- cross-posted to:
- shitliberalssay@lemmygrad.ml
- cross-posted to:
- shitliberalssay@lemmygrad.ml
cross-posted from: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/40877
Email is inherently insecure. If you want or need secure communications, that’s what software like Briar, Matrix, or Signal (yes despite some drama).
Secure emails can always be done manually with PGP and will be a lot hardier than trusting an organization that gives away subscriber payments to Western-backed coup attempts and color revolutions.
You haven’t seen the difference between HK police and US police, that’s all I can say lol.
What makes you think your “community police” will not harass homeless people? What about an anarchist commune makes it Inherently good, impervious to gentrifying and petit bourgeois elements?
If you want police to be better in HK then support the city’s reintegration into China, which started with the bill to get a murderer tried for his crimes. HK police might have issues due to how HK is structured. In the PRC police does not intervene when workers kidnap their bosses due to unpaid wages. They don’t intervene to break up strikes. This is the class character of the state; seeing that capitalist police act like capitalist thugs and theorizing a constant truth out of this is not a class analysis.
The implication that all of history is on its own wrong side (because all of history is the class struggle and all of history has had prisons and police in some capacity) is a very large claim.
No indeed, i’ve never been to either of these places. Although i’ve had plenty of occasions over the years to talk with people who had first-hand bad experiences with the institutions in both regions.
Because homelessness does not exist at all in the zapatistas caracoles (communes). And because their police does not have any form of monopoly on violence: they derive their power from the community, not from a centralized authority. If for some reason (which i’ve never heard of since the 1994 insurrection) their police committed crimes against the population, there would instantly be a response from the population and the situation would be fixed.
We stay critical of power structures and domination scheme. Emancipation is not a theoretical milestone but an everyday struggle. Having a popular background does not make you inherently good/empathetic (cops aren’t exactly bourgeois to say the least) like having a bourgeois background does not make you inherently bad/sociopathic (Kropotkin is a good example of that: he chose to live in misery according to his ideals rather than bow to the bolshevik State). What matters is structures: if you take a Nation State and replace its government/parliament with workers, you still have a Nation State with the same factories and prisons.
So first, by abolishing money and private property as part of free communes, we’re developing some relative immunity to gentrification. Of course people still have personal possessions (it’s my house/room because i live in it, not because a piece of paper says so), and as long as we have to deal with capitalist society we need some money to trade with the outside world. But you won’t ever see someone billing someone else for goods and services in a free commune (or with another free commune), so wealth accumulation becomes almost impossible which makes the project really unappealing to capitalist/gentrifying types.
That’s a pretty lie. Were Lenin and Trotsky proles? No, they were elites who used proletarian rhetoric to rebuild the same structures of oppression (wage slavery, police, prison) which the soviet movement was aiming (and starting) to abolish. For the workers, is there much difference between stakhanovism and neoliberal managerialism? (no) Is there much difference between a goulag and a capitalist prison? (no) You have to analyze the situation materially to understand what a society is about: in so-called “communist” States, power and resources were not distributed equally: the bolsheviks actively slaughtered the actual communists (whether anarchists or libertarian marxists) the people who advocated for distributing power and resources.
I agree with your sentiment that the western media portrayal of chinese society as docile is strongly biased. Of course there’s popular uprisings in China and there is room for direct action. That doesn’t do away with the question of political repression which is very much of a problem in China as in the western world.
That is provably false. Many societies throughout history (and some to this day) don’t have either prisons or police. I recommend you read some anthropology like Graeber’s or Kropotkin’s works.
I’ve read Graeber and Kropotkin. Debt was interesting, Conquest of Bread was just an old man writing down his thoughts on papers – he figured people will spontaneously turn to anarchism once his revolution starts coming together lol.
The societies they describe were and are classless. But history and pre-history are two different things, and primitive communism was only widespread in prehistory. Changes in our material conditions (probably agriculture) naturally led to class distinctions once you had people whose job was not to produce tangible goods like food or clay pots, but to keep track of them and allocate them – administrators.
I know anarchists love the Hadza people and I think it’s great they have their way of life (though it has led them to many problems in the 21st century, as they have to turn to wage work without knowing their rights or having any) but let me tell you right now: nobody wants to live like the Hadza. I want antibiotics, I want electricity, I want food security, and you have millions of people who need this like me. We’re not going to go back
So they still have the monopoly on violence, they just exercise it differently. Which means there is a class character to the state and it’s not the tool itself that’s a problem, but how you use it – and why you would use it in one way and not another. So then we can theorise that the state represents the interests of a certain class. Capitalist police is going to enforce the laws of the capitalists, and proletarian police like with the Zapatistas is going to enforce the laws of the proletariat. I’m reminded of Engels’ words: “[anarchists] think that when they have changed the name of things they have changed the things themselves”.
Until people in the commune decide they don’t want to live with black people. Though I’ve heard the undesirables will just be able to form their own commune in this somehow anarchist world that I still haven’t heard how will come to exist lol. Most answers I get is that it’s for the people that will be fighting the revolution to figure out.
Yeah, and who won the revolution? Would Kropotkin’s anarchist Russia have held on for more than a few months? I can’t think of any anarchist experiment that survived past months.
I’m sorry but get some perspective. Read some Marx, Engels and Lenin and at least then you’ll have heard of another point of view that looks like yours and you can sill not like it if you want.
French police: uses explosive tear gas grenades that maim people, then the gov refuses them compensation for it. Defends the use of these explosives.
HK police: does not draw their guns even after being shot at with arrows, shows incredible restraint against violence even as their cars are surrounded or they are beaten to the ground, only got their weapons out in rare cases when rioters were trying to steal them from their belt.
You: these are exactly the same thing because they both have the name police.