Hey Holla Forums, I've been thinking about the rise of All Cops Are Bastards rhetoric. ACAB is nothing new, but I've noticed a surge of ACAB posts, tweets, threads etc that coincides with the recent surge in interest of socialism
I'm not gonna argue that All Cops Aren't Bastards. What I'm gonna argue is that ACAB sentiment is performative bullshit that accomplishes nothing. Please let me know if my logic is faulty.
One problem is I see with ACAB is if you're going to say all cops all bastards, then you have to extend that to the military as well. If anything, the U.S. military commits far worse atrocities than police officers babysitting MAGA and antifa cosplayers will ever do. Yet you rarely see ACAB people go after the military, as that would require committing to a stance that's actually controversial. A lot of young men enlist in the army because they're poor and they see it as their only option of paying for college. By extending ACAB to the military, it would force middle to upper middle class leftists to shit on poor kids who had to sign up for the military for material reasons.
People who say ACAB are the same camp who are anti-SWERF (Sex Workers Exclusionary Radical Feminists). For the record I don't agree with SWERFs. However the argument SWERFs make is the sex industry is exploitative and should be shut down. The argument against SWERFs is sex workers shouldn't be treated differently because they're just another class of laborers and ultimately we're all being exploited by capitalism. If you make that argument, then you have to concede that cops or soldiers are also just laborers who are also being exploited by capitalism.
Ultimately, we're all complicit in funding the American empire. Unless you plan on going full Ted Kaczynski, your tax dollars are being spent to drone strike a brown kid overseas.
Again, this is not at all a defense of police. I'm all for police abolitionism. I guess what I'm against is this glee people take in demonizing proles in the police. It's performative because it does nothing to advance police abolition, it only serves to let people ignore their own complicit role in perpetuating capitalism.
Let's do a social experiment in which no ACAB will be offered police protection.
Robert James
wow a real deep fote… rly made me think…
Colton Hill
Is there any sort of experiment where police was abolished? Cause at least we know communism work in small communes, but any lack of tend to degenerate into pillage and mobs.
Zachary Wilson
Free Ukraine/Makhnovia? Not got an in depth knowledge of it myself.
Wyatt Campbell
Stop confusing police and lawmen.
Ian James
I ain't even gonna pretend like I give a fuck bout the sensibilities of pigs or soldiers.
Christian Morgan
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Julian Reyes
We have this fucking thread every month. Yes, police are technically proles. No, that doesn't make them somehow our allies or saints who cannot or shouldn't be hurt. Policemen are class traitors, they further the interests of the ruling class against the interest of the proletariat. In a language that even you can understand: they are one of the biggest classcucks ever. You realize that their primary function is to defend private property relations?
Jack James
Do you actually know the history of police and police tradition that lead to our current systems? Do you know any of the arguments for why armed servicemen and police are different in this regard?
Fuck off liberal, you get the bullet with the cops too
Ian Peterson
tldr; your logic is faulty
Blake Gomez
ACAB is retarded because it focuses on blaming individuals rather than the institutions that will have cops no matter what. If one individual doesn't become a cop, another one will. This is why anarkiddies are considered retards with no sensible theory. They don't see that the material conditions make it possible to exist, not individual cops themselves. The same goes for soldiers. This is just moralizing in another guise.
We can dismantle institution of police as is without trying to shame individuals into somehow seeing it our way from the very beginning. That's never worked and it never will. It just makes more enemies.
Connor Martinez
No it doesn't, it blames both.
Gavin Robinson
At least the army occupies other countries. The cops are the army occupying us.
Obviously its important we have someone to call for help when we are in trouble. But theres massive problems with the police as they currently exist, and they are also massive hypocrites who are the ones most directly standing in the way of what we want to achieve. They bust unions but they form their own. Fucking come on.
Chase Adams
This here.
The whole "All People-who-try-to-get-by-doing-jobs-available-to-them-under-capitalist-system-that-happen-to-perpetuate-it Are Bad" shtick needs to stop. It's extremely counterproductive.
Daniel Cruz
But it doesn't. This is why retards worship criminals like Micah Johnson who shot at cops. The justification for these murders is that they were cops, so it's okay. They weren't cops who killed innocents, nor were they doing anything wrong at the time, and Micah Johnson didn't do it out of some kind of revolutionary ideal, but rather because of idpol, and he's still thought of as a good guy in anarkiddie circles. This is individual terrorism of the worst kind, and it doesn't work. Now, the very phrase "All cops are bastards." is not at all attacking the institution of the police as it is. It's talking about individual cops, and try to dress it up as you like, it is what that is. If you truly believe that, then maybe you should go out and shoot a random cop. Of course, you won't, because you don't really believe this, or you're hoping someone else will do it for you. If one cop quits, another one gets hired. You can never do away with this unless you change society as a whole, and blaming cops for being cops doesn't help.
Josiah Mitchell
Are you a little bit retarded?
Nolan James
All cops is talking about all individual cops. It's not talking about "the police", which is an institution rather than individuals. A soldier can hate the Army, but if he says "all soldiers are bastards" then he must necessarily also hate his own buddies and himself. Maybe you're the retarded one, or you just really like the phrase because of aesthetics. Either way, it's not a helpful phrase and does not fit with what we know about capitalist society.
Mason Reed
Killing cops (and all sorts of advocation for violence) is right up there with the elimination of private property, as far as things that aren't talked of go. (of course no one has a well-meaning protest irl and calls for killing, but so often 'radicals' can't even remember that abolishing private property is a priority)
Make systemic effort then to educate the people to the purpose of the police.
What happened to the strikers in the US? Oh yeah they got shot and killed and more complacent ones took their place because they knew what would happen if they rebelled
Josiah James
I don't remember Marx writing about killing cops. It's always just anarkiddies.
Then they aren't socialists. If you can't advocate for what you intend to do, then what are you doing?
That, and take over the functions of police and other state apparatus. Socialism won't come about from killing cops just because they're cops. It will come about from revolution. Now if a cop chooses to fight, then he is obviously a legitimate target, but chances are that long before that happens, many of these current cops will come to our side, and the same goes for the military. So what do you gain by antagonizing them, or telling them that they are immoral for ever having held that job. I myself was a soldier. Am I no longer fit to be a socialist? Of course, that's silly, but you have people who legitimately think that.
There isn't a capitalist incentive in keeping strikers around. There is for police. If police work becomes more dangerous, or less people want to do it, salaries will go up until enough people do. This is how capitalism works. Supply and demand, like it or not, does exist under capitalism. Cops will not be replaced by tamer cops. They will be replaced by more determined, better-equipped, and more aggressive cops.
Jose Ross
this
yes, all cops voluntarily take an oath to murder their neighbors in defense of private property. that is there entire function. they are literally the army of the bourgeoisie.
land belongs to the workers and the bourgeoisie is an occupying force, their military arm is the police.
becoming a police officer is precisely the same morally as joining the invading force that murdered your family. its a declaration of taking up arms against your own people.
historically police officers existed for slave patrol, strike breaking, and evicting renters, at all times in this history it was entwined with murder.
every single one of these "wars" was working men and women and their families being massacred by private militias and private detective agencies financed by industrial capitalists.
Wyatt Rivera
Except they don't. No cop goes into it like a cartoon villain. You'd just really like to believe that. The fact is that he is motivated by material conditions. Someone has to fill that job. Get over it.
The rest of your post is absolutely worthless. By that logic, anyone that works for Exxon or BP now also deserves to be killed because they joined a company that is poisoning the planet. Obviously, there really is such thing as ethical consumption under capitalism.
Xavier Morales
I don't think OP is saying that, or at least it's certainly not what I mean when I argue to the same effect.
It's more a matter of rhetoric than activism. Of course, any soldier or cop that stands against popular uprising is an enemy, that much is undeniable and must be made clear. The point here is to not use discourse to make the entire institutions themselves class enemies, as it puts all their members in conflict with the people at once. It's necessary to encourage and enable their desertion, and violent engagements must be seen as what they are: an unfortunate but unavoidable intra-class battle in the middle of an inter-class war, not a blood feud. Regardless if your ideal leftist society is to have standing armed and police forces or not, we have to deal with these things before a revolution, while they are Porky's weapons, and needless to say, it's better to face a disamed enemy than an armed one.
As everyone knows, cops and soldiers are composed mostly of proles (tho not as much as in poorer countries, but still), but with a blanket "kill all cops and soldiers" message, you're not simply alienating them, you're pushing them towards identifying as cops/soldiers rather than proles, the worst thing you could do. You're losing valuable allies and making enemies at the same time. Every effort should be made to make the police and armed forces fraternize with the people both during peaceful times such as now as during a period of popular uprising. Because, make no mistake, every single one of us is doing Porky's bidding until the end of our days. You're not automatically better than them just because you're attached to a different puppetstring.
Call it subversion if you wish, but it's both a tactical and moral imperative to bring as many soldiers and policemen to our side as possible. Not just in times of civil strife, but at all times. Who do you think will be the more humane police officer, the petty-reactionary who thinks poor people are sucking off his tax dollars, or the class-conscious one who finally understands that he was hired to be Porky's bloodied trotter? Which of the two will be more likely to abuse homeless people or draw a gun against an unarmed black guy?
Let me finish with 3 historical examples.
The biggest one is that, without a radicalized army, neither the February nor the October revolutions would have happened.
Second example: you might not know this due to porky media's whitewashing, but the Tiananmen Square protests began from the left, against some Dengist reforms and demanding more democracy but of a socialist variety, not liberal. Regardless, when the government decided to bring in the first troops to quash it, they made a critical oversight: they came from Beijing's garrison, and ended up fraternizing with the protesters. One soldier was quoted as saying something to the effect of "we are following the words of Mao, who taught us the soldier must live among the people as a fish swims in water". Now that must have made Deng shit his geriatric diapers.
Lastly, something from the Chilean 9/11 we just commemorated the other day. The coup sent political activists scrambling for refuge, especially given that Santiago had become ahaven for leftist exiles from other Latin American dictatorships. Embassies are prime locations for it. The Panamanian one was among the last ones to be secured by Pinochet's troops and policemen, so about 300 refugees, 45 of whom children, were crowded in 2 small rooms. They also had to stay away from the windows, because anyone who was sighted from outside got sniped. They didn't even have space to lie down on the floor, and slept either standing up propped against a wall, or taking turns on one of four chairs. All they had to eat was a pastel a day, and shared one bathroom, sans shower. After a disease risked breaking out among them, the troops let them be evacuated to an empty house, much more spacious, but then they were much more at risk of being snatched away by the soldiers and cops. Two months after the coup, they secured a safe passage to the airport to be flown to Panama. Their driver, a cop, turned toward them, couldn't help start crying and begged them not to remember Chile as this, and that Chile was not Pinochet, and started leading them into singing the Internationale.
Nathan Hughes
reminder that police using military force and equipment on civilians is not new
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruby_Ridge In the firefight, a shot or shots from DUSM Roderick killed the Weaver's dog, at which time Sammy Weaver is reported to have returned fire at Roderick.[62] After the Federal agents began firing, Sammy Weaver was killed by a shot to the back while retreating. Randy and Vicki went to the "Y" and retrieved Sammy's body. Randy, Vicki and Harris placed Sammy's body in a guest cabin near the main cabin. Weaver's 43-year-old wife Vicki was killed by FBI sniper fire. Before the negotiators arrived at the cabin, FBI sniper Lon Horiuchi, from a position over 200 yards (180 m) north and above the Weaver cabin,[98] shot and wounded Randy Weaver in the back with the bullet exiting his right armpit, while he was lifting the latch on the shed to visit the body of his dead son.[99] (The sniper testified at the later trial that he had put his crosshairs on Weaver's spine, but Weaver moved at the last second.[100]) Then, as Weaver, his 16-year-old daughter Sara,[101] and Harris ran back toward the house, Horiuchi fired a second bullet, killing Vicki Weaver,[102] and wounded Harris in the chest. Vicki Weaver was standing behind the door through which Harris was entering the house, holding their 10-month-old baby Elisheba,[101] in her arms.
Jaxon Hughes
Daily reminder that cops are also generally bastards in socialist countries, and many of these problems are endemic to policing utopians are morons
Easton Hall
Someone doesn't have to fill the job though. People are not driven to become police because of material conditions. Police officer is not a bottom tier job like stocking shelves at walmart or flipping burgers at McDonalds and its not manual labor. Retired police have more options than the average person looking for a job. They could quit at any time. In a constitutional republic like the united states where the law is set up to defend private property a person who continues to stay in the position of law enforcement is a person who willingly chooses private property over life. If they are a reactionary that doesn't consciously make the decision it doesn't matter when the material effects of their actions are the same.
Nathan Jackson
and being a cop isn't consumption
John Bailey
So, first of all I think we should stop viewing the state, civil society, and its police as some neutral center. Why else would you call killing a pig terror?
had too much respect for civil society and 'democracy' imo. Marx also wrote
Parker Turner
Being a cop is literally class traitordom.
When they spend time as a police officer, they are going to be faced with the abuses of their fellow officers. When that time comes, they can either effectively choose to leave either by just leaving or by speaking up and being let go, or they can stay silent and enable the abuses to continue.
It is not a productive job, nor is it one that someone has to fill.
Jose Parker
People do every economic activity because of material conditions. Again, if it wasn't a popular job, the salary would go up. Just look at garbage collectors. You just fucking wish a McJob paid that well.
And it doesn't matter, because it's perceived (rightly) as stressful or potentially dangerous.
And workers of Exxon or BP could quit at any time and do something else as well, but the exodus of all those workers would make it so it's hard to employ them. You are living in a fantasy land.
Again, no cop that I know sees it that way, and most Americans believe in private property anyway. The same argument can be made of any oil company employees. They know global warming exists and choose to make a living by helping it along. All oil workers, all coal workers, and all workers of all sorts are bastards.
Then according to you, everyone should just be a socialist from birth or die, because people make reactionary choices all the time. Raising class conciousness must not be worth it, and everyone that already doesn't agree with you must die. This is what you are basically arguing for.
No, you idiot, but it is the same kind of necessary economic activity. People must have jobs, and being a cop is just a job. If one man doesn't do it, then another one will. If enough people won't do it, then the price will rise until they find someone willing to do it. You cannot avoid this reality. I get that you just really want to antagonize people, but it isn't a useful thing to do, and that must make you mad. Some former cops will be comrades when the revolution comes. It makes no sense to start shit before that time.
Mason Rodriguez
Because that is the definition of terrorism, but it isn't collective terrorism. It's individual terrorism and that never works. This is like killing a few investment bankers. This does not work, and it's a selfish act.
Yeah, those quotes by Marx referred to general terror, not the execution of random cops or soldiers. It referred to revolution. Once the war is on, lines have been drawn. We are not in that state now, though.
Eventually, but first comes dictatorship of the proletariat. We will always have police functions. No, you don't get to go around and do whatever you like. There will be a monopoly of force always.
What about to defend the revolution from counterrevolution? We need a state at least in temporary terms, and police functions will always happen.
Colton Gutierrez
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Joseph Allen
Again, this only makes sense in the context of that cop already being a socialist. This is normal economic behavior under capitalism.
Not all police departments are abusive, and not all cops experience crimes of their fellow officers. This is a bad generalization.
Again, it must be filled because capital dictates what jobs must exist. As long as you live under capitalism someone will fill that job. If only grannies are willing to do it, then they will find a way to employ them to the same capacity. You cannot get out of this without dismantling capitalism.
Here is the first google link when I googled "Why did you beceome a cop"
Did you notice that none of them talk about enforcing private property or becoming class traitors? This is to be expected of those not class-conscious. The key here is that when the time comes and revolution is at hand, this will no longer be an ambiguous position. They will not be unaware of what their job entails, nor will they be unaware of what they must do. That is when these people become legitimate targets, not before, and instead of trying to tell people that they deserve to die because of their occupation, we must bring them over to our side. Plenty of units will revolt with us when the time comes if we lead a popular uprising. This will not be so if you attack them at every turn and then demand their loyalty.
Bentley Lee
The police aren't murdering you, you drama queen, and it won't stop even if you got all the cops of the world to quit today. Someone else will just become a cop because there is a job open and it pays well. Your retarded moralizing does not work, and it never will.
Jacob Reyes
I just don't get the end-goal, the Vision, like, after you subdue the counterrevolution?
You make it sound like a big labor-camp.
Jaxon Roberts
You might need to re-word that. I'm using up all my English as it is.
Adam Martinez
Sorry. I assumed English was your first language.
You talk a lot about things being Necessary, like work and police. So I ask, how do you want society to function, after the revolution and the defeat of the counter-revolution? After all, the police and state are mostly justified on grounds of fighting the counter-revolution.
Do you have a final goal for how society should be?
Thomas Perez
So when police are responsible for more deaths than gang violence in some cities, and combined seize more assets than burglars, that's not cops being thugs and murderers?
Tyler Flores
Well, work will always need to be done. It may be far more automated, but even management of resources can be labor. We will just have it geared toward human interests instead of capital ones. As for police, we will need people to be held accountable for crimes. Crime doesn't stop just because we have socialism. People will murder, rape, and do other things. We must have an apparatus chosen by the people and made up of the people to take care of this. Of course, in the far future, this might be automated, but people will need to be brought to justice and removed from society if they cannot play with others.
I think worker councils will eventually replace the centralized state with de-centralized functions of that same state with coordination happening with each other. This will be more like a real democracy than the world has ever had. Of course, communities will need to police themselves. We will have schools, fire departments, and police will exist, but not to give out tickets, or the things they do today. They will protect the community, and make sure crimes are solved. The people will see much less of them.
Well, a classless, stateless society. But the functions of a state are always inherited. This is not a state, but functions of it must remain.
Not individual cops, and a lot of those deaths are justified, whatever you might believe. Or do you think cops should never shoot back? Now, of course, cops, especially in America, are trained to be afraid all the time. So the problem that the US has is that their cops are trained wrong. Europe does not have this problem. Cops don't play a cowboy. So clearly there are worse ways to do policing, and of course, there are better ways too. Under socialism, some criminals will try to kill police, and the police will have to shoot them. Of course, police will also make mistakes then, and innocent people might die, but it doesn't mean we should throw it all out. It is a necessary function of society to prevent crime. It's just that we will stop preventing crime against private property, and start preventing crime against people, the workers.
Jacob Howard
One in SIX people killed by cops do not have a weapon. And no, you are wrong. The violence of the state is just flat out not justified. The state uses its own violence to prop itself up. The very state of existence of the state IS a crime against the workers. You are literally justifying the capitalist state killing the proletariat to keep itself sustained as it being "necessary" to prevent "crime." Who's side are you even on?
Wyatt Miller
OP is a fag, every cop gets the bullet.
Colton Walker
You can kill people without a weapon, and you can also be trying to steal the cop's weapon. These two should earn you a bullet. However, this falls back on bad training, where cops see weapons everywhere and people always ready to kill them. There is a video they show all cops about a cop being executed because he hesitated to shoot. The lesson they are taught is: If you hesitate, you die. Think about that for a sec. If you try to shoot someone, they have the right to shoot back, even if they are cops. This is justified, whatever you might think.
Yes, this is true, but individual cops do not act with this function in mind. Also, I disagree that all states are the same. A worker's state may be considered a crime, but it is a crime against capital and its agents. It's a justified crime.
See, now you're saying that I was talking about the state, when this has always been about individual cops. You are trying to blur the line between state and individual so you can project what the state is onto individuals. This is arguing in bad faith. I am merely saying that we should not make more enemies than we have to.
Camden Thompson
he doesn't seem to get that being a cop makes you an agent of the state. give up arguing my dude.
Thomas Turner
And you seem to think cops know that this is somehow wrong. Workers of Exxon or BP are workers for entities that are literally destroying the planet. Should they be killed?
Andrew Kelly
Are you under the impression that everyone shot by a police officer is attempting to kill the officer? You're making this insane argument where cops are both trained badly in a way that encourages unnecessary death and that they are justified in doing so? What the fuck?
Sure, cops as people have the right to shoot back. That'd be great if it werent for the fact that it's usually cops who start the shooting and generally escalate things to violence, often unnecessarily, even as you yourself argue, as a result of training.
This is just incoherent rambling nonsense that throws the word "crime" and "state" about.
I don't advocate violence against cops because they're brutal assholes. I advocate it because they're agents of the state who repress the working class. The fact that the two coincide isn't mere coincidence.
Robert Bell
No. I am merely mentioning things that you might miss if you only mention that someone killed didn't have a weapon. I mentioned that most of these wrongful deaths were likely bad training.
Because sometimes they are justified, and sometimes they are simply badly trained. It isn't 100% of one or the other.
No, this is not actually true, especially not outside of America.
Yes, but you see, even in socialism if we do not do away with bad training, this will happen. This is also a problem of the system, not the individual.
No, it's not. General terror against capital is justified. Individual terror against individuals is not.
Then why haven't you killed a cop? Maybe you suspect already that this is counterproductive.
Christopher Wilson
Literally because I don't yet have the resources.
Daniel Hughes
Doesn't take much. This sounds like an excuse. You can kill a person with arson, or poison, or a knife, or a blunt object. You can even run one over with a car, even a rented one. Why lie to yourself?
Benjamin Harris
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Hunter Hernandez
Terrorism is a euphemism for non-state sanctioned violence. The violence carried out by the state is not recognized as terrorism because the state supports it. If a group of individuals has legitimate complaints against a state the state can simply not recognize there independence which legally makes them terrorist.
To really bring it home I'm gonna need you to look up the IRA, understand that they were "terrorist" by this definition, and then look up "partisan" and how fascist Germany treated partisan fighters during the war. Just because the state declares its violence legitimate and labels opposition factions with real grievances "terrorists" or "partisans" doesn't make it true. There is only the international working class and those who are against it.
I think this is where your problem is.
Class has nothing to do with identity.
Marxism is a type of scientific analysis.
When we say "capitalist" we don't mean "supporter of capitalism" we mean "a person who holds private ownership of the means of production".
When we say "class traitor" the implication is that the police officer, who may or may not support socialism, is a proletariat by default, because he works for his wages and does not own the means of his production. His class is still working class - proletariet.
When he works, unlike a person who happens to create products for sale under capitalism, a police officer takes direct physical actions in the interest of the bourgeoisie, ie the property owning class, against the populace often to the extent of extinguishing lives and livelihood. He is, at all times on the job, working directly against the material interests of himself, his family, his neighbors, his community, and all other working people in a physically direct and active way. That is to say each day when he straps on his glock he is quite literally "taking up arms against his own people". They are class traitors.
When a person thinks that by "defending the law" they are "helping people" what they are really doing is "helping people who hold property maintain their property" which can indeed make them "happy". This false consciousness is one of the main progenitors of institutionalized violence. That makes them a bad person, and an efficient bootlicker, not a good or neutral person.
You're defense is essentially the same as saying Knights under feudalism were necessary etc and they are only victims of their material conditions. "Just let them sack this village and burn all our crops and maybe they will join us when we go to guillotine the king lol".
Eli Hall
wait a sec
OP is Holla Forums
Matthew Gonzalez
assmad anarkiddie detected :^)
Charles Sullivan
KILL ALL COPS
Jason Butler
Because killing literally one cop is a pointless endeavor.
You seem to be under the impression that the only options are to categorically reject something or to accept it as praxis.
Connor Evans
Are you a fucking retard? To even think about becoming a cop you have to buy into the morality of the system. Every single cop wakes up and straps their gun around their fat little waist with the thought in their minds that they are protecting and serving the state and liberal system that we live in.
