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Confessions of a former bastard cop - An essay by a former police officer on why police are like this
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- Title
- Confessions of a Former Bastard Cop
- Authors
- Officer A. Cab
- Published
- Jun 6 2020
- Word count
- 5462 words
Gangs aren't solely driven by people whose material needs aren't met. Plenty of communities that are perfectly comfortable form gangs or similar associations to bully, sometimes violently, others. I mean, most of these sovereign citizen militia types are functionally White Nationalist gangs. And a lot of them are perfectly materially comfortable.
Of course, our police don't actually do anything about them. ..
For this to be the work of capitalism specifically, we would have expected these issues to not exist in pre-capitalist or modern non-capitalist societies. But that's not really the case. In pre-capitalist societies it's fairly obvious, though the power-disparity between the state and gangs is usually not so high so the gangs can easily end up being warlords or local power brokers. In non-capitalist societies it's also not unheard of. Cuba has street gangs, China does, even the Soviet Union did.
This again is laying at the feet of capitalism forms of domination and interaction that existed long before capitalism, or even general commercialization, existed. This whole strain of Marxist thought that highlights capitalism as the root of all evil seems reductive and poorly considered to me. Most of the stuff you're complaining about seem like basic shortcomings of the human condition. It sounds like we're putting all the underlying problems that our economic system tries (and fails) to solve into a cognitive bucket called "capitalism" without thinking too deeply about how to solve those things instead. Capitalism may do a poor job of addressing them, but at the end of the day it's just an economic system. It's not a moral framework, it's not an ethical system, it's not cultural norms and mores. Economic systems are descriptions of how society makes decisions about the allocation of scarce resources to determine what to make, how much, and for whom. All that other stuff is determined along different processes that all interrelate but are still mostly independent.
I harp on this because when you erroneously lay all the problems at the feet of "capitalism" then you're diagnosing a problem in a way that doesn't lead to a solution. You're just kind of eliding the important question of what a better world would look like instead. Suppose you abolish capitalism one day (whatever that might look like), does the problem of scarcity go away? Does mankind's innately tribalistic nature? Does people's desire to accrue honor and esteem according to whatever cultural mores prescribe (and not just material goods) diminish in any way? I don't think they do. And I don't think just saying that we should be nicer to each other and engage with each other as human beings is a workable alternative.
Also, the idea that capitalism teaches an ideology of dominance and deference to natural hierarchy is basically wrong. Capitalism, insofar as it is a coherent ideology, is all about the wisdom of crowds and faith in the vast intricacies of market dynamics to average out power dynamics between people. Dominance along personality traits is much more of a pre-capitalist thing. In a purely capitalist mindset, money talks and literally everything else walks. Race, religion, sexual orientation, or anything else don't matter as long as your money spends. If anything, capitalism has helped society make great strides in undoing the logic of social class and dominance.
In fact, why do you think the Republican Party was originally a union of Whigs and abolitionists? It's because the factory bosses in the North resented having to compete with free slave labor in the South. They were ideologically committed to the idea of "free" labor paid for in wages. They believed pricing labor by unit instead of as chattel would naturally allocate it to its most valued uses.
That's not inherently capitalistic though. Non-capitalist and pre-capitalists systems had/have it too.
That's what Marxism is. The one person's name was Marx. . .
I'm talking specifically about the type of historiography you were applying
The abolishment of capitalism is easier than you think. Capitalism is described typically as a system with markets, firms, and private property.
The component in biggest contention is private property. Leftists typically seek to abolish or limit private property and convert it into public property. Public property is any kind of property communally owned, and the ideal social system used to control communal property is called democracy.
So what's the best way to "abolish" capitalism? It's to promote democracy and democratic ideals and optimize for ideal democracy. Movements abound around the world to create better democracy, with systems like single transferable vote, proportional representation, citizens assemblies and sortition, condorcet methods, scored voting methods, etc etc.
A variety of social structures are proposed to democratize government and economics. They include worker cooperatives, consumer cooperatives, unions, citizen assemblies, etc.
The more power is granted to democracy, the more private property is converted to public property, the more socialistic society becomes.
Democracy is also about the wisdom of crowds applied in a systematic manner. Unlike capitalism, democracy treats the wisdom of each participant as equal. In contrast capitalism demands that private property owners have full control.
Obviously scarcity doesn't magically go away. Democracy is just another feedback mechanism that people can use to control society in an optimal, utilitarian fashion.
Take for example the problem of global warming where capitalists push negative externalities onto society. Capitalists can do this because the People don't have sufficient control to force the capitalists to stop. The solution is to seize control and regulate the industry, seizing their private property and enforcing regulations and imposing control. A form of seizure that capitalists typically hate for example is tax, and for global warming the solution is a carbon tax.
No. Market Socialist or Mixed economies have all of those things.
Publicly traded corporations are also communally owned, and there is a whole process for corporate governance to manage the decision-making for them. It's also up for debate what the "ideal" social system for managing communal property is. I would argue it is emphatically not pure democracy because that can quickly devolve into 2 exclusionary decision-making through majoritarian bullying.
None of these have been able to scale. Even the successful large scale worker owned co-ops, like Mondrian, are still hierarchical and can be rather beastly in terms of how much abuse they're willing to accept outside their purviews.
But participants aren't equal, neither in the wisdom or expertise they can apply nor in the level of stake they have in the outcome of the decision. If you need to decide where to put a toxic waste dump, what incentive do any of the people not living near the proposed dump-site have to ensure it's a fair arrangement?
All of this isn't to say these systems are bad or expanding them isn't desirable. But it's definitely not true that "abolishment of capitalism is easier than you think." You're eliding every difficult question with what seems like a naive faith in abstractions, like "democracy" without considering the challenges and costs that come with that. For example:
The Soviet Union wasn't exactly an environmental powerhouse either. They were also happy to push negative externalities onto society. This is because management, at scale, relies on metrics and feedback loops to convey information. If you're not measuring ecology as a success criteria, you're not going include ecology as a consideration in decision-making. There is nothing stopping our capitalist society from instituting neoliberal solutions to Climate Change, such as cap&trade, carbon taxation, or large-scale subsidies for renewables. It's political resistance that holds it back, not the economic system. Most of that political resistance doesn't go away under a socialist system. The fundamental problem is that future generations don't get a vote, so present generations discount their preferences.
Hmmm, why do you think capitalism encourages domination? At the simplest level, trade between two people seems like interaction as equals.
This of course changes depending on relative wealth and desperation, but even a small fixed income (like with social security) can result in a modest independence. Which is why I push UBI.
Yeah, I agree that when it's "if you don't work you don't eat" then it's exploitive. If you can say "no" and mean it because it's a viable choice, not a bluff, then that's pretty powerful.
Maybe I skipped something while skimming but I'm not sure why you think we're meant to realize it's a lie? It seems like they want us to believe it's real? (It's suspiciously woke but I don't know if it's because their politics changed.)
It's anonymous so of course we don't know. This is why it's better to read anonymous accounts in a reputable newspaper so that they can check credentials, even if they can't reveal them.
https://medium.com/@OfcrACab/hello-everyone-558e35931fc8
A few journalists appear to have reached out to him in the comments too, so its possible one of them may be able to verify his claim of actually being a former cop eventually.
I don’t understand this argument at all. Do you want to literally abolish law enforcement, not just rebuild it to be fairer and less abusive? That plan is never going to work unless you live in a utopia. First of all, crime has existed in all societies, including ethnically homogenous and precapitalist societies. It’s a part of the human condition that we need to deal with. Secondly, even if this hopelessly reductive take on the causes of crime were true, abolishing the police will not suddenly fix all the other issues with society.
It’s all well and good to wish for a society where we don’t need police because nobody ever beats their partner or robs old ladies or assaults people in alleys. It’s also a total fantasy that has no root in reality, and requires fundamentally rewriting human nature to accomplish. While we work on that, we need some other way of dealing with crime. Such as an organization that enforces laws while being accountable to government and ultimately, the people.
Maybe my naïveté is showing, but what precludes this from being written by a former police officer?
Definitely not the first line:
Why do you assume that?
Why not take the essay at face value and assume it actually was written by a former police officer, maybe an officer who's been out of the force for a few years and gained a sense of perspective about what he used to do?
People do change. Or maybe he chose the police force as an idealistic young man, and then learned what it was really like, and left after some years.
Why do you assume this is fake?
True believers who have already been convinced are probably not the intended audience of this piece. None of them are going to say, oh, well now that a former cop says it, that changes everything. Fence-sitters, on the other hand…
This is mostly already discussed, but I thought I'd say something about why I'm not taking it at face value. Instead, I've decided just to have no opinion either way.
I'm the farthest thing from an expert in police work. I don't know anyone who's a cop. My personal experience is limited to a few traffic stops. I haven't talked to other people about their bad experiences. My view of police work is distorted by decades of police shows and by lots of news articles and by Twitter reshares that are all very biased towards whatever is the most sensational.
So, I think a lot of people could tell a story about police work that would be plausible to me, and those stories could be wildly different. I don't have the strong priors needed to spot bullshit. And that's why I'm sticking to stuff in reputable newspapers.