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this post was submitted on 11 Aug 2024
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chapotraphouse
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Recognizing the theoretical utility of empowering the investigative apparatus of a hypothetical proletarian state is a piss poor defense of empowering the actually existing settler colonial bourgeois state with tools to defend their class supremacy. I'm no scholar, but I'm pretty sure Mao's point wasn't that you should arm your class enemies to better fantasize about how cool it would be if those tools fell into your lap instead. Lenin is quite clear: "Today, in Britain and America, too, 'the precondition for every real people's revolution' is the smashing, the destruction of the 'ready-made state machinery'"
yeah, and ~~Joe Biden~~ Kamala Harris is the most progressive president in history so who are you to shirk your duty to vote for ~~him~~ her to Save Democracy™? after all, "shut up and listen to the sensible policy solutions of qualified bourgeois experts" was famously Mao's whole deal...
"Marginal improvements" that aim to more effectively maintain the instrument of bourgeois class rule are called "reformism". Proletarian class politics don't involve building a mass movement of settler cops around what helps other settler cops better enforce imperial property relations and racial hierarchy. Marxism is a doctrine of violent revolutionary class struggle. It is not a doctrine of peacefully ceding power to the bourgeois state and their front line enforcers in the hope that you'll incite them to surrender control at some point in the future via the correct combination of campaign contributions, primary votes, and picket signs.
Liberals tell me that every day about Donald Trump and Kamala Harris, and to give them the smallest amount of credit, at least they're technically correct that Trump didn't share Harris and Krasner's career in law enforcement.
You characterized giving cops more power to do their jobs more effectively as a generally understood "marginal improvement" that "helps people". That characterization only follows from a misunderstanding about the purpose of police under bourgeois dictatorship or a very specific view of who constitutes "people". To be clear, there's little to no revolutionary potential in narrow minority of the US population that the bourgeois criminal legal system exists to "help".
This is the crux of the issue. The people in the United States who belong to a class that the police exist to help will always be counterrevolutionary, because the police do not exist to prevent violence. The police exist to perform violence to one class on behalf of another. This is the primary purpose of a state. A mass movement of propertied settlers whose interests the police represent is an obstacle, not a prerequisite, to proletarian revolution. Saying that we should empower US cops because some individual action might incidentally "stop a bad guy" is akin to saying that we should empower the US military because they built schools in Iraq, or a "floating aid platform" in Gaza, or "stop terrorism". It's not what they're for. It's true that many propertied Americans believe the police and military are there to help them, because the US is the imperial core and its citizens largely labor aristocrats. Socialism requires defeating those people, not persuading them. It requires organizing the subjects of imperial violence, not finding common cause with the beneficiaries of it.
The people in the US that require organization already understand on a deeply personal level that the police do not exist to protect them. They don't believe this because someone convinced them of it, they understand this from experience because the US has never afforded them the luxury of misunderstanding how quickly and easily cops are will kill them.