Slate Liberals - Why you should love a police state that will be used against you
Slate Liberals - Why you should love a police state that will be used against you
Linky: https://archive.is/bqfe6 and https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2024/08/why-progressives-should-actually-want-more-police-surveillance.html
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It is painfully clear that almost no one read the article. What did Mao say about investigating matters before speaking on them?
If the idea of more police cameras makes you queasy, I understand: I spent the first decade of my career as a criminal defense and civil rights lawyer and during that time, I would have treated a plan for more police-controlled cameras with suspicion and skepticism. But acting as the policy director for progressive prosecutor and Philadelphia DA Larry Krasner for six years changed my perspective.
The author is no leftist, but she worked in opposition to the police first, then went to a DA's office where the guy at the top is at minimum doing actual harm reduction (e.g., a significant reduction in sentences and requests for pretrial incarceration, prosecuting cops, exonerating and freeing people who were railroaded by prior DAs). This is someone whose ideas have been informed by practice and we're dunking without even reading it.
What finally broke the [nonfatal shooting] case open was the discovery of surveillance footage from a private camera outside the Get It Mini Market... Before the discovery of the Mini Market footage, the shooting on Marston Street seemed destined to contribute to one of the grimmest statistics in the American criminal justice system: less than 20 percent of nonfatal shootings in most large American cities are ever solved. The clearance rates have been as low as 11 percent in Chicago, 10 percent in Durham, 15 percent in San Francisco, and 18 percent in Philadelphia.
Shootings are the type of crime that is still prosecuted in an AES state. 80-90% of nonfatal shootings resulting in no case is a real problem. It's one thing to say "I've investigated the issue and this is not a worthwhile tradeoff," but you'd have to actually investigate, and you'd have to acknowledge that there's a real issue (gun violence) you're choosing to pull back on.
Opposing ideas without investigating and ignoring real-world problems that get in the way of sweeping solutions are hallmarks of ultraleftism.
Opposing ideas without investigating and ignoring real-world problems that get in the way of sweeping solutions are hallmarks of ultraleftism.
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'"
the guy at the top is at minimum doing actual harm reduction
yeah, and
Joe BidenKamala Harris is the most progressive president in history so who are you to shirk your duty to vote forhimher to Save Democracy™? after all, "shut up and listen to the sensible policy solutions of qualified bourgeois experts" was famously Mao's whole deal...I'm not saying there are no leftist critiques of this article. I'm saying you have to actually read the article to make them, which no one did. It's obvious no one read it when a ton of people are upvoting stuff like "she's hiding that she worked for the DA!" when she says it pretty early in the article. That sort of thing makes us look like idiots when we share the article or our takes on it elsewhere.
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
This is the accelerationism debate: do you support marginal improvements because they help people, and that's the end goal? Or oppose them because they strengthen the existing state? I don't think you can build a mass movement around opposing what helps right now.
yeah, and Joe Biden Kamala Harris is the most progressive president
If you're saying Larry Krasner is essentially Kamala Harris I don't believe you've investigated either in much detail.
This is the accelerationism debate: do you support marginal improvements because they help people, and that’s the end goal? Or oppose them because they strengthen the existing state? I don’t think you can build a mass movement around opposing what helps right now.
"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.
If you’re saying Larry Krasner is essentially Kamala Harris I don’t believe you’ve investigated either in much detail.
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.
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.
From the article talking about similar measures being used in Seattle (emphasis mine):
In February, the mayor of Seattle, Bruce Harrell, announced a pilot program: The city would spend $1.5 million on surveillance equipment, including CCTV cameras and software, in four areas of the city where violent crime is highest. Citizens and privacy groups complained, and the city scheduled an open forum before the City Council, where a tense and heated debate ensued.
It was residents of color from Seattle’s poor communities who overwhelmingly advocated for installing the camera equipment, citing the 24 percent clearance rate for homicides. “The Black community wants it,” community advocate Victoria Bush told the council, according to KOMO News, adding that opponents of the camera rollout “are not in our neighborhoods. They’re not dying.” In May, Seattle moved forward with installing most of the equipment.
This measure is overwhelmingly supported by the people you say would be most harmed by it. However, those people are the ones calling for the surveillance measures to be there. They know what would benefit their communities better than any lemmygrad rando. Do you disagree?
Proletarian class politics don’t involve building a mass movement of settler cops
I'm not going to engage with incredibly bad faith interpretations of what I'm saying.
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".
Solving a shooting in the middle of a city is something cops should be doing, and is something cops do right now in AES states. If someone shoots up the block where your kids play, finding who did it is absolutely helpful. We are not going to build a mass movement by telling people "leftists are opposed to things that help you right now." There are other positives of having a crime caught on video, too (eyewitnesses don't have to risk and inconvenience themselves to come to court, less misidentification, video can catch cops in lies).
Of course, you can argue that the benefits here are outweighed by how this technology will be applied in harmful ways. But you have to acknowledge there's a benefit otherwise you're out of touch and people will stop listening to you. It's the difference between an informed opinion and a slogan.
"We are not going to build a mass movement by telling people “leftists are opposed to things that help you right now.”
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.
the police do not exist to prevent violence. The police exist to perform violence to one class on behalf of another.
What police actually do is what matters (the purpose of a system is what it does, after all). And in addition to keeping the working class in check, they also do things police do everywhere, including in AES states where the working class controls the police. You can think of the difference as "class control functions" vs. "essential functions."
When leftists attack the class control functions of police, working people respond positively because they can see the harm of police control. But when leftists attack even the essential functions of the police, that support falters because people want those essential functions fulfilled, the way they want a host of other social services fulfilled.
akin to saying that we should empower the US military because they built schools in Iraq
If you're talking to people about the evils of the U.S. military, you don't rip on the military for... building a school. You don't insist building a school is actually bad somehow. The best response is "I'm a sane person who can acknowledge that building a school is good, but here are all these much larger issues that demonstrate the need for revolutionary change."
What do you think the author is actually advocating for here?