One of the main tools for establishing and preserving the capitalist
social order is the "police", which after becoming an institution fromthe 19th century onwards, would focus on crime and the control of public
order in the face of the pressure of the workers' movement. ----
Currently, with the dominant neoliberalism, this security, exercised by
both the State and private companies, fulfils a material function:
guaranteeing private property, profit and investments (security of the
economy). But, in addition, security has a symbolic role: in its name,
society is ordered in a hierarchical way, watching in a very special way
the poor, immigrants, young people..., controlling dissident groups and
thus guaranteeing that all the problems that cities and neighbourhoods
suffer due to social inequalities are magically solved through the
accusation, persecution and punishment of said subjects.
Reforming the Police?
Following the Black Lives Matter struggles triggered by the deaths of
thousands of African-descendants at the hands of the police in recent
years, we have received a series of institutional proposals that
consider that, in order to avoid such deaths, a series of reforms should
be made to the institution.
Based on the experience we have in our own country, only some reforms
focused on the transparency of police work have the potential to subject
it to public scrutiny. Examples of this are the powers of citizens to
ask for the license plate number or to record police actions, or the
programs that force officers to compute the racial profile of the people
they identify in order to find out if racist criteria are being used.
However, the first measures mentioned were prohibited in Spain by the
Gag Law.
The bulk of police reforms that we have seen in recent decades, far from
reducing the growing police power, have accentuated it through different
mechanisms. Through "soft" police figures (tutor agents, mediating
agents, community police, police officers who give talks in schools...),
the integration and fluid communication with neighbours, students... is
sought, making people more likely to become police collaborators.
Another perverse effect of these police reforms is that the institution
does not cease to grow in competences, budgets and legitimacy with the
new tasks, while not losing an iota of presence in the most traditional
tasks (crimes), which feeds a monster within the State itself that makes
it ungovernable, even for the political leaders themselves.
Fighting against repression, yes, but not only
The correlation of forces between the population most affected by the
crisis and the financial elites that benefit from it is absolutely
favourable to the latter. At their service, a neoliberal State that
tries to guarantee "social peace" less and less by distributing wealth
and power, more and more by imposing it through repression. Their tools:
a legal framework that criminalizes poverty and protest (Gag Law); a
social, political and media discourse that incites the fears of the
middle classes (squatting, theft, tenant debt) while promoting war among
the poor (politically constructed scarcity and convenient scapegoats
such as the migrant population).
Is it necessary to be alert to this increase in repression against
protest expressions? Our lives are literally at stake. However, we must
make the leap from a defensive (and necessary) position to an offensive
one: the time has come to ask ourselves what emancipatory paradigm of
security and protection could be imagined and rejected in practice,
against and beyond neoliberal security.
Towards new security paradigms
In the face of police presence and actions, people who protest in
demonstrations or political actions often shout: "Social spending, not
police spending!" The slogan illustrates an idea of security related to
material conditions capable of guaranteeing a habitable present and a
future free of threats. A paradigm of security freed from the fear of
imminent dismissal, from insomnia in the face of the imminence of an
eviction, from anxiety in the face of the arrival of new and unpayable
bills. Security understood as a possibility of guaranteeing our social
reproduction depends on our capacity to carry out an eco-social
transition capable of decommodifying our social relations.
Security conceived in emancipatory terms should be provided through
prevention, protection practices and social agreements of an
anti-punitive nature and a restorative and healing vocation.
A new security paradigm would have to address the need for protection
against violence arising from many relations of domination (sexist,
racist, homophobic aggressions, etc.) or, simply, against miserable
attitudes that can cause deep damage. The questions would be: if we are
capable of imagining post-capitalist societies, how can we guarantee the
protection of democratically decided norms in them?
We believe that, beyond the neoliberal State and its violence, there is
not and will not be any society in which, either because of relations of
domination that are always updatable, or because of the miseries or
errors of individual existences, violence and conflicts are something
inherent to human relations and, even in the most just and egalitarian
dreamed society, we will have to see how to deal with them.
Our challenge is, therefore, to sow emancipatory security paradigms and
explore ways to make them grow and mature. Security conceived in
emancipatory terms should be provided through prevention, protection and
social agreements that are anti-punitive and have a restorative and
healing vocation. At all levels, from the smallest community space to,
ideally, the largest organized social group.
At all levels, in order to become anti-punitive and restorative,
protection and justice practices should, from the start, unmask the
traps of neutrality, individual guilt and false eye-for-an-eye
solutions. Since the imposition of capitalism in the 16th century, the
social order is, above all, an order that defends property, and the
powers that guarantee its safeguarding-among them, the police order and
justice-are anything but neutral.
For its part, the individualization of guilt exempts societies and/or
communities from taking responsibility for the damages generated within
them. What of what happened has social causes? What part of the violence
produced could have been prevented or alleviated by the action or
omission of a community? The criminal/victim pair avoids questions,
hides collective responsibility behind individual atonement and cuts off
the possibility of short-circuiting the reproduction of the same ravages.
Another idea that is as useless as it is counterproductive is that of
punishment, since it prevents laying the foundations for a given
aggression not to be repeated: that is, reaching agreements that include
all the parties involved. We are talking about working with the people
who commit the damage, as well as with those who suffer it, to
establish, in a community and/or social way, the best ways to restore
the damage caused and to heal both individual pain and collective wounds.
These ways of understanding security without police and guaranteeing it
through anti-punitive justice and protection devices are not only
possible, but are also practiced daily in some corners of this planet.
Some are geographically further away, such as the experiences in
Acapatzingo
(https://desinformemonos.org/acapatzingo-el-otro-mundo-en-medio-de-la-ciudad/)
or in Rojava
(https://desinformemonos.org/como-abolir-la-policia-lecciones-de-rojava/).
Others are very close, such as the political commitment of AAMAS
(https://ctxt.es/es/20220401/Firmas/39365/feminismo-autoorganizacion-barrio-antipunitivismo-comunidades-violencia-machista.htm),
in Manresa.
There are many experiences that we do not yet know, many others to
recover, even more to invent. This is the challenge.
https://www.cnt.es/noticias/seguridad-mas-alla-del-capitalismo/
_________________________________________
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