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“Cops are class traitors, but naming what class cops are part of in order to betray it is liberalism”
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this post was submitted on 06 Sep 2024
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As I see it (could be wrong):
They're the state-equivalent to private security, so they're being hired by the ownership class in a non-market, non-commodified way. They're not offering their labour up on a labour market, their "output" is barely being invested in, they're not having their wages driven down either. The way their jobs work is completely separate from the rest of the economy and the rest of the working class. I'd assume that mapping their wages to the rest of the economy bares little relation.
They are direct extensions of capital rather than being semi-independant bodies in the market.
they're human beings with survival needs who, in the absence of common means to provide for them, must debase themselves in some way to extract the necessities of life from some capital owner, somewhere
this doesn't mean their decision to do so isn't fucking evil, but like, it is what it is. Unless they're some rich failson (who would be bourgeois, or, idk, bourgeois-in-waiting?) who wants to be a cop for fun, idk, people have rent and bills and shit to pay.
you can say this about a lot of jobs, but that doesn't mean that the people who have those jobs have the ability to produce an income without selling their employment to their employer in exchange for a wage
it's not like they can go out and be a "private" cop not working for the state, then they would just be a robber/murderer
I literally can't, that's why they're different.
I would call the whole like idk work from home office "job" people who can "work" while playing videogames all day some type of weird labor aristocracy or whatever but that doesn't change their fundamental relationship to how their labor is performed, which is ultimately at the behest of and facilitated by employment by the capitalist class
the real big difference is their ultimate, extreme treachery, but like, idk I think of the Jack London poem about scabs:
like, that's the same as a cop, but that doesn't mean they don't work for their wage ultimately to survive
Also, I'm talking about labour power and labour markets in regards to cops and their employment, not just "doing stuff for people for money". They're not proletarians, specifically.
You'll notice cops aren't getting hired based on labour output. They're not getting squeezed for labour or getting their hours extended or bringing machinery to increase their output (they buy their own machinery through the department to protect themselves or enhance how much pain they can inflict and how much privacy they can spy upon, but it's not actually a capitalist money circuit where their variable capital shrinks as all this constant capital builds up).
This kind of has echoes of the barista debate last year.