Comments

You must log in or register to comment.

ziq admin wrote

We'd send them to bed without dinner.

8

celebratedrecluse wrote

okay lot of potential for joke answers here but let's deconstruct for a sec (this is why i get paid the soros bucks for my posts)

ideal anarchist society

anarchist thought, while diverse, usually pushes back on the idea of an "ideal society". a lot of us want to live in the real world, not a platonic fantasy. In fact, many of us believe that "ideal society" concepts, going back as far as Plato's Republic, are at the root of the perpetuation of everything from authoritarian legal systems to rape culture to capitalism, etc etc etc. So many anarchists are not trying to create an ideal society, but rather to live in the real world and address social problems from a more practical and immediate way. For example, by applying the principles of mutual aid to address houselessness and hunger (creating community potlucks which welcome houseless and housed folks alike), rather than donating an abstract value token (money) to a vaguely defined and abstractly branded organization (non profit).

punish criminals

anarchists also, even more broadly, tend to oppose the idea of "crime" itself. Many of us wish to delineate more specifically what a so-called "crime" is: is it a violation of bourgeois property rights? No big deal. Is it a violation of someone's bodily autonomy, or basic right to live & survive? Very big deal. Many anarchists want to be more specific about these things, because crime is often thought of as the latter but actually is the former. That is, the state cloaks its ideological agenda in the implementation of criminal "justice" by getting people to think of crime as violence committed by individuals against society. The reality is, the concept of crime is an act of violence and gaslighting against the individual by society. It is a way to elide away the distinctions between different acts, lumping them all together as "crime", so that there can be broad social acquiescence to the legal systems' punitive measures. In reality, the legal system exists to unequally protect privilege, not equally protect people from violent acts.

15

Anargnome_Communist wrote

Leaving aside that the word "criminal" might become meaningless in an anarchist society, it would depend on the specifics. What community, what act, what does the perpetrator want, what does the victim want, what does their respective loved ones want, etc.

/u/celebratedrecluse does a good job addressing this already, but the question as it stands simply can't be answered.

The idea of an "ideal anarchist society" isn't something most anarchists are interested in. Anarchism is a process, not something we can actually achieve. Our struggles are perpetual and we'll always need to be on the lookout for how a society can or should be changed. There's always risk of hierarchies establishing themselves or individuals and groups needlessly restricting others.

To pretentiously quote someone:

I am an Anarchist not because I believe Anarchism is the final goal, but because there is no such thing as a final goal.

-- Rudolf Rocker

Similarly, the idea of punishment and crime aren't necessarily useful to describe anarchist approaches towards justice, transgression, and deviance.

5

shanc wrote

How is the community to respond?

You'd have to ask the community that one.

Also if you look at the OP's comment history you'll see it's unlikely they're asking in good faith. Hence the joke replies.

1