Would an Anarchist Society Have a Legal System?
- Thread starter Shevek
- Start date
chainsaw cat
Tea. Biccies. Happy now?
Trial by jury and magistracy accord nicely with anarchist objections to hierarchical power. So, glib comment alert, we already have an anarchist justice system.
No we don't because the JPs are all middle class and DM to boot, and juries mostly do as they are told.
But that is not necessarily a bad ting.
You are not comparing related things together. What you are doing is like comparing a ham sandwich with Handel's Water Music.
The Lib Dems are the vestigial remains of a mildly radical parliamentary political party. Anarchism is an analysis of society that rejects hierarchies including parliamentary democracy.
Azrael
circling Airstrip One
Middle class status and Daily Mail reading aren't signs of hierarchy, are they? Bias, perhaps. And if juries currently do as they're told, how would courts in an anarchist society function differently?
Problem with an anarchist justice system is that criminal justice is inherently hierarchical: someone has to have authority over the defendant, be it a judge or a panel of jurymen and women. The jury is elevated to a status of unequal power for the time they're sitting in judgment.
And that's not getting started on law enforcement!
frogwoman
Let them eat newts
i thouhgt the anarchist idea of law enforcement was that it could be organised on a rota type basis, with the population armed but the people whose "job" it was to be the police force would all have other jobs as well, and it would be organised in such a way as to make sure that a hierarchy didn't develop?
Azrael
circling Airstrip One
Call out the militia!
Even if we ran it like that (perfectly possible, it's not so far from the hue and cry) the person making the arrest has power over his prisoner, so hierarchy is created. A lesser degree of hierarchy than a gendarme, perhaps, but not intrinsically different.
Even if we ran it like that (perfectly possible, it's not so far from the hue and cry) the person making the arrest has power over his prisoner, so hierarchy is created. A lesser degree of hierarchy than a gendarme, perhaps, but not intrinsically different.
kyser_soze
Hawking's Angry Eyebrow
Cid - cheers for your answers, particularly the first one; I especially liked the bit about anyone being able to become a judge, because the things you'd need to know would be more based around social ethics than arcane legal theory/knowledge.
BG - I specifically said 5 years because the kind of transition to a wholly low-energy/sustainble generation societyyou're talking about would take a lot longer. I envisaged something like this event being a 'testing' point. Peeps would be over the first heady flush of revolution and onto the mundanity of incorporating the new social structures, behavioural requirements into their lives, and thought that a radical protest action that has wider implications of impacting on people's choice would be an interesting 'test case' - or at least an interesting thought fox!
Funnily enough I was thinking about this on the train this morning - how to manage road maintainance and other infrastructure and I came close to a moment of enlightenment about anarchism - there would be people who find this stuff personally interesting, and they would do the work; huge amounts of 'work' would ultimately be self-selecting because there would be millions of people available to do it, once the bullshit industries of capitalism were gone - think about insurance, legal system, huge swathes of manufacturing - people would have the opportunity to do stuff they wanted.
I realise this is an obvious point for the longer term anarchists, but it was a 'shift in thinking' moment for me...
As you were...
BG - I specifically said 5 years because the kind of transition to a wholly low-energy/sustainble generation societyyou're talking about would take a lot longer. I envisaged something like this event being a 'testing' point. Peeps would be over the first heady flush of revolution and onto the mundanity of incorporating the new social structures, behavioural requirements into their lives, and thought that a radical protest action that has wider implications of impacting on people's choice would be an interesting 'test case' - or at least an interesting thought fox!
Funnily enough I was thinking about this on the train this morning - how to manage road maintainance and other infrastructure and I came close to a moment of enlightenment about anarchism - there would be people who find this stuff personally interesting, and they would do the work; huge amounts of 'work' would ultimately be self-selecting because there would be millions of people available to do it, once the bullshit industries of capitalism were gone - think about insurance, legal system, huge swathes of manufacturing - people would have the opportunity to do stuff they wanted.
I realise this is an obvious point for the longer term anarchists, but it was a 'shift in thinking' moment for me...
As you were...
newbie
undisambiguated
big queues to be the helicopter pilot on whale watching trips, rather smaller queues to be the one who drives the gritting lorry for hours on end when the weather is utterly awful. Not that that matters, the only queue that's important is the one to be warlord.
Cid
Proper break this time
You're mistaking bottom up democracy for some kind of mob rule; that is not what anarchism is about... As I said above if you become a judge (we have a problem of language here as well I think, the terms we use are loaded with sociological implications), you have to have the support of your community behind you. You can't simply rely on a better education and wealthy parents, in this society everyone has that education and anyone can study; I'm trying to find a way of saying 'even the core workforce will only be working 3/4 days a week', but that's not the right way of putting it since someone who is a judge one day may well be a steelworker the next.
The point here is that to do something that requires you to dedicate yourself to it full time, you have to have the backing of the community; they must have invested sufficient trust in you to support you... at any moment that support could be withdrawn. We are talking about a highly educated, motivated group of people here, they are the ones that you are accountable to. Your jury is also going to be drawn from the same type of community; ie highly educated, motivated people.
I don't like things like rotas etc, it kind of tries to apply our own thinking to something which will be totally different to anything we think of here; it's an overused word but anarchism would really constitute a paradigm shift. For me a police force would be something that is simply naturally integrated into your community; everyone has a responsibility to protect the rights of others. People may take it upon themselves to patrol the streets at night if they want to, but they have no more or less authority than anyone else; the point is that a criminal violating the principles of an anarchist society (say by breaking into someone's property) is, for that moment, dropping their own rights to not be smacked in the face by someone trying to stop them. Of course if excessive force is used against them then that is something the community must also bear responsibility for adjudicating on.
As to more serious crimes, again there is no reason that people can't study criminal psychology or forensics... these too are held accountable to the community.
Call out the militia!
Even if we ran it like that (perfectly possible, it's not so far from the hue and cry) the person making the arrest has power over his prisoner, so hierarchy is created. A lesser degree of hierarchy than a gendarme, perhaps, but not intrinsically different.
Again you're mistaking anarchism for a total absence of hierarchy, anarchism (at least the kind i would advocate) is specifically about bottom up democracy, it is about the removal of state power... fundamentally it is about the preservation of the rights of others, and if you violate those rights then you leave yourself open to whatever the community decides to impose on you.
Well that's the thing about anarchism, it requires you to completely change the way you think about society... I was thinking more about mass transit and trade and how it could be organised than road maintenance etc (which could be a community thing), but then I realised I'm completely falling into the trap of thinking of anarchism as a string of small communities... Of course it is, but there's no reason those communities have to be focussed on any one location and no reason you couldn't be a member of several, no reason they can't co-ordinate or use people from other communities.
I dunno, I quite like the idea of driving a gritting truck around for a few days a year... As to warlords, well I just don't think they'd have the opportunity to form within the community, and if they did there's no reason that everyone else shouldn't get together to kick them out.
newbie
undisambiguated
no reason except that old saying from the Little Red Book "political power grows out of the barrel of a gun".
The thing about a legal system is that it rather imperfectly protects the weak against the strong (that's alongside various other roles, including entrenching economic power). As one of the weak, what protects me in the absence of legalities- I'm not sure your assertion that there's no reason why the guys with the AK47s shouldn't be kicked out is quite reassuring enough.
kyser_soze
Hawking's Angry Eyebrow
*falls over laughing*
8ball
As seen on TikTok
We only have one set of warlords, the others having been co-opted and out-competed.
littlebabyjesus
one of Maxwell's demons
It's a big mental hurdle to overcome to imagine a society in which *you* are the state just as much as anybody else, where people do not hand over responsibility for order to a powerful elite or consent to a uniformed guard to police them. Every capable adult would feel both a much greater stake and a much greater sense of responsibility in such a situation.
It's hard to leave the prejudices of this society at the gate.
It's hard to leave the prejudices of this society at the gate.
kyser_soze
Hawking's Angry Eyebrow
I don't know - a lack of recent imperial occupation which allowed 1,000+ years of common and court law to develop.
The law doesn't protect the weak - you were right in your comment about defending entrenched economic interests. If our legal system was based around human, rather than property issues, you might see a system that actually protected the genuinely weak, but the current one...nah, at most it offers the chance of legal redress to most, but protection?
littlebabyjesus
one of Maxwell's demons
You are mistaking an absence of central power with a power vacuum. Into a power vacuum, warlords will step in. But in a functioning anarchist society there would not be any central vacuum to fill - any potential warlord would find no followers.
newbie
undisambiguated
precisely so and almost all 60-odd million of us sleep soundly in our beds knowing that it's very, very unlikely that men with guns will burst in and start shooting or raping us. It might happen, no-one could claim it's impossible, but it's a lot less likely than somewhere where there that monopoly, and its legal system, hasn't been imposed.
8ball
As seen on TikTok
Well, yes, they're not going to fight each other once a monopoly on violence has been established, the violence gets exported.
It's called progress.
kyser_soze
Hawking's Angry Eyebrow
The fact is as well, we do have warlords - the only difference is we vote for them. The State has the monopoly on the use of force in our society; they coerce taxes from us not freely given, but under threat of incarceration.
How much protection, or indeed redress, did the 'weak' of Iraq and Afghanistan gain from our system of law?
How much protection, or indeed redress, did the 'weak' of Iraq and Afghanistan gain from our system of law?
newbie
undisambiguated
isn't it the law that stands between us and competing warlords?
Yes we know there are economic aspects to everything, but on the more human level, the law protects children or the elderly or those with mental illness against rape, robbery or slavery. It gets broken, of course, but wouldn't there be more abuse without it?
newbie
undisambiguated
yes.
the state doesn't, by and large, rape us or murder us in our beds or allow us to be enslaved. It protects an economic system, we know that, and it gathers taxes and starts wars and all sorts of thoroughly unpleasant things I don't approve of. So get rid of the state and its economic structures, but if you also get rid of that legal structure, what protects me from the men with the guns?
kyser_soze
Hawking's Angry Eyebrow
It prevents someone from directly owning me, yes.
You and the people around you. That's kind of the point really - as Ghandi said 'How can 100,000 Englishmen control a country of 100 million?', and he was right.
Cid
Proper break this time
Anarchism is not unstructured, it's just the nature of the structure that changes...
A warlord requires weapons, intimidation, belief and propaganda... you simply wouldn't be able to do that in an anarchist society.
Cid
Proper break this time
Hang on, where did all these motivated, well educated people come from?
That's kind of the whole point in an anarchist society.
newbie
undisambiguated
I don't know because I have no aspirations like that, but one model might be the way gangs operate, with some sort of bond based on eg postcode or a football team or motorcycles or something and some initiation rites and a bit of blood brother rhetoric and so on.
See I'm all in favour of faith based politics but isn't your expectation that all 60 million are '"highly motivated" stretching credulity just a little? Some are bound to be disaffected and unreasonable, but also strong and unconcerned about the consequences of their actions. Gather a few like that together and there's something rather powerful that can only be subdued by an even more powerful group. And when that second group- who all started off with the best of intentions- realise their own power... oops!
Similar threads
