ACAB

That's the anti-police acronym which stands for "All Cops Are Bastards". This is a decidedly left-wing slogan that needs some explaining because hyper-individualism caused many to lose sight of its true meaning. And while I'm at it, I'll rant on some other common misconceptions as well.

The problem is that we've been saturated with the failed ideology that has become the current paradigm, capitalism. This ideology is based on individualism as opposed to collectivism. It requires that participant behaves like a rational agent who makes choices that are in their own best economic self-interest. Now, we can spend a lot of expensive sounding words explaining what this means, but I'm sure you'll understand immediately when I say it boils down to just be greedy and selfish. The entire ideology is based on some fantasy of a self-regulating mechanism, known as the "Invisible Hand", that would result in a somewhat just equilibrium in which all individuals get what they deserve. But only if we all behave like rational self-serving agents, only if we do what's best for ourselves.

I won't have to explain that centuries under this system has resulted in a culture of hyper-individualism. Everything is reduced to the individual; if someone's a billionaire he or she must have earned it through hard work, talent, a big brain or a combination thereof. If someone's poor, it must be because of the poor choices they made in their life. Under this paradigm every individual is responsible for their own good or bad fortune. This idea is further enhanced through a faulty explanation of evolution theory that translates to "survival of the fittest". The only problem is that the "fittest" is in fact the "greediest" or the "most selfish sociopath bastard". Not all of them, of course, but studies have shown that sociopathy and psychopathy, both associated with a severe lack of empathy and on the narcissism-spectrum, are more frequently found among leadership figures in both politics and businesses.

The reservation I made when I said "not all of them" is at the heart of why ACAB is a leftist slogan, and why right wing people don't agree. People on the political right are proponents of capitalism and individualism. They believe wholeheartedly in the benefits of private ownership of the means of production and the voluntary exchanges and trades made in a free market system. In other words, they, as opposed to leftists, don't see or even think about systems, only about individuals. So when a leftist says that "All Cops Are Bastards", they don't mean to say that every individual cop must be some asshole on a power-trip, but they do mean to say that every individual cop is part of a system that benefits and protects the interests of capital and capitalists. Cops formerly hunted escaped slaves, they busted unions and now they bust peaceful protests, and they do it using violence. They don't exist primarily to protect you and me, but to protect private property and therefore the owners of that property.

This dichotomy between systemic and individual reasoning can be seen in many fields. Unjust police violence they'll reduce to a few "bad apples" in an otherwise just system. Take racism: the right will reduce it to individual racists and individual acts of racism, and won't discuss or even think about systemic racism. They'll claim that there are no laws that explicitly hamper people of color in the execution of their civil rights, while ignoring that people of color are also the poorest and can't take a day off work to vote. Or that ballot boxes are harder to reach in neighborhoods predominantly occupied by people of color because there are simply less ballot boxes. The law or the economy doesn't have to say "African Americans can't do this or that" for African Americans to be discriminated against by the system.

With this in mind, imagine the horrible hell-scape we would live in if anarcho-capitalists would get their way. I mean, I am a leftist who says ACAB, but as long as capitalism is alive I wouldn't want to live in a world without the police or the rules, laws and regulations dictated by, and enforced through the monopoly on the use of force of the state. Ancaps imagine that the police would become private security forces, and justice would be dealt by private for-profit courts. Imagine that. The private Amazon security force would have no incentive whatsoever to protect my or your safety, as they're paid by Amazon. And Amazon would have no incentive to make their security force protect anything other than Amazon's property and interests. The Ancap world would be just like the world we know now, only with the state replaced by the biggest corporations. Rape, theft and murder would be legalized with nothing but black-shirts, mobs and the Amazon security force. It would be feudalism reinvented, only this time with guns, tanks, bazookas and missiles instead of torches and pitchforks.

Look, in the end the separation between the collective or community and the individual is nonsensical because individuals make up the community. Trying to position them as opposites or in some way antagonistic forces is absurd and makes no sense. But... Ask yourself who guaranteed fundamental basic rights for workers, who won the right for women to vote and who freed the slaves. Was it the rugged individual who fights for the billionaire's right to exploit labor and have their taxes cut? Or was it collective action, unionization and the people working together in order to leverage power to achieve justice for the individual? In the end it's the collective that's most effectively able to to fight for the rights of the individual, there's no two ways about it. Only collective action brings the results all individuals want; individual freedom is found in, and guaranteed by the community. Only if we internalize that basic truth about our species, will we ever be able to abolish the state and all other unjust and unnecessary hierarchies.

In a post-capitalist world it's the community and the workers who have true power instead of the capitalists and their governments. Poverty would be eradicated, and since poverty is one of the main indicators of crime, crime would be reduced exponentially; that's a scenario in which community-policing can be done. Insane private wealth would become a thing of the past too, as the means of production would be in the hands of the collective or the workers who actually provide the labor that's at the base of all real wealth. Wealth can only be created through the labor that transforms natural resources into the end-products we all want and need. All the income from speculation, stock-trading and rent is not backed by real wealth; it's the stuff of bubbles and crashes, which we pay for.

“If one man has a dollar he didn’t work for, some other man worked for a dollar he didn’t get.” - William "Big Bill" Haywood
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So now you know what ACAB really means, and maybe you'll be able to figure out for yourself where the sentiment behind "Defund the Police" really comes from. I'll end this rant now and leave you with a video explaining some more reasons why anarcho-capitalism is an oxymoron. Capitalism, which is an unjust and unnecessary hierarchy all by itself, and anarchism are polar opposites, and the video explains this very well by dividing the explanation in two parts, one called "anarchism" and one called "capitalism".

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