WeeklyWorker

09.07.2020

An ever timely demand

Jack Conrad critiques the opportunist left and calls for the abolition of the police and all standing armies

Not only in the United States, but across the globe, people are going far beyond just questioning bad police training, police bigotry and police rotten apples. The very existence of the police as an institution set above and apart from society is being questioned. Following the violent death of George Floyd in Minneapolis, the Black Lives Matter “call for a national defunding of police” has gained widespread support.1 From Atlanta to Athens, from Boston to Berlin, from Chicago to Copenhagen, hundreds of thousands have defied Covid-19 lockdowns and joined BLM demonstrations. Many carry home-made ‘Defund the police’ placards.

Unsurprisingly, Donald Trump brands BLM as treasonous. Nigel Farage compares BLM to the Taliban. Sir Keir Starmer, former director of public prosecutions, might go down on one knee, but he too stresses his “strong support for the police”. Demands for defunding the police are curtly dismissed as “nonsense”.2

Some in BLM really seek police retraining, redirection of funds to areas such as mental health and education, and relatively modest reductions in budgets. That holds the promise of the police becoming “community stewards”.3 So there are clearly those just itching to be incorporated into the establishment as well-rewarded consultants, police advisors and career politicians. Others, though, standing in the black nationalist tradition of Malcolm X and the Black Panthers, say they are committed to the struggle to “dismantle imperialism, capitalism, white-supremacy, patriarchy and the state structures that disproportionately and systematically harm black people”.4

Naturally, the opportunist left eagerly tails what is suddenly fashionable. After all, there have not only been impressive demonstrations, but wall-to-wall media coverage, countless corporate endorsements and generous expressions of sympathy: some 30,000 people have donated over a million pounds to BLM UK in just one month (June 2020).5

Still reeling from the comrade Delta rape scandal, the Socialist Workers Party is caught on the horns of a dilemma. On the one hand, the SWP is determined to keep respectable left Labourites gracing its Stand Up To Racism popular front platforms: eg, Diane Abbott and her Bell Ribeiro-Addy sidekick. On the other hand, in front of BLM activists, the SWP is desperately keen to pose as very revolutionary. “The police”, it declares, must be abolished “altogether”. However, upon examination this turns out to be under socialism, after the overthrow of capitalism, in “an alternative society”.6 But what demands should we advance in the here and now? Not abolition, that is for sure.

Socialist Resistance too tries to sound bold, but cannot quite manage anything more than a faint - a very faint - echo of BLM: “We need to move beyond reform,” declares Susan Pashkoff. After that, though, it is downhill all the way. “Listening and hearing the protestors’ demands is essential. We must support the campaign for defunding the police and support the movement that is arguing for a transition towards a more just society.”7 She writes fully in the spirit of the woolly liberal.

Members of the Socialist Party in England and Wales march on BLM demonstrations carrying Malcolm X ‘You can’t have capitalism without racism’ placards, which also feature the revolutionary-sounding slogan: ‘Build a mass movement to smash racism.’ However, programmatically SPEW is rooted in the mildest of mild-mannered reformism and the call for “police accountability”.8 A pusillanimous formula doggedly repeated by Socialist Appeal and the still more recent Socialist Alternative breakaway.9

Then there is Martin Thomas of the social-imperialist Alliance for Workers’ Liberty. He writes fully in the spirit of the frightened liberal. Warning against the “abolition” of the police demand, Thomas says, “it would lead not to liberty, but to selected ‘police’ functions being operated instead (and worse) by mafias or private security forces, as they were against strikes and unions by the Pinkerton Agency in the late 19th-century USA.”

As if BLM, or anyone else for that matter, can vanish the police like David Copperfield vanished the Statue of Liberty. No, in politics - real politics that is - we are not dealing with some magician who can do away with the police in a blink of the eye. On the contrary, we suppose aspiration, persuasion, mobilisation, organisation and prolonged, often bitter, struggles.

With Thomas we are dealing with a foreign-office socialist who is undergoing a further degeneration into becoming a home-office reformist. His wretched perspective shows all the morbid symptoms: “push back the scope and powers of the police, to demilitarise it, to decriminalise areas of life, to improve mental-health and school provision, etc, and to cut police funding as a result”. What happens, though, if capitalism refuses to become peace-loving, generous and ever so nice? What happens if capitalism extends and extends again police powers (against free expression, against free association, against the right to protest)? What if capitalism cuts back on education, health and social services and instead expands police numbers and oppressive hardware?

Reformism inevitably leads to complicity: “a low-paid police in the same class structures will probably just be more corrupt”. So, presumably, an AWL or Momentum Internationalist MP would vote to increase police salaries and pension provisions.

To keep up the pretence of being a socialist organisation there has to be a radical disconnect between the present and the future. Hence we read that the AWL’s “general formula” is first the “struggle to impose democratic checks on the police under capitalism, and then to replace it under a workers’ government by a public-safety service, democratically controlled by communities”.10

Evidently, there is no logical link. The AWL’s perspective of imposing “democratic checks” on the police under capitalism leads not to ‘replace’, but ‘defence’, and therefore opposition to those who would abolish the police under capitalism.

Bolshevism

Compare and contrast this horrible modern-day collection of tailism, posturing and timidity, with Lenin and the Bolsheviks. They actively encouraged workers, students and peasants to violently resist the police. Advice was given on street-fighting tactics and how to obtain weapons. What about defunding? In 1908 we find the 5th conference of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party instructing its deputies in the tsarist duma not to vote for government budgets - specifically not to vote for items in government budgets which “sanction expenditure on instruments for the oppression of the masses (the armed forces, etc) … [the] point of departure should be the principle of our programme that Social Democrats reject reforms involving tutelage of the police and the bureaucracy over the working classes”.11

Hence, in April 1917 Lenin unequivocally calls for the “abolition of the police, [the standing] army and the bureaucracy”.12 He makes the exact same call a few days later in a Pravda article:

the replacement of the police and the army, which are institutions divorced from the people and set against the people, by the direct arming of the whole people; order in the state under such a power is maintained by the armed workers and peasants themselves, by the armed people themselves.13

And again and again throughout 1917 till the October Revolution itself. This is a key lesson Lenin draws from Karl Marx and Frederick Engels and their most famous writings on the Paris Commune (1871, 1872 and 1875). Lenin’s suggested revision of the RSDLP programme contains this splendid formulation:

The party of the proletariat cannot rest content with a bourgeois parliamentary democratic republic, which throughout the world preserves and strives to perpetuate the monarchist instruments for the oppression of the masses: namely, the police, the standing army and the privileged bureaucracy.14

Nor, as we have seen, is Bolshevik opposition to the police confined to the Russia of Nicholas II and Alexander Kerensky’s provisional government. Lenin sets out the charge sheet:

In all bourgeois republics, even the most democratic, the police (like the standing army) is the chief instrument of oppression of the masses, an instrument making for a possible restoration of the monarchy. The police beat up the “common people” in the police stations of New York, Geneva and Paris; it favours the capitalists either because it is bribed to do so (America and other countries), or because it enjoys wealthy “patronage” and “protection” (Switzerland), or because of a combination of both (France). Separated as it is from the people, forming a professional caste of men trained in the practice of violence upon the poor, men who receive somewhat higher pay and the privileges that go with authority (to say nothing of “gratuities”), the police everywhere, in every republic, however democratic, where the bourgeoisie is in power, always remains the unfailing weapon, the chief support and protection of the bourgeoisie. No important radical reforms in favour of the working masses can be implemented through the police. That is objectively impossible.15

Background

It is often argued by opportunists - the more ‘sophisticated’ citing the so-called ‘transitional method’ - that the demand to abolish the army and replace it with the armed people is only applicable in a revolutionary situation. The facts show otherwise.

It should be stressed that, when it comes to opposing standing armies and demanding a people’s militia, Marxists stand as part of a long tradition. The Florentine bourgeois republic of the 15th and 16th centuries deserves mention. Having overthrown the Medicis and experienced the failure, incompetence and betrayal of the professional army, the republic adopted a system of district militias. In the humanist mind the militias of ancient Rome served as the ideal - spread throughout renaissance Europe via the writings of Niccolò Machiavelli (The prince chapters 12, 13 and 14, Discourses on Livy and The art of war). Machiavelli, of course, helped create the Florentine militia. Between 1498 and 1512 he served as a senior official in the republic.

English radicals such as James Harrington (Commonwealth of Oceana 1656) and John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon (Cato’s letters 1720-23) took up the militia ideal. From England it travelled the Atlantic to America. Militia units helped trigger the 1776 revolution.

Anti-Federalists - a very diverse political grouping - feared that the US presidency could easily evolve in the direction of a monarchy. There were those - eg, Lewis Nicola - who wanted George Washington crowned king. To guard against such an outcome guarantees were demanded against the “establishment of a standing army, the bane of liberty” (Eldridge Gerry, 1789).16 The camp of plebeian and middling democracy saw in the militia their best defence against another tyranny.

Ratified to popular acclaim in 1791, the second amendment to the US constitution is justly famous: “A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.”17

Marx and Engels considered Machiavelli, English radicalism and the second amendment part of their heritage.18 Clause four of the Marx-Engels Demands of the Communist Party in Germany (1848) is unequivocal:

Universal arming of the people. In future armies shall at the same time be workers’ armies, so that the armed forces will not only consume, as in the past, but produce even more than it costs to maintain them.19

The Marx-Engels team never wavered. Read Can Europe disarm? (1893). Here, in this pamphlet written by Frederick Engels, 10 years after the death of his friend and collaborator, we find a concrete application of Marxism to the dawning epoch of universal suffrage and universal conscription. Engels concluded that the key to revolution was mutiny in the armed forces. His pamphlet outlined a model bill for military reform in Germany. Engels was determined to show that the proposal to gradually transform standing armies into a “militia based on the universal principle of arming the people” could exploit the mounting fears of a pending European war and widespread resentment at the ruinously costly military budget.20 For propaganda purposes, Engels proposed an international agreement to limit military service to a short period and a state system in which no country would fear aggression, because no country would be capable of aggression. Surely World War I would have been impossible if the European great powers had nothing more than lightly armed civilian militias available to them.

Not that Engels was some lily-livered pacifist. He supported universal male (!) conscription and, if necessary, was quite prepared to advocate revolutionary war on the model of the Napoleon’s grande armée. Needless to say, his Can Europe disarm? was not intended to prove the undoubted military superiority of a militia over a standing army (it can fully mobilise very large numbers with incredible speed, provides defence in depth and is, therefore, capable of successfully surviving a whole series of initial defeats). No, Engels wanted a citizen army within which discipline would be self-imposed. An army where rank-and-file troops would, if necessary, turn their guns on any officer tempted to issue orders that ran counter to the vital interests of the people.

Subsequent Marxist writers took the militia for granted. Though his L’armée nouvelle (1910) was marred with various reformist assumptions, Jean Jaurès elaborated upon the whys and hows of a militia system. Work and military training had to be brought close together, full-time army cadre would be confined to instructors, etc.21

What went for Marxist writers went for Marxist parties too. Eg, the 1880 programme of the French Workers’ Party, the 1891 Erfurt programme, the 1889 Hainfeld programme of the Austrian Social Democratic Party, the 1903 programme of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party, etc.

In the ‘political section’ of the programme of the French Workers’ Party (Parti Ouvrier), authored jointly by Karl Marx and Jules Guesde, we find the demand for the “abolition of standing armies and the general arming of the people” (clause 4).22 A proposition faithfully translated by the Germans: “Education of all to bear arms. Militia in the place of the standing army” (clause 3).23 The Austrians too are adamant: “The cause of the constant danger of war is the standing army, whose growing burden alienates the people from its cultural tasks. It is therefore necessary to fight for the replacement of the standing army by arming the people” (clause 6).24 Then the Russians: “general arming of the people instead of maintaining a standing army” (clause c9).25 The newly formed, though hardly Marxist, Labour Party in Britain too: in its first general election manifesto, 1900, there is this call: “Abolition of the standing army, and the establishment of a citizen force”.26

Practice

Besides the word there is the deed.

We have already mentioned the 1871 Paris Commune. Amongst its first decrees was the abolition of the standing army and its replacement by the national guard - “the bulk of which consisted of working men” (Marx). By actually constituting a new state, based on a repressive force that did not sit outside the general population, the Commune opened a new chapter in global politics. And Russia took what happened in Paris to new heights.

With the virtual collapse of the old tsarist state machine in 1917, the Bolsheviks strove to prevent the “restoration of the police”. Following the February revolution, two rival militias arose: a civil militia organised under municipal dumas; and a workers’ militia, largely brought into being by groups of factory workers. They were overseen by factory committees and served to maintain law and order locally. Workers did not give up their jobs. They served in the militia according to an agreed rota.

The Menshevik and Socialist Revolutionary-dominated executive committee of the soviets voted in favour of merging the civil and workers’ militia. This in effect was an attempt to revive the professional, full-time police force. Only the Bolsheviks denounced the decision, but it was a position fully in accord with rank-and-file sentiment.27

In May 1917 a conference of workers’ militia took place in Petrograd. It denounced the attempt to impose on the population a western European police force “hated throughout the world by the majority of people, the poorer classes”. The conference agreed a Bolshevik motion for reorganising the workers’ militia as a “transitional stage towards the general arming of the population” - a position which found wide support in factory committees, including many dominated by Mensheviks and SRs.

From the start there were those groups of armed workers who called themselves Red Guards. They saw their task as defending the gains of the revolution. Over April-June 1917, more and more workers’ militias voted to transform themselves into Red Guards - a development denounced by the Mensheviks. After Kornilov’s attempted counterrevolutionary putsch in September 1917, the Red Guards grew into a mass force and proved crucial to the success of the October Revolution.

And there are other instructive examples. Beginning in the early 1920s, the two main workers’ parties in Germany built their own non-state militias. The SDP dominated the soft-left Reichsbanner, while the Communist Party formed the much more militant Rotfrontkämpferbund (at its height it boasted 130,000 members). In Austria, despite its 1923 founding statutes emphasising ceremonial paraphernalia, marches and band music, the Schutzbund served as a kind of “proletarian police force”.28 When it came to strikes, demonstrations and meetings, this workers’ militia maintained discipline and fended off Nazi gangs. Though hampered by a dithering social democratic leadership, the Schutzbund heroically resisted the February12 1934 fascist coup.

Workers formed defence corps during the 1926 General Strike in Britain. American workers did the same in 1934. There were massive stoppages in San Francisco, Toledo and Minneapolis. In Spain anarchists, ‘official communists’, the Workers Party of Marxist Unification (Poum), etc, likewise formed their own militias in response to Franco’s counterrevolutionary uprising.

Then, more recently, in 1966, there was the Black Panther Party. It organised “armed citizen’s patrols” to monitor and counter the brutal US police force.29 Even the “non-violent” civil rights movement, led by Martin Luther King, included within its ranks those committed to “armed self-defence” against Ku Klux Klan and other such terrorism.30

Invented

As we have seen, the Bolsheviks opposed funding the police under tsarism. We have also seen that the Bolsheviks opposed attempts to establish a western-European-type police in 1917. And yet today’s fake Bolsheviks - along with mainstream liberal and conservative opinion - take the police for granted. They appear to believe that the police have been around forever. But, of course, today’s police force was invented by home secretary Sir Robert Peel, beginning in 1829, with the establishment of the Metropolitan Police Force for London (Peelers). It is worth stressing that he drew heavily upon his experience of being chief secretary - read chief oppressor - of colonial Ireland.

The British bourgeoisie was terrified by what had happened in France, especially with 1793 and the sans culottes briefly imposing their will upon society. The emergent radical and working class movement posed the same sort of threat. The ideas of Tom Paine, Robert Owen and James Morrison gained a mass audience and took material form with corresponding societies, insurrectionary conspiracies and revolutionary trade unionism.

Before 1829 there was nothing like a centralised police force. Various local bodies financed night-watchmen (Charlies). There were also unpaid constables, supervised by justices of the peace. In theory every able-bodied male householder was expected to serve as a parish constable for a one-year term. In practice this duty was passed onto others in return for a small payment. Corruption was endemic.

What first evolved in the 15th century could not serve the fully-fledged capitalism of the early 19th century. The use of untrained constables - often dissolute, old and in poor health - proved useless, when faced with mass meetings, demonstrations and even the everyday pilferings of bully bucks, moochers and snick fadgers. Not that the military were much of an answer. Troops were unreliable - they had sympathy for those whom they were ordered to attack. On occasion rank-and-file soldiers actively took sides with radical protestors. This explains why the yeomanry - a mounted force officered by the upper and middle classes - was formed. Hopeless in military terms, its main purpose was to suppress local ‘Jacobinism’. Something it did with “enthusiasm and unfailing brutality”.31 The Peterloo massacre of 1819 saw 11 peaceful demonstrators killed and 400 wounded, just because they were calling for parliamentary reform. In other words, the yeomanry applied too much force. So in 1829 the army was placed in reserve and a strong body of professional, trained, paid police was put on the front line. The truncheon was to prove more effective than the sabre.

Popular pamphlets attacked “Peel’s bloody gang” and called for unity around the demand, “Abolish the new police”. Showing the hostility of the general population, when, in the early 1830s, a policeman was fatally stabbed during a meeting of the National Political Union - a thoroughly moderate reform organisation - the inquest jury returned a verdict of “justifiable homicide”.32

As the Metropolitan police model was applied to other areas, local big wigs lost their customary powers. The growth of the central bureaucracy provoked objections from the landed gentry. However, with the rise of Chartism, that evaporated. The police were in the forefront of the fight against revolution. Hence, the passing of the 1839 Metropolitan Police Act was opposed not so much by Tories, but the Chartist movement and Radical MPs. The Herald newspaper expressed its outrage at what was in effect a move to establish a national police force:

The Centralised Police Bill is unconstitutional in its very essence; in its operation and effects it will prove the most frightful instrument of despotism - of money despotism - ever introduced into England.33

Over the years, while there has been the attempt to give the appearance of local control - eg, the election of police and crime commissioners - the fact remains that the police still operate as a single national force for operational purposes under the overall direction of the home office.

The official account insists that the main reason for the creation of the modern police was crime prevention. A dubious proposition. True, the police function to protect the property and persons of ordinary citizens. But the evidence strongly shows that the police have little effect on reducing crime. Economic booms and slumps, government social provisions and the organised strength or weakness of the working class movement, all are far more important factors. Clear-up rates are undoubtedly pathetic. In 2019 police forces in England and Wales reported that just 7.8% of offences saw someone charged or summonsed - down from 9.1% the previous year. Only to be expected from a force set above and apart from society.

No, the police exist primarily to maintain order and to protect the state. Towards that end the police force - not just top personnel - must be thoroughly imbued with loyalty to the monarch (queen or king) and the country.

The top echelons of the army and civil service are still heavily recruited from the public-school intake into universities. Not the case with the police. Though there has been the introduction of fast tracking for university graduates, since 1958 and Sir Joseph Simpson, all Met Commissioners have joined as constables. There is, in other words, no officer caste.

Despite the constant gripes, police constables are, relatively speaking, well paid. Starting on just over £20,000, the pay scale goes up to £40,128.34 Sergeants get between £40,500 and £45,098. A buying of loyalty.

Then there is natural conservatism. Most recruits join the police not with especially reactionary views: in general they appear, on entry, to share the problematic outlook and moral values of the respectable end of the working and middle classes. But experience of the police being the police produces especially reactionary and especially racist notions and ideas. There can be no doubt that the great majority of serving police men and women despise, look down upon, fear, striking trade unionists, the left, black-rights protestors, statue topplers, etc. Members of the police force are certainly far more likely to vote Tory or Brexit Party than Labour.

Ranks

A clear distinction must be drawn between street cops and managerial cops.

Street cops face the daily risk of physical injury (or worse). Every time they stop and search, every time they close down a rave or a block party, every time they ring a doorbell, they put themselves in danger. Policing for the police can, though, be thrilling, enjoyable, a game of wits and skill. But they see themselves as more than “just a racing-driver or boxer in a blue uniform”.35 In the canteen, street cops talk of themselves as thief-catchers, as the good guys versus the bad guys, as the saviours of a society which otherwise would be overwhelmed by yobbery, riot and robbery (ie, the lumpen proletariat).

Street cop culture combines a sense of mission, love of action, cynicism, heavy-drinking and race bigotry (for historical reasons black people are disproportionately stuck at the bottom end of the class structure). Stereotyping is an “inevitable tool of the suspiciousness endemic to police work”.36 From stereotyping to race bigotry is just one short step. Exceptions doubtlessly exist. There are ‘crusaders’ who sincerely want to help the “weak against the predatory”: eg, abused children, victims of rape and those who have suffered racist or homophobic attack.37 ‘Crusaders’ either gain promotion into the CID, go native or resign in disgust.

Police work is, of course, mainly dull, petty and often desperately sad. The bulk of cases involve traffic offences, domestic disputes, public drunkenness, the effects of homelessness and extreme poverty, drug addiction and mental illness. This ever-rising tide of social decay produces ‘police pessimism’. Street cops view society as a cesspit: they cannot trust anyone, because everyone is up to no good. That includes politicians, celebrities and the upper classes in general. Many street cops “subscribe to an egalitarian ideal.”38 Even if due deference has to be shown, nicking some toff driving a Rolls Royce brings a particular glow of pleasure.

The police see themselves as a beleaguered minority, a band of brothers, almost a religious sect. Long hours, erratic shift patterns and the difficulty of mixing with ordinary people, because of their fear and distrust of the police, leads to social isolation and group-think solidarity. Street cops have a “powerful code” of backing each other, if faced with either internal or external investigations.39

Managerial cops are different. They present to the public the legalistic, acceptable, rational face of the police. Managerial cops mouth all the standard anti-racist tropes and anti-discrimination nostrums. However, they are also responsible for disciplining the rank and file. Occasionally ‘bent coppers’ have to be weeded out. Street cops view managerial cops as out of touch, soft and obsessed with political correctness. So there is an endemic conflict. Nonetheless, managerial cops are quite prepared to cover up for street cops, turn a blind eye to their illegal acts, their rule-bending, their bigotry.

Unions

Not that the state has been content to rely on relatively high pay and natural conservatism alone. Members of the police are forbidden from taking an active part in politics. Nor are they permitted to join a genuine trade union - the latter being the product of the turbulent years immediately following World War I.

The pathetically weak Jeremy Corbyn leadership of the Labour Party proposed, in its 2019 general election manifesto, to “consult on creating a representative body for the armed forces, akin to the Police Federation”. A declaration of abject political surrender.

Established by the 1919 Police Act, the Police Federation forcibly replaced the National Union of Police and Prison Officers, which - and this is crucial - in August 1918 and June 1919 organised nationwide police strikes. In response, the government despatched infantry and tanks onto the streets. Yet a “combination” of economic concessions, repression, political manoeuvring, union blunders, police divisions and the failure of organised labour to support the police “ensured the failure of the 1919 strike”.40

Liberal prime minister David Lloyd George saw the defeat of the 1919 strike as a decisive “turning point in the labour movement, deflecting it from Bolshevist and direct-actionist courses to legitimate trade unionism once again”.41 His Liberal-Conservative coalition proscribed NUPPO and made sure that strikers were summarily fired and then blacklisted - a cruel act of revenge, which faced only “half-hearted” opposition from the Labour Party in parliament.

Unlike NUPPO, the Police Federation is barred by statute from affiliating to the TUC. No less vital, it represents all ranks, from ordinary constables to chief inspectors, and is legally forbidden to take strike action. With good reason, the Police Federation has been described as “amounting to a sort of company union” (Owen Jones - writing when he was a leftwinger).42

We certainly support the right of rank-and-file police officers to join a genuine trade union. But communist MPs would either abstain on or vote against police budgets. Programmatically we are committed to abolishing the police and the standing army and replacing them with a popular militia.

  1. blacklivesmatter.com/defundthepolice.↩︎

  2. labourlist.org/2020/06/watch-defund-the-police-demand-is-nonsense-says-starmer.↩︎

  3. The Week June 8 2020.↩︎

  4. gofundme.com/f/ukblm-fund.↩︎

  5. Ibid.↩︎

  6. Socialist Worker June 16 2020.↩︎

  7. Socialist Resistance June 15 2020.↩︎

  8. L Walsh, ‘The police’ The state London 1983, p59.↩︎

  9. See socialist.net/changing-consciousness-within-the-police.htm and www.socialistalternative.org/marxism-and-the-state/role-police.↩︎

  10. Solidarity June 24 2020.↩︎

  11. VI Lenin CW Vol 15, Moscow 1977, p326-27.↩︎

  12. VI Lenin CW Vol 24, Moscow 1977, p23.↩︎

  13. VI Lenin CW Vol 24, Moscow 1977, p39.↩︎

  14. VI Lenin CW Vol 24, Moscow 1977, p471.↩︎

  15. VI Lenin CW Vol 24, Moscow 1977, p352.↩︎

  16. S Cornell The other founders: anti-federalism and the dissenting tradition in America, 1788-1828 Chapel Hill 1999, p161.↩︎

  17. usconstitution.net/const.html#Am2.↩︎

  18. Marx, writing to Engels, describes Machiavelli’s History of Florence as a “masterpiece” (K Marx and F Engels CW Vol 40, London 1983, p187). In his Dialects of nature Engels praises Machiavelli as the “first notable military author of modern times” (K Marx and F Engels CW Vol 25, London 1987, p319).↩︎

  19. K Marx and F Engels CW Vol 7, Moscow 1977, p3.↩︎

  20. K Marx and F Engels CW Vol 27, London 1990, p371.↩︎

  21. As far as I am aware L’armée nouvelle remains untranslated into English. An abbreviated translation was published in 1916 and can be found on the excellent Marxist Internet Archive - see marxists.org/archive/jaures/1907/military-service/index.htm (though I think the 1907 dating given is mistaken).↩︎

  22. marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1880/05/parti-ouvrier.htm.↩︎

  23. marxists.org/history/international/social-democracy/1891/erfurt-program.htm.↩︎

  24. I am grateful to Ben Lewis for his translation of the Hainfield programme.↩︎

  25. marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1902/draft/02feb07.htm.↩︎

  26. I Dale (ed) Labour Party general election manifestos 1900-1997 London 2002, p9.↩︎

  27. See SA Smith Red Petrograd: revolution in the factories 1917-18 Cambridge 1983, pp199-201.↩︎

  28. M Kitchen The coming of Austrian fascism London 1980, p116.↩︎

  29. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Panther_Party.↩︎

  30. See CE Cobb This nonviolent stuff’ll get you killed New York NY 2014.↩︎

  31. AL Morton A people’s history of England London 1974, p349.↩︎

  32. Quoted in R Reiner The politics of the police Brighton 1985, p14.↩︎

  33. Quoted in J Harvey and K Hood The British state London 1958, p134.↩︎

  34. polfed.org/pay/constable-pay-scales.↩︎

  35. R Reiner The politics of the police Brighton 1985, p89.↩︎

  36. Ibid p92.↩︎

  37. Ibid p88.↩︎

  38. Ibid p94.↩︎

  39. Ibid p93.↩︎

  40. O Jones, ‘The “spirit of Petrograd”? The 1918 and 1919 police strikes’ What Next? No31, November 2007.↩︎

  41. Lord Mayor of Liverpool Stanley Salvidge, quoted in O Jones, ‘The “spirit of Petrograd”? The 1918 and 1919 police strikes’ What Next No31, November 2007.↩︎

  42. Ibid.↩︎