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…
@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.
HeavenlyPossum
No Exceptions