iriyan

ACAB without further political content is empty and useless. Whether it is an army of repression in the hands of the rich and powerful, a tool to enforce and maintain social/economic inequalities by force and threat of violence towards the underclass is a reason for ACAB. Whether in every class/social mobilization cops are always on the side of the rich and powerful to maintain inequality and injustice (even though they are legal) is a reasone to state ACAB. Not because they are a different breed of humans with a biological determinant to be unjust and cruel.

So be ware of content free ACAB and Antifa rhetoric that can be misleading towards a meaningless cop-hate. It is very much a class issue that cops are hated for a very good reason and for a long lasting history of grounds to be hated.

Both money and power can corrupt people to do great injustice for personal/individual gains and for providing the service as a role to the bosses. Whether it is a state sponsored official force to repress or an unofficial repression group of fascists, they both ultimately serve their masters well.

Apolitical ACAB/antifa is as dangerous as political apathy.

I just realized you are also Spanish and I have a funny old story for you. Some decades ago the woman I was with had a mother who was Spanish, father was from a Caribbean island and they lived in the US. The mother was born in Tangir Morocco from Spanish parents, I knew of this for a while but didn't think much more of it. At some period elections were coming up and between joke and casual discussion the mother said she was and will always vote republican (the more conservative of the two conservative parties dominating US elections). I dared asked why and she said my father was republican so I am a republican too. Republico in Spain in her father's time meant he was against fascism and Franco. To confirm how much of a republico he was she explained that his friends (fishermen) called him Rojo. So I returned and I said that not only was he an anti-fascist he must have been a communist. She went crazy and didn't want to hear about it, but she said the entire family and many relatives were exiled from Spain because they were "republican".

The youngest son in early teen age, somehow paid extra attention and found this discussion interesting, so I offered to bring him books or what to ask for in library. I guess because he never met his grandfather but had his name became overly interested on what all this really meant. A few years later he has a music group playing songs about class war, filling up his school and neighborhood walls with graffiti about class war, and dedicated his life to radical anti-capitalism.

I had a cat named rojo for a while and many times I thought of this story when I used his name.

Rojo Vive no struggle is ever waste ... it travels through time and generations, it is a seed that grows and replants itself and will never be uprooted.

You make it sound as coming out of the closet :)

Realities vary so much from different parts of the world, in some social situations it would be a shame not to be one due to the history of the family, the community. Although in many such realities many people were communist without really deeply knowing what this meant, and had many contradicting practices between what they claimed and what they really were. There were religious communists, communists who did nothing else in their life than enterprise and devise ways to make more money (and exploiting everyone around them), some were family abusers, cheaters, cons, etc. To make things worse some were even racist and ethnocentric, while defending their communist identity. But there are such places, social situations.

I had even witnessed an entire village of communists calling the cops to do a massive blockade of a beach and arresting and fining young people for free camping, because they owned campgrounds and rented rooms to tourists and this was bad competition, to be camping free near "their beach".

Hopefully, since it is by choice and not by birth or origin, you will take your new public identity with more respect and live accordingly.

I am not sure of what you mean of a dialectic relation, whether it exists or not between them. As long as you can categorize them, you can realize conflict of interests, and friction between groups, there is a dialectic relation. Whether it is explained fully by traditional Marxist class analysis or not is debatable. In other words, it is not the dialectic's fault the theory is incomplete or wrong, or Marx can't be held accountable for future fragmentation of the "working class" into internally struggling sub-classes.

In the old days, in industrial settings where capitalist model of production was based on, people more or less entered production as equals. There wasn't much schooling needed or available to the working class, and many entered industrial work as teens. With seniority and good record of obedient hard working people who gained experience and displayed high aptitude on the specific work, would get elevated as supervisors and trainers of younger workers. Imagine people being engaged in industrial manufacturing from 12 or 15 till the age they just dropped dead in the assembly line. Very few ever reached the current age of retirement, and there was no retirement benefits, private or government provided.

After ww2 especially, the working class had attained the right to have access to education, laws in many industrial countries to prevent children from working, and vocational/trading schools becoming more of a norm than someone dropping off school at 15 and getting a factory job. Also universities and colleges became more and more accessible to the masses, and sometimes affordable by the working poor's children. This provided industry with a way to distinguish entry level ranks, and a managerial class was born. People who had never worked before, due to a certificate or degree would be placed higher up in hierarchy than people who had worked for years. This provided them a false class consciousness, they weren't workers, they were managers or administrators because of their education. They behaved very differently than an aged experienced supervisor who started from 0 and knew what it was like, and saw himself as a worker, not something different. The owners saw a benefit of this fragmentation, this "managerial class" would develop owner like consciousness and would become very conscious of the very fact that it was manual work exploitation that produced profit, and out of that profit was their position necessary. The higher the exploitation and oppression they would exercise the higher the profitability, therefore their job security.

I believe generally the left and traditional syndicalism, because of the theoretical constrains of traditional class analysis never knew how to deal with this. They were eager to get more people registered to the union but had no theoretical tools to learn how to discriminate against management. In many cases those same internal class enemies would make it up to the top ranks of union hierarchy and help in diluting struggle to maintain "peace" with the owners, seek negotiation instead of clash, and further serve the interests of owners to prevent strikes. In some horrible moments of union history they were the same responsible for splitting unions up in terms of race, gender, or just varying interests of different ranks of workers. See hospitals for example, especially in countries where private health care was more the norm than exception, physician unions, nurse unions, non-medical hospital workers, one boycotting each others' actions, and rarely acting as a unit. The owners learned all too well to play this game against them, set one group against the other.

I remember this long term massive strike within UPS (US private parcel shipping company) that brough the largest transportation company of the country to its knees. Management, who did not strike, some had commercial licenses as to improve their chances of getting a job there, had 0 experience, and offered to drive when drivers and warehouse workers were on strike. Within days there were trucks overturned, wrecked, lost, destroyed. From this strike FedEx and DHL were born or became giants overtaking what UPS lost. UPS caved into financial world demands to sell itself in the "markets" and stop being a "family owned business". The market lost has yet to be recovered. It also became less competitive due to backling to union pressure and allowing some of the demands to become policy. This an Eastern airline strikes were pretty much the end of a long history of union struggle in the US. Ever since the movement became so fragmented and owners became armed with systems specifically designed to defeat mass movement and strikes.

There have been Marxist scholars, some of m-l tradition, who argued that high/higher education role in the US specifically was to provide fragmentation criteria among workers for bosses to exploit. At work, very little of what is learned in school transfers. One thing that does is subservience and obedience to those above, and an elitist attitude towards those below. Ask anyone who went through grad school if there were 22-25 year old grad.students mistreating 40+ yo clerical stuff who had to do work "for them".

Why was Pol Pot shooting managers, experts, highly educated people in the head? Why were they perceived as an enemy to farm workers? Cruel and nasty, but he may have been right about some things.

Think of a biologis, working at a lab, wearing a white robe and being in a nearly sterile environment, alalyzing sample after sample. They are not managing anyone, neither is their opinion on other workers weigh in firing, demoting or promoting anyone. A teacher or professor on the other hand is managing students, and can be abusive due to the power she/he holds on them (pass/fail them).

A plumber, or an electrician can work alone, they are self employed (meaning they work for a different boss in every site they go to work at) but are they above workers, maybe industrial plumbers working for a large manufacturer/constuction co. In some repair work due to the nature of the work one may need an assistant because 2 hands are not enough, or are not long enough, .. (AC installations).

So what boils down as the difference among them is the authority they exercise within the workplace. The higher in hierarchy the more their interests are closely resembling the owners', the lower they are the more likely they are to be in alliance at least with workers struggles.

I think through your argument and question you provide a false definition or perceived difference and others here respond based on the false premise of this difference.

The difference between "blue collar" "white collar" is not whether the one is working inisde an office/lab/building or outside in the field/machine room/dock etc. The difference has to do with the hierarchy of work/production itself. Whether you are doing the actual work that is part of production or overseeing the work done by others. Whether you are a secretary, a truck driver, a lab analysis technician, or a stock room clerk is not what makes you white collar. To oversee and direct the work of others doing work is what makes you white collar, even if you are in the field, whether you wear a suit or blue overalls doesn't matter. I even had worked in a machine shop many ages ago where the owners themselves (2) would wear blue overalls and come to the shop and actually work the machines and tell new comers how to do something right, or how they wanted it done. Meanwhile there were people who wrote code/programmed machines to do mass-production (3d printing they call it 40y later) and never wore blue uniforms, they sat on a desk, read blueprints and typed in codes.

In some work settings those who are "managers" and oversee others' work can terrorize them to do it right or do more or face unemployment, they do evaluations and if they don't like your face or think threatened by you as knowing more than they do, especially when you prove them wrong, and will burry your future of raise or promotion. Those are problematic when they are in union as they act as snitches of the bosses and are really never on the side of the worker.

There can be engineers, material scientists, expert machinery technicians in the field, with construction boots whose only office may be a trailer parked in the mud. The bosses (owners) can not live without them, but their actual role of getting work done correctly or snitching on who is lurking and who is not, is a different issue.

Who tells you what to do and what to not do, who threatens you with having work tomorrow or not having any, or how necessary it is to put in overtime (sometimes for free) or don't expect to work too long or at a higher pay, or in a better position, are they in the union?

Work for home is some bullshit notion that never did and never will work. The pathology of the capitalist is to actually see the army of the exploited and their managers on their means of production, not invisibly having work done off-site. There is "out-sourcing" for those things that can be done off-site. It is almost as a test to see who and when are essential and with the production can do without. So if your boss says take this task and do it home and bring the results in (or mail them in), it is a trap for being able to do without you. Those that physically must be at work are always more secure than those that work from home. Say people working on IT who must have access to the systems that need to be available for those lurking at home on their pijamas. If the servers are down and don't respond there is not much you can do remotely to reset them or solve the problem.

There is much of capitalism producing and reproducing psycho-pathology that results from the insecurity of the bosses, which of course is caused by class struggle. They have no illusion there position in wealth and power is never secure, everyone around them can benefit from their demise. In this respect they want to see faces, they want to employee people who are actually useless in production but assure them their ownership and operation is secure. So they pay extra for some white collar thugs to maintain a buffer zone between the exploiter and the exploited. They want someone else to be mean and nasty to workers so they don't have the emotional weight of doing it themselves.

US liberals in particular tend to dig a tiny hole on sand during war that other liberals started, and pretend there is no war. Sand is supplied freely by Saudis together with loudspeakers to emphasize oppressive Chinese social policy and human right violations.

If it wasn't for liberals capitalism would have ended long ago.

Most linux is open source, right, meaning packages of distros are also opensource. You can edit fedora packaging and build modified versions and get fedora to boot and run with runit, or s6, but to say Fedora allows choice is a lie.

You mean in the historic documents their ideology is based on or on the actual rhetoric they use now (past 30-50 years) ?