Alex Birnel

“We live well enough to have the luxury to get ourselves sick with purely social, psychological stress.”
― Robert M. Sapolsky, A Primate's Memoir: A Neuroscientist's Unconventional Life Among the Baboons

“The police cannot be reformed—more than a century of experience proves this beyond a reasonable doubt. Even if we tried, and we do continue to try, police resist tooth and nail even the smallest reforms and the most minimal accountability. They do so, in part, because ultimately they want zero accountability. They also do so simply because they can. As we have seen, the history of American police is the history of their expanding power, and it is a voracious power that accepts no limits: a fascist power.”
― Geo Maher, A World Without Police: How Strong Communities Make Cops Obsolete

“A world without police is therefor a world in which the police are obsolete, useless—a world where they serve literally no purpose. Seen from this angle, we're already halfway there: the police are useless. They don't do what they claim, they don't protect and serve, much less prevent, care, or support. At the same time, the police do play an essential, indeed indispensable role in fabricating and upholding the world we inhabit today, premised as it is on the domination and exploitation of the vast majority.”
― Geo Maher, A World Without Police: How Strong Communities Make Cops Obsolete

“Maximum awareness and respect for the scholarship of historians outside the boundaries of Marxism is not incompatible with rigorous pursuit of a Marxist historical enquiry: it is a condition of it. Conversely, Marx and Engels themselves can never be taken simply at their word: the errors of their writings on the past should not be evaded or ignored, but identified and criticized. To do so is not to depart from historical materialism, but to rejoin it.”
― Perry Anderson, Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism