The state & Occupation U.

Oct 31, 2011

The chain reaction of protest occupations that has swept the United States has already reinvigorated the struggle for equality and for participation in decisions that affect the lives of the 300 million people the demonstrators call the 99 percent.

These occupations, beside raising protest to a new position of respect, have been universities of class struggle. After decades of what appeared to be political stagnation, there is a complete openness to discussion about what makes 21st-century capitalist society tick in the center of world imperialism.

On Sept. 24, the New York police sprayed pepper gas on Occupy Wall Street protesters near Union Square Park and the next week arrested 700 on the Brooklyn Bridge. At that time in this editorial space we began a discussion of the capitalist state based on Frederick Engels’ book, “The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State.” By “the state” we Marxists mean the standing army, the courts, the prisons and especially the police, who have the most direct contact with the demonstrators. These days we might also include the corporate media for its mind control, buttressing and rationalizing state repression.

Increased repression, recently most obvious in Cleveland, Ohio; Chicago; and Oakland, Calif., plus threats of repression in Atlanta and elsewhere, put the question of the state and the police again on the front burner at Occupation University.

Based on their salaries, police would be among the 99 percent, and not even at the top. But from the point of view of training, discipline, life experience and prevailing racist ideology, the police are servants of the 1 percent -- or really of the top 1 percent of that 1 percent. They maintain capitalist order.

Where there is large participation of youth of color in protest movements or where people come out against “stop and frisk” laws, this message has been brought to the occupations. In Atlanta, where the cops shot a Black youth in the back and killed him, this became part of the protest and clarified the repressive and racist role of the police.

The tiny number of rich people on top could never rule without their paid propagandists, without their miseducators and especially, when all else fails to deceive the people, without the clubs and guns of their professional police. Whether the police talk nice or scowl, they take orders from their paymasters, and their job is to keep the big capitalists on top.