Besides posting on chapo, what is something you may do often or occasionally that you think/know is pretty lib?
I use to have a hard time saying no to cashiers who'd ask me to round up my total to donate to some terrible organization the store owned or partnered with. Not only are most non-profits complete shit, but doing it this way the store is the one doing the write off too, kinda a double whammy. I stopped doing this for the most part, but occasionally my mouth speaks before I think and I say "sure."
The other thing is buying girl scout cookies sometimes. I just assume this org is bad, i've never really looked into it, but if they are even remotely like the boy scouts, they are for sure bad.
And the last one is probably shopping at the salvation army, which has a horrible track record, has donated to anti-LGBTQA+ orgs, has a horrible labor track record and more. But like, I almost never buy brand new clothes and random household items anymore because it's both so much less expensive this way and the textile industry is one of the worst polluters out there plus they also have horrible labor practices. But in my mind at least, buying second hand is much better to reuse stuff instead of contributing more to those industries.
what do you got?
I'd probably dial 911 if I was in trouble.
Thermonuclear take: "ACAB" is in part an extension of the western myth of the rugged individual who doesn't need anyone to protect them. Every single example of AES has decided that the police, in the context of enforcing socialist laws, is necessary.
Most AES countries are still in the capitalist mode of production, and police are required to enforce things like private property until that can truly be transcended (something that is still a bit of a ways off, for various reasons). The police and other law enforcement entities will naturally be reformed until they're no longer needed.
ACAB is just a bumper sticker. It's a good one, and one I largely agree with, but it's not really a serious political analysis. Actually analyzing thing y going to be a lot more complex than "acab" or "ac(except AES cops)ab".
I agree with this 110%. It just bothers me that some fellow leftists reflexively fall back on this when it comes time to do some serious analysis.
My take has always been that even under perfect socialism, there will still be some types of crime. I'm talking things like crimes of passion, rape, child molestation, etc. While the abolition of capitalism will reduce some of these crimes, I doubt that they can be eliminated.
I think most leftists agree that even under perfect socialism, we'll still need a group of people who are trained to enforce the law, using force as a last resort if necessary.
This is correct -- socialism won't turn people into saints. I also think there's a "locks keep honest people honest" effect, where we'd see a bump in some crimes if we eliminated police entirely in a socialist state. I'm thinking things like petty theft, property destruction, and probably bar fight style assaults. Intuitively, you try more when you can get away with more, and this tracks with studies showing that the likelihood of getting caught (as opposed to the severity of punishment) is a primer deterrent of crime.
Of course, police in a socialist state should look far different, as should the property relations that define crimes like "property destruction." But fundamentally, having some organized way of handling unacceptable behavior makes a lot of sense.
I think that they can be near-eliminated, especially when we can avoid mental illness and trauma that often results from poverty and poor material conditions as well as deliver high quality mental healthcare to everyone, starting at an early age if necessary. By the time we get there though, the nature of law enforcement will have changed enough to resemble something else entirely
ACAB to me at least, has always meant abolish all cops, destroy the systems that allow them to exist, and then rebuild. If that rebuilding requires the organizing of a cop like force, so be it. Just make sure that the people always have the ability to tear down that organization should they ever overstep their bounds.
ACAB because cops are the enforcers of the capitalist state and its rule, they dont exist at all to help people.
When socialism overthrows the state and, if possible, needs to enforce socialist laws, and such workers governement "enforcers" or such wouldn't any longer fit our understanding/definition of "police" as it is today - as it's always been sorely a tool to protect private property and wage war on minority groups. A socialist revolition abolishing private property and ending oppression has no need for police as it's always been known.
The police exists to defend existing hierarchies and will always tend to side with conservative currents so all cops are indeed bastards. But we would still need policing of some kind in the free society of the future. This is a real dilemma of police abolition.
One suggestion is to have a voluntary people's militia where members have "real" jobs as well and where it is expected of every citizen that they volunteer at least one in a while. The problem with that is that not everyone can go and do police work. Most people could man a speed gun but other things from driving an emergency vehicle safely to breaking up fighting drunks takes training and experience that you can't expect volunteers to have.
Another solution would be to keep a professional police force but to go the ultimate lib checks and balances route with body cams, harsh punishments for infractions of good behaviour, awareness training, targeted recruitment of minorities etc. It would all be a bandaid on s structural issue though and real world examples shows that this approach can only do so much.
The free society of the future could also shift focus in training and recruiting police from being interior troops to being more like social workers and tone down the gun and uniform part of the job to discourage chuddy types from joining.
yeah i wish cops were not automatically a first responder to every single 911 call. Does depend on where you live, but in the vast majority of places in the US, especially outside big cities, a 911 call means at least one cop shows up and that can be insanely problematic