Well, if there's someone going to back for global capitalism, you've answered the call.
The USSR was invaded by Western europe, their colonial territories, and the US
Yea acab but surprisingly ussr did not have much police brutality problem. Many people around the era had no complaint on such matter. I remember even a joke about "police would be using their gun holster more frequently if it carried sandwich". Also something about them having to report every time they dispatch their gun
The police state isn't just the cops walking the beat, but the judicial, legislative, and penal system, and all those who uphold it. I'm not too keen on the gulags.
What's wrong with gulags? What would to do with people who carried out pogroms against Jews?
Verticality! Three dimensions! Those things that you love in your shooty games!
Don't incarcerate, just kill the nazis. Blood upfront to prevent more blood later.
I'm all for killing Nazis, but even a socialist justice system would be prone to making errors. You can release a wrongfully convicted guy from a gulag but you can't exactly ctrl-z shooting someone.
Anarchists aren't opposed to self defense, they're opposes to punative justice. If you look at abolitionist texts on application, for example Generation 5's Towards Transformative Justice (cw child abuse), you'll see phrases like "minimum neccesary force." In another example, Malatesta's anarchist classis Anarchy and Violence explains that anarchists view revolutionary violence as self defense against structural harm, and try to limit it only what's necessary.
In practice, the YPD for one example, has kept policing in its territories, but has also set up non carceral systems that are mediating conflicts with the goal of restoring relationships rather than punishing wrongs. I'd love to see how far they can push that system and if they can totally do away with punative justice.
I'm admittedly not well read on modern PRC or the GDR. Did they practice punative justice?
Goddamn :gold-anarchist: :gold-communist: for real, thank you for effort posting in this thread
:fidel-salute-big: Could not have said it better myself, we're completely aligned and you've articulated thoughts I've had around this for a while beautifully. :100-com:
Right, again, I'm not asking about fascists and spies, as I said, I'm not against revolutionary violence. I'm asking about selling drugs (which I'll acknowledge has imperial history to it in China), assault, and hell, even murder. I'm not trying to discredit China, I'm trying to see whether or not policing is a site of struggle for anarchists within China. If I was trying to challenge China I'd be asking more about the policing of striking workers, minority ethnic groups and ultra leftists. But I'm not asking about that, I'm not challenging China. I'm trying to assert that an anti carceral politics (I think its inappropriate to call that abolitionist in this context) goes deeper than a Marxist politics.
I think about it all the time but have no idea.
I have just witnessed and been victimized by ruthless power, and once people have had a bite of the apple, there's no looking back.
The best bet out of this quagmire is China's ascension to the world stage and following through on their socialist ambitions, but I'm skeptical of both humans and AI.
That's too close to some Malthusian human nature bullshit for me.
The proletariat state is enforcing things for a completely different reason and with a completely different context than the bourgeois state. This context matters immensely.
Many Marxist Leninists are also anti police. I think Ruthy Wilson Gilmore and Angela Davis are the most famous of these (although at this moment Gilmore is more of a revolutionary than Davis). Gilmore's Golden Gulag is a good analysis of prisons, but I think her upcoming book will offer more of a program than Golden Gulag. Of those thinkers, who are anti police but think with Marx and Lenin, Robin Kelley is my favorite.
I suggest you look into them if you're thinking through these issues, since they all break out of the anarchist vs ML back and forth.
I'm not going to offer a specific solution since others have and I haven't read that much theory regarding anarchist justice, but I would like to point out that overdoing things by any means would backfire badly. I can't think of anything people could do to inflame a counter-revolution than going on witch hunts and arresting people with low standards of evidence. Continue to pursue things overzealously, and you could easily fall into a trap of paranoia and end up doing stupid shit like with Stalin and the Doctors' Plot.
You win by giving people freedoms that they don't want to give up. Anything that's perceived as taking freedoms away will end up being a liability. Because of this preventing a counter-revolution would largely end up being a propaganda war. Gulaging any amount of the wrong people is an easy way to make propaganda material for the other side, but if it happens to people who are very clearly threats it would show the necessity of whatever system -- with the caveat that this will make it harder to abolish the system down the line.
Actually, now that I think of it, having people infiltrate counter-revolutionary groups would likely be somewhat easier under a decentralized system. Having no agency, you could just have people with no real background to discover under a call to arms to infiltrate, disrupt, and expose white supremacist groups, and having it being openly organized and widespread would add a lot of overhead to counter-revolutionary organizing.
American cops have to write a report when they discharge their gun too, and American cop lovers cite this fact as evidence that they are careful in their use of lethal force.
At what point do the community defense forces organized to hunt down cops become cops?
It seems like they have this? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asayish_(Rojava_regions)
The Wikipedia article says:
In addition to the use of weapons, Asayish members are also trained in "mediation, ethics, the history of Kurdistan, imperialism, the psychological war waged by popular culture and the importance of education and self-critique."
Which is basically what every socialist country aims to do anyways. It seems like they put an emphasis on autonomy, but isn't that basically how every police department is? In the US, local police departments have tons of authority and the federal level pretty much doesn't oppose them.
You can argue they're different in character, but every socialist country's police are different in character. It just depends on whether you want to be honest with the terminology or make new words for the same things.
On how he was fucking monstrous? idk it's been a while. What I read was critiques from actual socialists. I'm now AnPrim and spend Most of my time reading on that.
The virgin state-trained law enforcement vs the Chad proletarian vigilante mob.
No, I will not clarify if I'm being sarcastic.
Technically not cops driving around in technically not technicals.
ACAB, yes red cops included. Just because they are necessary for the vanguard does not make them good. They are a temporary evil that should wither away as soon as it is feasible.
Nah, cops are extensions of the state they serve. Capitalist cops protect capital, and socialist cops protect proletarians.
The withering away of the state (including cops) is not something that is done by choice or decree; it's something that will happen naturally once the conditions arise.
State interference in social relations becomes, in one domain after another, superfluous, and then dies down of itself. The government of persons is replaced by the administration of things, and by the conduct of processes of production. The state is not ’abolished’. It withers away.
What incentive do they have to protect the vanguard that will strip them of their authority, or would it just be like a well-kept secret?
The state is a mechanism that will always perpetuate itself over the liberation of the working class. A state can temporarily be used to defend against counter-revolution, but it will inevitably be seized by revisionists who will betray the revolution.
The USSR centralized itself to the point it could be toppled by the imperial core. When the USSR fell, it degenerated into a capitalist oligarchy. A decentralized USSR might have stood a better chance. If a handful of weak leaders can topple an entire socialist project, then it has been poorly built.
No it should have decentralized after stalin. Stalin could have focused on empowering the individual members of the USSR to function independently. Corn man maybe could have pulled this off, but he was of course not nearly as good of a leader.
Stalin was exceptionally talented as a leader. When you are that good at mobilizing people, you need to make sure that if at all possible to mentor as many others to divest power into as possible.
That of course is much harder and after having been so hands on while combating fascism, he may just have not had it in him. Stalin was an immensely powerful human being however and I believe he had it in him if he had tried.
I'm AnPrim, but it's because most people do not have that sort of gusto in them. This isn't great man theory, it's just the outcome of stressors. Stalin was uniquely positioned to step up to the role he had. The risk of so much centralized power in a single human is far too great however, you have to divest it amongst the proletariat. You have to trust your fellow workers!
No it should have decentralized after stalin. Stalin could have focused on empowering the individual members of the USSR to function independently.
yeah but the gdr had cool green uniforms im told so whos the real bastard here
Unlike the kontrrazvedka, who weren't cops, just the federated unhierarchical voluntary horizontally organized peoples militia
