Soldiers and Cops

In our system the state has a monopoly on the use of violence. The police and the military are the main tools by which the state exercises its monopoly on violence. The only message that I want to convey with this post is that if you have access to members of the police or the military (or, really, any other enforcement arm of the state that can cause serious damage to a person's life), that you use this access to convey progressive messages towards them.

Now, certain types of people are attracted to police work and the military. Often their personality traits are such as to make them our enemies. But many within these organizations have enough intelligence, humanity and principles to make them amenable to concerns about social justice, fairness, and democracy.

Personally, when conveying my message on radical democracy, I wouldn't say anything that would incriminate me later. This is easy because "Workers as Citizens" isn't about smashing the present system but about working within it, by its own rules, to achieve a radical transformation of society.

The more exposure soldiers and cops have to a progressive message and progressive values, the more it will impact on their thinking. It's better than nothing at all. And even if you don't think you've made an impact immediately you might be surprised later to find out that you had more of an effect than at first appeared.

As I said; Even though "Workers as Citizens" is all about working from within the system to implement legitimate changes through legitimate structures ("legitimate" literally and within the stated values and rules of the elites themselves) the elites will not hesitate to distort it and portray it as a seething, violent, illegitimate movement against all that is right and true. I am not naive in that I believe that if a movement plays by the rules that it will not be attacked. I am well aware of the moral emptiness of the ruling class. But I am also aware of their power and our weakness. It seems to me that as much as super-anarchists might revel in throwing off all rhetorical restraints and taking on the system one-on-one in the streets, the fact of the matter is that the propaganda system has most of the populations in the industrialized world against them. Their numbers in the streets are inconsequential. And if they ever went beyond mere token levels of violence and "ungovernability" they would be crushed.

They would be crushed by the violent apparatus of the state. The police and the soldiery. But the police and soldiery are human beings. Often from social strata more like our own than that of the elites they protect. The smallest cogs in the machine can be affected so that the machine doesn't move as smoothly as the elites would wish.

One of the problems of the left is to write-off almost every group that isn't immediately amenable to our messages. It is this process of self-isolation that, well, ... we're marginalized. What else is there to say? T'would behoove us to bring those people as we can onto our side.