"Fightback" Hails Reactionary Prison Guards Strike

Cops, Prison Guards Out of the Unions!

Prison guards are the enforcers inside the capitalists’ penal system. Like the cops, they are a cesspool of violence, racism and corruption—the perfect mirror of a society based on the exploitation of labour for profit. It has always been axiomatic for Marxist revolutionaries and the most advanced sections of the working class that these “armed bodies of men” are part of the repressive force of the capitalist state and have no place in the labour movement. Yet today the trade-union bureaucracy embraces these thugs as fellow union members, a measure of their own loyalty to the capitalist order. And on the reformist left, no group is more notorious for supporting cops and prison guards as so-called “workers in uniform” than the Fightback group and its co-thinkers in the International Marxist Tendency.

So we were disgusted but not surprised to find Fightback hailing the recent five-day strike of prison guards in Alberta (“Alberta prison guards’ wildcat: a lesson for the entire labour movement,” marxist.ca, 3 May). In the old Edmonton Remand Centre, prisoners awaiting trial endured horrific conditions including racist abuse and assaults by these guards. The jail was recently replaced by a massive high-tech “open concept” prison which allows inmates a modicum of physical freedom. It was this that drove the prison guards, who are part of the Alberta Union of Provincial Employees (AUPE), to take job action over “safety” concerns. Their demands included equipping more guards with pepper spray to use against inmates as well as greater video surveillance. The strike soon spread to other prisons, and to sheriffs and others working in the court system.

Some delegates to the Alberta Federation of Labour (AFL) convention joined a pro-prison guard rally on April 27, and heard AFL president Gil McGowan praise the guards: “These workers did the brave thing, they did the right thing” Toronto Star, 27 April). Fightback’s article saluted AFL members for their “solidarity with their brothers and sisters.” That some workers felt an entirely misplaced solidarity with the jailers and enforcers of the capitalist injustice system reflects not militancy, but a deep-going retrograde consciousness in the organized labour movement. It is also a graphic demonstration of the pro-capitalist labour bureaucracy’s role as a transmission belt for bourgeois “values” into the working class. Such values include respect for the sanctity of the bosses’ laws and state apparatus, a deadly perspective which has always brought defeats for the struggles of the working people.

Fightback rhapsodized that “The prison guards showed tremendous class instincts,” and claimed that these “workers in uniform were in conflict with the ruling class who uses them to oppress the rest of the working class.” To be sure, the ruling Alberta Tories were hostile to this strike, which they moved to end through a contempt of court injunction. But at bottom, when prison guards or cops demand and win better wages and conditions including more “safety” measures, this strengthens the capitalist state and its forces of repression. What they want “more” of is the unrestricted right to inflict violence on workers, minorities and all the oppressed. Strikes by prison guards mean lockdowns, denial of medications, food and exercise. But Fightback could care less. Such sentiments, they say, are “the language of strike breakers.”

Prisons are an instrument in coercing, torturing and brutalizing those who have been cast off by a system rooted in exploitation and racial oppression. Canada’s prisons overflow with the poor, the mentally ill, the drug addicted and, above all, Native people. Making up less than four percent of the population, aboriginal people account for 23 percent of federal prisoners, and one-third of women prisoners. In the Prairies, nearly half of all prisoners are Native people. It is hard to find a more stark measure of this society’s racism. The Harper Tories’ intensified law-and-order regime will see more and more people—and especially Native people—jailed for longer and in more punitive conditions.

The labour movement is on the defensive across the country, and in Alberta the government is ramping up its attacks on workers and their unions. The government levelled a $350,000 fine against AUPE in connection with the prison guards’ walkout. The vast majority of this union consists of actual workers. This cash grab is thus an attack on the labour movement as a whole and we oppose it, as must all working-class organizations. But in doing so, we bitterly denounce the union leaders and those shameless “leftists” who welcome cops and jail guards into the trade unions.

At its core the state consists of armed bodies of men and instruments of coercion—the police, the army, prison officers, the courts—committed to the defense of the prevailing capitalist property forms. Fightback’s article genuflects to this understanding “in the final analysis.” But in the real world, they peddle the illusion that the direct enforcers of capitalist rule are “workers in uniform,” allies in labour’s struggles. This is an expression of Fightback’s preachments of parliamentarist reformism and its denial of the need for workers revolution to overthrow the bourgeois state.

A critical task of a rejuvenated labour movement will be to clean house in the unions, purging the armed thugs of capital from labour’s ranks. That in turn requires a struggle to replace the union bureaucrats, who are truly the labour lieutenants of capital, with a class-struggle leadership. In struggling to advance this perspective, it continues to be our unpleasant task to expose groups like Fightback for their fidelity to the capitalist order and its most violent and reactionary enforcers. A year ago, in taking on these same retrograde views, we declared:

“The Marxist attitude toward crime and punishment is that we are against it. Our objective is not to punish offenders: such a vindictive penal attitude is fundamentally a religious rather than a materialist conception of social relations. The state power of the proletariat, built on a collective material basis, will be free of the pathological injustices of capitalism. By getting rid of the scarcity and violence which define the capitalist order, such a society will lay the basis for human freedom as part of the transition to an egalitarian communist society free of classes and the organized coercion of the state.”

—“Prison and Border Guards Out of the Unions!” SC No. 173 (Summer 2012)