The classic one is, of course, “ACAB,” but I’ve already gotten into these arguments so I will spare you reading too much on it. Let it suffice to say all US cops are bastards (or, you know, they serve an especially malignant bastard function), all German cops, all UK cops, etc. But, to find a diplomatic way of getting this across, the security patrols deployed by the Panthers were also cops if that word has a non-moral meaning.
I think, and this is why I even bring ACAB up, that it gives people something to rally around and maybe even encouraged them to see things differently, and they get attached to it as essentially a dogma without seeing the analysis that produced it (or justified it, in any case). The slogan becomes the analysis. It becomes what exists in place of having reasons for what you believe, even when good reasons are out there!
I don’t know how to do dividing lines
I think it’s pretty funny when some asshole chud gets fired or injured or whatever and someone comments “another kkrakkka down, unlimited genocide on the first world”. The humor comes from the absurdity, that there is no such genocide in the works and the subject in this case usually isn’t even dead. It seems like a perfectly fine meme.
So then a huge hurricane hits Florida, we have hundreds of normal, mostly poor people dying and people are saying this and, when someone goes “Hey, that’s not right” they double down. [I was busy when this was happening, this isn’t me complaining about being dog piled or whatever]
The weird thing about it is that I thought it was 100% a joke, but some people got attached to the phrase in a way that reminds me of people going “ACAB means ACAB” as though it’s anything other than an unhinged exclamation that is funny because it’s unhinged. I don’t know how this happened, but I am forced to conclude that the way the meme was treated up to this point was conditioning people in a detrimental way. Or maybe they were always bloodthirsty chauvinists, but that seems like the greater leap to me.
Of course there were a couple of pathetic, cowardly losers in the mix saying “Oh, don’t take it so seriously, it’s a shitposting site”. Those people I direct to 4chan. Antisocial behavior is antisocial behavior, and calling it meaningless to escape that it does have a meaning and that meaning is quite negative is contemptible behavior that should be rejected by the policy of any space that claims to be leftist.
Anyway, I don’t really have a call to action or anything, except perhaps: Oppose Slogan Worship.
I feel like slogans are strained by their multiple functions:
Outward facing publicization, something to chant and that represents the group’s views
Inward facing summary, serving to distill a hopefully well-investigated position into something applicable to the current situation
Because this kind of slogan goes hand in hand with social movements that use chanting at protests the nature of the protest should be kept in mind. These are not universal maxims and should not be the core value to base everything else on, but an abstracted outer layer, to use in the context of spreading ideas to those unfamiliar with them, while also being an accurate representation of the application of values to the current situation.
ACAB is a phrase originating in the west, to protest the hand in glove compact between police and capital. Non bastard cops can/do exist, but for a western protest in thr current moment, chant ACAB all day long. If people want to apply ACAB to security patrols outside this dynamic, it is refusing investigation of their relationship to the power structures they serve.
No investigation, no right to speak, but yeah, the exposure of many/most people to the nature of such movements begins and ends with the slogan, so I understand the need to accurately represent views may contradict the need to agitate for change in the present.
(Is this an accurate dialectic between in/out-facing functions of slogans?)
Makes sense 2 me