I mean, let’s be honest: People do crimes even when they have no material need to do so, so you will always need some form of law enforcement, how should a solarpunk society handle this?
The same is true for a military: As long as there is no world peace or some magical way to shut the outside world out, and as long as other societies exist somewhere nearby (and in today’s world this means somewhere on the same planet), a society needs the means to defend itself… what would this look like?
Solarpunk is an anarchist philosophy. There wouldn’t be law enforcement.
The assumption that law enforcement is a necessity is a shortsighted one. I’m not the best at explaining it but I can provide a link to reading about the concept.
https://www.mpd150.com/faq/
In reality, the difference between objective law enforcement based on rule of law and anarchy in a small community is demonstrated by lynch mobs. It’s lovely to think that people don’t need someone like a local law enforcement officer, but someone with legal authority to counter mob mentality is for the benefit of the accused. Mobs don’t care about evidence or the law or circumstances. Localized collective violence is the term.
I’ve seen this a couple times around Africa. Zambia’s “flying coffin” is an ideomotor effect where sometime gets killed because “the body points to who killed them.”
Plenty of examples. Women accused of witchcraft. Lynchings. Necklacing. If you search for the word mob and “burned alive” you’ll find examples from every continent of localized collective violence.
Intentional communities aren’t immune from this.
In fact, I had an in-law that had to leave an intentional community they lived in for decades because no one was willing to address a member that was sexually abusing children. The collective violence was being unwilling to act.
That’s just plain false. You have a very limited perspective on this topic, it seems.
Read Graeber’s works such as “Dawn of Everything”, “Debt: the First 5000 Years”, and/or “Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology” and learn the history of humanity. Society works perfectly fine with hierarchy and the state.
Literally all of human history is littered with examples of localized collective violence. Its a fairly well-studied topic.
Your meme paste is hopeful, sure. But you seem to speak from an obvious lack of experience of small community living. It takes a lot of work to keep a community going. Many intentional communities fail once a cluster of leaders age out of leadership.
I’m just asking you to accept that reality is real, messy, and complex. None of this should be shocking unless you’re just fantasizing about this.
Police riot. Trump and ICE are the institutionalization of the lynch mob. If government disappears, everything will not be just fine. People can be unreliable. The police and government are made of people. Governments fail, societies collapse. Solarpunk is a movement to adapt communities so that when government fails again, the harm can be mitigated.
The lynch mobs you’re referring to didn’t happen in spite of government, but with tacit approval of government at some level of administration. The people doing the lynching knew that they wouldn’t be held accountable, and that they would be protected by the government from retaliation. They aren’t examples of anarchy, they aren’t typical of small communities.
Lynch mobs typically are the result of unwritten laws being tacitly enforced by government.
Small communities do have problems, so we should continue the collective discussion of how to best resolve those problems in ways that preserve justice. Bringing in the FBI to deal with the racist police who were leading lynch mobs only worked until the federal level was recaptured by a more virulent strain of white supremacy. ‘Strange Fruit’ didn’t end because the FBI suddenly discovered injustice. It was a result of a long running grassroots community conversation about the problem until progress on alternative solutions showed enough success to become threatening to the supremacy of the federal government.
Reality is real, messy, and complex, and doesn’t get simpler by abdicating responsibility for that messy complexity to a class of people with even less accountability than ourselves. Communities fail, and often people with the imagination to think of creative alternative solutions and are doing the hard work of community building are the reason that they don’t. Assuming we don’t live in real, vibrant, complex worlds only telegraphs the simplicity of your own worldview.
I was interested so I started reading the link. From what I understand their main point is that crime is committed when someone is unable to meet their needs and that the best way to prevent crime is to adress those needs by social programs. But what if ones need is sexual frustration and they want to commit rape? I’m guessing we are not talking about giving out government mandated GFs here. Every need can’t be met especially if someone happens to simply be a sadist who specifically enjoys the feeling of causing harm. How are you gonna prevent these kinds of crimes with social programs? Mental health resources only work as far as the people who need them actually want to partake in them.
Most cases the reason for rape is less about urges, and more about power (with a dash of opportunity). There’s also societal predispositions baked into the way that people are raised. If your parents, friends, neighbours, media, etc, all treat rape as a horrid thing that nobody would do, it doesn’t even pop into people’s heads. And even if someone does it, they get shunned, though in the general the way solarpunk societies are presented also include community support, so both the perpetrator and the victim would get support. For the perpetrator, I’d assume there’d be an involved process of the why - what’s making them feel powerless, or making them think hurting others is okay, or whatever. They might need counselling, rescue from an abusive situation of their own, medication, or whatever not. It’s incredibly rare to have people who genuinely cannot help themselves, in which case they’d need additional support just like anyone else who has troubles that affect themselves and those around them. There’s sadists who are sadistic due to their own trauma, there’s those that are such due to mental health issues, and there’s very few who are like that due to the way they were born. In the last case, it could be a combined “enforced” support, as well as general community perception of “ah, that’s sadistic George, be careful around him and don’t be alone with him, otherwise he bakes a mean cottage pie” kinda stuff, if that makes sense?
TW: rape mention
::: spoiler This is my thought as well. I know it’s not palatable to think about - we don’t want to extend empathy to rapists, of course we don’t. But we can’t say that some people deserve help and others don’t. I’ve thought about this a lot for my own moral values, and yeah, if we have someone who is unable to stop themselves from raping (whether by some kind of psychological issue or because they simply don’t want to), then I want to extend community support to them just like anyone else.
That might look like having them in some kind of supportive housing situation (NOT a prison) where they can be supervised, or allowing them to go out and have a job if they’re showing signs of working hard against the urges with a caretaker present to, well, stop them from raping. Medication that lowers the libido would be necessary. So would counseling.
I don’t like the idea of helping someone who happily rapes any chance they get, but I will not ever play God and decide who gets human rights and who doesn’t.
In terms of “enforcement” in the cases of rape, I think we can safely get rid of cops and lean toward a team of mental health professionals who can employ things like supportive confinement and counseling etc.
spoiler:::
Spoiler tag did not work for me. Its not hidden, I mean.
You might find this documentary interesting: Hollow Water | 2000 | 48 min
I think there’s a difference between law enforcement and police, though the word “enforcement” does stick in my craw a little. I don’t know if it’s what the OP was getting at, but there does need to be some way to ensure that people don’t abuse others even in an anarchist society.
That could be community intervention in the moment and social services in the long term, with cessation of community support as a last resort for people who simply will not cooperate with the community.
Of course, there would be a lot less crime in a supportive society, but it wouldn’t disappear entirely.
The law part sucks too.
The law is impartial, which is to say it does not care for the wishes of the victim. The law is blind, meaning anyone who finds a loophole is in the clear. The law asks whether people are guilty or innocent, meaning complex situations have to be assigned a binary label.
You’ll want some way to protect people who are in danger from others, whether that’s warning them of others’ selfishness or violent mutual aid. But you don’t need a rigid law for that. Situations can get messy and benefit from things being cleared up, but that’s closer to investigative journalism than to courtrooms referencing obscure clauses written by lawmakers who never conceived of this situation.
Laws were made by centralized states to enforce the wishes of the central authority on its behalf. They are shaped like authority, not justice.