Based. Exist solely as a public good.
Some can be reactionary but that’s with every profession.
Firefighters have saved more people’s lives in 1 year than all of the capitalist police forces have ever
Truth spoken
Very much needed service. Also the one that is often ignored or overlooked by the neoliberal ghouls, so it works fairly good even in places like Poland.
I like them
Ok imo
Met some Marxist firefighters, they’re mostly good people. Honestly I think if you can volunteer as a firefighter it might be worth considering, you can learn a lot of revolutionary skills. Just about anyone can walk into their lessons too, they’ll teach you a lot of different things like triage and basic first aid.
Still enforcers of the state. They also help evict people.
This is not bait, y’all need to stop being naive about fire departments. They have shut down protests and let buildings burn because the people inside weren’t white. They’ve let entire neighborhoods burn down. They cut off utilities to people refusing eviction.
Now think of the ways FD investigations can wrongfully blame people of certain backgrounds? Letting landlords off the hook?
Enforcers of not having your house be on fire and having to have a smoke alarm that will save your life.
In the U.S., at least, there is undoubtedly some truth to the claim that firefighters still enforce the will of the state and act as representatives of it.
The Birmingham campaign comes to mind.
And firefighters are still being misused this way, as another of the state’s weapons to quell dissent.
They also help evict people.
Source?
Firefighters will be used to end building occupations (like someone refusing to move out and protests from neighbors to keep them in) by cutting power and other utilities to force the occupants out. Firefighters are also used against protestors.
We shouldn’t be naive, this is an extension of the reddit ass zeitgeist that firefighters are noble and good while police are stupid and bad. Firefighters can be just has pig.
this might be another primarily USian thing, just like police fill all kinds of unusual roles over there
Firefighters are still serviced for the Bourgeoisie, of any bourgeois state. I’m confident I could find firefighter racism in Europe, against refugees Africans and MEsterners as well as Romani people.
Settlers states in the Americas all have this problem.
Remember that for Gramsci the “state” includes the civil society, firefighters are included. Their “misbehavior” towards racialized people is actually systemic racism being upheld.
This is an anarchist position, the idea that everything must be abolished (or opportunistically called something else), because we myopically only look at their misuse under capitalism / capitalist states.
All these institutions have a class character, which is why there’s a difference between capitalist vs socialist rule of law, police, firefighters, medicine, etc. The communist line isn’t to abolish all these things, its to make sure they are controlled by the people, and serve our interests, rather than capitalism.
Well we are talking about firefighters in the current state of affairs, not hypotheticals. OP didn’t ask what we think of firefighters in China or Cuba.
You should be giving me the benefit of the doubt that I’m speaking about a real issue of people naively throwing trust at firefighters in states where they are used for oppression. It’s not “anarchist” to point this shit out. Like no shit soldiers and cops are bad in a DotB, when we talk shit about cops, police in DotPs are not included in the discussion.
OP’s question was just “thoughts on firefighters?” Police, firefighters, etc under DotP should always be included in the discussion, as there are many AES states with firefighters, who would probably disagree with your characterization of all of them. I recommend prefacing it with “capitalist cops”, “capitalist firefighters” to be more precise.
You responded to a comment that specifically did include the qualifier ‘bourgeois’. People regularly post about ACAB here and elsewhere in communist spaces without any prefacing and it’s practically never taken the wrong way. If anything, your critique would be better applied to the original post than Kaffe’s comment.
Yeah I doubt AES firefighters give a shit that I’m criticizing firefighters in bougie states, and they would understand that many of these criticism wouldn’t land on them, because shit like eviction and water gunning racialized people is not part of their job description. AES firefighters aren’t gonna “not all firefighters” this conversation, that would be weird for them to do in the first place.
What’s the point to talk about “thoughts on firefighters” in AES states? Is it not a fair assumption that OP would only bring this up if firefighters in non-AES states, which almost all of us on this site live, were not controversial?
The most populous country on earth is a socialist state. It wasn’t clear to me that you weren’t referring to them as well, which is probably why your first comment got downvoted.
I see. Interesting thought
Honestly this is valid but my argument would be that rather than police the firefighters are not systemically designed to oppress, they’ve just been used in those ways. Like cops exist solely to oppress, I don’t think firefighters exist for that purpose rather they’ve just been used or commanded to in reactionary branches if that makes sense
