Long-form analysis on the #50501movement. I found this thread on mastodon interesting, so I thought I’d crosspost here as well
Long-form analysis on the #50501movement. I found this thread on mastodon interesting, so I thought I’d crosspost here as well
imho, BLM is a textbook example of recuperation. To start, you have a revolutionary movement with a revolutionary message/goal (abolish the police). Over time, the movement centralized leadership and softened message (defund/reform the police). And now today the movement is a brand that is owned by a company and the leadership is too timid to be effective or promote anything other than slogans and t-shirts.
The Harris campaign ran and died on exactly the same playbook. Come out strong and rally the base with revolutionary talk, then walk back demands to reformist ones that are palatable to the donor class you’ve become dependent on, then become irrelevant and fail.
History on this is clear to me. America is in terrible state, and everyone living here knows it, which is why revolutionary ideas are so immediately popular with the masses. But those ideas are too dangerous for Capital so they get watered down and defanged every. single. time. Until we build a decentralized mass movement that isn’t susceptible to leadership ideological capture, we’re going to keep losing.
I think this is exactly it. Let the liberals be liberals. They’re only going to learn by failing and seeing other possibilities.
We should be there to say, “yeah, it would be cool to tax billionaires but what if we abolished them? What if we abolished money? Let’s work together until our ways part naturally.”
We don’t racialized them by demanding something we can’t figure out how to get, or by criticizing the things they think are victories. We do it by showing them better ways and offering hope.
I’ve worked with a lot of liberals who’ve become more and more radical because I tell them what’s going to happen next and then it happens. That’s just what an anarchist analysis gives you. Eventually, they want in on it.
I also think there’s subtle opportunities to show where boundary of reformism’s usefulness is. For example, we want to abolish the police and liberals want to reform them. Offer reforms that appear completely rational but are absolutely impossible. E.g. “cops should have to retire if they shoot someone, regardless of if the shooting was ‘justified’ or not”, “police officers should be banned and immediately fired if there’s any evidence they have been involved in any white supremacist group”, “internal affairs investigations should all be made public within 6 months of an initial complaint, and complaints should be made public after PII related to everyone but the officer is scrubbed”, “police should have to go through background checks to make sure they have never been a member of any group identified by the SPLC as a ‘hate group’”, etc. Almost any normal liberal would agree with these and be surprised that they are completely impossible to implement without functionally abolishing the police.
We have so many opportunities now. We also know that reformism will not work. We can articulate why it won’t work. We can help them find the wall. We can continue to organize outside of the political system and help them join us when they realize it’s time.
You can abolish the police, if you want to, and you get enough people on board. Somewhere in my comment history is a lengthy discussion I had with someone about the idea. There are actually a handful of examples to draw on of in-US communities that functioned without police: Among them the libertarian takeover of a small town in New Hampshire, and the community described in “Wild Wild Country” on Netflix. The Freak Party attempted takeover in Aspen is another example, although they didn’t succeed and they weren’t talking about complete abolition anyway. There are also quite a lot of unincorporated communities where any day-to-day presence of police is basically nonexistent, and where even that nominal county-level police oversight could be cancelled out with a single abolitionist sheriff winning a single election.
If you want to see the wider discussion or continue it, I’m up for that. Overall, I’m saying that the claim that “they” won’t let there not be police is false. “They” in the sense of, the consensus of the people in the city/county/whatever is that there should be police, and the general institutional and capital resistance to abolition, is absolutely true. But if you can win the right elections, or just set up your own place separate enough from existing administrative structures, you can to a pretty large degree already have this, in the present day. The system’s resistance to it is real, but it’s not indomitable.