https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1765648049794105626

  • Awoo [she/her]
    ·
    10 months ago

    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.

    • zed_proclaimer [he/him]
      ·
      edit-2
      10 months ago

      It disables a possible vector of counter-revolution.

      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.

      • Awoo [she/her]
        ·
        edit-2
        10 months ago

        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.

        • zed_proclaimer [he/him]
          ·
          edit-2
          10 months ago

          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.

          • Awoo [she/her]
            ·
            10 months ago

            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.

            • zed_proclaimer [he/him]
              ·
              edit-2
              10 months ago

              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.

              • oscardejarjayes [comrade/them]
                ·
                10 months ago

                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.

                • zed_proclaimer [he/him]
                  ·
                  edit-2
                  10 months ago

                  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.

                  • oscardejarjayes [comrade/them]
                    ·
                    10 months ago

                    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.

    • SkingradGuard [he/him, comrade/them]
      ·
      10 months ago

      Disarming the cops is a good idea once you've got some sort of stability going post-revolution.

      This is exactly why China has normal police and the People's Armed Police.

      • zed_proclaimer [he/him]
        ·
        edit-2
        10 months ago

        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.

    • save_vs_death [they/them]
      ·
      10 months ago

      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).

      • zed_proclaimer [he/him]
        ·
        10 months ago

        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

        • save_vs_death [they/them]
          ·
          10 months ago

          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.

          • zed_proclaimer [he/him]
            ·
            edit-2
            10 months ago

            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.

            • save_vs_death [they/them]
              ·
              10 months ago

              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

              • zed_proclaimer [he/him]
                ·
                10 months ago

                They are literally called “Armed Police” and you are acting like they aren’t armed police lmao