If you thing that currently, cops are protecting people being abused, you are misinforms.
This is not something we have to thing for after the revolution; we have to solve it now. And this is not the sole respectability of anarchists or activists.
In my organisations, we do. We have a procedure to listening victims and gathering their needs. Most of the time, their is material need (and we have a solidarity fund to response), and keep away the aggressor from the place the survivors evolve. If He/sh comply, we start a mediation in order to not let the aggressor alone and let him evolve. If not, that personne is warn that he/she is not welcome in thoses places.
If we threat the survivor again, or if force himself into those places and refuse to leave, we may make him to, by force. If you think that could make us like cops, our comrades could agree, and we may have to justify ourselves in front of our community.
This one of many point of view one “how to deal with violence”. Their is not common solution, each place need to inform and try out. We need to be better than fascists with guns and no accountability to the people; that leave a lot place.
So basically vigilante violence with zero standards and regulations is your grand idea of replacing an actual police force because you think they lack a proper amount of standards and regulations? Can’t make up this clownery
Your comment was pretty hard to read with all the typos, but I still think I got the core of it just fine. What you’re proposing is already the case with modern police forces. The only difference is that the police now common standards and regulations they must follow nationwide, but under anarchy there will be no oversight at all.
What? It’s almost like you think burning witches at the stake and hanging people from trees based upon their skin color is a bad thing. Don’t you know that large groups of random people are always the most logical and best thinkers the human race has to offer.
If you thing that currently, cops are protecting people being abused, you are misinforms.
If you think we don’t need cops, you’ve never needed cops.
Our problem isn’t law enforcement as a concept, it’s how we manage (or don’t manage) the people who are supposed to work for us. The whole institution needs to be rebuilt from the ground up, but we need societal guardrails. I’m sure there are many ways you can effectively work on reducing domestic abuse but we need people who can enforce the laws of the people by force, who are also bound by the governing body that the people control.
Yep, I do agree. So maybe we need to define things.
According to Foucault, the police is not about law enforcement. Magistrate interprets laws to make the police actions legals afterward. I would not gave example, but you could read his work on power and punishments. He describes how the use of violence structure the society as a whole, and how it does absolutely not even try to prevent violence in doing so.
It’s of course more complex, but to summary : the police as not the same social function before and after the modernisation.
For example, miliciens keeping cities safe before that are people with another work, that have to bee miliciens. Everyone that could do so, have to do that work from time to time (the corvée). And they have to protect people. So they would requisitions empty places for people without housings.
The modernization militarize this forces, centralize how they work and shift their mission and recrutements. Cops are now specialize forces, with military training, and a strict hierarchy. Colonization, brutalization of war (“Free company”), enclosures, …
A lot of anarchists do refers to police with a compatible definition of Foucault and weber : the “monopoly of legitimate violence”
This violence could not be broken or diminish if the force got social legitimacy and monopoly. In my previous example, I described the use of violence that is legitimate by default, and could be judge by everyone. Others gave example when this use is not specialize, so diminish this monopoly.
Some could says we want reforms police, and use a different word. We do not. Institution reproduce themselves through the people in it. Even the most social advance organization for “law enforcement” with former cops in it will go wrong. It took time to change one habits
Forgive me but I do have some difficulty with your English, but if this is the point you are making:
Some could says we want reforms police, and use a different word. We do not. Institution reproduce themselves through the people in it. Even the most social advance organization for “law enforcement” with former cops in it will go wrong.
Then I will say, just because we are likely to make the same mistakes over and over is not an excuse to stop doing a thing if it helps, and I cannot subscribe to the belief that just because a thing CAN go wrong that it necessarily MUST go wrong. We can manage our world better with better policies and social structures, to abandon something just because it’s been misused is like not using dinner knives anymore because they’re used for stabbings.
Either we abandon modernity or we overhaul our system for maintaining and preserving it. I would respect the anarchist position more if it said that we need to return to a more primitive lifestyle. I would still think it’s dumb, but I would respect it more.
We hate our police, but we would hate the alternative more. Those two facts can exist side-by-side without conflict, it’s called nuance. I want a shining, gleaming future where people leave their doors unlocked, but we don’t get there with police, and we also don’t get there without police. We need new structures for dealing with evil, and we need to do a lot better in admitting and recognizing that evil is real and it WILL take advantage of whatever utopian visions you have. It just will.
Then I will say, just because we are likely to make the same mistakes over and over is not an excuse to stop doing a thing if it helps, and I cannot subscribe to the belief that just because a thing CAN go wrong that it necessarily MUST go wrong. We can manage our world better with better policies and social structures, to abandon something just because it’s been misused is like not using dinner knives anymore because they’re used for stabbings.
Yep. And to make better policies and social structure, we need to understand why it goes wrong. Modern police has been made with mercenaries, soldiers (18/19e centuries), slave hunters (19/20e centuries), gang members paid to terrorize union members, and nazis. Those people were fired for their skills, and taught others cops to do like them. Because it was need by the ruling class to keep the inequality that favor them : to keep slave in slavery, workers wish small wages, or keep away racialize and colonized people from the infrastructure build with loot of other countries.
I’m not saying that cops are evil people. Some cops know that kind of issues and want to be “a lesser evil”, others want to be good but will believe in some stuff that give sense to the violence they are making (racial inequity, nationalism, … ). In the end, a white collar triggering war, or funding war crime would have a better treatment than a hobo stealing.
My point is : the social structure are stronger than individual will. And the police is a social structure. Again, police as an institution with people, a hierarchy, and an history that produce it. The social function “protect everyone against violence” is important, and is not the police we are talking about.
A lot of them unironically believe that abusers like that will magically stop after the revolution because they think that things like wife beating are caused by capitalism and the state
The community itself deals with it. This could be a rotating group of mediators with the ability to escalate issues as needed for resolution. The process is almost always democratic and when involving the whole is unreasonable or impractical, a rotating committee-based system is generally used. For example, when a jury, verdict, or punishment is needed.
This might sound like an excuse (community deals with it), but human is wired to live in self-organized ~100 people groups. It gets nasty only if the groups get much bigger.
Problem is, in a modern society, you can’t leave every decision (like, what to teach) to the group only. Which means you need a framework in which the groups are embedded. And that framework needs mechanisms against abuse and to enforce some decisions. Which then again is a state.
I don’t think their could be anarchists society with keeping inequality. So I do agree we could not solves issue link to wealth inequality. But those inequality have to solve first. This is a common point view among libertarian communists, anarcho-communist and anarcho-syndicalists.
Ofr the inter-communities issues, the whole thing is to create common interests :
if a place have more funds, the production have to be split. To make this solution acceptable, the work needed could be equally distributed among thoses communities. The idea is to prevent wealth accumulation, create link among communities, and make the live more comfortable for everyone. Other solutions may be used, like cultural one to gather people from many places (physical activities, free party, …)
Some working places need people from different places to be run. Like hospital, university, or power plant. This common need may prevent those agressions, but otherwise, if one community refuse mediation, some non vital production may be stopped. Like electricity, radio, or other cultural stuff
Again, their is no common recipe. This stuff have to be experiment from now to get more and more efficient.
So how do you think it should be handled when one community protects their criminal who has attacked another community? What if one community becomes richer than another and therefore the other communities are unable to project justice onto them for being assholes?
… You’re kidding, right? Are you 5, or something? It’s a serious question, I’m trying to understand how someone can write that down and be serious about it.
You will always need police, because there will always be misbehaving elements in society. Be it due to mental illness or plain psychopaths, doesn’t really matter, you need a trained group of people designated to be the ones to keep society nice. Let’s call them “police”
From the mad ramblings of what you wrote, it sounded like the description of police and a judge / justice system only much, much worse. You want random untrained idiots to decide on justice matters? I’m sorry no.
I want a judge who has been trained and learned how to be ethical and impartial. I want police that has been trained, especially in de-escalation, who have been checked for not being psychopaths.
There is nothing wrong with the basics of current police systems (not you US, you’re fucked up) we just need more focus on police being trained better (or, in case of the US, trained at all), being monitored better by independent groups to ensure abuses stay at a minimum.
We need changes like limiting net worth. If we limit net worth to (just an example) 1 million dollar and any income after that goes 100% to taxes, we don’t need to change anything else. Nobody can be super rich anymore, nobody can have crazy bad influence anymore, we’d literally be all the same.
Governments get huge tax incomes that can be used for free healthcare, free education, universal basic income, even. It’s a simple single change that will have the most impact.
If you’re interested in how a society without police could look like, there’s a good book by Ursula K. Le Guine, called " The Dispossessed".
If you’re interested about more theoretical work on why the police is a problem, you can search for “Abolition” or “Restorative Justice”. Especially for the latter there are loads of Videos explaining how to deal with unjust behavior of individuals.
There is a ton of theoretical work about how to resolve conflict and harm done without involving the police or the penal system. Its a very interesting subject and just imagining a society without police and penal justice can make for good utopia’s to strive for. Maybe it doesn’t work, but working towards a society that doesn’t need those systems is worth it in any case.
Here’s the issue with joke ideologies like anarchy, they only ever work in theory. They’re so deeply flawed that they collapse in on themselves any time they’re attempted in real life. Therefore, these ideologies only ever exists in fiction books and philosophical theories that revolve around unrealistic hypotheticals. In other words, anarchy is as a concept is nothing more than a thought exercise because it’s too fundamentally flawed to be anything more.
I you okay that police kill us fro moving from a place to another, getting food, or just by racism, I’m not interested in your opinion. But I’ve got another question : why shall we care of the life of someone who clearly don’t give a shit a ours ?
I answered the question accurately and good faith based on anarchist theory and actual implementations by anarchist autonomous zones like Mexico’s Zapatistas. If you don’t like the answer or agree with it philosophically, that is entirely on you.
… You’re kidding, right? Are you 5, or something? It’s a serious question, I’m trying to understand how someone can write that down and be serious about it.
I was answering a question I know the answer to, not proselytizing. But you stay classy, eh?
Ok interesting, thanks for the answer. I’m also curious what exactly “community” envisions? Does it just refer to existing towns/cities/city divisions? Or would it be necessary for the existing areas to be “broken up” into smaller, closer communities? My thinking is that in large cities there are often a huge number of people, and yet very little sense of community between them, so I am doubtful how well a community driven system could scale?
I’m not personally convinced the model is scalable. It has worked in small, mostly rural autonomous zones — provided there wasn’t a bigger, better armed government murdering them for having the gall to be independent — but I can’t imagine any way in which it scales up and remains stable.
Anarchists will generally acknowledge this issue and argue the theory that zones need to remain small and independent and must cooperate with other independent zones each with certain specializations. For example, one zone might have certain types of medical care expertise and another might grow certain types of crops and another might focus on energy production. I’m sure there are many more theories for how an ideal anarchist society would structured, but that’s the one I hear the most.
So, genuine question: under anarchism, what would be the societal response to, say, someone abusing their partner, or a serial killer or something?
If you thing that currently, cops are protecting people being abused, you are misinforms. This is not something we have to thing for after the revolution; we have to solve it now. And this is not the sole respectability of anarchists or activists.
In my organisations, we do. We have a procedure to listening victims and gathering their needs. Most of the time, their is material need (and we have a solidarity fund to response), and keep away the aggressor from the place the survivors evolve. If He/sh comply, we start a mediation in order to not let the aggressor alone and let him evolve. If not, that personne is warn that he/she is not welcome in thoses places.
If we threat the survivor again, or if force himself into those places and refuse to leave, we may make him to, by force. If you think that could make us like cops, our comrades could agree, and we may have to justify ourselves in front of our community.
This one of many point of view one “how to deal with violence”. Their is not common solution, each place need to inform and try out. We need to be better than fascists with guns and no accountability to the people; that leave a lot place.
So basically vigilante violence with zero standards and regulations is your grand idea of replacing an actual police force because you think they lack a proper amount of standards and regulations? Can’t make up this clownery
I said the exact opposite. Read again
Your comment was pretty hard to read with all the typos, but I still think I got the core of it just fine. What you’re proposing is already the case with modern police forces. The only difference is that the police now common standards and regulations they must follow nationwide, but under anarchy there will be no oversight at all.
What? It’s almost like you think burning witches at the stake and hanging people from trees based upon their skin color is a bad thing. Don’t you know that large groups of random people are always the most logical and best thinkers the human race has to offer.
They’re an oxymoron because they simultaneously advocate for and against mob justice without a hint of irony
If you think we don’t need cops, you’ve never needed cops.
Our problem isn’t law enforcement as a concept, it’s how we manage (or don’t manage) the people who are supposed to work for us. The whole institution needs to be rebuilt from the ground up, but we need societal guardrails. I’m sure there are many ways you can effectively work on reducing domestic abuse but we need people who can enforce the laws of the people by force, who are also bound by the governing body that the people control.
Yep, I do agree. So maybe we need to define things.
According to Foucault, the police is not about law enforcement. Magistrate interprets laws to make the police actions legals afterward. I would not gave example, but you could read his work on power and punishments. He describes how the use of violence structure the society as a whole, and how it does absolutely not even try to prevent violence in doing so.
It’s of course more complex, but to summary : the police as not the same social function before and after the modernisation. For example, miliciens keeping cities safe before that are people with another work, that have to bee miliciens. Everyone that could do so, have to do that work from time to time (the corvée). And they have to protect people. So they would requisitions empty places for people without housings.
The modernization militarize this forces, centralize how they work and shift their mission and recrutements. Cops are now specialize forces, with military training, and a strict hierarchy. Colonization, brutalization of war (“Free company”), enclosures, …
A lot of anarchists do refers to police with a compatible definition of Foucault and weber : the “monopoly of legitimate violence” This violence could not be broken or diminish if the force got social legitimacy and monopoly. In my previous example, I described the use of violence that is legitimate by default, and could be judge by everyone. Others gave example when this use is not specialize, so diminish this monopoly.
Some could says we want reforms police, and use a different word. We do not. Institution reproduce themselves through the people in it. Even the most social advance organization for “law enforcement” with former cops in it will go wrong. It took time to change one habits
Forgive me but I do have some difficulty with your English, but if this is the point you are making:
Then I will say, just because we are likely to make the same mistakes over and over is not an excuse to stop doing a thing if it helps, and I cannot subscribe to the belief that just because a thing CAN go wrong that it necessarily MUST go wrong. We can manage our world better with better policies and social structures, to abandon something just because it’s been misused is like not using dinner knives anymore because they’re used for stabbings.
Either we abandon modernity or we overhaul our system for maintaining and preserving it. I would respect the anarchist position more if it said that we need to return to a more primitive lifestyle. I would still think it’s dumb, but I would respect it more.
We hate our police, but we would hate the alternative more. Those two facts can exist side-by-side without conflict, it’s called nuance. I want a shining, gleaming future where people leave their doors unlocked, but we don’t get there with police, and we also don’t get there without police. We need new structures for dealing with evil, and we need to do a lot better in admitting and recognizing that evil is real and it WILL take advantage of whatever utopian visions you have. It just will.
Yep. And to make better policies and social structure, we need to understand why it goes wrong. Modern police has been made with mercenaries, soldiers (18/19e centuries), slave hunters (19/20e centuries), gang members paid to terrorize union members, and nazis. Those people were fired for their skills, and taught others cops to do like them. Because it was need by the ruling class to keep the inequality that favor them : to keep slave in slavery, workers wish small wages, or keep away racialize and colonized people from the infrastructure build with loot of other countries.
I’m not saying that cops are evil people. Some cops know that kind of issues and want to be “a lesser evil”, others want to be good but will believe in some stuff that give sense to the violence they are making (racial inequity, nationalism, … ). In the end, a white collar triggering war, or funding war crime would have a better treatment than a hobo stealing.
My point is : the social structure are stronger than individual will. And the police is a social structure. Again, police as an institution with people, a hierarchy, and an history that produce it. The social function “protect everyone against violence” is important, and is not the police we are talking about.
That’s the beauty of anarchism. If someone is beating their wife, that’s not your problem and you don’t have to care.
/s… maybe
A lot of them unironically believe that abusers like that will magically stop after the revolution because they think that things like wife beating are caused by capitalism and the state
The community itself deals with it. This could be a rotating group of mediators with the ability to escalate issues as needed for resolution. The process is almost always democratic and when involving the whole is unreasonable or impractical, a rotating committee-based system is generally used. For example, when a jury, verdict, or punishment is needed.
“We don’t want police, we want a chartered committee that is authorized to use violence to impose the will of society!”
This might sound like an excuse (community deals with it), but human is wired to live in self-organized ~100 people groups. It gets nasty only if the groups get much bigger.
Problem is, in a modern society, you can’t leave every decision (like, what to teach) to the group only. Which means you need a framework in which the groups are embedded. And that framework needs mechanisms against abuse and to enforce some decisions. Which then again is a state.
So a police force…
I don’t think their could be anarchists society with keeping inequality. So I do agree we could not solves issue link to wealth inequality. But those inequality have to solve first. This is a common point view among libertarian communists, anarcho-communist and anarcho-syndicalists.
Ofr the inter-communities issues, the whole thing is to create common interests :
Again, their is no common recipe. This stuff have to be experiment from now to get more and more efficient.
So how do you think it should be handled when one community protects their criminal who has attacked another community? What if one community becomes richer than another and therefore the other communities are unable to project justice onto them for being assholes?
… You’re kidding, right? Are you 5, or something? It’s a serious question, I’m trying to understand how someone can write that down and be serious about it.
You will always need police, because there will always be misbehaving elements in society. Be it due to mental illness or plain psychopaths, doesn’t really matter, you need a trained group of people designated to be the ones to keep society nice. Let’s call them “police”
From the mad ramblings of what you wrote, it sounded like the description of police and a judge / justice system only much, much worse. You want random untrained idiots to decide on justice matters? I’m sorry no.
I want a judge who has been trained and learned how to be ethical and impartial. I want police that has been trained, especially in de-escalation, who have been checked for not being psychopaths.
There is nothing wrong with the basics of current police systems (not you US, you’re fucked up) we just need more focus on police being trained better (or, in case of the US, trained at all), being monitored better by independent groups to ensure abuses stay at a minimum.
We need changes like limiting net worth. If we limit net worth to (just an example) 1 million dollar and any income after that goes 100% to taxes, we don’t need to change anything else. Nobody can be super rich anymore, nobody can have crazy bad influence anymore, we’d literally be all the same.
Governments get huge tax incomes that can be used for free healthcare, free education, universal basic income, even. It’s a simple single change that will have the most impact.
If you’re interested in how a society without police could look like, there’s a good book by Ursula K. Le Guine, called " The Dispossessed". If you’re interested about more theoretical work on why the police is a problem, you can search for “Abolition” or “Restorative Justice”. Especially for the latter there are loads of Videos explaining how to deal with unjust behavior of individuals. There is a ton of theoretical work about how to resolve conflict and harm done without involving the police or the penal system. Its a very interesting subject and just imagining a society without police and penal justice can make for good utopia’s to strive for. Maybe it doesn’t work, but working towards a society that doesn’t need those systems is worth it in any case.
Anyways, hope you have a wonderful day! Cheers
Here’s the issue with joke ideologies like anarchy, they only ever work in theory. They’re so deeply flawed that they collapse in on themselves any time they’re attempted in real life. Therefore, these ideologies only ever exists in fiction books and philosophical theories that revolve around unrealistic hypotheticals. In other words, anarchy is as a concept is nothing more than a thought exercise because it’s too fundamentally flawed to be anything more.
I you okay that police kill us fro moving from a place to another, getting food, or just by racism, I’m not interested in your opinion. But I’ve got another question : why shall we care of the life of someone who clearly don’t give a shit a ours ?
>“I’m not interested in your opinion” >Proceeds to ask for their opinion anyway in the very next sentence
I answered the question accurately and good faith based on anarchist theory and actual implementations by anarchist autonomous zones like Mexico’s Zapatistas. If you don’t like the answer or agree with it philosophically, that is entirely on you.
I was answering a question I know the answer to, not proselytizing. But you stay classy, eh?
So I enjoy good discourse, and I think most of your post is reasonable, but is it really necessary to start it off with insults and condescension?
Ok interesting, thanks for the answer. I’m also curious what exactly “community” envisions? Does it just refer to existing towns/cities/city divisions? Or would it be necessary for the existing areas to be “broken up” into smaller, closer communities? My thinking is that in large cities there are often a huge number of people, and yet very little sense of community between them, so I am doubtful how well a community driven system could scale?
I’m not personally convinced the model is scalable. It has worked in small, mostly rural autonomous zones — provided there wasn’t a bigger, better armed government murdering them for having the gall to be independent — but I can’t imagine any way in which it scales up and remains stable.
Anarchists will generally acknowledge this issue and argue the theory that zones need to remain small and independent and must cooperate with other independent zones each with certain specializations. For example, one zone might have certain types of medical care expertise and another might grow certain types of crops and another might focus on energy production. I’m sure there are many more theories for how an ideal anarchist society would structured, but that’s the one I hear the most.
This is like asking who is the CEO of pollution.
Humans are humans.