New Members Not Supposed To Know About It

RCA/IMT’s Long History of
Supporting Cop “Unions”

By Jacob and Ray

A reputation for supporting cop and prison guard “strikes” and “unions” is not a great selling point if you’re a left group with a checkered past trying to rebrand as shiny new “Revolutionary Communists of America” (RCA). (See accompanying article.) To their trademark “Are You a Communist?” stickers, those in the know might respond: Is the “RCA” communist? Are you serious – how can they claim to be with that line on the cops? This is also a good example of why, as those new to the left often ask, the different groups can’t “all just get together.”

This issue of Revolution features items about last spring’s Gaza solidarity encampments and protests against the onslaught of police repression against them. At one in New York after hundreds, among them our comrades, were arrested at City College and Columbia, RCAers tried to shout down an Internationalist activist when she mentioned their organization’s long-standing stance on the cops, yelling that it isn’t true. And though it’s rather widely known on the left, new RCA members tend to voice angry denial, or sheer disbelief, when they hear about it.

So clearly the quick-change artists running the RCA, U.S. affiliate of the group previously known as International Marxist Tendency (IMT), hope the topic just won’t come up. That’s unsurprising, given what most radical youth think about capitalism’s blue-uniformed enforcers – particularly since 2020’s mass upsurge against racist police terror. While these days it prefers silence on the subject, the RCA’s attempts to hide or deny its amply documented record speak volumes about what kind of organization they’re building: not revolutionary or communist, but rankly opportunist.

The RCA’s parent body, the IMT, proclaimed itself the “Revolutionary Communist International” (RCI) in June, as part of the new posture as red-hot communists adopted by the group, previously known as one the most staid and stodgy of the ostensibly Marxist left. The new look could fade fast if hoped-for recruits question how supposed revolutionaries could hail “strikes” to boost the pay, job security and “working conditions” (more powerful weaponry, even more protection from legal consequences…) of the professionals of racist repression and incarceration.

It's not some random blip. The IMT-now-RCI’s social-democratic line on the cops is emblematic of its nature and history. As our comrades of the League for the Fourth International’s Brazilian section emphasized in their historic 1996 campaign to oust police from the municipal workers union in Brazil’s “Steel City,”¹ the cops are the armed fist of the bourgeois state. And as Rosa Luxemburg stressed in Reform or Revolution, and V.I. Lenin in State and Revolution: the question of the state is the central dividing line between revolutionary and reformist politics.

Not True? See for Yourselves

So for genuine revolutionary communists, few topics are more central than this, and it’s important to address it squarely. But for the RCA’s leaders, the key whenever facing revolutionary criticism is to fall back on the three D’s: divert, distract and deny. Fortunately, those who want to find out the truth can check for themselves. One good place to start is with materials that, with a little digging, can be found still on the RCA/RCI’s own website, marxist.com.

There you’ll find what might seem like an oddity, for a group that dismisses all organizations to its left as “irrelevant sects”: a polemic of almost 20,000 words – about 30 pages – by the IMT’s U.S. section against the Internationalist Group (of which the Revolutionary Internationalist Youth is the youth section).² After many pages of generalities about “dialectics” and everything under the sun, this 2019 item finally gets down to brass tacks: “the IMT’s position on police and prison guard unions and strikes.” The article denounces our call for “Cops out of the labor movement!” It advocates that striking workers appeal to police “as fellow union members.” And it states:

“While we support police unions linking up with the rest of the labor movement insofar as this can, in certain instances, weaken the bourgeois state [!], we do not support making any reactionary concessions to the police unions in order for them to remain within the broader umbrella of organized labor.” (our emphasis)

Police and prison guards are key to the “special bodies of armed men,” in Friedrich Engels’ classic phrase, that are the nucleus of the bourgeois state. Calling to “link up” with “police unions” is in itself a reactionary – and dangerous – concession to that state. The presence of these professional strikebreakers’ associations (which are not “unions”) in the labor movement – or of cops, prison or security guards in some actual workers unions such as AFSCME (American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees) and the Teamsters. – is a deadly threat.³ And when did the IMT publish its 30-page lawyers’ brief for labor bureaucrats “uniting” the union movement to the armed enforcers of boss class repression? Just months before the murder of George Floyd touched off mass protests by millions voicing outrage against racist police terror.

The polemic against us by the group now called RCA posed the question of why “most individual cops join the police,” answering that this is “because they have no other job prospects or have honest illusions that by becoming a police officer they will be ‘helping their community’ or even ‘combating racism’”! No qualms, apparently, when it came to making up such grotesque claims about why most cops became cops – that’s how intent they were on defending “the IMT’s position on police and prison guard unions and strikes.” RCA/RCI spokespeople really ought to quit claiming that it just ain’t so.

And if it sounds ridiculous and shameful to Revolution readers, that’s because it is. As huge numbers who have marched against unending police murder, or in this year’s protests against genocide in – or simply oppose racist cop terror! – know, the police serve the oppressors and are no friends of the oppressed, working-class and poor population.

The background to the 2019 IMT polemic was that a young member of the IMT in Minneapolis had written several documents criticizing its positions on the police and other topics. Given the organization’s claims to stand on the politics of Leon Trotsky, the documents’ author cited such basic statements by the Bolshevik leader as: “The worker who becomes a policeman in the service of the capitalist state, is a bourgeois cop, not a worker” (What Next? [1932]). Another example was Trotsky’s description in his History of the Russian Revolution (1930) of how the insurgent workers sought to fraternize with and win over soldiers, whereas “the police are fierce, implacable, hated and hating foes. To win them over is out of the question.”

The U.S. IMT/now-RCA leadership sought to deny or obfuscate the organization’s line on the cops (despite it’s being known on the left for decades) – but innumerable articles from their press – many of which, as noted above, can still be found on the website of their new “Revolutionary Communist International” (marxist.com) – exemplify their pro-cop line. Here we only have room for a sampling.⁴

● The IMT-now-RCI’s British section, which has played a leading role in the international organization since its inception, in its widely-cited 28 January 2008 article “Bolshevik Bobbies” (an endearing local term for police officers), jubilantly announced that its newspaper “got a phone call from the ‘Police Review’ [a weekly magazine for cops] asking for permission to republish an article from our website on the police strikes of 1918-19.” This was “a sign that we are heading for explosive times,” they wrote.⁵

● A few years later they were proclaiming that “the consciousness of rank and file police officers has begun to change, leading to demonstrations by the Police Federation” in the UK, in an article based on a lengthy interview with a police constable. Denouncing “left-activists [who] feel that police officers can never be anything but enemies of the working class,” the article concludes: “Above all, bringing rank and file police into the labour movement undermines the ability of the capitalist state to repress the working class, and thus is a[n] important pursuit in the class struggle” (“Changing consciousness within the police: a Marxist view,” 14 August 2013).

● Following violent cop repression of Occupy Wall Street protests, the IMT’s U.S. section wrote: “The police are unionized…. Although their job involves protecting the capitalist state, a significant layer also has an interest in defending itself through defending labor.” Labor, it said, should further the struggle by “calling on the police unions to defend the rights of working class Americans” (!) (“Occupy Wall Street & the Police,” 10 January 2012).

● When prison guards in Canada walked out in 2013 over “working conditions” in their brutal job of incarceration, the IMT hailed their “inspiring militant strike.” Calling the jailers “workers in uniform” and gushing that “the prison guards showed tremendous class instincts,” it compared the “services” they provide to prisoners with the relation of teachers to their students and nurses to their patients. “The prison guards have shown the way,” it exulted (“Alberta prison guards’ wildcat – a lesson for the entire labour movement,” 3 May 2013).

In November 2018, at a “Marxist school” held by the IMT in New York City, members of the Revolutionary Internationalist Youth spoke during the discussion, putting forward the genuine communist position that cops, prison and security guards have no place in the labor movement. In response, the editor of the IMT’s U.S. publication at the time (Socialist Revolution) doubled down on the organization’s position, stating that far from opposing police “unions” being a part of the AFL-CIO or central labor councils, they favor “unity” between the police and the working class. To exemplify this he talked about the PBA (the notoriously racist cop protection racket called Patrolmen’s [now Police] Benevolent Association) being the only “union” that opposed healthcare concessions during pattern bargaining in New York City.

Their 2019 “Marxism vs. Sectarianism” diatribe against the Internationalists was meant to be the mega-magnum opus that would inoculate IMT members against questioning of their line on the cops. But not a year later, the enormous, almost daily protests against racist police terror swept the country. We Internationalists intervened continuously to highlight that the police can’t be reformed, “only revolution can bring justice”; that Democrats are the bosses of the racist police in urban centers throughout the U.S.; and that the fight to unchain workers power in the struggle against terror highlights the need to forge a revolutionary workers party.

What’s at Stake Here

With millions in the streets and the fact that cop terror is embedded in the systemic racism of U.S. society being discussed by large numbers of radicalizing youth, the IMT found itself in a real dilemma. Even if it wanted to repudiate the age-old Grantite line on the cops (which it didn’t), to do so would bring attention to this disgraceful history. So as opportunists adapting to mass sentiment while evading any reckoning with such inconvenient truths, they tried to have things both ways (at least until things blew over).

So they issued a statement titled “USA: how can the working class end police terror?” (12 June 2020) that argued – on the one hand – that the “inclusion” of police “unions” in the labor movement could have “represented a potential point of pressure by the broader working class on the capitalist state apparatus” (!). But – on the other hand – in light of the massive ongoing protests, it asserted not that its position had been wrong, but that a “tipping point” (sic) had now been reached, and so “labor leaders should take action and unceremoniously show these entities the way out the door.”

End of story? Not at all. Since then, the tide of opinion among left liberals has shifted. Already by late 2020 Democrats were moving to walk back slogans like “defund the police” (which, while promoting the illusion that shifting some funds would end endemic police violence, was jumped on by Republicans to charge them with not “backing the blue.”).

An item from late 2021 on the IMT/RCI’s site hails the “hefty wage raise” accorded the “unionized police” of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (“RCMP union wins large pay raise: Every union must demand the same or better,” 7 October 2021). “Cops in the labour movement?” asks a subhead.

So did they now answer “No”? Not at all. True, the “RCMP is a violent tool of the wealthy elite,” observes the article by the IMT/RCA’s section on the scene. But “unionization” of Canada’s notorious Mounties “opens up the possibility … of bringing rank-and-file police closer to the working class so they cannot be used when the capitalists really need them” (!). Therefore, state these incurable reformists, seeking yet again to have it both ways, “we take the approach of opposing the actions of police unions that are at the expense of the wider working class, but supporting those actions that benefit workers and bring rank-and-file police closer to the labour movement” (our emphasis).

Now in 2024, rebaptizing itself Revolutionary Communists of America, the IMT/RCI’s U.S. section has issued a founding “Manifesto for America’s Communist Generation” (9 May) that does not even mention the fight for black liberation, key to socialist revolution in this country founded on slavery. Their color-blind “socialism” is no communism at all. Nor, of course, does the RCA’s manifesto raise anything remotely akin to the call – whose importance was underlined yet again amidst the mass upheaval sparked by the police murder of George Floyd – for cops out of the unions and out of the schools. Its “fighting program” lacks any reference at all to the question of the cops, which sparked the biggest sustained protests in this country’s history. This evasion is yet another symptom that under the radical RCA/RCI wrapping, the IMT’s social-democratic outlook and standpoint remain.

What’s at stake here is no esoteric or academic dispute. The struggle against racist police terror demands seriousness and honesty – which, frankly, is the least one should expect from those actually aspiring to revolutionize the world. The Revolutionary Internationalist Youth means what it says about fighting for the actual program of Marx, Lenin and Trotsky – in a word, genuine communist politics. If that’s what you’re interested in, let’s talk. ■