O.W.S. Activist: ‘Police Rank and File are Professional Class Traitors’, But We Should Attempt to USe Them Against the ’1%ers’

From Big Government, by Trevor Loudon

An Occupy Wall Street activist and veteran of the Trotskyist International Socialist Organization, Pham Binh,  has written a widely circulated article, which explains how socialists should attempt  to  manipulate rank and file police officers against society’s so called rulers – the “1%ers”.

According to Pham Binh;

Occupy is a once in a lifetime opportunity to re-merge the socialist and working-class movements and create a viable broad-based party of radicals, two prospects that have not been on the cards in the United States since the late 1960s and early 1970s. Occupy is broader in terms of active participants and public support and, most importantly, is far more militant and defiant. Tens of thousands of people are willing to brave arrest and police brutality. ..

Binh goes onto outline how some of the numerous Marxist sects operating inside the O.W.S.  movement have attempted to inflame hatred against the police;

One of the socialist left’s most consistent criticisms of Occupy has concerned the issue of the police. PSL’s Liberation News ran an article entitled, “Are the police forces part of the 99% or tools of the 1%?” The Internationalist Group attributed the predominance of whites at OWS to its “line” on the police: “A main reason why there are relatively few black and Latino participants in Occupy Wall Street is this positive attitude toward the police, who day-in and day-out persecute the oppressed.”

Socialist Worker correspondent Danny Lucia concluded an article entitled “Officer not-at-all-friendly” this way: I’ll ask the same question now to all those chanting and blogging about the police being part of the 99 percent. When you chant and blog support for the cops, when you publicly speculate that maybe deep down the cops really like you, how does that make you appear to your darker-skinned comrades in the movement who have no doubts about how the police feel about them?
The New York City ISO even held a public meeting on the topic: “Our Enemies in Blue: Why the Police Are Not Part of the 99%.”
Socialists are duty-bound to object to politics, strategy, tactics and slogans we believe harm or impede movements of the oppressed and exploited. On this point there can be no debate.

Binh then goes onto explain that Marxist hatred of police was so intense and blindly ideological, that numerous criminal incidents, including rape and lesser sexual assaults were ignored;

However, the socialist left’s objections on this issue are not rooted in the needs of the uprising but in our desire to “teach” Occupy Marxist orthodoxy. According to the socialist left, OWS was and is too friendly to the police, when, in reality, OWS had the opposite problem: hostility to the NYPD was so strong that incidents of groping, sexual assaults and rapes that began almost from day one of the occupation went unreported  for weeks. This practice changed as the incidents escalated and occupiers realised it could not be handled “internally”,

None of the socialist publications acknowledged or seemed to be aware of this development within Occupy, nor did they offer any practical guidance on what to do about the sexual assaults that plagued occupations across the country.

Binh sees a problem with the socialist left’s analysis of the police as unequivocally part of the ‘1%” .  Binh’s approach is more sophisticated – in his view, the police are BOTH part of the “1%”, AND the “99%”.

To comrade Binh, this new analysis has implications;

The socialist left objects to the inclusion of the rank and file of the police force in what Occupy calls “the 99%” by which the uprising means everyone outside the wealthiest 1% who destroyed the economy, paid themselves and rigged the political system. These objections have been framed in a problematic way; the issues have been mixed up and, as a result, Occupy’s “friendliness” towards the police in the face of repression appears to be stupidity, insanity, or both.
No act of police violence will “finally settle the debate” about whether the police are part of the 99% because there is no debate, at least within Occupy. The police rank and file are part of the 99%. They are the part of the 99% that keep the rest of the 99% in line at the behest of the 1%. The police rank and file are professional class traitors. Shouting “you are the 99%!” at them drives that point home far better than calling them “pigs” or “our enemies in blue”.
To argue that the police are “not part of the 99%” means to argue that they are somehow part of the 1%, a radically and demonstrably false notion. This explains why the socialist left’s argument on this issue has gained zero ground within Occupy despite all the beatings, arrests, abuse and brutality.

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