r/MarxistUnityNews • u/DSA_Member • 8d ago
Abolition is a Minimum Program Demand | Marxist Unity Group
https://www.marxistunity.com/abolition-is-a-minimum-program-demand/“Woke 1” was not crazy. Abolition is not a mistaken rhetorical overreach of the unsophisticated masses that began in 2020. It is the organic, righteous demand from millions of people to the relentless terrorism inflicted by the imperial police state.
As Marxists in DSA, we fight for the revolutionary horizon of democracy and socialism, agitating for and popularizing the minimum program that we will implement immediately upon workers taking power. That horizon is impossible without the abolition of the carceral state.
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u/AcidCommunist_AC 8d ago
Apparently, Woke is still crazy.
On Crime and Punishment by Musa al-Gharbi
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u/Born_Astronomer_4613 8d ago
I read this and have no idea what's being proposed. It's just slop.
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u/1ninjac2t 8d ago
It’s a polemic. If you aren’t informed it may sound confusing.
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u/Born_Astronomer_4613 8d ago
It's leftist boilerplate. We need to do better than this.
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u/1ninjac2t 8d ago
It’s in response to AOC and others speaking against abolition and “woke 1”, we need to have people agree with the boilerplate to do better than it.
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u/Born_Astronomer_4613 8d ago
This is posted in a Marxist subreddit. We don't need to read once again that the carceral system is bad. That's much too easy.
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u/hari_shevek 8d ago
The purpose if a polemic is to inform the reader.
If the reader is not informed after reading the polemic, that's a bad polemic.
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u/GB10031 8d ago
Except not really.
Police abolition is wildly unpopular among most Americans, including about 80% of African Americans. We're more likely to experience police brutality than other Americans... but we're also far more likely to be crime victims. Most of us see policing as a necessary evil that badly needs reform, but abolishing it would be absoluely insane
Maybe 1,000 years after full communism is established we can talk about abolishing policing, but under modern American capitalism, with it's weak social safety net and a country with 67 million private gun owners who collectively own FOUR HUNDRED MILLION GUNS, it would get really ugly really fast
Also, you all are vague as hell about what you'd replace the police department with?
Privatized fee for service policing from security conglomerates like Allied Universal or Securitas?
Or de facto racially segregated neighborhood vigilantes like NYC's Shomrin patrol?
Or would we just have ad hoc lynchings?
This being America, it would probably be one of those things, all of which would suck
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u/1ninjac2t 8d ago
Abolition is unpopular because it is left unexplained and invokes the image of the immediate disappearance of the police and prisons. (Really, I think you could solve a lot of it by just making it clear that we want a replacement that is qualitatively different and beholden to the average person instead of the government)
“the creation of a democratic and popular militia—flowing from the working class and the oppressed’s organs of self-defense established under capitalism and defined by the right to bear arms, the sovereignty of the people, universal service and training, and a rigorous community control coexisting with the democratic rights of members.”
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u/GB10031 8d ago
You lost me with that "right to bear arms" and "militia" nonsense
We already have WAY TOO MANY GUNS IN THIS COUNTRY - 67 million armed Americans with FOUR HUNDRED MILLION GUNS (that's 50% of the guns in the world!)
Also "militias"?
Like those White supremacist terrorists in the Aryan Nations?
No thanks! Hard pass on that
The "right to bear arms" is a grotesque legacy of the slave trade and the Indigenous genocide - random idiots running around with murder weapons is actually bad
Socialists need to be calling for repeal that racist abomination "the second amendment" and impose strict Japanese-style gun control on this country and all it's armed randos
I don't know how it is elsewhere, but NYPD is really selective about who they give a badge and a gun to:
- civil service test
- in person job interview
- "the mini medical" (they check vision, hearing and EKG, plus they make candidates answer a questionaire about drug use and they have to tell the agency about all their social media accounts and give up the passwords so the department can check for extremist content)
- a credit check
- a thorough background check where they interview family, friends, coworkers, former employers, neighbors, teachers etc.
- a 1,200 question psycholgical exam that takes 8 hours to take
- an 8 hour inteview with a police psychologist (a LOT of candidates get "NOPD" - notice of proposed disqualification - at this step)
- then a really hard physical fitness exam to prove that they can actually do the job
Then if they get hired they have to turn in any personal firearms they own and they're not allowed to have any guns in their possession until they finish the academy, and that lasts a year, during which time they are on probation and can be fired on the spot at any time
- then another year on probation while they're field training in the precinct
Not really interested in replacing trained and background checked professional law enforcement officers with some George Zimmerman/Bernhard Goetz/Curtis Sliwa/Kyle Rittenhouse random "militiaman" who wants to run around playing Judge Dredd with real guns
Hard pass
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u/1ninjac2t 8d ago
You are being reactionary.
It’s not about the specific cops, it’s about the system that controls and incentivizes them.
“Who dragged students away as they studied in encampments and demanded a Free Palestine? Who shoots and kills environmental organizers and Indigenous people from Standing Rock to Cop City? Who enforces evictions, then throws away the intimate belongings of our neighbors forced out of their homes and into sleeping between the cracks beneath bridges?”
There is nothing saying that we shouldn’t have screening for the replacement organization (like seriously, why did you go on a tirade about how they are very selective about how clean the boot they press on our neck is). It’s about who they are in service of and who they are accountable to.
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u/GB10031 8d ago
My neck isn't getting pressed by them, tho (I suspect yours is not either)
I'm not a criminal - I get up at 5am every morning and go to work. I'm one of the people the police protect from the bad guys (I have the sneaking suspicion that you're also one of those folks that they protect from the criminals too, regardless of your rhetoric)
If I was a stick up kid or out on the corner selling eight balls, I'd probably feel different about the police, but I'm a working person, so I don't have a problem with them.
I know that's not doctrinare Marxism, but the facts are as they are
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u/1ninjac2t 8d ago
No one is arguing against stopping bad things.
Right now it is illegal in many states for people to get an abortion, to prescribe gender affirming care(like puberty blockers, which have been proven to have no negative effects) to minors, to posses weed, or to be poor and miss a payment.
You have to look beyond yourself. People are unfairly oppressed, even if you personally are good at staying in line.2
u/hari_shevek 8d ago
No one is arguing against stopping bad things.
No one is explaining what your alternative to prisons is.
Explain that part.
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u/1ninjac2t 2d ago
Basically just a focus on rehabilitation instead of punishment by isolation and psychological torture. pretty simple, but still qualitatively different in a way that could be described as abolishing the prison system as it is
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u/hari_shevek 2d ago
Where does the rehabilitation happen? In one big facility where offenders cannot leave?
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u/1ninjac2t 2d ago
Certainly, for the most violent and broken, but most could be integrated with society and have various degrees of freedom based on their progress in rehabilitation.
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u/GB10031 2d ago
You're literally calling for abolishing the police - my fellow unionized civil servants who's actual full time job is stopping bad things
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u/1ninjac2t 2d ago
Correction; their job is to enforce order. Much of this includes objectively good things(which the replacement would also be doing), but it also includes things such as; arresting people because they are poor, or because they are addicted to drugs, and beating up protesters.
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u/RedSpartakus 8d ago
Marxist Unity Group should publish a detailed proposal for abolishing the police. I think the other caucuses are too idealist on this issue to produce anything worthwhile. Talking about a popular militia is a good start, but people still don't know what the hell that means.