Notices by Abolisyonista (abolisyonista@ni.hil.ist), page 5

Something I'm thinking of at the moment: How can we think of public capacity as separated/liberated from the state and state capacity?

I haven't been reading enough, so I didn't know there was a Filipino American critical theorist that deals with the Black radical tradition! Really cool find for me.

After retiring from the communist movement, Jesus Lava—once the top communist in the Philippines—became a… psychic pseudo-scientist. Lol, lmao even.

RIP Jesus Lava, you would have loved J. Posadas.

https://web.archive.org/web/20160218005707/http://www.newsflash.org/2003/01/hl/hl017361.htm

@zotero Dark mode AND emoji annotation? Y'all are spoiling me 😭

Didn't think I'd get moved by a non-game program, but the Zotero 7 by @zotero is beautiful!

“The US incarcerates more people than Maoist China”

Yeah America bad and all, but shouldn't we hold revolutionary projects to higher standards? The carceral power of the party-state led by Mao himself incarcerated and executed the brightest flames of the Cultural Revolution. Everyone remembers Mao, but who here remembers Yu Luoke?

At some point we have to stop thinking of a idealized and mythologized “democratic centralism” and instead base democratic centralism on what it appears as in reality, i.e. literally cults of personality, careerism, opportunism, etc. etc. Otherwise we must admit it never existed.

The tragedy of Marxism is that the same revolutionaries who accomplish great things can also be those that ruin things. Mao launched the Cultural Revolution only to crush it later when he could no longer control what he unleashed. Huey Newton co-founded the Black Panther Party only to run it into the ground through egomania.

@wolf I deal with it a bit here https://haters.noblogs.org/post/2022/03/26/against-carceral-communism-for-abolition-communism-by-simoun-magsalin/

No, of course not, lol.

But wait, one might say, weren't and aren't there police and prisons in "actually existing socialism"? Yes, but for varying reasons, the "socialism" of these projects was merely the political ideology of their ruling parties, not in terms of their mode of production. All of these countries had wage-labor, proletarianization, money, commodities, et cetera—all features of a capitalism. Because they had these features of capitalism, these state socialist projects necessarily needed police and prisons to enforce the rule of state capital.

When Marx talked about socialism, he most clearly outlines it in his *Critique of the Gotha Program* where he uses the term "lower-phase communism" that Second International Marxism and later pre-Bolshevized Comintern Marxism interpreted as "socialism." In socialism or lower-phase communism, the state is already abolished because classes are already abolished. In doing so, we can necessarily expect the cruelest features of the state like police and prisons are necessarily also abolished.

Police and prisons are historically contingent to class society. They serve as a mode of upholding class society. Across Europe and North America during the development of capitalism, police and prisons were used to enforce the rule of wage-labor and force previously non-proletarian peoples into proletarianization. These institutions would drive people off their land, enclose the commons, and then impose regimes of terror to enforce class society.

But how about, a socialist might ask, the enforcement of class rule of the proletariat? The dictatorship of the proletariat? First, it is important to note that the dictatorship of the proletariat is not yet socialism. It is the transition period to socialism. Second, the dictatorship of the proletariat is indeed a class dictatorship, just like the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie we currently live under. Third, the class dictatorship of the proletariat *cannot look like previous modes of class dictatorship because it is a class dictatorship for the transition from a class society to a classless society, not a transition from a class society to another class society*. Previous modes of class dictatorship used the terror of police and prisons to transition from a monarchist system to a republican system, or the class dictatorship of the aristocracy to the class dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. The proletarian class dictatorship is different in that it is a class dictatorship that abolishes class distinctions, the most important of which is proletarianization. Logically, if proletarianziation needs police and prisons to be enforced, then the class dictatorship to abolish proletarianization likewise does away with police and prisons, simply because one cannot use the enforcement of proletarianization to do away with proletarianization.

However, the crucial feature of class dictatorship is its *dictatorship*, the ability for a class to enforce its will on all other classes. We have previously noted here that previous modes of class dictatorship does this using police and prisons. How is proletarian class dictatorship supposed to do this without police and prisons? Very simply, the power of a proletariat as a class-for-itself does not come from the barrel of a gun or a ballot box, but by their ability to subvert what they are as proletarianized beings. This does not mean that there will be no violence, far from it, but that this violence is ordered towards subversion of class society rather than reproducing it. Commonly, Second International Marxism, especially as embodied by Lenin in *State and Revolution*, advocates for a whole armed proletariat as opposed to special bodies of armed force (e.g. police and prisons). For whatever reason, Lenin disregarded this when the Bolsheviks took power in Russia, thus reproducing class society and all that that entailed, leading the Soviet Union down a path of an unambiguous class society where the proletariat continued to be proletarianized.

Abolition communism means moving beyond this failure to abolish police and prisons under a transitional period and forwarding abolition and communization in its place.

So no, there would not be police and prisons in socialism nor in the transitional period to it, unless of course that transitional period was not transitioning to socialism at all but back to capitalism.

@mook that's a good theory. I thought it was because the PCI was Stalinist and that they therefore support big business.

Remembering the time when Francis Ford Coppola randomly has the Communist Party of Italy welcome Michael Corleone to Italy in THE GODFATHER III.

Does Anyone know why Coppola frames this scene like this? Why randomly add the PCI to this scene? What does it achieve? What is it supposed to say?

The book I'm reading is like

Horrors of war 😢😢😢
Next chapter:
Cooking contest! 😃😃😃

@ch0ccyra1n Maybe you're looking in the wrong place? You don't have to look for anarchy in its historically-contingent sense, but in the small ways people resist to power every day. For example I wrote this on the Philippines: https://sea.theanarchistlibrary.org/library/simoun-magsalin-the-libertarian-elements-in-the-philippine-archipelago-en

@ch0ccyra1n Comparatively and historically speaking, hierarchy is anomalous. That doesn't mean anarchy is natural vis-à-vis hierarchy, but that there's still hope.

Dhaka 2024 and the revolution in Bangladesh today proves that proletarian self-activity can absolutely win the day.

Always rubs me the wrong way when the IFI are still tagged as “Aglipayan” (at this point a reclaimed slur) while INC aren't tagged as “Manaloian.” One of these is clearly based on a cult of personality!

This toot was just yesterday? It really is every day Alan Moore is vindicated for saying comic book movies are fascist. Like wow, they're so infantilizing

https://ni.hil.ist/@abolisyonista/112909043970144319

Oh no, I found out Nick Joaquin was a bootlicker. He had a whole book dedicated to celebrating the Philippine Constabulary and their role in the transition to “democracy” entitled “The PC and EDSA: A Paean to the Peers of ‘86.” Bro....

@aby oh that's cool. Thanks for offering but I'm drowning in readings 😅