Personally, I believe that A CAB. Yes, all cops are bastards, no exceptions. Yet I have met people who think that cops in socialist countries aren’t bastards.
My reasoning is that it is a position of power over your fellow citizens/countrymen/people and only bastards would be attracted to such positions. While a person may go in with “good intentions”, invariably they will be at some point in their career be expected to do something “not good”: cover up for a colleague, arrest someone for law they don’t agree with, beat somebody up, and so on. If they do it and remain a cop, well they are a bastard, no matter how many old ladies they help cross the street or whatever.
Let’s also not pretend that a full communist utopia where every single law/regulation/rule is fair is possible in our lifetimes (or at all likely), there’ll always be people who will want to abuse their power and take control, cops are an easily bought section of society that makes it possible for them. Historically, cops have always sided with the aristocracy/bourgeoisie/land-owners/those with money.
Your thoughts?
I apply ACAB to capitalist countries. Their police operate as organized crime that protects capitalist interests and occasionally their stated purpose to keep up appearances and a false sense of service. In these countries, bad cops are common and “good cops” all either cover for the bad cops or get hounded out of the department.
Not that socialist countries haven’t had cop problems, but it really has been fairly different in them. They tend to divide up the duties of cops and split them among different organizations. Like… the traffic cop doesn’t carry a gun and instead calls for help when they see something go down. There are usually fewer cops per capita in socialist-run countries. There is less need to protect private property interests when there is less private property in the first place. In addition, you don’t need cops to dehumanize and eject homeless people in front of businesses when you virtually eliminate homelessness. You also don’t need as many cops if you don’t have a racialized drug war to prosecute or a cartel to fight.
If you go to Cuba you will find cops just standing around, hanging out, not intimidating anyone. They’re of the community. It’s not simply good or bad, but it’s very different from the ACAB conditions experienced in capitalist countries.
That’s true for a lot of Western capitalist/imperialist countries too.
The less cops there are, the more socialist a country is?
Agreed.
I’m sure you can see that in Palau and other Pacific Island nations, and a few of the Caribbean ones, too. Does that mean those countries are socialist? Cops being “chill” is more a result of the culture of the country they’re in, rather than the main ideology of the state.
In capitalist countries they tend to wear different uniforms but are part of the same department. Sometimes just one big organization for the whole country, even! There’s usually only one division and it’s not very common - mental health first responders vs. cops.
The reverse. Cops protect the interests of private property and as part of this address the contradictions of capitalism in favor of capital. Both are decreased in countries run by socialists.
Why are you sure?
This is the second such odd question you’ve asked. It doesn’t follow from what I’ve said. I think you might be arguing with someone in your head rather than me.
Culture is also a product of material conditions and deeper political economic forces. But for cops in particular do you really think it’s just “culture” and not the combination of these things?
The laws they are expected to enforce, written for private property interests.
The people they are expected to fight with, e.g. informal policing (gang violence) and cartels vs. the occasional drunk guys.
How well they are paid and by what metrics they are compensated.
Who advocates for their paychecks and who does not.
Their relationships with the downstream “justice” system.
Whether they are armed.
Whether they live within the community vs. apart from it.
Whether the societies in which they live create more or fewer crisis situations, e.g. serious untreated drug addiction, mugging, unwanted cohabitation.
These things are all shaped by the political economic forces at work. They cannot be overcome by “culture” by itself, they will instead redefine a culture and retell its stories in its own favor. For example, the convenient revisionism of Christian positions on profiting from debt. The “culture” was pretty clear that it wasn’t okay but the political economy of Rome depended on it. Guess which one won.
Yes. And can you guarantee the police won’t turn on the State if they are promised higher pay and more power in the new capitalist state after the socialist one is torn down? That’s what happened in pretty much every ex-socialist state.
You said there are fewer cops per capita in socialist states. I’m saying that’s not a metric by which you can tell whether a country is socialist or not, and that it often has nothing to do with the state being socialist. Countries like Palau have also fewer cops per capita, yet that doesn’t mean that those countries are socialist.
Because small island nations rarely have a big problem with “crime” as large countries with big cities.
Majority of those factors that would create “bad” cops could exist in socialist states, too. Change of a society has to be total, you can’t just put a red star on the same capitalist cops and call it a day. A police force borne out of capitalism has to be abolished in favour of something else. I can guess and imagine what that something else might be, but I can’t know for certain.
The only country on the planet without a capitalist-style police force is the DPRK. That’s because they have a politically educated populace that is also largely part of the defense forces of their country. They do not need “cops”.
china model. economic dominance and providing such a good deal to everyone its never even considered
Is Haiti not real to you?
The DPRK has cops…
Find me a society with anything close to what you have previously described.
Haiti isn’t a small “island nation”. Haiti is half of the island Hispaniola, the other half is the Dominican Republic. Dominica is an example of an “island nation”.
Do they? Or do they have a local “militia”?
The Soviet Union. I corrected myself in other posts, I was wrong to name them as an example of counter-revolutionary cops. Lenin abolished the police in the Soviet Union and replaced them with local “militias”. The difference was that these militia people didn’t have country-wide powers, they were tasked with their own city. This means that they couldn’t be shipped from one city to the next to “restore order”.
Its all relative, if you keep moving the goalposts till only criteria that you have defined is met, of course you’re going to be right. For most people, Haiti is a small island nation; also we cant take micro-examples and expect them to work in countries with billions of people.
Yes, they have police.
Again just putting a different name tag on the police and giving them smaller juristictions doesnt make them not police, and isnt what ACAB represents, which is deleting the police outright, not just renaming them and giving them a different coat of paint.
That’s not how it works. Just because “most people” think something that doesn’t make it true. An island nation is a country that comprises a whole island, or several islands. Iceland is an island nation, for example.
They’re not “micro-examples”. Iceland has 176 cops per 100.000 inhabitants, while the European Union average is around 333. China has some 142. Does that mean Iceland is close to being socialist? Or is Iceland more socialist than the EU?
What countries with billionS of people? China and India have about 1.5 billion each, and they’re exceptions.
Someone should have told Lenin that.
ACAB represents that “all cops are bastards”, I don’t think anything is implied about what should replace them.
Im being hyperbolic, consider my framing of ‘billions’ to just mean ‘a country with aprox a billion+ people’
Its an anarchist strain of thought and it has a whole connation behind it with the term, usually tied to just burning down the police force as it stands.
No need, he surely recongised the need to have a police force to defend the citizens of the revolution from bad actors and yeeted the police of the monarchy/tsar into the shadow realm.
What seperates the two is ideology, obviously.
Point taken, its half a island nation.
yes
They will be the ones throwing you out if you cant make rent. I dont think Cuban cops will be doing the same thing!
Are you sure about that? Nobody in Cuba pays rent, there are no landlords and everyone just lives for free?
thats exactly my point