Something along those lines, perhaps. I haven't thought too hard about the specifics (I'm not sure I would object in principle to the police/militia being a special body, as long as it was answerable to the people, but all this would be best decided by a community responding to the requirements of the situation). What concerns me more is just to rectify the idea held by some anarchists that, because all bad aspects of the human character are supposedly due only to environmental factors, then if society is improved, people will be socialised to be 'good' and there will be no more conflict or violence or aggression and thus no need for a protective militia. I think this is founded on a false theory of human nature, and though I think that an improved environment will improve people's characters to some extent, and also remove the motives and causes of a lot of 'crimes', still humans are not going to transform into angels any time soon.
Mar 3 2008 00:19
Mar 3 2008 00:40
There's been a bunch of threads on this stuff already and general consensus is that only mentals think human nature isn't imperfect and that we won't need some sort of militia/police whatever and detention and stuff.
We'll not get rid of all the negative human emotions that we experience no matter how transformed society is- fucked up interpersonal relationships, jealousy, possessiveness and whatever that'll cause conflict and aggression - as well as just plain nutjobs doing psycho shit.
This stuff came up in the various prison threads I think?
Mar 3 2008 00:41
Fair enough. Although socialisation and social structure can do a lot. The Hutterites, a communal christian group in North America (originally from Russia), have a population of about 150,000 and have reportedly never had a murder. They live in little colonies of about 150 people. Similarly, the Kibbutz in Israel don't have much crime, and in fact there have been successful criminal rehabilitation programs involving integrating convicts as full members of a Kibbutz. So I do think that there is hope that different ways of organizing society would have a large effect, even if some active organization to prevent serious misdemeanors is also necessary,
Mar 3 2008 00:44
xConorx wrote:
There's been a bunch of threads on this stuff already and general consensus is that only mentals think human nature isn't imperfect and that we won't need some sort of militia/police whatever and detention and stuff.
We'll not get rid of all the negative human emotions that we experience no matter how transformed society is- fucked up interpersonal relationships, jealousy, possessiveness and whatever that'll cause conflict and aggression - as well as just plain nutjobs doing psycho shit.
This stuff came up in the various prison threads I think?
Could you link to some of these threads. I'd be interested to read them.
My main problem would be, if there is to be some specific organisation to "keep order", without this task being rotated around the whole community, what is to stop them from taking over? There are plenty of abuses by police in western countries. My girlfriend studies human rights law, and half the serious police abuse cases are from France!
Mar 3 2008 00:52
Oh certainly, no-one in their right mind would deny that a libertarian communist society would have a significant effect on this sort of thing, indeed it's surely on of the reasons we want a libertarian communist society in the first place - not just purely to do away with class-society and the state, but the destructive effects they have on our relationships with each other.
as for previous threads touching on this:
Will communism have prisons?
"Free all prisoners"
Mar 3 2008 01:10
sam sanchez wrote:
xConorx wrote:
There's been a bunch of threads on this stuff already and general consensus is that only mentals think human nature isn't imperfect and that we won't need some sort of militia/police whatever and detention and stuff.
We'll not get rid of all the negative human emotions that we experience no matter how transformed society is- fucked up interpersonal relationships, jealousy, possessiveness and whatever that'll cause conflict and aggression - as well as just plain nutjobs doing psycho shit.
This stuff came up in the various prison threads I think?Could you link to some of these threads. I'd be interested to read them.
My main problem would be, if there is to be some specific organisation to "keep order", without this task being rotated around the whole community, what is to stop them from taking over? There are plenty of abuses by police in western countries. My girlfriend studies human rights law, and half the serious police abuse cases are from France!
I'm not certain why you'd assume their function would be "keeping order" per se but maybe that's just words. Certainly we'd need some sort of mechanism for going after, catching, dealing with and if necessary, putting a bullet in the back of the head of 
, violent psychos, rapists, nonces (sorry these topics always generate the most extreme examples, but to assume they wouldn't exist is pretty fuckin unrealistic).
What would stop them from taking over? Obviously it's a bit daft trying to project models for dealing with things in a society we've never experienced. I'd imagine many roles of such an organisation may well be rotatable and it's probably only highly specialised cases that would be less subject to rotation - again accountability to the community etc would be paramount.
If we won't steal and horde stuff because we all have enough, there'd not be as much of an incentive to just dominate others for the sake of it.
Actually even just talking about this speculative stuff makes me sound mental.
In these discussions, much of the arguments become semantic - like, you find prison-abolitionists acknowledging we'd need some form of detention for proper nutjobs, they just don't like it being called prison or whatever.
And whether punitive measures would be justifiable in extreme cases (violent murders/assaults, rape, noncing) came up in another thread that I'd rather not link to because it was a mess and started a whole load of shit that I don't think would be helpful here.
Mar 4 2008 02:19
Quote:
Capitalism existed before the factory system became widespread in the 19th century. Its beginning can be traced to what has been called "the long 16th century" with the spread of market relations to more and more aspects of economic life. Seeing society, not as in feudal times as a God-given hierarchical community where different "estates" have obligations to each other, but as being made up of autonomous individuals trading and making contracts with each other was a consequence of this. Of course there's been a chicken-and-egg argument here over which came first -- the reality of market exchange or the idea of autonomous individuals -- with Max Weber, for instance, famously taking the second position with his The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. But I thought there was general agreement that there was a "spirit of capitalism" and that it had something to do with Protestantism and that it originated in the "long 16th century" and grew in importance in the following century (when Hobbes was writing) along with the spread of market relations.
It is a semantic issue, really. Thanks for the history lesson, though I've read Leviathan like four times and many more secondary sources about it and the context it was written in. The period in which he wrote would be more accurately be described as mercantilist...although this is sometimes called 'mechant capitalism' interchangably, so big deal. When I said 'capitalism' I meant 'industrial capitalism'.
The roots of industrial capitalism are certainly to be found in mercantilism both in terms of psychologies and unfolding material-economic tendencies so for all intents and purposes you are right.
I would argue, however, that it would be more accurate to put the prophet of capitalism title on Adam Smith, a full century later. I see the political and economic changes that took place during the time of the English Civil War as having more to do with the accelerating breakdown of the church-state system and the power grab by landowning aristocracy and some merchants (Marx played up the latter to the exclusion of the former) in the absence of a powerful central authority.
The distinction that needs to be made is that the class system that Hobbes wrote in the context of was one in which economic elites and the state are in no way seperable in terms of enforcing new property relations and allowing for new forms of trade. The psychology of industrial capitalism, however, is one in which the economic elites are much less unified as competition (domestic and international) had intensified and property relations were solidified through entirely new layers of material culture, technology, institutions and methods of organization. The roots of possessive individualism existed in the 1640s, to be sure, but what we really see is the extension of the same old domineering, authoritarian psychology of economic domination through the exertion of state power (albeit with the dissolution of church-based social ideology). The true atomized individualism swept through the entirety of society to a much greater degree as the factory system took hold.
Mar 4 2008 08:20
Antieverything wrote:
I would argue, however, that it would be more accurate to put the prophet of capitalism title on Adam Smith, a full century later.
I dunno, imho smith wasn't really a prophet as many of his most famous points were elaborations on what he saw going on already around him (the division of labour example of pin manufacture etc). hobbes on the other hand was living through a shift from a feudal-agrarian to a mercantilist economy, and in railing against the divine right of kings, asserting the rule of law and equality before it, individualism etc can retrospectively be said to have been a prophet of capitalism (or again, one could argue he just had a good eye for tendencies already present and their logical implications, expanded trade requiring equality before the law wrt contracts etc).
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No, I don't suppose there would be nothing that could be described as lawkeeping. I have very little difficulty with having laws, as long as they are made by direct democracy and as decentralised as is feasible. Are you proposing something like Guillaume's suggestion?:
"It will nevertheless still he necessary to take precautions for the security of persons. This service, which can be called (if the phrase has not too bad a connotation) the Communal Police, will not be entrusted, as it is today, to a special, official body; all able-bodied inhabitants will be called upon to take turns in the security measures instituted by the commune."
The only problem is, a lot of people might not really be up for it. A lot of people in London, for example, are really quite frightened and wouldn't so much as confront a teenage girl playing loud music on the bus. But I suppose if people were trained up it might be feasible. After all, the police do it and their only people like the rest of us.