[Marxism] A cop is a cop is a cop

[Angelus Novus]

Lüko Willms:

> I'd say they are working on producing and
reproducing 
> the labor power. David Picón Alvarez mentioned that 
> at least to a certain extent, teachers and medical 
> workers are also exploited labor, allowing their 
> employer to appropriate a part of the socially 
> produced surplus value. 

I think a lot of the posts on this thread implicitly
conceive of value as a physiological "substance"
embedded  in commodities.

"Value" as a category used by Marx indicates a social
relationship that mediates the relationship of various
private acts of labor to the sum total of the labor of
society:

"As a general rule, articles of utility become
commodities, only because they are products of the
labour of private individuals or groups of individuals
who carry on their work independently of each other.
The sum total of the labour of all these private
individuals forms the aggregate labour of society.
Since the producers do not come into social contact
with each other until they exchange their products,
the specific social character of each producer’s
labour does not show itself except in the act of
exchange. In other words, the labour of the individual
asserts itself as a part of the labour of society,
only by means of the relations which the act of
exchange establishes directly between the products,
and indirectly, through them, between the producers."

http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch01.htm#S4

And at the level of depiction of Chapter one, Vol. I,
where those words appear, Marx is writing at an
extremely high level of abstraction, not describing an
empirically or historically existing "simple commodity
production" where commodities are actually exchanged
according to their values.

But with regard to the present discussion, it is
rather clear that cops are not "workers", since they
are not carrying out private labor expenditure whose
relationship to society is mediated through exchange. 
The activity of police is directly managed by the
state apparatus.

The same goes, however, for social workers, teachers,
and medical workers employed by the state.  It is not,
however, the case for the same workers if they are
working for private firms that receive state
contracts.

However, communism isn't university, and it is not a
matter of being "admitted" to the working class in
order to qualify as the "revolutionary subject".  This
sort of Economistic scholasticism is precisely what
Lenin polemicized against.




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