this post was submitted on 21 Apr 2025
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Their cops murder people too, like for real? Thats what cops do! Chinese cops arent suddenly and magically not bastards! What a shit meme, i dont even really dislike china all that much but this is fuckin wank
Super fucking embarrassing for a communist forum
Chinese cops kill an average of 2 people a year, and having spent a good amount of time there, no one has the fear of them they do in the states. Public perception of police range from support to complete and total disrespect and disregard for their authority. Could vary by province I suppose, it is a big country, but I’ve not seen anything to suggest that police there are violent or oppressive.
ACAB isn't a general communist position. Communists have always implemented policing in every state they run. ACAB is a strategic position to hold against cops whose primary function under a capitalist state is to protect the interrsts of private property.
As part of the state, we want it to eventually wither away. But to immediately abolish all cops after a revolution is more of an anarchist position (though anarchists have historically also still had people deputized to do cop things).
Cops in capitalist states aren’t magically bastards. They’re bastards specifically because they serve bourgeois interests against proletarian ones.
Also worth noting, I'm pretty sure US cops are some of the worst in the world, even when compared to other capitalist countries. Like they developed in part from slave patrols and in modern day, have been known to get psychopathic training that glorifies murdering people. On top of the fact some of them are literal gangs.
Yes, but this is not the point. We should not rely only on moral arguments against bourgeois institutions, because the same thing can be said against socialism. The thing is, the police is an instrument of the capitalists because the laws in capitalist country favors the capitalists. It's basically the superstructure as a product and in a dialectical relationship with the base structure.
That's fair as a general thing, but I didn't really mean it as a "moral argument"? People have good reason to have developed a viscerally negative view of policing if their experience has only been the US. So part of my point there is just how abnormally bad US policing is and some reasons why it is that way, to help ease off on the instinct that if they are horrific in the US, they must always be horrific everywhere. Yes, part of it is the standard "the police are there to protect capital, etc.", but it's not just that. The US developed from colonizing, genocide, slavery, none of which it ever really reckoned with as more than reformist things that were extremely hard-won. In post WWII, it also became a global capitalist empire and the breeding ground of a vicious anti-communist world campaign. All of this is going to have consequences on what policing ends up looking like.
The whole "they favor the capitalists" thing is true for the US, but also somewhat of an oversimplification. The worst crimes done by US cops (such as extrajudicial murder) are more often carried out against people who are considered non-white, for example. That's something you won't see covered in a purely class analysis.
But that's exactly what I meant. Cops are bad for the working class not because they are cops, or because they enforce state rule. They are bad for the population because their function, as part of the superstructure, is to maintain the base of society (production, distribution and classes) working as they are intended.
So cops in a colonial society are going to enforce colonial social relations. Cops in a slaver society will enforce slavery social relations. Cops in a capitalist society, which existed in a historical process of past colonial and slavery relations that then transited to capitalist class relations, will be racist and target those minorities, since they are now part of the lowest sections of the proletariat and subproletariat.
In a post-capitalist society, where workers are now in power, the superstructure will have a group of people who will enforce the new rules of the society and protect the workers' interests. You can call them workers' militia, people's militia, workers' gendarmerie, or any other name, but they will act in a similarly to what cops do today, but now considering the new base structure of society, their class character will be different.
Then I guess we're meaning more or less the same thing, just going about it differently.
I think it's good to mention this otherwise we fall into the anti-authority argument that anarchists love to bring up.
Yeah, I presume that anarchist rejection of all forms of authority is what kicked off this thread. It is a very basic understanding that Marxists in general[^1] and Marxist-Leninists in particular[^2] do not reject authority as-such, which OC ought to have known, so she oughtn’t have been surprised.
[^1]: Engels, 1872, On Authority [^2]: Lenin, 1920, “Left-wing” communism, an infantile disorder
According to what information?
According to anarkiddies that view any authoritative structure as bad as evil because they cannot comprehend reading basic theory.
They are police! ALL COPS ARE BASTARDS? since when was this a new concept
ACAB is about how American (and British) police are bastards because they serve capital it’s not some inherent quality of law enforcement.
What would you say is the role of police in the state?
To defend the state against the people who live within it
It's a class distinction, who controls them and for what purpose, the common worker is not in control of Chinese police behavior tactics or actions, it only theorhe5ically acts in their interest the same way cops do here, albeit substantially less of a lie in the case of China it does not suddenly make Chinese cops revolutionary vanguard
I definitely agree that there's a class component to the police, but then I don't follow that police in China is the same as police in e.g. Europe or the USA, because the class character of the Chinese state is demonstrably different than that of the US France or Britain.
Unless you don't believe that China is a DotP but the way you phrase your argument makes it to be a constant that applies to all states, so that's what I have trouble understanding. If there's a class component to the police, then it doesn't follow that all states will also have the same class characteristic as each other. Otherwise there is no point in saying that there's a class distinction to the police, it's just the police.
This is the problem with dealing with anarchists, especially those from the west. They view all authority as bad because they cannot comprehend the idea that other countries governments may be different than their own.
The mere idea that Chinese law enforcement works for the people, and actually exists to serve and protect said people, is incomprehensible to them.
It's as simple as that. "My only experience with law enforcement and government is bad thus all law enforcement and governments are bad." Something something bedtimes.
I'm not trying to be snarky or pedantic when I ask, what is a cop to you? Would you consider a cop to be any enforcer of a formalized state structure that has a monopoly on violence? Anyone who takes on an armed role for organized community defense?
It's very easy and sensible to go with ACAB for the US, but when we're talking about for example a communist vanguard in defense of a working class state socialist project, if we just say it is identical fundamentally, then what are we left with to defend against the violence of the colonizer, imperialist, etc.? Or if we were to say it's bad when it's a "dictatorship of the proletariat", but good if it's community defense, what constitutes the difference and how is the 2nd one strong enough on a practical level to achieve liberation?
In other words, ignoring the context and interactions of a category is the same as removing the dialectics from materialist analysis. Then we limit ourselves to analysing the reality with metaphysics.
I'm not sure how you expect to secure proletarian class interests without police. What, inframaterialism?