Q. What is the basic role of the state and the police in society?

A. The state apparatus, armed bodies of men, the police, the army, and their appendages the courts and so on, are tools for the oppression of one layer of society by another, usually of one class over another (for example the capitalist class oppresses the working class). At a certain stage in the social evolution of humanity, the state came into being as a result of the division of society into classes. Once it became possible to produce a surplus above the needs of the producers then it became possible for a minority to free itself from the need to labor, living instead off the surplus produced by the majority. Inevitably however such a small minority required a special force to keep the majority in order, and thus the earliest forms of state apparatus were born out of the division of society into classes. This earliest class division between slave owners and slaves, has been replaced by other forms of class division (feudal lords and serfs under feudalism, capitalists and workers under capitalism). But even to the present day under capitalism it was always only a minority who could live off the surplus produced by the majority. Capitalism has played a progressive role in building up the economy through investment to a point where it would be possible for the first time to do away with this archaic class division. Since the task of socialism is precisely to abolish that division, the state itself should increasingly whither away, passing from the government of people to the administration of things before disappearing altogether.

In his masterpiece on Stalinism, The Revolution Betrayed, Trotsky explained that wherever there are shortages there is want. Wherever there is want there are lines, wherever there are lines you need police to keep order, and the police will find themselves at the front of the line. The police, as instruments of state repression, inevitably abuse their privileged position. Under socialism, there will be no separate police force or standing army, but rather the armed people - if everyone is a policeman, then no one is really a policeman - sort of like a big neighborhood watch.

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