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this post was submitted on 07 Mar 2024
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the_dunk_tank
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It's the dunk tank.
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That quote is stupid as fuck anyway
I know it sounds dumb, but the essence of it is anti-cop. You can't abolish the police and then create socialist cops, they're same thing, you essentially changed nothing, it's there to demonstrate that some instruments of state power cannot be reformed, no matter what political system is in charge.
No shit, but it misses that laws are not all the same, nor are the varying degrees of responsibility that you can hold law enforcement to (e.g. qualified immunity vs actual accountability). It's just crass idealism and George Orwell-style "left"-anticommunism in practice. There's nothing good you can glean from the quote except "bad things are bad", it gives you no real understanding of why bad things happen, how they can be prevented, what they would be replaced with, etc.
also, the richest man on Earth should be beaten with the people's stick.
If you really believe Elon Musk is anti-cop in any way I got a bridge to sell you.
socialist cops are necessary until imperialism is no longer a threat I'm sorry to say. Proletarian defense forces protecting collective property is a fundamentally different thing than bourgeois agents defending private property. The conflation is fake. Even under pure final communism there will be armed bodies of people protecting the community from sabotage and anti-social behavior
I appreciate your reply, but I don't quite understand it. I fundamentally agree that protection of collective property is completely different from what cops do. And I'm sure we'll both agree that when it comes to personal property and assorted antisocial behaviour we'd both think what's most needed is something much closer to a social worker than someone who's strapped. I agree the conflation is fake, because one are cops, and the others are not cops, because this kind of policing would be abolished.
Disarming the cops is a good idea once you've got some sort of stability going post-revolution. It disables a possible vector of counter-revolution.
It's not complicated to have firearms specialists who are called out to events where they're needed while the general cops simply do not have weapons. This is common practice in a lot of countries.
Post-revolution the "cops" are your primary agents of suppressing counter-revolution. Disarming them will allow counter-revolutionaries to run rampant unchecked. Do you think the Venezuelan cops that arrested the mercenaries that invaded their country need to be disarmed? I think they need more weaponry tbh.
The teams you send to deal with counter-revolutionaries are not the same people you send to deal with the kid shoplifting.
I don't understand why this is complicated. You have regular cops that are unarmed, then you have a specialist team with elevated training requirements. This team is sent to events where someone is said to be armed, otherwise the regular cops are sent.
Every cop does not need a gun at all times. And every cop will not get shot just because they're unarmed. The calculation for a criminal completely changes when the other person doesn't have the means to fight back, having a weapon makes the cop and everyone around them less safe. It is significantly more preferable for the criminal to run away and for a team to get them later than for the badly trained cop to have a weapon causing the criminal to feel threatened and calculate they need to kill someone. They aren't gonna add murder to their records unless they feel they have to, that's what armed cops cause.
Calculation for kid shoplifting when confronted with an unarmed cop: I need to run away.
Calculation for kid shoplifting when confronted with an armed cop: I am going to die and I need to fight to survive.
OK but you're just arguing specifics of how we are setting up the Proletarian Cop System, where there's tiers with various levels of armaments. Fundamentally you agree that there ultimately will be a Proletarian Cop System.
Sure but, 95% of them don't need to be armed. You just have each station have a specific armed team with elevated training requirements.
A lot of the rest of the problems sort themselves out by not having armed cops. Criminals have totally different calculations about their own crimes, no need to add a murder to the rap sheet if there's no danger of losing their life committing a property crime.
Alright, but this is a very different argument than the one you were just making that these new prole cops would possible be counter-revolutionary. Everything I've seen about socialist revolutions and experiments has been that counter-revolution comes from the petty bourgeois, organized crime and Liberal intelligentsia/reformists - not from the low-level enforcement agents of the socialist state. It wasn't the Soviet cops that shot Lenin, it was the succ dem intelligentsia (and maybe there should have been MORE soviet cops present to prevent this!). It wasn't the Venezuelan cops that aided Guaido in attempting to run the border, it was Liberal NGOs and local fascists and cartel criminals. It wasn't the Polish cops who overthrew their socialist state, it was the trade unionists and Liberals.
Every time it's the Liberal intelligentsia, the rich and local criminals and fascists doing the counter-revolution. These groups are suppressed by the proletarian cops, the role of the dictatorship of the proletariat is to suppress these classes out of existence with force. I'm completely fine with the agents of the revolution being as armed as they need to be to fulfill their historical role of active red terror.
On 9/11, while the head of the Carabineros de Chile (national police) was loyal, a significant amount was not. Mendoza (one of the four members of the Junta) was high ranking, and more Carabineros died fighting against Allende supporters than any military branch.
"the Liberal intelligentsia, the rich and local criminals and fascists" are not the only people that engage in counter-revolution, they were just, for a variety of reasons, more successful in their counter-revolutions. Even peasantry can be counter-revolutionary, look at the Tambov Rebellion.
Chile was not a revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat, they had no revolution and the cops were the ones remaining from Liberal bourgeois society not proletarian enforcers. Electing a socialist president doesn’t convert the entire system into a dictatorship of the proletariat by magic, that requires revolutionary struggle and turnover of the state.
This process happened over a decade of suppressing counter-revolution in Venezuela and is still an ongoing partially completed struggle. In Chile, the process barely even began before it was aborted in the womb. What the cops in Chile did doesn't matter because they were bourgeois cops still, there had been no purge and re-making of society. The solution wasn't to disarm the "counter-revolutionary" bourgeois cops and leave them in their jobs, the solution was to purge them all and install armed proletarian cops in their stead.
Ok, even with Allende's reforms of the Carabineros, perhaps that wasn't the best example.
At the beginning of the breakup of Yugoslavia, local police forces fought for their (non-communist (the minister of defence of Slovenia was a liberal, for example)) breakaway, rather than for Yugoslavia. In Operation Action North, Slovenian police blocked Milošević supporters. Slovenian police fought in the Ten-Day War. Croatian police fought against Serbs. These police forces were all formed prior to the independence of their respective republics, and basically all of these police officers had served for a number of years.
Or take Hungary in 1956, where local police participated in acts against the Hungarian People's Republic. Or how Ceaușescu was arrested by local police. Local police, even created from the ground up in AES, are not trustworthy.
This is exactly why China has normal police and the People's Armed Police.
China still has armed bodies of men enforcing the state monopoly on violence. They still have cops, and that's fine and necessary. So does DPRK and Cuba.
Indeed, which is why China has such a great track record w.r.t. deaths by cop as another poster in this thread pointed out, having disarmed cops (withing a wider disarmed society).
Fundamentally China still has cops though. They still have some that are armed too. So at the end of the day, it comes back around to proletarian cops being necessary
The People's Police is unarmed.
The People's Armed Police is their version of the National Guard. It sprung out of the PLA and answers to the Military Comission and nobody else, unlike the civilian police. Nobody in this tread, or for that matter on this website is arguing that a socialist military should be armed with foam swords.
The fact you're conflating the two just to be able to say "some chinese cops have guns" makes you look like you're grasping at straws.
The People's Armed Police are Proletarian Cops.
You're just playing word games, whether the prole cops are under the jurisdiction of the military or the civil government doesn't change the fundamental relationship and role. Socialist revolutions will have armed bodies of people enforcing state monopoly on violence, and that's fine and necessary. I'm not going to play along with the anarchist word games where we have cops but don't call them cops (to idk, make ourselves feel better?). it's flimsy and easy to see through.
look man, if you think the difference between "police" and "paramilitary" is "word games" and they mean the same thing then you got me, i have to agree with you, we'll have armed police, because i think armed paramilitaries are necessary
They are literally called “Armed Police” and you are acting like they aren’t armed police lmao
The communist "not cops" are going to be strapped because guns are everywhere and reactionaries have them. Sorry to burst your bubble yet again.
Lmao right that's just cops with extra steps
Exactly why there will be proletarian cops and denying that is denying simple reality.
Really, you'd send people with handguns to do a wellness checkup?
Just because socialist police will exist doesn’t mean they will do what capitalist police do. Note: China has a ton of socialist cops and they’ve killed 19 people ever in the whole people’s republic’s history, mostly violent criminals.
While China's rate of death to law enforcement is really good, you're wrong. 19 is just the number of boxes on the Wikipedia page (which doesn't even have any deaths for the first 57 years of the PRC's existance). In one event alone at least 28 people were killed by police. That event is also mentioned on the Wikipedia page, albeit with a dead link to a terrible website as the source.
(Totaling up the deaths on the Wikipedia page gives me 72 killed by Chinese LEO since 2006, but they cite RFA so take it with a grain of salt)
I wholeheartedly agree with you. I appreciate that the US is a special case w.r.t. the proliferation of guns, and you can't hocus the guns out of socialist cops and expect great results if wider society is still armed.
That being said, I think China is such a great example precisely because it's one of very few countries that have disarmed police (within a wider disarmed society) an obviously humane policy with a great effect.
Nobody here is arguing that having your beat cops not armed to teeth is a bad idea, this conversation started with a comment stating that Bakunin’s quote is a good sentiment and that we don’t want proletarian cops. We do need proletarian cops and that’s a brute fact, their various specifics of tiered armaments is not the subject of discussion - their very existence is.
Bakunin thinks there should be no people’s stick. This is deluded. We must wield the people’s stick to suppress the bourgeoisie out of existence.
Bakunin wants no proletarian cops whatsoever right, no armed bodies of men enforcing state violence? That’s a bad, idealist sentiment and not a realistic or revolutionary one. Such bodies will exist and must exist. It does us no favors to play word games to pretend we have abolished police when we haven’t and sets people up for disillusionment when the revolution doesn’t instantly create anarcho-communism without any legal enforcers.
I'd send people with handguns to stop active shooters, stop saboteurs, stop criminal gangs, suppress reactionaries, break up cults, protect production lines, etc. yes.
Where did I say cops should do wellness checks? Complete leap.
💯💯💯💯 exactly
Socialist cops are for counterrevolutionaries. The state is a monopoly on violence for the ruling class.