Categories are useful inasmuch as they help us understand and interact with the world. We can construct a box that describes both cops and working people. We can construct a box that describes working people but not cops. We can construct a box that describes industrial working people but not service workers. Et cetera, et cetera. There’s an infinite number of ways to draw lines and group things.
If we learn anything from the Russian and Chinese revolutions, it’s that categories developed in 19th century Europe don’t cleanly map onto other times and places. The ability of the revolutionaries to identify particularities of their peasant classes allowed the peasants’ revolutionary potential to be harnessed alongside that of an underdeveloped proletariat.
So what are cops, then? To group them into either proletariat or bourgeoisie is a mistake, I think, akin to grouping all working people into one proletarian class (there’s a reason so many non-bourgeois statesians support the police and military, and it’s not because of some universal false consciousness). In the US their role in the imperial, colonial, capitalist structure is clear. I think they generally align more closely with the PMC, petty bourgeoisie, and labor aristocracy than international capital, though.
In that sense they experience a higher degree of precarity than the bourgeoisie proper. But their relationship to the means of production and their own means of subsistence is distinct from non-PMC workers (service industry and global proletariat). As such I don’t think class traitor is an accurate label, not in the US. It better suits cops in colonized countries, when they aid their colonizers. US cops are well-aligned with the interests of the “middle” imperial class they belong to.
But even though class analysis and discussion is important, we need to be careful to avoid semantic debates (except maybe when defining categories for a party line to use externally). The labels we slap on these categories are less important than the categories themselves (and the real entities they try to describe)
Categories are useful inasmuch as they help us understand and interact with the world. We can construct a box that describes both cops and working people. We can construct a box that describes working people but not cops. We can construct a box that describes industrial working people but not service workers. Et cetera, et cetera. There’s an infinite number of ways to draw lines and group things.
If we learn anything from the Russian and Chinese revolutions, it’s that categories developed in 19th century Europe don’t cleanly map onto other times and places. The ability of the revolutionaries to identify particularities of their peasant classes allowed the peasants’ revolutionary potential to be harnessed alongside that of an underdeveloped proletariat.
So what are cops, then? To group them into either proletariat or bourgeoisie is a mistake, I think, akin to grouping all working people into one proletarian class (there’s a reason so many non-bourgeois statesians support the police and military, and it’s not because of some universal false consciousness). In the US their role in the imperial, colonial, capitalist structure is clear. I think they generally align more closely with the PMC, petty bourgeoisie, and labor aristocracy than international capital, though.
In that sense they experience a higher degree of precarity than the bourgeoisie proper. But their relationship to the means of production and their own means of subsistence is distinct from non-PMC workers (service industry and global proletariat). As such I don’t think class traitor is an accurate label, not in the US. It better suits cops in colonized countries, when they aid their colonizers. US cops are well-aligned with the interests of the “middle” imperial class they belong to.
But even though class analysis and discussion is important, we need to be careful to avoid semantic debates (except maybe when defining categories for a party line to use externally). The labels we slap on these categories are less important than the categories themselves (and the real entities they try to describe)
insightful post. The real class struggle though is shitposters who cant remove comments with an insulting last word vs mods who can.