:stalin-shining:
https://hexbear.net/post/52672/comment/496787
For real, if someone's got a shit take here on the site, go bully them in the thread.
Lol they just kept going and going and going.
Being the ultimate leftist that Marx would be proud of obviously involves shouting down even those of your own tendency for not being orthodox enough"Defund the police" is also such an unclear slogan it's hard to tell what people mean when they say they support it or not in a poll. I feel like disarming and demilitarising the police would be a clearer slogan, since I could see how someone would reject an effort to more or less disband the police without replacing it with a democratically run public saftey infrastructure.
that's kind of the way of things with non-reformist demands. remember that defund the police started as abolish the police and defunding was the attempt to recuperate the demand. the point is that the system can't grant the demand and that just talking about it opens up a whole realm of political ed opportunities.
While there were definitely some lib reformists and opportunists who wanted to water down the police abolition demand, I would argue that calls to "abolish" the police are actually ultraleft and unscientific, because we can't go straight from having police that follow the orders of the capitalist class to not having police when revolution isn't immediately on the table. Any municipalities like Minneapolis who actually "abolish" their PDs are simply going to replace their departments with informal "not-cops" who are functionally identical to cops, because we still exist under conditions where the capitalist dictatorship is unchallenged.
The time to call for actual abolition of the police only comes when the workers actually have their own institutions ready to replace the capitalist state, i.e. when we have workers' councils all over the god damn place ready to step up and actually govern and maintain some semblance of order during a transition to socialism. We don't even have our own mass workers' political party yet. This is why we should be calling to "massively" or "majorly" defund and demilitarize the police (none of these small token budget cuts like the libs are willing to settle for - we should be talking orders of magnitude in the range of 25% or even 50% police budget reductions to fund underfunded social services!), rather than calling to completely abolish the police at this stage.
Addendum: this doesn't mean we shouldn't take a 100% sympathetic approach to the people out on the streets marching or even literally fighting to win police abolition, since replacing the bourgie state with a workers' state is one of the goals of a socialist revolution to begin with. We should make the argument that complete abolition is good and necessary but only possible through socialism, and that we can fight to defund cops in the short term on the way to fighting for that longer-term goal.
yea, agreed. my nit is that we should be recruiting the people on the streets who are willing to fight the cops into a revolutionary party. but it's the anarchists who have built those relationships and consequently garnered that trust. it's one of my frustrations with, for example, PSL. the people who are already willing to stand in front of a police line in front of the white house, facing flashbangs and rubber bullets night after night - those people don't need to be radicalized, only educated on how to effectively channel their anger and actually bring down the state. we only hurt ourselves by ignoring them and PSL's absence in the more radical protests is visible.
as the state can't actually grant either demand - either police abolition or defunding - it's important to remember that these are focal points for agitation, not in themselves constituents of a policy platform put forward by a revolutionary party (which as you note does not yet exist). consequently, the demand in the present (such as that banner can even be taken up, given the patchwork of organizations we currently work through) should take the maximalist position, as espoused by the most radical elements of the class, until such a party forms. demands like these are important in the formation of the party because they focus the grievances of the class and put them ideologically past the bounds of recuperation by liberals and opportunists.
this is actually a really good example of the phenomenon - the call to abolish the police cannot itself be recuperated. it's too plainly obvious to everyone what that means and whether the demand has in fact been met. well, until the capitalists try abolishing the police and replacing them with the same institution under a different name - but the level of organization of the class before such a concession can be forced must be much higher. whereas, in comparison, calls to defund the police have already been recuperated into meaninglessness by city councils around the country. mass demands that resist recuperation in this way are incredibly useful tools for recruitment, education, agitation, and destabilization of the system as a whole.
I can see where you're coming from, but I've already pointed out how calls to abolish the police have already been recuperated in Minneapolis, partly because the local BLM organizers were arguably more politically advanced than many of their counterparts in other large US cities. If the maximalist abolition demand isn't carefully formulated, we can expect to see this outcome replicated elsewhere: the local bourgie government gets rid of their official police department following the letter of the demand but not the intent, replacing their official police department with a more loose/informal sheriff's office or "public safety" institution capable of summoning posses; or we see sudden growth in private security, rent-a-cops, or armed mercenaries/goons like the Pinkertons. Either way we have our "abolition" of the police, but that special body of armed men ready to make workers bleed to defend the capitalist class and their property hasn't actually gone away, it's just changed form into something more opaque and sinister.
I could maybe see the argument for refining the maximalist version of the demand into something like "establish workers' councils to abolish and replace the cops", but the US working class for the most part has almost none of the historical memory or context to understand what the hell that means yet. US workers as a whole are still too immature to actually begin that work, and our immediate task includes laying the foundations to even make that possible. A more carefully formulated version of the defund demand, something to the effect of "reduce [insert city here]'s police budget by 90% to fund social services/public transportation/education/etc., demilitarize the PD, and also don't do this by recategorizing police spending as non-police spending in other budgets", is of course also inevitably going to be bastardized by the liberal city councils but it gives us a more tangible and recognizable transitional goal to organize around, and through that process we attract people to a revolutionary banner and begin building community coalitions which will eventually be developed and disciplined enough to form the basis for a mass workers' party and revolutionary party, and later the workers' councils representing the embryo of the workers' state.
You're right in that this is more or less inevitable when slogans are put forth by a patchwork of organisations and unorganised people, and that we are in a better terrain for organising around these issues than we were prior to the unrest. Still, I just wish there was more clear programmatic unity around what reforms could actually be achieved in this moment.
I've seen "defund the police" be "implemented" in places by decreasing the annual bump to the PDs budget by like 10% or something and then the liberal and opportunist organisations claim this as a victory and by then there isn't any momentum to take it any further. At this point this has nothing to do with your original post, but seeing the slogan just reminded me how much I hate how well the protests have been recuperated and I felt I had to rant lol
"Opening up political ed opportunities" seems like an iffy and vague goal, but I'll table that because it's hard to gauge the downstream effects of these movements, especially when they're ongoing.
Obviously "muh white anarkiddies" is a shit take, but that doesn't discount that poll, and that data does make me wonder if "Abolish/Defund the Police" comes across as an incomplete vision to a lot of people who do live in impoverished areas, who do have genuine experience with and concerns about crime from living in those neighborhoods. Seeing cops do fuck-all for victims of crime in their neighborhood doesn't necessarily innoculate people to the Pure Ideology of thinking that maybe the fear of police still reduces crime in some way. Or even with the full understanding that police don't really do shit to reduce crime--"great, police abolished, now what about all the other shit we're dealing with?" Just conjecture loosely based on talking with people I used to know from the city, but my point is that these slogans could do with alluding to a more comprehensive plan, like emphasizing the use of those police hoards towards aggressive poverty reduction.
if we're not taking every opportunity to instill political education, what kind of vanguard are we?
the problem with this take is that it's fundamentally tailist. it sets you up to follow where people are at and what they profess to want today and treating that as some kind of immutable truth. in fact, people got into the streets and fought the cops to demand police abolition - so the revolutionary segment of the class is already ahead of this sentiment. that bourgeois opinion polling - intended to recuperate that demand - says that the demand isn't popular isn't particularly surprising or noteworthy. chase the polls into electoralism if you like, but the revolutionary path is to work out what future demands the class ought to make on its path to overthrowing its masters.
not gonna dunk on a comrade, but ketamine really needs to get a grip. a quick glance at their profile shows that literally all of their comments are in the negatives vote-wise. not that this means anything, these are just internet points. but it does mean that either ketamine's opinions are against the vast majority of this fairly leftist/ml website or they aren't expressing the opinions properly.
"Most voters are over 50" americans are so fucking old.
look at the content of their fucking comments, they're shitting on poor people and protesters. total fuckin chud with leftist aesthetic
youd' think eight mate would be on this fucker like libs to brunch
