In the former West Germany members of the Communist Party were banned from a variety of state jobs. The idea was that if you thought the DDR was great then you could clear off there.Now let’s turn the proposition on its head. Should doing some jobs make you ineligible to be a member of a revolutionary Marxist organisation which wants to overthrow the bourgeois state?
It’s not a hypothetical question. Prison Officers Association (POA) general secretary Brian Caton has joined the Socialist Party. Understandably enough the interview with him shines a bright light on his opposition to privatisation of the penal system, the expulsion of BNP members from the union, his socialism, the impossibility of any real rehabilitation in the current system and his disdain for new Labour and Cameron. Anyone who has heard him speak cannot doubt the sincerity of these convictions.
Now I can perfectly agree with comrade Caton that the job you do does not necessarily colour your politics. Not all prison officers are right wing. We can reasonably speculate that the SAS and Special Branch are probably full of people who subscribe to New Internationalist and are planning career changes into social work or charities supporting asylum seekers. It’s even easier to understand how in a strongly unionised trade the pull of social democracy will have led many POA members to join the Labour Party. Labour’s critique of the British state’s repressive machinery always struck me as a bit underdeveloped and joining the party would not have been much of an ideological rupture for many prison officers. In his interview comrade Caton says that he was awarded not one, not two but three gold brooches to acknowledge his success as a Labour recruiter. I would bend the stick to the extent of saying that if a senior union official wanted to join Respect, the Campaign for a New Workers’ Party or whatever emerges from the swamp in the next few months that the job should not be an obstacle.
Things become a bit murkier when a prison officer wants to join one of the many organisations that sees itself as the only real successor of Lenin’s Bolsheviks. Some jobs are just politically unacceptable for members of a Marxist organisation. Bailiffs, cops in armed response units, the sort of News of the World journalist who runs scams to get migrant workers arrested and deported – in the right circumstance the people earning their living in this way might be pretty good union militants but the job that they they do is so directly oppressive and anti-working class that it should preclude them from being in a Marxist organisation. The contradiction between the politics and the personal is as insurmountable for them as it is for jailers, even ones in unions.
Liam redux 
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