The reports this week about police state brutality in Italy have genuinely shocked me. I was clearly naive.
On the one hand it makes anarchist revolution look deeply attractive, but it also begs the question:
Imagine a cooperative society has prevailed in large parts of Scotland, to the extent that there is no de facto government or police. The means of production are held in common and the means of coercion are being put beyond use.
How do we do this without making society completely vulnerable to an external or internal fascist military force? Watching how the Italian police treated protestors in Genoa, looking at how the US has installed military dictators every time its interests are threatened by a popular movement, imagining what a future global empire - Chinese? European (again)? - may look, how does the anarcho-communist conceive of "security"?
Also, on a more practical level, I would like to see the police that perpetrated the violence in Genoa brought to justice, and I understand this could take many forms in an anarchist society. But my biggest reason isn't revenge against the individual fascist police themselves, it's because the state has acted with immunity from its own laws. This is an opportunity to highlight the fragility of the system, the lies that undergird it, and the brutality at its core.
But the most effective way to highlight this without giving the fascists further succour seems to be through the legal apparatus that exist, seeing as they've broken their own laws. I am inclined to write to my MP, MEP etc. to call for political pressure. But you disapprove of this engagement with the state, right?
