Montreal Police – Capitalism’s Milita

With the week against police brutality coming up fast, as well as an important social movement emerging, it is important to remind ourselves of what role the police plays. More precisely, we would like to enumerate several reasons for which we oppose the police, wherever it is, wherever it’s from, and in every and all situations.

In our rotten societies, not a single week or day goes by without lengthening the list of injustices committed by members of the police. They have never hesitated to humiliate us, hurt us, play with our lives and those of our families and friends, and even to assassinate us if need be.

Strangely, we find that the people most repeatedly affected by these police ‘errors’ belong vastly to the working class, whether employed or not. Bosses, bankers, traders, and other living blight are spared from these problems. If wage-work dispossesses us each moment of our lives, the police reminds us that even our own lives no longer belong to us, since they have the right to take them away forever.

Whoever has even slightly participated in a social movement during their lifetime has very likely been confronted with the repressive force of the police, at one time or another. Riot police, tactical intervention teams, provincial police, and other forces of repression have the sole purpose of breaking strikes, preventing protests against the status quo, and repressing more or less violently all political opposition. This violence – that of the State – by constantly arming the police, by equipping them with military technology and ‘non-lethal’ weaponry, has given them the full ability to ‘control crowds’ almost entirely independently. There are jobs, and entire teams, whose social utility consists only in ‘breaking protesters’ more efficiently, more rapidly, and always more inhumanely.

To ensure the reproduction and the maintenance of its own domination, the ruling class has two tools at its disposal: ideology and violence. If ideology is diffused throughout society, and demands that everybody stay in line, then the role of violence is to bring deviants and dissenters back in line. The State, guarantor of class reproduction, ensures the monopoly of violence by means of the police. In other words, the social function of the police in its entirety is to ensure the maintenance of a class’s domination over another, whether ‘softly’ by applying the law, or by direct repression. As a revolutionary union, we wish to overthrow the dominant class, and as such are fundamentally opposed to its dominant ideology, and to its police.

Let us build solidarity with one another against the police.

No Justice, No Peace!