this post was submitted on 21 Apr 2025
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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