As an anarchist, I often hear questions about how, exactly, we would stay safe in a world full of rapists and murderers without the state’s protective monopoly over violence.
So I often have to remind people that not only does the state often decline to protect people facing harm…
…but also explicitly punishes people who do try to defend themselves from abusers:
https://www.propublica.org/article/oklahoma-survivors-act-domestic-violence
Many people recognize that there is an unacceptable amount of interpersonal harm in society, and conclude that the state is all that stands between them and an overwhelming amount of harm, a war of all against all.
But this misses the role of the state in creating, fostering, or facilitating those harms.
@HeavenlyPossum And that’s *before* we consider states becoming/acting rogue, see Minnesota; and I don’t mean *just* the feds, State government didn’t do much to protect citizens of Minnesota from harm either.
Attempts to make policing more just? equitable? (see Peel’s 9 principles) aren’t exactly a success either, UK police’s been plagued by racism and sexism and attempts to reform it weren’t successful. Don’t get me started about the whole “thin blue line” mindset common with police everywhere.
Our safety should be in our hands, organized around our needs, and with our oversight. Government role could be in coordination of community orgs and possibly in establishing a common infrastructure.
I prefer to abolish the government role entirely, but otherwise fully agree.
Government *is* centralized power. Coordination across multiple communities can be something other than government.
@wbftw @HeavenlyPossum I don't know how to make it work, but it's clear that cops are objectively awful.
Safety being in our own hands is certainly right. And government funding and enabling good things is good (see: the ignobel prizes)
There's definitely better ways to do a society.
@wbftw @HeavenlyPossum A perfect state could defend the large number of people with a little power from the small number of people with vastly more power (e.g, the EPA getting corporations to slow down on the polluting). Without anybody to stop them, sociopaths inevitably accumulate power, which they use to accumulate even more regardless of the consequences for others. They’re hard to stop once they get going.
Unfortunately, we’ve never seen an example of such a state lasting more than maybe 50 years without being captured by the more powerful and used to launder their actions (or worse).
@bob_zim «Without anybody to stop them» is a very strong assumption. The “sociopaths” you're thinking of thrive under the state, because the state protects them and stops people from autonomously dealing with them. And then it eventually makes presidents and billionaires out of them.
@bob_zim The point is that it's much, much easier to stop the “sociopaths” by abolishing the state than it is by using the state to stop them.
Another example
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/iowa-teen-who-killed-her-rapist-ordered-to-pay-150000-to-mans-family
An Iowa court sentenced a teenage victim of sex trafficking to five years probation and ordered her to pay $150,000 to her abuser’s family. The case is underscoring a serious issue of justice where hundreds of victims of sexual abuse and trafficking have faced similar legal consequences. Human trafficking survivor and criminal justice reform advocate Cyntoia Brown-Long joins Amna Nawaz to discuss.
Uvalde proved once and for all, cops are worse than useless. they're in the way.
My wife of 41 years is a Jew. She once called the SFPD hate crime hotline to report an antisemitic death threat. It went to voicemail 17 times. The *never* responded.
See also:
@HeavenlyPossum I think it comes down to this: Are human beings essentially good? Or evil?
Marx saw humans as essentially good natured, with crime and cruelty being primarily caused by privation and capitalism.
Freud saw humans as essentially neurotic and depraved without the intervention of the superego.
Capitalists seem to see humans as nothing but mindless cattle to be exploited and exterminated.
I don't know. Maybe people are just what they have to be to survive in their personal circumstances. There are evil ones and good ones. I tend to believe that more people are good than evil, though.
@Quasit
@HeavenlyPossum
where did marx ever say that humans were essentially good natured?
indeed, he did attribute the existence of crime to class society, but he didnt make any sweeping claims about the inherent moral nature of humans.
"But the essence of man is no abstraction inherent in each single individual. In reality, it is the ensemble of the social relations." —theses on feuerbach
According to RAINN only 50 out of a thousand sexual assaults lead to an arrest.
https://rainn.org/facts-statistics-the-scope-of-the-problem/statistics-the-criminal-justice-system/
@AdrianRiskin @Petesmom @HeavenlyPossum
Reported* sexual assaults
The ratio of solved murder cases to number of murders reported has gone down even though there are fewer murders than there used to be and we have more cops.
also police are themselves responsible for much raping and assaulting (not to mention killing), e.g.
https://nwlc.org/sexual-assault-by-police-is-a-systemic-problem-that-demands-a-systemic-remedy/
Leigh Goodmark April 21, 2023The average messaging of most anti-violence organizations include some variation on the following: “If you are in immediate danger, call 911.” Embedded in directing a victim of violence to call 911 is a key assumption—that law enforcement will make that person safer. But the headlines regularly feature stories of law enforcement […]
@HeavenlyPossum Abolishing the state would eliminate state-sponsored crime, violent or not, but not crime itself.
I libel you and ruin your life. Have I even committed a "crime"? I didn't force your employer to fire you, or your friends to abandon you, or cut off your means of self-preservation due to your inability to get a job, etc.
And if I'm Trump and r'pe an 11-year-old girl, a child, you can't lock me up, you can't punish me physically, you can't use force against me in any way, and an 11-year-old girl alone in a room with Trump surely couldn't defend herself. Could she?
These are the kinds of things people are concerned about, with respect to anarchism and jurisprudence.
I don't want a state. At all. But I do want solutions to these problems. Or: worse than problems. State or no, you can't un-murder someone, and I respect that concern.
I encourage you to consider your own example.
The state did not intervene to protect that girl. It did not retroactively punish Trump in order to deter future predation. Instead, the state protected Trump and his co-conspirators, interfering with investigations into these crimes and assigning (and rewarding him with) the most powerful state office in the world, which he has used to enrich himself while overseeing massive abuse. His fellow abusers surround him in positions of power.
Crimes would not exist in the absence of the state or other coercive hierarchies to explicitly and formally forbid or authorize actions. But you’re absolutely right that interpersonal harms would continue to exist in the absence of the state. That’s why I would much rather live in a context in which the people targeted by Trump for abuse could have killed him in self-defense a long time ago, rather than placing nuclear weapons under his personal control.
@HeavenlyPossum I was thinking about this, and my term "state-sponsored crime", and I should clarify:
My understanding of state-sponsored crime, which I don't think is unreasonable, is predicated on exactly the hierarchies and power structures (which themselves are often, mostly, maybe always) propped up by capitalism you set out. So state-sponsored crimes go from the cops to insider trading by legislators; Congress letting insurance companies deny coverage is a state-sponsored crime, coz the insurance companies are playing by Congress' rules. State-sponsored crime includes things like not securing our need for health care and denying people a living wage, etc. It's very broad.
I've been reading Gary Chartier's "Anarchy and Legal Order", which he claims his treatise (it's a legal textbook, basically) "embodies a distinctively leftist, anticapitalist and socialist antistatism"". Regarding crime, his first idea is to eliminate the concept of crime altogether, which would make all state crimes vanish. Well and good enough, but he then falls back into the worst right-libertarian practices you can think of, and to be consistent, he has to abandon just savings and any claims future generations deserve from us (a livable environment, for example) because they aren't born yet, among many other repugnant ideas, for order.
I worry about this. My concern is what to do with those responsible for injuring others, we all already know what "crime" is. We can't use force. This freaks people out. It freaks me out. But most people don't know what anarchism is, or that liberty is the mother not daughter of order. (An extreme position many anarchists hold is that you can only defend yourself to the extent you are being harmed. This means there will be more not less sexual assault, and so on.)
Sorry, this is a mess. We're basically in agreement and that's good enough. I will address your last sentence. I have many regrets, and my biggest regret is that I didn't kill my parents.
Anarchism doesn’t preclude the use of force. Force, by itself, is not a synonym for authority. If I push you out of the way of a speeding car, I am using force to reposition your body in space, but that hardly constitutes authority in the sense that anarchism opposes.
@HeavenlyPossum Yes I understand that. I don't think it's controversial.
I did want to say that I used Trump because it's current. It could be anyone with the motive, size and strength beyond a child's ability to counter. That is to say, someone not directly connected to the state, and not protected by it as a state official would be, as we're seeing now.
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