Re: To Bill Lear: re soldiers & cops

[Waistline2]

Bill writes:
>The stance toward them should be the same: they are both pawns, usually non-wealthy, fed intensive propaganda, left largely ignorant of the big picture, and placed in often dangerous situations where it is nearly impossible to do the morally correct thing.  They should be held
responsible for their actions, but those who direct them, set the scope
of their activities, etc., deserve far, far more condemnation.<

<Comment:

Agree they are 'both pawns'. That sort of terminology brings up the
further point: Without 'turning' both of them, the left will be gunned down. It was a key part of the military tactics of prior revolutionaries to incorporate
that thinking.

H>



Comment

I seriously doubt that the "left will be gunned down" as such. Social revolution is not ideological but involves ideology. Ideology is not politics. An enormous section of the antiwar movement is not "Left wing." We cannot travel more than a step ahead of what is shaping up to be a social movement, unlike anything the world has seen before. People pick sides and sides change as the nature of the social process.

Carl Stokes was elected the first African American mayor of Cleveland Ohio in 1967. Whites with baseball bats were attacking black kids walking through their changing neighborhood and one of the whites was stabbed to death. The stabber was eventually acquitted on the basis of self-defense. A white mob prepared to storm the mayor's mansion. When white police officers said they could not stop the mob, the black police officers who had organized themselves to protect the Mayor warned the white officers they would open up on the crowd with automatic weapons if the mob crossed the last street between them and the mansion. Black police were defending the black representative of the black community and slogans like Black Power expressed this political reality. He mob did not cross the last barrier.

In Detroit, the Black Police officers became organized during this period and on many occasions had to draw their weapons and threaten to shot white officers trying to run us down in automobiles or beat us. During this time frame and a little later the old League of Revolutionary Black Workers had many contacts in the Police Department who would alert us of foul plans by any section of the department. Then there were the armed demonstrations in downtown Detroit on behalf of the white officers complaining about the policy of Mayor Coleman Young.

I also remember the police riots in New Orleans during the early 1980s.

All the "old heads" remember the South, and the process of the state power fighting itself to realign the social infrastructure and itself on the basis of the changes in the productive forces.  One also recall's Kent State and soldiers following their "orders." The police force and soldiers are subject to and respond to the social processes in society, and more often than not are compelled to pick sides. This process of picking sides contains its own dynamics conditioned by the character of the social struggle as it unfolds and the state power begins to fight itself. 

The social revolution is a process that must evolved within the context of the quantitative stages of development of the productive forces. We are at the beginning of the beginning stage of social transformation and a process where the people start turning away from the police and the military because they are compelled to protect property and the rule of property at the expense of the people. Those who have lived and experienced this process must recall what is involved.

The Russian revolution is instructive. Russia had a fairly well developed, although small working class. An industrial bourgeoisie was developing rapidly and was very rich, especially on the basis of the war. The contradiction between the feudal ruling class and all the new classes being generated on the basis of the development of industry was there; the contradiction between backwards Russia and the most advanced European states was in the soup; the contradiction between Czarist expansionism and the southern layer of countries we call the Moslem areas were all leading to and arising from the destruction of the agrarian political economy.

What you had in Russia was the rebellion of a newly formed working class in the vanguard of about a hundred million semi-serfs and semi-slaves who were in absolute rebellion. All of this was taking place within the context of the unprecedented slaughter of eleven million Russian soldiers at the front. As this process accelerated the soldiers were simply deserting the front, throwing down their guns and walking back home. At this time, the peasants were taking over land; there were more strikes, street fighting and planed insurrections than there was war at the front.

Soldiers were changing sides as well as the police as countless political organizations called Soviets changed back and forth over politics, direction and what to do next. The process is that at a certain stage in the development of the social process wherein society attempts to leap forward to a new political basis the state power turns in on itself. We are a long way from this occurrence but it must happen on one level of another.

There were soldier and police organizations - Soviets or counsels, subject to this intense social process. What was straining the social, political and economic fabric was the war. In America and throughout the world a communist class is crystallizing. This communist class is not an ideology category but a class created by advanced robotics, computerization and digitalized production process. The price of labor power is being destroyed in stages and phases.

And herein lies a real danger of the Bush Jr. administration and its war policy. Hundreds of millions of people have been dragged into the political process. The social process is more advanced and intense than most of us believe. Politically, the country has - in my opinion, leaped beyond a certain social consciousness of the Vietnam War era. The world is talking about the politics and economics of the war.

What songs are the soldiers singing as they march into battle? "He died to make men Holy Let us die to make them free?"  Not at all.

Some soldiers have named base areas after Exxon and Shell oil companies. They believe this fight will improve the conditions of living for the American peoples and this is not true. Our country and diverse people are in for a rude awakening. Some soldiers wanted to raise the American flag in conquered areas of Iraq and were ordered to take the flag down. I can only imagine what this means to men willing to die to import American democracy and Liberate the people of Iraq. Even the bourgeoisie - as does the revolutionary, must explain the reason for policy and especially war.

Just as the leap from agricultural political economy to industrial political economy destroyed and created new classes so must the current revolution in the productive forces. Here in lies the trajectory of the social struggle that no one can escape from. The social revolution is absolutely inevitable. Our modern means of communications are going to drive the process more rapid than anything we can currently conceive. 

Modern communications have punched enormous pathway through the fog of war. There is something very strange and complex about the current wave of patriotism that I cannot exactly pinpoint yet. "Do you support our troops" - which I answer no, is the last refuge of the ideologist unable to show the noble reason that inspires us to fight and die for a greater good.

There are no more stages in the quantitative and qualitative growth of the industrial system - zero! We have entered an era social revolution for real.


Melvin P.