a tool of the state emergent from organizations like the pinkertons and slave catchers used to protect property
Nuh uh. That is not what I said. You're describing the historical origins and function of the police under capitalism and colonialism. That is very specifically what I'm avoiding.
Here's Wikipedia, which I think would be a pretty decent look at a non-Marxist/anarchist/whatever radical definition that aligns with common use:
The police are a constituted body of persons empowered by a state, with the aim to enforce the law, to ensure the safety, health and possessions of citizens, and to prevent crime and civil disorder.
We can quibble over whether they're always or ever really for ensuring the health and safety of citizens or at least all citizens, but the gist of the conventional usage is right there.
Police exist in socialist states in the sense described there and as recognizable to the vast majority of people using the word police. What you described doesn't apply to them; they don't share a descent from the those precursors like slave patrols in the US and other settler colonies and don't exist to enforce capitalist property relations. But the police in the DPRK or Cuba or the USSR are still recognizable as police, because the essence of what "police" is in the conventional usage is the "empowered bodies of the state enforcing laws" thing (which necessitates the use of force).
The immediate concern as far as police abolition for everyone who supports it is at least the abolition of the police in capitalist society for the reasons you described and all the other reasons socialists have for why they're bad. But the eventual goal, at least to non-anarchists, is to do away with them eventually even in socialist society, since their function, plainly described by the conventional sense of the word "police", is always to oppress in some way or another in service to the state. Who is being oppressed and what kind of state the oppression serves is going to vary, but that's always there as long as any institution recognizable as "police" exists.
This should be abolished in its entirety for a bunch of different reasons, including: that their existence relies on the existence of the state which has a lot of issues, that society should not have to rely on people using violence to organize itself, and that even lawbreakers who do need to be threatened or subject to force (e.g., the bourgeoisie, imperialists, fascists) shouldn't exist and getting rid of them would eliminate any necessity whatsoever for police.
Under a revolutionary socialist state, the capitalist police should be replaced with a proletarian police (even everybody's favorite, Cuba got them) until communism is established and they're no longer needed.
Anarchists can subtitute all that for their own views on the roles of the police and the state or whatever; I'm not trying to sell this particular view of socialism and the state, just illustrating the point that the fundamental problems with the police align with the conventional use of the term, so even if you acknowledge the necessity of law enforcement under socialism, the idea of abolishing the police still makes sense from the perspective of a conventional sense of what the word "police" means.
Ok, a few more things:
"People who help stop crimes" alone doesn't make most people think police, since most people don't think of vigilantes or regular civilians working with the police in some way (both would be helping to stop crime) as police. The state giving them some special power to enforce the laws, which means being able to to use some kind of violence, is clearly involved in the commonplace understanding of the term even if most people wouldn't use those exact words. Which brings me to:
A definition that aligns with what people mean when they say and think and hear a word isn't necessarily the same as one that most people would give you. So, most people would probably have a hard time describing something really specific, like I dunno a fez or an archaeologist, but there is a description of what they would generally understand and identify as a fez or an archaeologist. Same with "police".
I'm deliberately generalizing here; I'm criticizing the phrase "abolish school" because I think it's either absurd or doesn't have anything to do with the most basic thing people would recognize as school and so it's ridiculous to expect people to adhere to it or to chastise people for not knowing what the hell people even mean by that. I'm not trying to establish what a definition is or what the truest one is or whatever philosophy.
Summary: if you got rid of all the things about school that are bad overnight, you'd still be left with something recognizable as a school. If you got rid of all the things that are bad about the police overnight, you would not have anything left that would be recognizable to the vast majority as police.
We’re not talking about the average person though.
Anyone who posts on this site would have something similar to “enforcing the will of capitalism through violence” as part of their definition of police.
The issues with school under imperialism and capitalism aren’t inherent to the concept of schooling, but violence is inherent to the concept of policing.
I think it’s silly to call people libs because they don’t want to abolish schooling while instructing them to read theory. It’d be a lot easier to get everyone to read theory if it was taught in schools.
People in Soviet Union were forced to learn about dialectical materialism in the university (and probably in high school too) regardless of their major and they developed an uncanny ability to pass those exams while having zero understanding of underlying topics. Like half of population had higher education and at best they straight up forgotten all the political education they had. At worst they channeled it into a galaxy-brain conception of communism that even an American boomer would think that's a bit much.
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Nuh uh. That is not what I said. You're describing the historical origins and function of the police under capitalism and colonialism. That is very specifically what I'm avoiding.
Here's Wikipedia, which I think would be a pretty decent look at a non-Marxist/anarchist/whatever radical definition that aligns with common use:
We can quibble over whether they're always or ever really for ensuring the health and safety of citizens or at least all citizens, but the gist of the conventional usage is right there.
Police exist in socialist states in the sense described there and as recognizable to the vast majority of people using the word police. What you described doesn't apply to them; they don't share a descent from the those precursors like slave patrols in the US and other settler colonies and don't exist to enforce capitalist property relations. But the police in the DPRK or Cuba or the USSR are still recognizable as police, because the essence of what "police" is in the conventional usage is the "empowered bodies of the state enforcing laws" thing (which necessitates the use of force).
The immediate concern as far as police abolition for everyone who supports it is at least the abolition of the police in capitalist society for the reasons you described and all the other reasons socialists have for why they're bad. But the eventual goal, at least to non-anarchists, is to do away with them eventually even in socialist society, since their function, plainly described by the conventional sense of the word "police", is always to oppress in some way or another in service to the state. Who is being oppressed and what kind of state the oppression serves is going to vary, but that's always there as long as any institution recognizable as "police" exists.
This should be abolished in its entirety for a bunch of different reasons, including: that their existence relies on the existence of the state which has a lot of issues, that society should not have to rely on people using violence to organize itself, and that even lawbreakers who do need to be threatened or subject to force (e.g., the bourgeoisie, imperialists, fascists) shouldn't exist and getting rid of them would eliminate any necessity whatsoever for police.
Under a revolutionary socialist state, the capitalist police should be replaced with a proletarian police (even everybody's favorite, Cuba got them) until communism is established and they're no longer needed.
Anarchists can subtitute all that for their own views on the roles of the police and the state or whatever; I'm not trying to sell this particular view of socialism and the state, just illustrating the point that the fundamental problems with the police align with the conventional use of the term, so even if you acknowledge the necessity of law enforcement under socialism, the idea of abolishing the police still makes sense from the perspective of a conventional sense of what the word "police" means.
Ok, a few more things:
"People who help stop crimes" alone doesn't make most people think police, since most people don't think of vigilantes or regular civilians working with the police in some way (both would be helping to stop crime) as police. The state giving them some special power to enforce the laws, which means being able to to use some kind of violence, is clearly involved in the commonplace understanding of the term even if most people wouldn't use those exact words. Which brings me to:
A definition that aligns with what people mean when they say and think and hear a word isn't necessarily the same as one that most people would give you. So, most people would probably have a hard time describing something really specific, like I dunno a fez or an archaeologist, but there is a description of what they would generally understand and identify as a fez or an archaeologist. Same with "police".
I'm deliberately generalizing here; I'm criticizing the phrase "abolish school" because I think it's either absurd or doesn't have anything to do with the most basic thing people would recognize as school and so it's ridiculous to expect people to adhere to it or to chastise people for not knowing what the hell people even mean by that. I'm not trying to establish what a definition is or what the truest one is or whatever philosophy.
Summary: if you got rid of all the things about school that are bad overnight, you'd still be left with something recognizable as a school. If you got rid of all the things that are bad about the police overnight, you would not have anything left that would be recognizable to the vast majority as police.
We’re not talking about the average person though.
Anyone who posts on this site would have something similar to “enforcing the will of capitalism through violence” as part of their definition of police.
The issues with school under imperialism and capitalism aren’t inherent to the concept of schooling, but violence is inherent to the concept of policing.
I think it’s silly to call people libs because they don’t want to abolish schooling while instructing them to read theory. It’d be a lot easier to get everyone to read theory if it was taught in schools.
People in Soviet Union were forced to learn about dialectical materialism in the university (and probably in high school too) regardless of their major and they developed an uncanny ability to pass those exams while having zero understanding of underlying topics. Like half of population had higher education and at best they straight up forgotten all the political education they had. At worst they channeled it into a galaxy-brain conception of communism that even an American boomer would think that's a bit much.