiliated had been productive and worthwhile” (Age, 4 July). In 2007 Boyd backed a “decent EBA” for police, despicably praising the “excellent work” of “coppers” from Melbourne to Darwin to the Aboriginal camps in central Australia under police occupation. The trade-union tops’ support to the police flows from their Laborite reformist politics, which promote acceptance of the bosses’ laws while pushing overall loyalty to the capitalist order.

While it is a good thing that the Police Association is no longer linked to the VTHC, it would have been far better if this had been brought about through a working-class fight to expel them. We seek to bring the understanding to the working class that it must organise independently of the bourgeoisie and their state. A class-struggle leadership in the unions, linked to a revolutionary workers party and standing in sharp political opposition to the current misleaders, would seek to mobilise the proletariat to oust cops, screws, and their auxiliaries such as security guards, from the unions. This would be part of a broader revolutionary struggle to win the working class to the understanding of their historic task to smash the capitalist state through workers revolution.

Reformist Opponents of Revolutionary Marxism

At no stage following TPA’s attempt to prevent their meeting, and the cops’ subsequent departure from the VTHC, did SAlt make the elementary point that cops and screws have no place in the workers movement. Never questioning TPA’s affiliation, SAlt politely appealed to Trades Hall to “not give in to pressure from a group that has, to say the least, been less than enthusiastic in its support for the aims of the labour movement in recent history”! SAlt fatuously queried, “Do [the Victorian Police Association] deny...that racism is an issue Victoria Police needs to deal with?” This is the type of garden variety reformism shared by groups such as Socialist Alliance, the Communist Party (CPA), the Socialist Party, and the Freedom Socialist Party, the latter often raising the call for “community control” of the police. It pushes the view that the capitalist state can be cleaned up and/or made to serve the interests of workers and the oppressed. Nothing could be further from the truth.

The interests of the capitalist class, which owns the means of production, and the workers, who must sell their labour power to the capitalists to survive, cannot be reconciled. As Russian revolutionary leader V.I. Lenin wrote in his famous 1917 pamphlet, State and Revolution: “The state is a product and a manifestation of the irreconcilability of class antagonisms.” The liberation of the proletariat and the oppressed is impossible “without the destruction of the apparatus of state power which was created by the ruling class.” Lenin explained that the capitalist state “must be replaced by a ‘special coercive force’ for the suppression of the bourgeoisie by the proletariat (the dictatorship of the proletariat)” (emphases in original).

The reformist opponents of revolutionary Marxism stand diametrically opposed to this understanding of the capitalist state. On 8 September last year, when the Unions NSW tops welcomed cops and screws into the massive public sector union rally, the reformists were incapable of drawing a sharp line in opposition to this provocation against decent unionists and all the oppressed. Tailing the union bureaucracy, the CPA embraced the police presence arguing “[the police] will remain united with the rest of the union movement to defeat the cuts,” while SAlt breathlessly reported: “The crowd, which filled Sydney’s Domain, was made up of all different public sector workers including nurses, bus drivers, ambos, RTA staff, librarians, park rangers and even prison guards and police” (www.sa.org.au, our emphasis).

Two months later, in the wake of repeated police attacks on picket lines and protests, including on the Occupy protests that SAlt and most of the reformists had opportunistically liquidated into, SAlt declared: “The police force is part of the capitalist state” and in times of crisis “have been relied upon to defend the property and wealth of the ruling class” (“The police are not on our side” Socialist Alternative, November 2011). However SAlt’s very occasional, feeble pretence at Marxist orthodoxy on the capitalist state is not worth the paper it is written on.

Last month, following a Queensland public sector rally against the Newman Liberal state government’s savage attacks, SAlt hailed a walkout by prison screws declaring: “Prison officers walked off the job on budget day in a wild-cat strike against the cuts. This is the kind of action there needs to be more of” (www.sa.org.au, 16 September)! Their support to the screws’ action should give pause to anyone who might be considering SAlt as genuine fighters against capitalist repression. Marxists know that any hard-fought defence of workers’ rights, and the rights of the oppressed, will face the repressive apparatus of the capitalist state. Better conditions for screws and cops simply mean they are better prepared to repress the struggles of workers and minorities.

Among those fostering deadly illusions that these thugs for capitalism are “workers” are the Socialist Party (SP), affiliated to Peter Taaffe’s Committee for a Workers International which openly insists that cops are “workers in uniform.” Peddling this grotesque line, the SP’s co-thinkers in South Africa, the Democratic Socialist Movement (DSM) scolded striking Lonmin platinum miners, following the police massacre of 34 of their comrades, for “killing first two security guards...and then two police officers. This did not move the workers’ struggle forward but divided it” (“For a general strike to end the Marikana massacre,” 17 August).

As Marxist revolutionary leader Leon Trotsky wrote, “The worker who becomes a policeman in the service of the capitalist state, is a bourgeois cop, not a worker” (What Next?, January 1932). The view, endemic on the left, that police and prison officers are a part of the labour movement reflects the outlook of the privileged and predominantly white Laborite union bureaucrats. Based on an increasingly thin layer of better paid workers, the trade-union tops play a key role in sowing false consciousness among the proletariat. Pushing the lie of a common interest with the capitalist rulers, these labour lieutenants of capitalism act in general to subordinate the interests of the working class to the bourgeoisie. The union misleaders and their left tails such as SAlt typically work for the election of the ALP, a bourgeois workers party that administers capitalism for the exploitative ruling class when in government. In the last federal elections SAlt advocated that workers should give “a first preference vote” to either Labor, the capitalist Greens “or others who are genuinely left-wing”!

Above all SAlt are defined by deep anti-communist hostility to the dictatorship of the proletariat. Their political origins go back to the late Tony Cliff and his followers in Britain, who capitulated to the then-ruling British Labour Party during the Korean War in the 1950s, reneging on the Trotskyist program of unconditional military defence of the degenerated and deformed workers states, including the USSR, China and North Korea, against imperialist attack. Cliff’s bogus theory of “state capitalism” was the theoretical justification for capitulating to imperialism. The Cliffites continue the same anti-Marxist tradition today, unmatched on the left in their hatred of the remaining deformed workers states of China, North Korea, Vietnam, Laos and Cuba. In contrast, we revolutionary Trotskyists defend the gains that workers have won through the overthrow of capitalism in these countries. Intransigent opponents of bourgeois rule, we stand for the unconditional military defence of the deformed workers states against imperialist attack and internal capitalist counterrevolution while fighting for the program of proletarian political revolution to oust the bureaucratic Stalinist misrulers.

Despite SAlt’s anti-communism—which includes barring the Spartacist League from attending their “public” events—we defend their right to hold meetings at Trades Hall or elsewhere. SAlt’s censorship of Trotskyists, including physical exclusion and threats to call campus cops such as at Sydney Uni in 2008, flows from their leadership’s inability to politically defend their wretched left-Laborite politics against communist criticism.

Just as we oppose all censorship by the capitalist state of meetings of the left and labour movement, we stand for genuine open political debate within the workers movement. This is part of clarifying the necessary revolutionary program before the working class. It is only through political struggle between contending tendencies in the workers movement that the advanced layers of the proletariat will be won from the poisonous grip of Laborism to the struggle to forge a revolutionary internationalist vanguard party. Modelled on Lenin and Trotsky’s Bolshevik party, which led the proletariat to power in Russia in 1917, such a party will be committed to the destruction of the capitalist state and the sweeping away of racist capitalist rule across the globe.