Adversarial trials and revolution.

[Brandon's Impotent Rage]

One thing I've noticed that has happened with every major socialist revolution of the past century is a series of one-sided show trials, usually followed by summary executions. Often times these are run by People's Tribunals, which sound good but obviously can be abused very easily to settle personal disputes and old grudges, and hurting innocent people in the process.

I understand that, in a time of revolution time can be of the essence and resources could run thin....but it would appear that a fair trial would require some sort of defense counsel.

So, what can be done about this? How can one set up a successful series of trials during and post-revolution that are both fair and just, and reduce the risk of injustice towards the accused?

[Armchair Partisan]

Well, first of all, in any legal system worth its salt, ex post facto laws (i.e. laws that are applied retroactively, to a time when those laws did not exist) are generally a big no-no. As such, when you conduct such trials right after a revolution, you are not really dispensing justice - you are merely setting up an arbitrary policy as to how to deal with the members of the old regime and then setting up courts to determine who played what role in that regime. There is a subtle difference. In these trials (which are different in nature from later trials that concern crimes against social society) the real question is whether someone was innocent and guilty, not so much the subtle nuances and degrees of their guilt. They are also, by necessity, one-sided, there's no way around that.

Note that in such post-revolutionary trials, the classic motives of modern criminal justice are missing. There is no deterrent factor (nobody is going to be deterred from trying to reestablish a capitalist society, no matter what you do), there is no question of rehabilitation (the capitalist old guard is probably not going to be rehabilitated, unless they see socialist society work very well, perhaps - even in that case, any punishment at all is only going to instill resentment in them, no matter how light), and as I've already mentioned, legally speaking there is no crime either (it is likely that whatever the cappies did, it was legal under the previous order). Further, these are extraordinary, one-off punishments, so there is no need to set up a consistent legal precedent or abide by the rules of future socialist society. Once again, this is not a question of justice, but of practicality.

Now, after a revolution, the death penalty is usually pointless, except to sate people's bloodlust - and if there's one thing I hate, it's criminal justice for the sake of sating people's bloodlust. It's just all around bad, and should not be used at all, if possible, once the revolutionary war ends. You can extract forced labor from them or throw them in prison for life if they are particularly serious offenders, or you can just exile them permanently into whatever capitalist shitholes are left in the world - an easy, permanent and humane solution. Of course, there are complications here. You won't want work camps or prisons in socialism, and will want to abolish it - but what will you do with those who were imprisoned in these extralegal trials? Exile is always an easy, safe solution that allows for reversing injustice upon later investigation, but is it really a good idea to let serious war criminals and other nasty pieces of work (of the caliber of the ISIS leadership, the Saudi royal family or Putin) run around freely in the capitalist world and gloat? Not punishing them at all runs into the same problem, except that now they can take part in counterrevolutionary agitation if they wish to.

Well, I hope that helped a little, even though I didn't give a definitive answer and raised questions of my own.

[Synergy]

Make them choose between five different flavored jellybeans. The twist is that one is actually poisoned. Perfectly rational and simple. Problem solved!

[Anglo-Saxon Philistine]

Now, after a revolution, the death penalty is usually pointless, except to sate people's bloodlust - and if there's one thing I hate, it's criminal justice for the sake of sating people's bloodlust. It's just all around bad, and should not be used at all, if possible, once the revolutionary war ends. You can extract forced labor from them or throw them in prison for life if they are particularly serious offenders, or you can just exile them permanently into whatever capitalist shitholes are left in the world - an easy, permanent and humane solution. Of course, there are complications here. You won't want work camps or prisons in socialism, and will want to abolish it - but what will you do with those who were imprisoned in these extralegal trials? Exile is always an easy, safe solution that allows for reversing injustice upon later investigation, but is it really a good idea to let serious war criminals and other nasty pieces of work (of the caliber of the ISIS leadership, the Saudi royal family or Putin) run around freely in the capitalist world and gloat? Not punishing them at all runs into the same problem, except that now they can take part in counterrevolutionary agitation if they wish to.

I'm afraid I'm not following you here. When you say "after the revolution", do you mean after the entire period of transition and civil war (i.e. when the world is socialist) or after the initial overthrow? During the civil war, there is an excellent reason to shoot people that has nothing to do with "bloodlust" - the task of the revolutionary authorities is to safeguard the revolution, and if someone is dead, it's pretty certain they won't be drawn into any counter-revolutionary plots. So if the Soviet authorities had gotten their act together and shot Puriskhevich, Kaledin, Kerensky, Dan, Chernov, Zhordania etc. the White movement would have been dealt a severe blow before it even started. After the transition is complete, of course, there is no capitalist area to exile people to.

[Armchair Partisan]

I'm afraid I'm not following you here. When you say "after the revolution", do you mean after the entire period of transition and civil war (i.e. when the world is socialist) or after the initial overthrow? During the civil war, there is an excellent reason to shoot people that has nothing to do with "bloodlust" - the task of the revolutionary authorities is to safeguard the revolution, and if someone is dead, it's pretty certain they won't be drawn into any counter-revolutionary plots. So if the Soviet authorities had gotten their act together and shot Puriskhevich, Kaledin, Kerensky, Dan, Chernov, Zhordania etc. the White movement would have been dealt a severe blow before it even started. After the transition is complete, of course, there is no capitalist area to exile people to.

I meant the immediate aftermath. I don't know, I'm assuming that the whole world doesn't go socialist immediately at the same time. That seems pretty unlikely to me. Say, to take an oversimplified scenario, everything from Canada to Chile falls to socialist revolution, and becomes stable without the threat of internal counterrevolution, but most of Eurasia, Africa and the Pacific are still kicking and unlikely to fall to revolution anytime soon. Unless you are saying this would immediately result in all-out nuclear war until one side or the other wins, surely this would describe a distinct scenario where there is no ongoing civil war but there are places to exile someone to? Or do you call that part of the civil war as well?

(Sure, I understand the need to execute enemy notables when there is an actual war going on, but after that, they are prisoners of war, pretty much, and I don't like the idea of essentially executing PoWs en masse.)

[Anglo-Saxon Philistine]

I meant the immediate aftermath. I don't know, I'm assuming that the whole world doesn't go socialist immediately at the same time. That seems pretty unlikely to me. Say, to take an oversimplified scenario, everything from Canada to Chile falls to socialist revolution, and becomes stable without the threat of internal counterrevolution, but most of Eurasia, Africa and the Pacific are still kicking and unlikely to fall to revolution anytime soon. Unless you are saying this would immediately result in all-out nuclear war until one side or the other wins, surely this would describe a distinct scenario where there is no ongoing civil war but there are places to exile someone to? Or do you call that part of the civil war as well?

(Sure, I understand the need to execute enemy notables when there is an actual war going on, but after that, they are prisoners of war, pretty much, and I don't like the idea of essentially executing PoWs en masse.)

I don't think the scenario is plausible. As long as there is the world revolution on one side and the capitalist world on the other, there will be civil war and imperialist invasion. I also don't think it's possible for an area, even a large area like the Americas, to remain indefinitely a working workers' state if it has become isolated and the revolution has become confined in that one area.

[Ricemilk]

as I've already mentioned, legally speaking there is no crime either (it is likely that whatever the cappies did, it was legal under the previous order). Further, these are extraordinary, one-off punishments, so there is no need to set up a consistent legal precedent or abide by the rules of future socialist society. Once again, this is not a question of justice, but of practicality. To be fair, the state isn't prosecuting capitalists for a lot of actually currently illegal things. Also UN resolutions to which a given state is legally signatory but current authorities don't enforce it. There could be a whole separate court system for prosecuting people based on the carefully studied legal situation of the time and place that we learn about while expropriating business records.


One thing I've noticed that has happened with every major socialist revolution of the past century is a series of one-sided show trials, usually followed by summary executions.Did I miss something about EZLN?


So, what can be done about this? How can one set up a successful series of trials during and post-revolution that are both fair and just, and reduce the risk of injustice towards the accused?Didn't the Barcelona Anarchists have trials where they proved POW were fascists before shooting them (sometimes)? For sufficiently vile antisocialist views you more or less just need a picture of someone in a corresponding uniform to justify shooting them, in which case a defense or collaborative counsel would fill a mostly formal or almost negligible role in cases where they didn't already have strong evidence of the evidence being tampered with.

In any case, theoretically anarchist (or other??) tribunals could take place in a collaborative way where the community hires counsel to advocate constructively to each other about how to work out the best resolution for everyone. So I'm not totally convinced of the necessity of adversarial law. But in any case, we'd need a lot of praxis to train ourselves to run truly fair adversarial courts when many viable suspects would interpret every possible line of prosecution as political repression.

[RedWorker]

What is clear is that these anarchists always end up setting a state of their own in practice, but meanwhile refuse to support the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat, for instance. In Spain they joined the bourgeois government. Of course, this doesn't sum up all of the situation, but this point needs to be seriously considered.

[Guardia Rossa]

Did I miss something about EZLN?


MAJOR socialist revolution

No you didn't. EZLN didn't conquered Mexico and now has a strong reactionary movement, they can barely cling on to Chiapas, as they are constantly under attack by reacionary militias. If they do defeat these militias and overrun Mexico, they would have the exact situation that BIR mentioned.

And I'm scared to agree with RedWorker. Gotta read some anarchist books when I finish my current book.

[Emmett Till]

[QUOTE=Armchair Partisan;2859202]I meant the immediate aftermath. I don't know, I'm assuming that the whole world doesn't go socialist immediately at the same time. That seems pretty unlikely to me. Say, to take an oversimplified scenario, everything from Canada to Chile falls to socialist revolution, and becomes stable without the threat of internal counterrevolution, but most of Eurasia, Africa and the Pacific are still kicking and unlikely to fall to revolution anytime soon. Unless you are saying this would immediately result in all-out nuclear war until one side or the other wins, surely this would describe a distinct scenario where there is no ongoing civil war but there are places to exile someone to? Or do you call that part of the civil war as well?

(Sure, I understand the need to execute enemy notables when there is an actual war going on, but after that, they are prisoners of war, pretty much, and I don't like the idea of essentially executing PoWs en masse.)[/QUOTE

If we're talking immediate aftermath, you have it wrong.

In 1922, immediate aftermath with Lenin still in power, you had the famous trials of the leaders of the Socialist Revolutionary Party for terrorist assassinations and mounting armed insurrections against the Soviet state.

It had no resemblance to the show trials of the '30s. It was a thoroughly adversarial trial, with most of the defendants proclaiming their innocence and SR loyal defense lawyers trying dubiously to claim that the SR's were not guilty of the crimes they were, obviously, totally guilty of. The death penalties from the trial were suspended for as long as the SR's stopped doing that kind of stuff, and indeed they did, a good idea that worked. They weren't executed until Stalin's Great Terror in the 1930s, when most of the prosecutors and judges were executed side by side.

As for mass POW executions, that only happened as far as I know in the Crimea with Wrangel's bloodstained mass murderers and pogromists, and that was a serious mistake Bela Kun was condemned for.

Trotsky's famous proclamation, "fight the enemy but spare the prisoner," was Soviet policy, the reason why so many White fighters, including even officers, could come over to the Red side, helping win the war.

[Ricemilk]

What is clear is that these anarchists always end up setting a state of their own in practice, but meanwhile refuse to support the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat, for instance.Pure propaganda to justify deadly treasons; in Russia/Ukraine alone, Anarchists participated in both the military defense of the revolution and the social/economic revolution itself before being slaughered/exiled by a dictatorship hostile to the soviets in even its very organizational structure.


In Spain they joined the bourgeois government.And with Franco's armies pounding away at Madrid after you have begun so successfully operating and defending the historic productive center of Barcelona that you can produce weapons and cross the country to fight them, your alternative to "joining" the defense of the Republic would be what, abandoning Madrid (including your comrades) to fascist slaughter? Perhaps wasting ammo on the government before turning to face the fascists? Remember, the anarchists who went to Madrid had already seen dozens of reformists and trade unionists held in makeshift dungeons and slaughtered by the fascists, left in their stinking horror to terrify (and vindicate) the liberators. The one instance I know of in particular, in a small Catalan town liberated early in the war, was a humbling experience for Durruti, who had just helped defeat the same fascists and - without yet knowing the horror they had left for the liberators to discover - convinced them to haul the POWs off to be executed after a trial rather than shooting them against the wall themselves.
https://libcom.org/history/barcelona-meeting-durruti-taking-sietamo-%E2%80%93-pierre-van-paassen


Of course, this doesn't sum up all of the situation,A euphemism for vile slanders.

ETA: Does this have anything to do with the topic at hand or are you just tendency-baiting?

[Anglo-Saxon Philistine]

Pure propaganda to justify deadly treasons; in Russia/Ukraine alone, Anarchists participated in both the military defense of the revolution and the social/economic revolution itself.

Yes, anarchists like Zheleznyak and Roshchin did.


And with Franco's armies pounding away at Madrid after you have begun so successfully operating Barcelona that you can produce weapons and cross the country to fight them, your alternative to "joining" the defense of the Republic would be...?

First of all, RedWorker mentioned anarchist participation in the Spanish government - the shameful spectacle of "anarchist ministers". It tells us a lot about the modern anarchist movement that they ignore the so-called "Soviet anarchists" in favour of such stalwart "libertarians" as the ultra-statist PLSR, and yet glorify the "anarchist ministers" and the Spanish "revolution" where the property of the "anti-fascist" bourgeoisie wasn't touched. Or at least anarchists on the Internet. What was the alternative? As always: class independence, not the coalition with the shadow of the bourgeoisie.

Also, the anarchist leaders in fact destroyed any chance of Madrid defending itself when they participated in the coup against Negrin, led by right-wing socialists and including generals with former connections to CEDA like Miaja. So much for the defense of the Republic.

[Ricemilk]

Yes, anarchists like Zheleznyak and Roshchin did.



First of all, RedWorker mentioned anarchist participation in the Spanish government - the shameful spectacle of "anarchist ministers". It tells us a lot about the modern anarchist movement that they ignore the so-called "Soviet anarchists" in favour of such stalwart "libertarians" as the ultra-statist PLSR, and yet glorify the "anarchist ministers" and the Spanish "revolution" where the property of the "anti-fascist" bourgeoisie wasn't touched. Or at least anarchists on the Internet. What was the alternative? As always: class independence, not the coalition with the shadow of the bourgeoisie.

Also, the anarchist leaders in fact destroyed any chance of Madrid defending itself when they participated in the coup against Negrin, led by right-wing socialists and including generals with former connections to CEDA like Miaja. So much for the defense of the Republic.
Realized I should come back here to address this: i'm going to brush up on the people and topics you raise before commenting further on them. feel free to bug me about it later if i haven't responded meaningfully (lately everything requiring more commitment than making a sandwich and shooting from the hip takes a while to actually get around to)