• SoyViking [he/him]
    ·
    2 years ago

    This is a version of the idealist liberal fantasy that bad things happen because of bad people and that you can prevent the bad things from happening by having good people doing them.

    In theory it would be better to have leftists working in the organisations of capitalist oppression like the police. You would imagine they would seeing the baton a little lighter, that they wouldn't go out of their way to fuck people over. And maybe a leftist cop would even try to do that in the beginning.

    But for such a leftist cop every day would be a marathon of compromising their leftist principles. They would spend all day protecting the bourgeoisie and brutalising the must vulnerable people. Any attempt at going against the fascist culture in the police would be met with hostility by the other cops.

    At best such a leftist cop would end up a disillusioned and burned out cop which is a bit better than an enthusiastically fascist one but not much and a horrible way to end up for a leftist. At worst he would persuade himself that he was one of the good guys, that he was actually helping people by oppressing them and end up becoming just as much of a fascist as all the other cops.

    Systems such as the police are much stronger than the individual both in terms of raw force as well as in cultural hegemony. You are not a heroic great man whose pure and true ideals can make a difference, if you fight the system on your own the system will win decisively every single time.

    • keepcarrot [she/her]
      ·
      edit-2
      2 years ago

      Surely you could be an infiltrator cop, compiling internal evidence of heinous shit? You would feel like shit playing the part, and you'd do terrible things, but a 9 minute video of a cop choking a guy caused nation-wide riots. If you could get access to old unreleased bodycams, you might be able to do more good than one cop does evil

      edit: this was the best case scenario I could think of, but like... The kind of person that could go through with it? It's not something anyone could do just because they needed a job. You'd certainly want a local support network outside who you knew could keep secrets

      • FirstToServe [they/them]
        ·
        2 years ago

        Adrian Schoolcraft is a case study of what happens to people like that. tl;dr they put you in a psych ward

        • keepcarrot [she/her]
          ·
          2 years ago

          That's what your little outside team is supposed to prepare for, real life communist spy breakout missions go!

      • UmbraVivi [he/him, she/her]
        ·
        2 years ago

        The Floyd murder video reaction was an anomaly caused in part by quarantine meaning people were home and had the time and energy to take to the streets

        There are plenty of videos of cops murking black people that don't cause nationwide protests because US workers are so drained that they simply can't do it between their 3 jobs