As young proletarians from the banlieues angrily faced up to the cream of the French Republic’s repressive regime during recent riots, an aging and green-behind-the ears protester held up a banner featuring the slogan: “Disarm the Police”.
A metaphysically absurd demand.
The State isn’t some kind of body appointed to oversee the “collective good”. It is the “collective capitalist” that exercises the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, and underwrites its monopoly of violence.
Only those dupes enamoured of mystery novels, films and TV series, film noir and thrillers could possibly believe that the gendarmes (whatever their sex, colour and sexual leanings, their class or rank, in States large and small) are an organization set up to defend the good and weak against the evil and powerful!
Every organization of gendarmes (whichever picturesque name each State chooses to call them matters little) is the body appointed by all States to defend bourgeois property, by which is meant the “prerogative” to take possession and share out “the private ownership” of that which we proletarians produce socially (i.e., all together). All this while we are exploited by monopolized forces of production that are defended tooth and nail by an impersonal bourgeois class in its companies, warehouses, emporiums and schools. And these gendarmes are appointed to defend “public order”, which has nothing to do with the serenity all of us seek from a tranquil and well-behaved social environment. No, instead, it has everything to do with a social climate where the evils of the society of Capital (from the free-for-all violence of free competition to the innumerable cases of alienation and reification of human beings reduced to mere sellers of labour power) can continue unabated, tolerating only criticism contained in the grumbling, the whining and – at most – the indignant and even violently demanded proposal for reform …
We revolutionary internationalist communists can’t help but laugh on hearing demands to “disarm the police”. Our work aims to ensure that the experience of spontaneous rebellion – a sacrosanct yet off-the-cuff explosion of proletarian anger that is necessarily short on staying power – will bring about the need to re-arm the proletariat. Exactly: we ask that the proletariat be re-armed because to welcome with enthusiasm the burning of the symbols of power on a bonfire is not enough. We know that the destruction of bourgeois power is a long way off, and thus the re-arming of the proletariat has nothing to do with the glorification of an armed minority or the aesthetics of a bomb attack; rather, it is the class organization of the proletariat on its march towards its ultimate ascendancy. And this entails the solid presence (theoretical and practical) of the revolutionary party, well established internationally, that has successfully held the line through many decades of counter-revolution.
2/7/2023
