Law in a Stateless Society?

[godlessfilthycommiedog]

Okay. So correct me if I'm making any presumptions here. How exactly is murder-assault, etc. punishable in a society where the state has already phased out, a post-revolutionary society? Would it be a vigilante system? What books talk about how this works?

[Lanky Wanker]

If there is anywhere you could read about it, it would probably be in one of those anarchism for beginners type books. This should help a bit, but some people would disagree on the system of punishment itself. How the "you're guilty, fuck you" part is carried out would just be the typical democratic assembly type thing.

PoCGFDCuzww

[Caj]

Here's one way in which I can envision "laws" functioning in a stateless society: "Laws" and the punishments for breaking these laws would be democratically ratified by the community. When an individual breaks one of these laws, he or she would be free to accept punishment and remain a member of the community. At the same time, this individual could refuse punishment and cease to be a part of the community. In this way, obedience to the law would be voluntary and consensual, while at the same time the community's acceptance of an individual would be mutually voluntary and consensual. In this "legal" system, there would be no need of imposed authority whatsoever.

Let me point out, lest I be condemned of "utopianism", that this system is in no way the only conceivable or possible system of law in a future stateless society. Inevitably, different experiments will be done in different regions owing to their respective material conditions.

[Zostrianos]

If the society is prosperous, crime will automatically go down. Poverty and crime go hand in hand, and the more equal and prosperous a society is for everyone, the less crime there will be. Harsh laws don't do anything. The US has some of the harshest laws in the world, it sends people to jail for insignificant offenses (like drug possession for personal use) and it's ravaged by crime. By contrast, Scandinavian countries where drugs are legal, the judicial system is very lenient, and poverty is almost nonexistent, have some of the lowest crime rates in the world.

[Caj]

If the society is prosperous, crime will automatically go down. Poverty and crime go hand in hand, and the more equal and prosperous a society is for everyone, the less crime there will be. Harsh laws don't do anything.

Good point.

Some anarchists -- Kropotkin, for example -- have maintained that since inequality, poverty, and the state are the causes of crime, once these things are destroyed in the revolution all crime will be eliminated simultaneously. Instead of laws, future societies will be held together through mutual aid, cooperation, altruism, and tacit obedience to social norm. Personally, I find such a prospect idealistic and impractical.

[eric922]

Crime will go down, but I don't think it will be completely gone. If nothing else we will have to contend with serial killers and the like. People whose crimes aren't related to material conditions, but to psychological problems. Even then, I don't think punishment is the answer, but treatment. Obviously serial killers have mental health problems that we need to try and understand and correct.

[ckaihatsu]

Just off the top of my head I'd say that, besides overthrowing exploitation / capitalism, the other major positive aspect of a revolutionary politics is that it necessarily *nullifies* many more social ills, the way a rainstorm nullifies concerns about thirst.

So much of *current* politics is about this-or-that private collection of capital and stuff, and how that collection competes with some *other* collection of private stuff -- this isn't even about the actual *people*, and the fulfillment of their *persons* -- it's only about their stuff. By eliminating the role of private-property *ownership* and replacing it with a collectivist *co-administration* instead, such oversight of the material realm will be *everyone's* proportional responsibility, since other animals on the planet don't have the same capabilities for it.

Currently most people are *disempowered* by politics, and see it as an edifice that must be approached as grand solid marble steps, obsequiously. With the overturning of private property relations politics would be freed to be *empowering*, so that the full concept of 'democracy' can be realized, even into matters of infrastructure, manufacturing, production, service, and economics.

These revolutionary societal changes are a much better basis on which to discuss notions of 'law' -- *after* there would no longer be any reasons for punishment for "crimes against property" and "crimes against oneself". Currently society is *so* dysfunctional due to concentrations of political power that it *is* conceivable -- and even practiced -- to use these categories of crime.

With a mass equalization of political power would come a like equalization of social standing among all individuals. No one *could* benefit from a social or political attempt to degrade or dehumanize anyone else, since there would be nothing to be gained from it. Society would finally be fully socialized, with no privileged areas of "exceptions" or "private concerns". One's social status -- if even *that* would have any meaning -- would be entirely based on what social circles one would *choose* to be in, without the slightest unaddressed obligation to basic human needs or privileged institutions.

A revolutionarily self-liberated world would find it in its best interests to dissipate private influence *entirely* so that each person would have full, sole responsibility for their own growth and development, practically from the cradle to the grave. If a person could not even conceivably *fault* another for their distresses then there would be no one to *lash out at*, and thus no crime to commit. (Likewise, society would not even be in a *position* to punish anyone if it could not be faulted, and no crime could even conceivably be committed.)

[MarxSchmarx]

There's a precedent for this; read up on xeer in Somalia.

Somalia - OMG that's what the anarcho-caps are accused of embracing. Well, yes and no. True, many otherwise dubious characters rush to defend somalia as an alternative system.

But anthropology and comparative ethnography can help any vision for a post-capitalist society as well. David Graeber in his "fragments of an anarchist society" makes the case that by learning in depth how other social systems actively dealt with pressing question of relevance to the left, we can inform our own praxis and potentially look to them for examples and inspirations. The cappies did precisely this, when the looked to e.g., the Iroquois confederation, as did the fascists when they looked to the Roman Empire.

Xeer systems offer something of an intriguing alternative to the capitalist conception of law. The left has ceded this talking point because it buys the prevailing statist narrative that somalia in the 1990s and early 2000s was an abject failure on so many levels, and because the last statist regime in somalia was nominally leftist but in practice deeply parochrial. I suspect that indigenous legal understandings contain a treasure trove of knowledge about how we deal with question of "law" in a post-capitalist/post-statist society more generally.

[Brosip Tito]

This is something I run into, when I finally conquer the "communism is the state owning everything" argument with some people. The idea of law is still a necessity, in my eyes.

How do we deal with it, how do we select what is and isn't law?

Well, my solution is the drafting, first and foremost, of a secular and socialist constitution. Ensuring things such as equal "rights" -- gay marriage, etc., if you want to call them that, and other things. A way to avoid "tyranny of the majority". After that, any new laws can be made and eliminated via the workers councils.

How do we enforce these laws? Worker's militias and worker's inspectors. There will be no "policing" (cars on patrol, officers walking around ,etc.), as the police force is abolished.

This is my opinion.

[ckaihatsu]

As much as I *usually* prefer formalism, I think the use of formalities like constitutions and laws would just be too *bourgeois*, and wouldn't be in the spirit of a worldwide people that just liberated themselves from incessant capitalist paternalizing.

I prefer to think in terms of a contemporary (industrial and digital) "primitive communism", in which humankind would demonstrate such *mastery* over the natural world and its own technological implements, that any social complications -- as the kind that would purportedly require an edifice of laws -- would be limited to mere interpersonal flare-ups, and would have absolutely no implications for the rest of society whatsoever.

Once the world transcended the class divide its major concern would be with *socialized production*, and so any formalities needed would center around *that* process -- what would be more likely is *guidelines* and *protocols*, instead of the systems of abstractions used today for similarly abstract forms of wealth that currently drive production (or don't).

[Rooster]

serial killers and the like.

Serial killers are made, not born.

[Jimmie Higgins]

Serial killers are made, not born.Yeah while radicals generally concentrate, correctly, on the big and more systemic features of capitalist oppression, there's also a lot of petty little daily slights that are either side-effects or developed out of various nooks and crannies of the system that make life generally annoying. So I have no doubt that a lot of "random" crimes and crimes of passion are indirectly related to the system because of all the shit that gets built up. So beyond the obvious types of crimes that would almost instantly be eliminated by reorganizing society (like drug-crimes, property crimes, debt non-payment etc) I think we'd be less likely to see people randomly flip out than we do in modern society.

That being said, sure there'll be cases where people get drunk, fight and kill someone, or there will be crimes of passion to some degree and so on, but they aren't systemic so it would be much easier for people to democratically decide what to do on a more or less case by case basis (maybe with some per-determined parameters also democratically decided upon by a community). Take out the democratic aspects and this is basically how even class societies generally dealt with interpersonal crimes. They didn't have police, people would bring the transgressor to a judge who would hear things out and decide. We can do the same but on a democratic basis.

[Tim Cornelis]

Laws that are directly democratically determined is highly feasible but much less desirable. I can imagine it seeing deteriorate into tyranny of the majority. While there is no guarantee in any system that there will be no tyranny of the majority (even in the legal system I propose), the odds, I think, dwindle.

I agree mostly with MarxSchmarx on Xeer (although Xeer is of course exclusive to Somali society). Thus, I would propose customary law.

To quote a nonarchist ("anarcho-"capitalist) Bruce L. Benson:


“Law can be imposed from above by some coercive authority, such as a king, a legislature, or a supreme court, or law can develop “from the ground” as customs and practice evolve. Law imposed from the top—authoritarian law—typically requires the support of a powerful minority; law developed from the bottom up—customary law—requires widespread acceptance … A potential action by one person has to affect someone else before any they question of legality can arise; any action that does not, such as what a person does alone or in voluntary cooperation with someone else but in a manner that clearly harms no one, is not likely to become the subject of a rule of conduct under customary law. Fuller proposed that “customary law” might best be described as a “language of interaction.” Facilitating interaction can only be accomplished with recognition of clear (although not necessarily written) codes of conduct enforced through reciprocally acceptable, well established adjudication arrangements”

Thus, while laws imposed from the top-down govern people, customary law governs relations between people, which diminishes the chance that victimless crimes would exist in a stateless society.

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Incidentally, I currently have in my possession two books regarding the converging relation between anarchism and law written by a former associate professor of law Thom Holterman (who is an anarchist). They are in Dutch, however... When I'm finished I may write a summary of it and post it here.