• Star Wars Enjoyer @lemmygrad.mlM
    11·
    3 years ago

    This is more or less what reformists are pushing for, and as long as we’re forced to live under capitalism I fully support it.

    Instead of using the police to deal with drunks, people with special needs who are causing a scene, domestic abusers, etc. We can bring social workers, who have already proven their worth in a few counties in the US. roughly two-thirds of all calls to the police have nothing to do with crime, being social issues instead… which is what social workers are trained to handle. So, it’s absolutely no wonder that precincts that have hired social workers see them as “indispensable” Here’s a link to an article about this

    There are various things that are criminalized that are nearly entirely non-violent but are illegal for either patriarchal, white supremacist, or elitist reasons. Things like sex work, which is criminalized to control women. Cannabis, which was criminalized on racist grounds and used to lock minorities away. or homelessness, which is criminalized because displacing the homeless is a lot easier than letting them have their shantytowns, or funding programs to give them housing. The simple act of decriminalizing these things would save thousands of lives a day, hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars, and generally make the US a much safer country.

    Then we also have the militarization of the police, which only serves to make police brutality worse. Reducing the funding of the police would greatly reduce their ability and willingness to engage in misconduct and violent behaviours.

    Defunding the police would be good in nearly every possible way, and the only people who disagree just so happen to be fascists

    Though, I agree with most of what my colleague @CriticalResist8@lemmygrad.ml said, and what @gary_host_laptop@lemmy.ml said about it being impossible to do under capitalism is also very important to mention while talking about this. We can try to get some reforms, but no matter how hard we try, we’re never achieving it without a violent revolution and a building of a marxist-leninist state.

  • CriticalResist8@lemmygrad.ml
    7·
    3 years ago

    I’m more of an abolish the police type. The police, of course, being this very specific institution with which we live that serves as the armed guards of capitalism.

    “Keep the peace” as seen in this meme implies several things, one of them being that keeping the peace is keeping order, and order is what the oppressing class decides it to be. Order, in capitalism, is when you evict tenants peacefully – when they accept the decision and don’t fight back. Order is when unpaid workers go through expensive and lengthy legal battles to claim their wages while bills keep piling up, because seizing the factory is unorderly. Order means that if the police beats you up, you are not allowed to fight back – this is the only profession in the world that is allowed to do that.

    In the USSR, police was not allowed to search any person or property in public without witnesses. They would ask people around if they could watch the search. If there was no one, then they wouldn’t pull a search. Already we can see that with different class relations we have different social relations, which lead to a different institution of the “police” – which is therefore not the police, it’s something different that is not exactly what we think of, in capitalism, when we say police. In fact, they weren’t even called police. They were called the militia which does imply a military nature (which also implies different, stricter laws applying to them!) but it also implies they are sourced from civilian volunteers.

    There’s the difference between abolish and defund the police. One is revolutionary, the other is reformist.

    • vis4valentineOP
      42·
      3 years ago

      if the police beats you up, you are not allowed to fight back – this is the only profession in the world that is allowed to do that.

      What about boxers and MMA Fighters? lol. Now seriously. I don’t support abolishing the police at all, we need the police, but i agree that ACAB. In my country, no ones become a policeman out of good will, they do it, so they can put down and harass regular people. But if defunding the police means what the comic say, then yes, i support it.

    • vis4valentineOP
      52·
      3 years ago

      I live in a socialist country, guess who instead of doing what the comic says, created even more policing institutions that doesn’t help to solve crime? It’s not about capitalism or socialism, more about what politicians we put in place who are willing to do this, and who lobby those.

      • ghost_laptop
        5·
        3 years ago

        I didn’t say every socialist country will do it now or that it is doing it right, even more a country like Venezuela who’s pretty fucked up in a lot of ways. But you will never see anything resembling this happen in a capitalist society, whereas it will happen at some point in a socialist/communist one. It is diametrically opposed to capitalist values, because the police is the repressive force in charge of protecting private property and bourgeoisie values.

          • loathsome dongeater@lemmygrad.ml
            3·
            3 years ago

            I’m not sure about Venezuela but Cuba saw an increase in crime rate once the Soviet Union collapsed and the blockade came into effect. They lost like 85% of their trade and wages shrunk, and the deprivation lead to more instances of crime, which also increased the incarceration rate.

            • vis4valentineOP
              3·
              3 years ago

              In Venezuela that exact same thing happened, but not because of sanctions or blockades, but because of the oil prices crash and the inflation cause by “Money printing machine goes brrrrrrr” Anyway, venezuela has always being corrupt and dangerous, just now it is more than ever before.

          • Nasst
            31·
            3 years ago

            Lmao at “Venezuela is socialist”.

            • vis4valentineOP
              1·
              3 years ago

              You wanna come here? I’ll meet you at the airport and take your to meet maduro, so you can tell him in his face that Venezuela is not socialist.

              • TheConquestOfBed
                6·
                3 years ago

                I mean, I’d tell him he’s a shit demsucc. The sort of top-down regime change that the Fifth Republic instituted is paternalistic and has no faith in the will of the masses. China, Cuba, and Vietnam had revolutions in which peasants and farmers were integral to the operation and governance of revolutionary territory, and the systems were designed around the interests of lifting the peasant class out of poverty through their own labor and self-governance.

                Chavez idolized a liberal who conducted a bourgeois revolution. Being charitable with oil wealth did not make him or his movement socialist when his government still upholds liberal power structures. It’s evident in how the lack of marxist planning made the state vulnerable when oil exports tapered off.