 The Black Lives Matter movement has put the police in the spotlight in a fundamental way. People are questioning the police in a fundamental way. And this is quite different to the last wave of Black Lives Matter protests because now a layer of people, more than before, have really moved beyond the demand for reform, onto demands for much more fundamental change. I mean, the protesters in the US, they burned a police station to the ground. This is not asking for a slightly nicer police force, this is asking. Well, in their own words, the demand is abolish the police. This is the demand that has been raised in the US, and this is the one that we have to spend a little bit of time thinking about. This movement, this slogan, abolish the police is basically what it means is it's getting people to ask the big question, what kind of society do we actually want to live in? The police are pretty, they're taken for granted as a fundamental aspect of modern society. To say that it should be abolished, that is asking in a fundamental way, what kind of society is it that we actually want to live in? And obviously we're Marxists. We have an answer to that question, what kind of society do we want to live in? But we take a scientific approach to it. Marx didn't just say abolish capitalism. He undertook a serious study of capitalism. He asked, what is capital? Where did it come from? How does it work today? By understanding that, he could understand how it should be, how it could be abolished. And we have to take the same approach, I think, with the question of the police. We have to ask, what is the police? Where did it come from? And how does it operate today? What sort of role does it play in society today? The slogans for us are not enough. They're important, but we have to penetrate beneath that and look at things in a more scientific and more fundamental way. So what is the police? I mean, to state the obvious, it's an armed body of men and women, armed in the sense of guns in some places, batons, handcuffs, tasers, whatever, but armed. And it is consciously made, is consciously portrayed as standing above society as a kind of neutral arbiter to resolve conflicts that arise in society. And it's consciously portrayed as doing that in the interests of the whole of society and the interests of everyone. To that end, and with that aim in mind, along with other parts of the state, like the prisons, like the army, the police has a monopoly on the right to use violence against other people. And when you whittle it down, that monopoly on violence, which is justified in the name of society as a whole, that is the essence of state power. All the regulation and administration that you think of when you think of the state, you think of it doing all these different things. All of that stuff that is carried out by the state is only made effective, is only possible thanks to the coercive power of the state. It's because it is backed up by the courts, the prisons, the army, and the police wouldn't be able to do that stuff without it. And so the police are one very crucial pillar of the modern state. Now the state has not always existed as a feature of human society. It actually first came into existence alongside the rise of private property. When private property first appeared, thanks to developments in economic production, the state also, classed society arose, and the state arose with that around 6,000 years ago. As organized violence, that's what the state was. Organized violence, protecting private property, that's why they arose at the same time, that's why it became necessary at a certain point in human history. Organized violence was required to protect the political power of a minority of property owners against a property less and powerless majority. That is the origins of the state. Of course, if a property owning minority of society wants to demand a monopoly on violence for itself to protect itself against the vast majority of society who don't own property, then it needs to make a pretty good case for that. That's quite a difficult case to argue. Us as a minority, we have the right to use violence against you, the majority, because we own property. To be honest, you can't make that case very obviously. To put it in those terms, to put it in that way, people wouldn't stand for that. The majority being the majority would overthrow the minority. Throughout all of history, the state and its various pillars, its various facets of the state, whether that's the police, the army, the courts, the prisons, whatever it is, the forces of organized violence, which are the fundamental essence of the state, they have always been shrouded in mysticism. It's pretty rare that the state says about itself, yes, we are the forces of organized violence, which arose along with private property and for the purpose of defending private property. They don't say that about themselves. The ruling class, for example, has used religion quite often to justify its rule and its organization of violence and of the coercive forces in society. Medieval kings, for example, they claim to rule by divine right. To this day, the state uses grand phrases like the rule of law. It dresses people up in wigs and gowns and ermine sophisticated Latin phrases and so on. All of that, its only purpose is to make the organized violence of beating up protesters, evicting people from their homes, locking up some of the most vulnerable people in society. It's designed to make that all that stuff seem respectable, but it's just shrouding it in mysticism. All that is going on there is organized violence to defend the interests of the property-owning ruling class. And that hard power of organized violence is made to seem legitimate, with softer methods also, efforts by the state to influence the media, education, the labor movement itself, how many trade union leaders get elevated to the house of lords, even knighted in some cases and so on. They use these methods also to shroud their state apparatus, their forces of organized violence, to shroud that in a kind of respectability. And the police are also part of this. If the police openly went around saying, well, we're a weapon in the class war, we arose at the same time as class society arose, at the same time as the division of society into classes, we're a weapon in the class war, we're designed to protect the private property of the ruling class. If they did that, they could claim no authority whatsoever. The vast majority of people who don't own land or businesses or large-scale private property, serious bits of the economy, people wouldn't have any respect for them. They wouldn't have any authority in society in general. And so they are shrouded like everything else in mysticism and in phrases, like in the US, for example, to protect and serve. There's this image, a bit old-fashioned now, but the nice, the bobby's on the beat in Britain, the nice friendly policeman who you could go and chat to and ask in the time and all the rest of it. This is a conscious effort to make these this force of organized violence, this institution which has a monopoly on violence against people, mainly working-class people, I'll come back to that, to make it seem like it is respectable that it stands apart from society in some way, that it's not actually involved with the class division in society. But if you want to understand the police, you have to look beyond what they say about themselves to where they came from and the role that they play in class society. Now clearly the state today is not the same as it has been in the past. It has gone through many changes. There were ancient slave states, for example, in Greece and Rome, and that was a particular type of state. And that type of state is different to the type of state that existed with the medieval kings, for example, under feudalism. And the type of state that existed then is also different to the kind of state that we have today, under modern capitalism. The role of the state as a weapon of whichever ruling class was in power at any given time, that hasn't fundamentally changed. The ruling class at any given time has always used the state as a weapon against the exploited classes. That function of a state has not changed fundamentally throughout all of the entire history of the existence of the state. But obviously throughout history it has been refined and it has been polished. And every time there's been a revolution, for example, or fundamental change in the way society is organized, the ruling class or the new ruling class, if there's been a revolution, finds a way to refine and adapt the state to better suit its purposes, to play the role better of being a weapon used by the minority in society against the vast majority. And the police, as we see it today, the police is a product of that refining, basically, it's a product of that polishing the state as a weapon of the modern ruling class, of the capitalist class. Now the metropolitan police, also known as the Met Police in London, was the first ever modern police force. And this is entirely connected with the fact that the industrial revolution, this is entirely connected with the fact that the industrial revolution first began in Britain. Because when that took place, the British ruling class, the British capitalist class, was faced with a problem. The industrial revolution brought about rapid proletarianization of larger layers of the population. They streamed into the cities, such as London. And so the potential for industrial unrest, and unrest amongst the working class, this newly proletarianized layer, leaving the countryside coming into the cities, central for unrest was rife. And all that existed was something called the watch, the night's watch, it passed for police. It was badly equipped to deal with anything, to be honest, beyond very low level crime, loitering at night time, they watched out for fires. That was the level of so-called police at that time. When it came to kind of disciplining the working class, when it came to large-scale industrial unrest, for example, they didn't have a police force. That wasn't the job of the watch, to be honest. All that the ruling class, all that the capitalist class had for dealing with that kind of thing, was a very blunt instrument of militarized units, like Hussars or the Yeomanry in a particular town. Now, in 1819, just over 100 years ago, sorry, just over 200 years ago, this kind of very blunt militarized instrument was used against the demonstration of tens of thousands of working class people demanding the right to vote at a gathering in Manchester. And that turned into what is now known as the Peterloo Massacre, because dozens of people were killed. The Hussars and the Yeomanry charged at the crowd and killed people in what was. If you inserted your agents directly into the communities to identify, isolate and then arrest the ringleaders without having to wait for widespread rebellion and therefore without having to use heavy-handed tactics against them, you can catch it earlier. If you basically infiltrate the communities, put individual or small groups of agents into the communities themselves. And those community agents, that's the forerunners of the police. That's where the idea of the police came from. As Home Secretary later, Peel imported this idea into the rest of Britain and established the Metropolitan Police in 1829, 10 years after the Peterloo Massacre. Now the Met Police's guiding principle is policing by consent. That's what they talk about and they still to this day talk about that a lot. The idea being that police officers are just, they're just citizens in uniform. They're just ordinary people like you and me. They were given blue uniforms to distinguish them from the green uniforms of the army. They didn't carry the same weapons as the army. They were saying, look, we're not the Yeomanry, we're not the Hussars, we're not these militarized units that you hate so much that have been used against you before to discipline the working class. We're the same as you. We're just part of your community. We're just citizens in uniforms policing by consent. They dress them, they literally, with their blue uniforms, dress themselves up as something different to everything else. But they came from the same place. They came from the exact same desire of the British ruling class to control, to discipline the working class. They just realized that if they continued down the path of, you know, the Peterloo Massacre, that they were going to provoke a rebellion against the government, against the establishment, against capitalism. So in this way, the British state found a way to refine its apparatus of organized violence, all the better to protect the interests of the ruling class. Now, although the Met Police Model was exported all over the world, and many countries use the exact same methods, in some places, the real role of the police was a bit more openly on display. They weren't covered up quite so well. In Pennsylvania, in the US, in 1865, the Pennsylvania General Assembly granted the right to coal and iron companies to exploit, sorry, to employ and maintain their own police force to protect their businesses, basically. Law enforcement at that time didn't exist at a state level. It was lower down than that. But the coal and iron companies said, we need more. Can we please form our own police force? And the General Assembly in Pennsylvania said, yeah, right. And the main purpose of that police force was to act as strike breakers. That was the purpose for its existence, in other words, protecting the rights of coal and iron companies to exploit their workers for profit. That was why that police force was formed. They used extreme violence up to and including lynching against working class people in the interests of the bosses. And all of that was while they were authorized by the General Assembly as a police force. They were called a police force. Now later, a state level police force was established, which refined and smartened up the image of the police in Pennsylvania. But the role and the position of police in society didn't change fundamentally. They just changed the uniforms a bit. But it played the same purpose was exactly the same. And so although over time and in some places, the police force has been smartened up and straightened out and is less obviously corrupt maybe in some places, it's no less a part of the repressive state apparatus, the repressive apparatus of organized violence in defense of the ruling class that it has always been. And in some places, of course, it is still very much openly that and all we need to do is look at what's going on in Nigeria right now to see that in some places it is just openly exactly the same. It's not like the police in Nigeria as an institution us are fundamentally in some way different. There's a reason that's called the police in Nigeria and then we have the police in every other country, they play the same role. Some of it is just slightly more smartened up and made to look a bit less abusive. But deep down, they come from the same place and their purpose is identical. Under the impact of great events, of course, and mass and in particular mass movements to the working class, the mask slips and you can you start to see the kind of ugly reality, the ugly face of the real face of the police under capitalism. During the 1926 general strike in Britain, the police were used to defend scabs. So as scabs crossing the picket lines, the police were used to defend them against the striking workers. In other words, the police used violence against the working class in the interests of the capitalist class. In East London, 1936, the police tried to fight their way through a demonstration of workers and young people and Jewish people which was blocking Oswald Mosley and his fascist black shirts marching through the east end of London. So yeah, this was the battle of Cable Street. You had the working class on one side trying to stop the fascists and on the other side you had this unholy alliance of the police and the fascists fighting in Cable Street against working class people. In June 1984, at all grief and rather in South Yorkshire, the police violently attacked striking miners and arrested dozens of them on trumped-up charges. And in fact, this was so brazen by this behavior of the police, it was more like Peterloo actually than policing by consent. It was so such brazen violence in the in the defense of capitalism and the Tory government at the time that even the courts, the police complaints commission, even senior South Yorkshire police officials were forced to criticize the actions of the police at that time. But of course, this is under the impact of great events. These things become clearer for people. In so-called normal times, the police try to appear a bit more as an independent pillar of society standing apart from everything else. Clearly though, the police are closely linked. They don't stand apart from everything else. They're clearly closely linked to other bits of the state, first of all, obviously the prisons and the courts. So I don't think I even need to explain that. Everyone can see the police, the prisons and the courts are all part of the same system. But they're also very closely linked to the army. The idea originally behind the police was that they would something different to the army. But today, there's something called the military joint task force headquarters. And that coordinates between the military and the police so that they're all on the same page and pushing the same agenda. The chief constable of Gloucestershire police, a man called Rod Hansen, he is the chief policeman on the military joint task force. So they wear different uniforms. But the army chiefs, who carry out the interests of British imperialism abroad, they're the same men who police the streets here at home. But the police aren't just closely linked to other parts of the state. They are also directly linked to the ruling class themselves. The capitalists got the big bourgeois, well, the police is directly linked to those people whose interests they serve. And there are a whole host of examples that I can give you illustrating this point. For example, the private security firm G4S, they hired the former Met Police Commissioner, a man called Paul Condon. And he was sat on their board until 2012. On top of that, the police and crime commissioner, which is the kind of an elected official, it's the highest civilian oversight of the police. It's the civilian who runs the police in every given area. There's about 40 of them around the country. The police and crime commissioner for Devon previously ran a management consultancy firm. The PCC in Somerset previously ran a very large bakery chain. The PCC in Wiltshire ran an accountancy firm. The PCC in Sussex ran a leisure company. I could go on. They're all business people. That's the people running the police at the moment. The independent office for police conduct, which deals with complaints about the police, is stacked with PWC accountants and people whose day job it is to privatize the NHS. These are the kind of people that are running the police complaints office. In 2018, the Bluewater shopping centre, massive shopping centre in Kent, it paid over half a million pounds to Kent police. Sorry, that's in 2015, not 2018. They paid this money for nine PCs and two sergeants from Kent police to police the shopping centre. They privately paid for the police to come and work for them. The Berkeley group property development company paid 85,000 to the MET for the same thing in 2018. Also in 2018, EasyJet, ASDA, Westfield shopping centres, private schools in Dulwich, for example, Thames Tideway, which is a big sewage company in London, and universities, including Bournemouth and Brunel, all contributed £132 million of private money to police. That's in 2018. All that private money from big business to the police. Between 1993 and 2009, big construction companies, blacklisted trade unionists, and they prevented them from getting work with those construction companies for years, and they based their decision to blacklist certain workers on information supplied to them by undercover police officers spying on trade union activists. There's a bill actually going through Parliament, obviously, which deals with this at the moment as well. I don't have time to deal with that now. Also, they based their decisions, by the way, on advice from senior police officers from a unit called the National Extremism Tactical Coordination Unit. That's big business and the police directly colluding against the working class, against the working class people. The current commissioner of the MET police is a woman called Dame Cressida Dick, very much part of the establishment, the elite, educated, of course, at both Oxford and Cambridge. The current police commissioner in Leicestershire is a man called Baron Bach of Lutterworth, who is as much of a cartoon villain as his name suggests. He's Oxford educated and he has sat on the board of various arms companies, held very important positions in the Ministry of Defense, and he runs the police in Leicestershire. 24 per cent, a quarter of all police commissioners and chief officers attended private schools compared to 6.5 per cent of the population, 50 per cent of them attended elite universities, chief constables, and anywhere from £130,000 to £230,000 per year, the House of Lords is littered with former police chiefs. The Home Office runs the police. It falls under their remit. Since 1867, every single one of the chief civil servants in the Home Office has been a knight of the realm, with two exceptions, which is the only two women who appear on that list, and there is also the current one who's not a knight, but he only started in March, so he's got a bit of time. Since 1885, every single one of those chief civil servants in the Home Office has been educated at either Oxford or Cambridge, with one exception who was educated at Edinburgh University, but every other one since 1885 went to either Oxford or Cambridge. The point I'm trying to make here is that the police are tied by a thousand threads, some very direct, such as big business colluding with the police to attack working class people, to blacklist them and so on. But some more indirect, such as educating the police chiefs in the schools and universities of the elite, they are tied by a thousand threads to the ruling class that they are designed to serve. That's not an accident, that is very, very deliberate. Obviously it's not to say that every police officer is like that, many of the lower ranks of the police are just working class men and women trying to get a decent wage. There is a big class difference between the people who run the police and those who work as rank and file police officers. That, of course, though, makes no difference to the objective role that the police plays in class society. And in fact, the nature of police work means that this class distinction does not often express itself. The police are used, almost exclusively, to discipline the working class. They see the worst, most lumpenized elements in society and they're taught to generalize and stereotype and use violence against all working class people as a result. This is how the police are taught. This is how they're trained. For example, in the London riots in 2011, a 23-year-old was sent to prison for six months for stealing a bottle of water worth £3.50. Meanwhile, recently, very recently, these FinCEN leaks have shown $2 trillion of money being laundered, basically, by the world's biggest banks over the 17-year period in the recent past. None of the people responsible for those crimes are going to go to prison. They'll probably face a slap on the wrist, if that. The point is that those laws, the money laundering laws, the laws dealing with the big banks, they're enforced by someone else. They're enforced by different agencies. The police enforce the laws aimed at the working class. The point is, obviously, the people enforcing the laws against the big banks, that's another question, but they have no real interest in enforcing those laws properly. Obviously, the fact that the police is used against the working class, that in turn attracts and promotes some of the most reactionary people and ideas towards the police. It's not just the nature, of course, of the laws that the police enforce, but also the way that they are trained to enforce them. The over-policing of Black neighbourhoods, for example, is absolutely endemic. Between March and May this year, so during the lockdown, over a quarter, over a quarter, more than one in four, all the young Black men, all Black men aged 15 to 24 in London, more than one in four, were stopped and searched, just in those months. Over 80% of those stops resulted in further action. Black people in England and Wales are 10 times more likely to be stopped and searched than white people. In Dorset, Black people are 25 times more likely to be stopped and searched than white people. The point is that the racism of the ruling class is incorporated into the methods used by its police force. That is why, and that's inevitable, because it is the police force of the ruling class. The racism of the ruling class, which has been discussed elsewhere in this weekend, is reflected in the police force. That's why, in 1999, the police force in this country was declared to be institutionally racist, and earlier this year, 20 years later, an anonymous Black police officer in the Met wrote an article detailing why she thinks the police is still institutionally racist to this day. Now, all of this tells us something very important. The police, like the rest of the bourgeois state, cannot be reformed away from being a weapon of the bourgeoisie, away from being a weapon of the capitalist class, into something that defends the interests of the working class. Obviously, this or that small change can be made, and we would be in favour of such reforms, make the police wear cameras, prosecute the more flagrant abuses and so on. But the police today are entirely a weapon of the ruling class against the working class, and to sever every single one of the thousand threads that tie the police to the capitalist class requires a revolution. You can't reform all of that stuff away. And in the past, all sorts of mistakes have been made by those on the left who think it's possible for the working class to seize the state institutions of the capitalists, capture them through elections or whatever, and use them in turn, use those institutions against the capitalist class that has created them. That is a fantasy. That's 30 minutes. The state is built, operated and refined over centuries to serve the interests of the capitalists. The bit that we see of the state, the elected politicians, that's just the tip of the iceberg. Beneath that is a civil service, a judiciary, a house of lords, an aristocracy, media, education system, bishops, the military, the secret services, and the police, none of which is elected, and all of which is educated, trained, and used by the ruling class in the interests of the ruling class. Now, that isn't to say that you can't use the institutions of the bourgeois state to advance the working class struggle. The Bolsheviks did that in Russia in the early 20th century. They used elections to the Duma, to the bourgeois Russian parliament, as a platform, very effective platform from which they could reach a wider layer of people with their ideas. And it's also not to say that the working class struggle can't curb the power of the state. The strength of the Black Lives Matter movement in the US has caused the Democratic Party in Minneapolis to promise to close down the police department there. Now, whether it actually does that and what that looks like is another question, but the fact that they were forced to promise that by the strength of the movement is an indication of how powerful that movement can be. And actually, you're seeing the same thing in Nigeria right now. The strength of the anti-police brutality movement in Nigeria that's taking place at the moment has already won concessions on the question of the police and is likely to be able to go much further. Obviously, though, those things, they don't fundamentally, they're stepping stone and they're good and we support them, but they don't fundamentally solve the question of the police. Our aim is not to take over the police and reform it into something fundamentally different because that is impossible. Our aim is to smash the police as it currently exists, to dismantle it as an institution and not just the police, but the army, the courts, the civil service, parliament, every institution of the bourgeois state sweep the whole lot away because none of that stuff is fit for the purpose of running society in the interests of the working class. Now, that obviously begs the question, well, what will replace all of that stuff if we want to get rid of it? What kind of institutions are fit for running society in the interests of the working class? Well, just as the ruling class has built and refined its own state institutions, so the working class can and has built its own forms of state power in the past, in different episodes of class struggle throughout history. Elected workers councils, also known as Soviets, were established during the Russian revolutions of 1905, 1917. They issued political decrees. They took over the running of society and they established a military revolutionary committee to deal with the question of organized force in the interests of the working class to combat the organized violence of the ruling class. And these then can be defined, can be said to be institutions of state power, which were tied by a thousand threads to the working class. And they challenged in 1917, they challenged the bourgeois, the forces of organized violence that belonged to the bourgeois, they challenged them for power, and of course they won. You saw the same thing in Italy in 1920, a wave of factory occupations and the trade unions organized red brigades to defend the factories and protect their class's interests. And most recently in Minneapolis, after the police were effectively ejected from large bits of the city, the NAACP began to organize armed patrols of local people to protect the community, protect businesses, stop vandalism, and so on. Like the red brigades protecting the factories in Italy in 1920, they weren't random individuals. These were organized and they were coordinated. And it was Trotsky actually, he pointed this out, that the workers' forces of law and order, the workers' militias, if you like, they come out of the picket line. It's workers defending the right to strike, defending their bargaining power, defending their living and working conditions against the scabs and the police, against the forces of bourgeois violence, that's where the forces of proletarian, well, violence, if you like, proletarian law and order come from. These are embryonic proletarian state institutions. And we need those as a class. Our class needs that kind of thing. They are weapons in the class, struggle against the capitalist class. Obviously, though, the need for a state apparatus exists only so long as there are mutually antagonistic classes in society. That's why it arose. And basically, as long as you've got some people who own the private property, other people who work on that private property, you will have classes and you will have the need for a state. A society that abolishes that class distinction by making the people who work also the people who own through expropriations and nationalizations and so on, you can then see the state apparatus wither away and eventually disappear. And then you would have a democratically planned economy, which could invest in housing, jobs, production, satisfy the needs of everyone. Vast swathes of crime on that basis would be eliminated. You could then have proper investment in healthcare, which would help to treat the most vulnerable in society instead of criminalizing them, as is done at the moment. And then for what a little crime remained, proletarian policing would come from within communities, not imposed by the ruling class on us from outside. That is the kind of society that we are fighting for. But knowing what kind of... And this is an important point now, and this will be the last couple of points that I made. Knowing what kind of society we're fighting for isn't enough. It's important, it's essential, knowing what kind of world we would like to see. But that on its own is not enough, because we have to connect that idea with the class struggle as it is actually unfolding at any given time. Now, slogans and tactics of the workers movement in relation to the police have differed and must differ depending on the concrete circumstances of the class struggle at any given time. So one of the slogans of the BLM movement is abolish the police. We have to connect with that to give it a clear and real revolutionary content to make sure it's not co-opted or watered down or whatever. So to the people saying we should abolish the police, I say, yeah, very good. Let's abolish the police. But how? How are we going to do that and what will society look like when it's done? I think we have to point out when people raise this slogan that you can't abolish the police without abolishing class society. It's naive to think that you can have a society divided into landlords and capitalists on one side and exploited and oppressed workers on the other side and not have a police force. That is a fantasy. That is a utopia. If we really understand what the police is, where it comes from, the role that it plays in society, then we understand that the slogan abolish the police only makes sense if it is linked with the fight against capitalism and for socialist revolution. Now, for a lot of people right now, especially black people in the US, especially people in Nigeria right now and in parts of London also, the police are perceived as an occupying army terrorizing working class people using racist methods. And they say abolish the police and I say, yes, good. And then I discuss with them, well, how are we going to do it? You have to link it to abolishing class society. But for a lot of people, a lot of working class people, both today and at various points in the past, the police are not always perceived and not always at every moment perceived as a weapon of the ruling class directed against workers. We know that that's what it is, but it's not always seen that way by the working class. They are often actually seen as this institution to fight crime and maintain law and order and people don't want crime. They don't want anarchy and chaos and vandalism and all the rest of it. You talk to a working class person whose community is blighted by drugs, by vandalism where it's not safe to walk at night where they're worried about their family, about bringing up a family there and so on. You talk to someone like that. I don't think they would necessarily be always, and at every point throughout history, receptive to the idea that we should abolish the police. They want to feel some measure of security in their lives and Jeremy Corbyn actually tried to tap into this at the last general election. He said, well, he actually campaigned to put more police on the streets. Now that's a mistake and we criticised him for that at the time because you don't make working class people more secure by strengthening the weapons of the ruling class, clearly. But in answer to Corbyn saying we should have more police on the street, the answer is not, no, actually we should just abolish the police in its entirety. We say that for working class people to feel more secure, they should have democratic control over the police. Instead of all these bourgeois hangers on these business people and all the rest of it who currently run the forces of organised violence, working class people should have democratic control over the police. A demand like that connects with people's desire to live their lives safely, but it also, and this is important, it would begin to shatter the police as an effective weapon of the ruling class because it brings to the fore the class question, who is it that you as the police are supposed to be serving and protecting? In other words, which class in society are you serving and protecting? If we raise a demand, we want democratic control over the police, then it can raise that question as well. And so the demands raised by Marxists, whether that is raised by the movement or connecting to the demands raised by the movement, the demands raised by Marxists, 40 minutes been, whether that's abolished the police or democratic control over the police, whatever it is, they all have the same goal, which is to shatter the police as an instrument of the ruling class. They use, of course, different tactics and slogans to achieve that aim. During the 1970s in Britain, there was massive industrial unrest, the police were threatening to go on strike. And actually in 1918, 1919, the police in Britain did go on strike. In 1919, the police in Boston went on strike and were accused by the press at the time of having been infiltrated by the Bolsheviks and this kind of thing. Under those conditions where the police itself was in a ferment, cracks opening up along class lines, society as a whole, there was a big industrial ferment in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution or whatever it was, the Marxists didn't use the slogan, abolish the police, because that would have been a bit of a blunt instrument, wouldn't have connected with the mood that existed in society at the time with the concrete conditions that existed. They talked about trade union rights for rank and file police officers, the need for democratic control of the police by society as a whole, in other words, trying to drive a wedge between rank and file police and senior officers to dismantle the police as an instrument of the bourgeois state. So obviously, like a slogan like abolish the police, we can agree with it, but we have to explain it and likewise, demands like that trade union rights for the police, if they are appropriate in a particular given moment, they also need to be explained because that on its own, those slogans also are not enough, they don't fundamentally solve the problem of the police as an institution of the bourgeois state, not least by the way, because the police does not stand still as an institution. After the police strike in Britain in 1919, all of the most radical police officers were sacked, all that was left was the most reactionary ones. Same things happening actually as has happened in the past period in Greece. The police was used against the workers movement, the most radical ones left, all that's left in the police now are very reactionary. In other words, as events change, as the class struggle develops, as things move, as society moves, the police is part of that society, it's not just a static mass. And so the consciousness of police officers can change, therefore the attitude of workers towards the police can change and the kind of slogans in relation to the police that we will raise will also change. In some countries, police unions will participate in general strikes. In other countries, those police unions will be used to break those strikes. Different police unions within the same country can find themselves on opposite sides of the barricades. None of that changes the objective role, our objective understanding, our scientific understanding of the role that the police play in society. But it does tell us that a blunt one size fits all slogan irrelevant of place and time and circumstance is not an effective tool for the revolutionary movement to use to smash the police as a weapon of the capitalist class. And today in the US, for example, the Marxists are correctly pointing out the thoroughly reactionary role of police unions in the US, which are little more than glorified gangs running protection rapids, funding right wing politicians covering up for their members when they commit the most heinous abuses of power. Police unions in the US today have absolutely no place in the labor movement and should be ejected from it. And the Black Lives Matter movement has really thrown that into sharp relief. So our job then to sum up our job is to understand what the police is objectively by studying the state, its origins, class society, and capitalism. And then we can understand how to get rid of it and what society would look like without it. And we learned that also from previous episodes of the class struggle throughout history. That understanding is our starting point. But we then need to connect that with the class struggle at any given time, patiently explaining those ideas, linking them to the slogans that are thrown up by the mass movement in a given historical context. And so the slogans we see today abolish the police, all cops and bastards, they arouse enormous sympathy in us. They are a raw expression of the anger that we all feel when we see the police kneeling on an innocent man's neck until he dies. But raw anger on its own, although necessary, is not enough to change society. For that, we need a worked out program and a strategy. Our program, of course, is anti-capitalist. It's for the abolition of private ownership of the economy for an end to class society. Our strategy is a socialist revolution led by the working class. For that, we need a revolutionary organization in Britain and all over the world. And that necessary organization does not yet exist, is up to us to build it.