Police: allies of the working class?
By Shane Bentley
At an early morning visit to the Patrick picket line at Port Botany in Sydney, it was surprising to see so many supporters of the wharfies brave the rain and the cold to join the peaceful assembly. More surprising was the assertion of the union officials on the megaphones that, besides the hundreds of picketers, there was another group of "comrades" to be found at the picket — the NSW police force.
Picketers have even received food donations from the NSW Police Association, who have expressed their desire to "not get into the business of breaking strikes".
Picketers were encouraged by officials to give three cheers to our "brothers in blue" (the "sisters" missing out on the comradeship). Despite the odd anti-police expletive, most responded to the officials' call with three hearty "Hip, hip, hoorays".
The tactics of the MUA in allowing scab labour into the docks while preventing trucks from entering have kept police action against the peaceful picketers to a minimum. But should workers be asked to trust the police and believe that they are on the side of the workers? No.
Already in this dispute, the police have clearly demonstrated which side of the fence they are on. More than 100 people were arrested in Fremantle two weeks ago, with another 184 arrests in Brisbane last week. Mass arrests on April 17 on Melbourne's East Swanson dock were averted only when 2000 construction workers walked off the job to join another 4000 workers already in a stand-off with hundreds of police.
Australian history is peppered with violent police attacks against peaceful picketers — a history that union officials are well aware of. Recent police violence includes the baton charges against strikers at ACI Spotswood in 1996 and Richmond Secondary College in late 1993. In the mid-'80s, police were used to attack striking SEQEB workers and the Builders Labourers' Federation during its deregistration.
The police will continue to try to break strikes when their political masters see fit. The Carr Labor government has not decided to exercise this option — for the moment — because it is posing as a consensual alternative to the confrontation of Howard and Reith. The NSW Police Association is also concerned that its tarnished image would take a further battering if it is called on to intervene.
There are numerous examples of police attacks against workers defending their jobs and their livelihood, but there is not one instance of police intervening to arrest the Corrigans and the directors of BHP who make thousands of workers redundant at the stroke of a pen. The "comrades in blue" have never acted to jail, or even subpoena, the likes of Corrigan and Prescott. (Alan Bond was jailed for his crimes in the 1980s, but this was a case of one businessman stealing from others, a breach of the capitalist code of conduct.)
Union leaders, by not explaining the real reasons behind the actions of the NSW police, are politically miseducating working people about the fundamental role of the police.
The police are not "workers in uniform". They may be employees, but their resemblance with workers ends there.
The police are employed as a body of armed men and women to defend "law and order". But that law upholds capitalist rule; the order the police defend is the order of capitalist society. They are not the exploited victims of capitalism, but its agents. The power they exercise has been taken away from society as a whole and put to work in the interests of one class — the capitalist rulers.
Only after a revolutionary transformation of society, which places democratic ownership and control of production in the hands of the working class, will the role of police change. They would no longer be a special force but instead be constituted directly from the working class. They would be electable, accountable, recallable on demand and would gain no material privileges from their position.
No longer would a uniformed elite ride roughshod over the majority in order to defend the interests of the capitalist class. Instead police, acting in the interests of the vast majority of working people, will make sure that the expropriated capitalists do not get a chance to impose their exploitative system upon us again.
Until that revolutionary transformation takes place, workers should be saving their cheers for the striking wharfies and supporters — and their boos for the scabs, the Corrigan-Howard-Reith alliance and the police.
[Shane Bentley is coordinator of trade union work for the Sydney branch of the Democratic Socialist Party.]