Going to disagree that "defund the police" is necessarily an opportunist demand, even if there are opportunist formulations that water it down. I also would argue that "abolish the police" is an ultraleft demand that can be watered down into something meaningless. My reasoning is as follows:
Chapo, the online left, and the tiny socialist orgs and groups that do exist are arguably at the forefront of class consciousness. We're outliers. The average American worker is now where many of us were 5-10 years ago. The survey shown in the screenshot asked people whether they support defunding the Minneapolis PD, not abolishing it. Calls to abolish cops will certainly win over some of the most militant anarchists and other revolutionary leftists eager to go out into the streets, but pushing that demand forces us to answer the question of how to abolish the police, what counts as abolition and what doesn't, what to replace it with, etc. Making the case for defunding police departments - reducing their budgets and shifting that revenue towards useful social programs, public education, public transportation, etc. - is much easier because it actually sounds feasible to unconscious workers without making a revolution happen tomorrow.
Which brings me to my next point. We aren't organized enough to actually abolish the police. We don't even have a mass workers' party in the US similar to Labour in the UK. The subjective factor is more than a century behind the rotten-ripe objective conditions because of the collapse of the old left in the 1990s, and we only started recovering from a position comparable to the late 19th century after the 2008 crisis. We have no trustworthy left leadership on a meaningful scale yet and we're entering a period of crisis comparable to the 1930s. Imagine if the 3rd and 4th internationals and their socialist/Communist parties hadn't existed during the Great Depression! That's the lagged and backwards position we're in, and we have a lot of ground to cover before we even entertain questions of dual power, which is what abolition of the police actually requires.
"Abolish the police" is a demand for when we have workers' councils ready to step up and form the embryo of a workers' state, with armed workers at the ready to replace the police and maintain stability within worker-controlled communities. Meanwhile in 2020 America we still haven't restored the socialist left's ties to the rank-and-file members of trade unions. If we call for abolition at all, we should call for abolition through socialism, i.e. through socialist revolution. Any "abolition" of police compatible with capitalism means cops get replaced with not-cops who continue beating and jailing workers and homeless people in protection of private property. The "special body of armed men" is maintained and simply changes its form or its name - maybe it turns into a "sheriff's department", or the cops get replaced with even-less-accountable privately-paid armed guards and corporate mercenaries.
Going back to the "defund" demand. There's an easy way to avoid the bait-and-switch problem here: a correctly formulated demand will include clarity, will include details that liberal saboteurs will readily reject without pressure from an organized and sustained movement. We call to massively defund the police (not a 5% budget cut, not 10%; something like 50% or 75%!), to demilitarize them, to reject any book-cooking bullshit to make it look like cops are getting defunded when they're not (e.g. cops in schools getting recategorized as part of the public education budget), stopping sending cops to answer 911 calls that don't require an arrest (and replacing them with more social workers, paramedics, firefighters, etc.).
The only immediate barriers to implementing these policies are city and state bureaucrats refusing to do it, but as the June protests demonstrate they could have folded to more of these demands, offering more concessions if the BLM movement had stronger organizations and parties to fall back on to sustain the initial burst of momentum through to the end of the summer, instead of fizzling out in a month (outside of Portland) after most participants burned out and the Democrats were able to capture and redirect some of that energy towards voting for Joe Biden. Think back to the 1955-1956 Montgomery Bus Boycott which lasted a year - a campaign that strong isn't sustainable without additional organization, coalition building, and more developed Marxist leadership. A scientific and transitional version of the defund demand is one which reaches workers at their current level of consciousness, is immediately economically (but not necessarily politically) feasible, and points towards the need for greater working-class organization towards socialist revolution.
I think a key difference between the Republicans dragging Dems to the right and our attempts to pressure them leftward is that Republicans are a ruling party, represented by the land-based/natural-resource-based wing of the US bourgeoisie. There is not yet a Marxist party, rooted in the US working class, capable of doing the same. We have to build and organize that structure first, which requires putting forth demands that address the immediate concerns of the working class. While there are radicalizing layers of workers and students gravitating towards the abolish demand, a "maximalist" demand like that might seem like a bridge too far for most workers. The defund demand addresses the same concern but reaches a wider audience and can be articulated as a first step towards the eventual goal of abolition.
Read my post again. I never said the situation was hopeless, just that we're not strong enough for a demand like "abolish the police" to be appropriate yet. We can progress from our current position to a better one very quickly in a short period of time, but in the meantime we have to continue laying and rebuilding the foundations that 19th-century Marxists built, and which the 20th-century left took for granted.
That means joining and building Marxist organizations, building community coalitions, radicalizing friends and coworkers, getting involved in your union if you're in one (not to join union leadership but to coordinate with rank-and-file membership), continuing to intervene in social movements like BLM. This will help lay the foundation for a mass workers' party and for a revolutionary party capable of running working-class candidates in elections as a platform to raise a Marxist banner, and rally around issue-centric campaigns built around demands like defunding the police.
For crying out loud. Things are not hopeless. Things might get harder (hell, covid has made turning people out to street protests harder) but that's not any reason to give up. If you're a socialist, you at least on an unconscious level are rejecting doomerism and the politics of despair. A better world is still possible even if conditions seem bleak right now and look like they're going to be horrifying for the foreseeable future. We can still organize. We can still reach our fellow workers. We can still fight back.
Trotsky wrote a very short article about how awful and hopeless things seemed at the turn of the 20th century. (I know it's early Trotsky who should be taken with a grain of salt but this particular writing aged well). This was his concluding statement:
It seems as if the new century, this gigantic newcomer, were bent at the very moment of its appearance to drive the optimist into absolute pessimism and civic nirvana.
– Death to Utopia! Death to faith! Death to love! Death to hope! thunders the twentieth century in salvos of fire and in the rumbling of guns.
– Surrender, you pathetic dreamer. Here I am, your long awaited twentieth century, your ‘future.’
– No, replies the unhumbled optimist: You, you are only the present.
Their dream lies in ruins and he got murdered thousands of miles away from his home, by people who used to be his comrades.
The century was a nothing but death and suffering and ended with the world humanity poised to finally kill itself via climate change. The people who did it are worshiped as heroes.
Even if what they built was mostly destroyed or distorted almost beyond recognition, there are still important lessons we can learn from the history of socialist movements. The Russian and Chinese revolutions were probably the most significant accomplishments of global Marxism (even if they can and should be ruthlessly analyzed and scrutinized for missteps, mistakes, and betrayals). These movements showed the world that it's even possible to establish a workers' state on a continental scale, and workers all over the world have attempted to replicate them. Lenin studied Marx's analysis of the failed 1871 Paris commune and applied those lessons in the Russian context. We can do the same with 20th century socialism as we push forward in our 21st century struggle.
I don't know, half the time on here it's just people literally telling us it's useless and we're just doomed to be shitty people by accident of birth. The other half is just people saying organize instead of vote.
This is false. I'm trying to put forward Marxist ideas, including many of the same ideas as my own organization (which I'm not gonna directly name-drop here, hello FBI). Other chapo users are attempting to put forth ideas, even if they're simply and crudely stated ones like "organize instead of vote". The organize part I can obviously get behind, but I tend to push back against pure electoral abstentionism when independent working-class candidates and potentially-useful ballot questions are on the table.
The online left (including chapo) isn't representative of the entire left either, there might be socialists trying to reach people like you both online and offline in or near your own community, especially if you live in a big city! At the very least there's probably some sort of DSA presence in a given large city, though DSA is a messy hodgepodge of liberals, Marxists, and anarchists and I would only consider working with them on non-electoral stuff, while not joining them.
Going to disagree that "defund the police" is necessarily an opportunist demand, even if there are opportunist formulations that water it down. I also would argue that "abolish the police" is an ultraleft demand that can be watered down into something meaningless. My reasoning is as follows:
Chapo, the online left, and the tiny socialist orgs and groups that do exist are arguably at the forefront of class consciousness. We're outliers. The average American worker is now where many of us were 5-10 years ago. The survey shown in the screenshot asked people whether they support defunding the Minneapolis PD, not abolishing it. Calls to abolish cops will certainly win over some of the most militant anarchists and other revolutionary leftists eager to go out into the streets, but pushing that demand forces us to answer the question of how to abolish the police, what counts as abolition and what doesn't, what to replace it with, etc. Making the case for defunding police departments - reducing their budgets and shifting that revenue towards useful social programs, public education, public transportation, etc. - is much easier because it actually sounds feasible to unconscious workers without making a revolution happen tomorrow.
Which brings me to my next point. We aren't organized enough to actually abolish the police. We don't even have a mass workers' party in the US similar to Labour in the UK. The subjective factor is more than a century behind the rotten-ripe objective conditions because of the collapse of the old left in the 1990s, and we only started recovering from a position comparable to the late 19th century after the 2008 crisis. We have no trustworthy left leadership on a meaningful scale yet and we're entering a period of crisis comparable to the 1930s. Imagine if the 3rd and 4th internationals and their socialist/Communist parties hadn't existed during the Great Depression! That's the lagged and backwards position we're in, and we have a lot of ground to cover before we even entertain questions of dual power, which is what abolition of the police actually requires.
"Abolish the police" is a demand for when we have workers' councils ready to step up and form the embryo of a workers' state, with armed workers at the ready to replace the police and maintain stability within worker-controlled communities. Meanwhile in 2020 America we still haven't restored the socialist left's ties to the rank-and-file members of trade unions. If we call for abolition at all, we should call for abolition through socialism, i.e. through socialist revolution. Any "abolition" of police compatible with capitalism means cops get replaced with not-cops who continue beating and jailing workers and homeless people in protection of private property. The "special body of armed men" is maintained and simply changes its form or its name - maybe it turns into a "sheriff's department", or the cops get replaced with even-less-accountable privately-paid armed guards and corporate mercenaries.
Going back to the "defund" demand. There's an easy way to avoid the bait-and-switch problem here: a correctly formulated demand will include clarity, will include details that liberal saboteurs will readily reject without pressure from an organized and sustained movement. We call to massively defund the police (not a 5% budget cut, not 10%; something like 50% or 75%!), to demilitarize them, to reject any book-cooking bullshit to make it look like cops are getting defunded when they're not (e.g. cops in schools getting recategorized as part of the public education budget), stopping sending cops to answer 911 calls that don't require an arrest (and replacing them with more social workers, paramedics, firefighters, etc.).
The only immediate barriers to implementing these policies are city and state bureaucrats refusing to do it, but as the June protests demonstrate they could have folded to more of these demands, offering more concessions if the BLM movement had stronger organizations and parties to fall back on to sustain the initial burst of momentum through to the end of the summer, instead of fizzling out in a month (outside of Portland) after most participants burned out and the Democrats were able to capture and redirect some of that energy towards voting for Joe Biden. Think back to the 1955-1956 Montgomery Bus Boycott which lasted a year - a campaign that strong isn't sustainable without additional organization, coalition building, and more developed Marxist leadership. A scientific and transitional version of the defund demand is one which reaches workers at their current level of consciousness, is immediately economically (but not necessarily politically) feasible, and points towards the need for greater working-class organization towards socialist revolution.
deleted by creator
I think a key difference between the Republicans dragging Dems to the right and our attempts to pressure them leftward is that Republicans are a ruling party, represented by the land-based/natural-resource-based wing of the US bourgeoisie. There is not yet a Marxist party, rooted in the US working class, capable of doing the same. We have to build and organize that structure first, which requires putting forth demands that address the immediate concerns of the working class. While there are radicalizing layers of workers and students gravitating towards the abolish demand, a "maximalist" demand like that might seem like a bridge too far for most workers. The defund demand addresses the same concern but reaches a wider audience and can be articulated as a first step towards the eventual goal of abolition.
Wow you're very smart and situation is entirely hopeless and we should not try.
Thank you very much for poinitng out yet again how awful things are.
Read my post again. I never said the situation was hopeless, just that we're not strong enough for a demand like "abolish the police" to be appropriate yet. We can progress from our current position to a better one very quickly in a short period of time, but in the meantime we have to continue laying and rebuilding the foundations that 19th-century Marxists built, and which the 20th-century left took for granted.
That means joining and building Marxist organizations, building community coalitions, radicalizing friends and coworkers, getting involved in your union if you're in one (not to join union leadership but to coordinate with rank-and-file membership), continuing to intervene in social movements like BLM. This will help lay the foundation for a mass workers' party and for a revolutionary party capable of running working-class candidates in elections as a platform to raise a Marxist banner, and rally around issue-centric campaigns built around demands like defunding the police.
No it's hopeless.
For crying out loud. Things are not hopeless. Things might get harder (hell, covid has made turning people out to street protests harder) but that's not any reason to give up. If you're a socialist, you at least on an unconscious level are rejecting doomerism and the politics of despair. A better world is still possible even if conditions seem bleak right now and look like they're going to be horrifying for the foreseeable future. We can still organize. We can still reach our fellow workers. We can still fight back.
Trotsky wrote a very short article about how awful and hopeless things seemed at the turn of the 20th century. (I know it's early Trotsky who should be taken with a grain of salt but this particular writing aged well). This was his concluding statement:
Their dream lies in ruins and he got murdered thousands of miles away from his home, by people who used to be his comrades.
The century was a nothing but death and suffering and ended with the world humanity poised to finally kill itself via climate change. The people who did it are worshiped as heroes.
Even if what they built was mostly destroyed or distorted almost beyond recognition, there are still important lessons we can learn from the history of socialist movements. The Russian and Chinese revolutions were probably the most significant accomplishments of global Marxism (even if they can and should be ruthlessly analyzed and scrutinized for missteps, mistakes, and betrayals). These movements showed the world that it's even possible to establish a workers' state on a continental scale, and workers all over the world have attempted to replicate them. Lenin studied Marx's analysis of the failed 1871 Paris commune and applied those lessons in the Russian context. We can do the same with 20th century socialism as we push forward in our 21st century struggle.
I don't know, half the time on here it's just people literally telling us it's useless and we're just doomed to be shitty people by accident of birth. The other half is just people saying organize instead of vote.
No one has any actual ideas about anything.
This is false. I'm trying to put forward Marxist ideas, including many of the same ideas as my own organization (which I'm not gonna directly name-drop here, hello FBI). Other chapo users are attempting to put forth ideas, even if they're simply and crudely stated ones like "organize instead of vote". The organize part I can obviously get behind, but I tend to push back against pure electoral abstentionism when independent working-class candidates and potentially-useful ballot questions are on the table.
The online left (including chapo) isn't representative of the entire left either, there might be socialists trying to reach people like you both online and offline in or near your own community, especially if you live in a big city! At the very least there's probably some sort of DSA presence in a given large city, though DSA is a messy hodgepodge of liberals, Marxists, and anarchists and I would only consider working with them on non-electoral stuff, while not joining them.
Stop doing this.