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?
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.