Will communism have prisons?

I don't know. We hand responsibility over, it's not "taken". However, this is not a psychological or consciousness-based action, it is a rational choice in the face of incentive. In order to break the cycle, a different set of actions can only be developed through incentive or coercion. Which means that the only viable communism is one with-decadence-theory or one that relies on misery to force rebellion. Decadence is too fragile a theory for modern tastes, so we’re basically left with misery mongers, or losers, whatever you want to call them. Which is where a fascination for dialectics springs from to be honest, I mean, that sort like a row don’t they. It's all very borderline-personality in the milieu, its upper echelons were no doubt flaky even when they’d achieved some kind of popular base.

i find it strange that peoples vision of communism seems to be so similar to present day society. As alibandi said peoples psychology will be massively different in a communist society than todays. You really think its beyond the realms of possibility that mental illnesses will ever be eradicated?

In a society freed from material need, wars , competition etc in which humanity would have no other considerations but the full development of all human needs, it seems difficult to argue that eradicating mental ilness (at some stage) could be considered "utterly retarded".

What people? I don't know anyone with a "vision of communism", I certainly haven't got one. Also, I think people who are mentally ill are valuable, indeed they’re required for some activities I enjoy at the moment and intend to after "the revolution".

Certainly eradicating competitions will work. Disco dancing competitions are especially evil, sinful on the Sabbath, and make young women think impure and non-communist thoughts which will only make them unhappy and mental in the end. Obviously.

i quite obviously meant economic competetion and things like the seperation of humanity into conflicting nations and classes etc.

you obviously don't have a vision of communism because you seem to love capitalism so much that, there is no need for a different society anyway, especially not one based on hippy ideas like the creation of a 'truly human society'.

jaycee you do realise people suffer problems with their health for a million different reason not directly linked with capitalism? Grief, lose of a lover, feelings of inadequacy, insecurity, to name just a few. Communist society won't stop that (and shouldn't aim to).

So it's a Disco Dancing competition with no prizes? That’s not a competition at all. All competition is economic one way or the other, and in so doing expresses "truly human" better than anything communist visionaries imagine.

ahh Lazy's reductionism in all it's glory.

The ladies love it, what can I say?

Or, consider the mustard seed, and then consider communist society. The second of these conforms to the prison model in the sense that human indiividuals attempt to conform to imposed codifications of behaviour, it departs from the prison in that all transgressions from the codes in themselves cause recodification – communism will not so much perfect itself as become more complex in its internal relations. Those who conform to the code inhabit the gulag regime, those who cannot conform are free to live beyond the walls. In this sense, any transgressor remaining within the frame set by communism would seek to engage with and come to recognise the transgression as such. He would therefore recognise in himself the required need to personally call for and also define his own punishment – society would oppose this and insist on the potential for his reconcilliation with the established code based on his late recognition of his own transgression – the subsequent arguments would reverse the capitalist logic of justice (‘the people versus ...’) In the communist version the transgressor would accuse society itself of faulting precisely at the location of his individuality... his call for his own execution (in show trial style) would seem appalling to the masses assembled at a cyber-tyburn. If the transgressor refused to accept the social cause of his crime and an executioner were employed if only to silence his proliferation of reflexive-codes then this should be on the understanding that the executioner was prepared to also execute himself given the prohibition on murder (and in anticipation of a cross-society negative feedback relating to street gang style revenge executions)... a suicide-executioner cult based on the motto of ‘take one with me’ would quickly sort transgressions at the level of individual organisms and thus facilitate further conformity of existence with the code – the cult itself though not conforming with communist principles.

Did I mention that fort-da game is my fav. poster at the mo? That "organisations are primarily for accumulation" line was wicked. Are we in the presence of one of Monsieur Dupont?

Fixed.

revol, surely grief and pain is not the same thing as mental illness, in fact mental health is surely more to do with how people cope with grief and loss etc. In communism surely you could concieve that people being genearlly more happy and healthy would mean dealing with such things would be easier to manage.

With regards to physical damage, I would think this very rarely leads to any sociopathic tendencies etc.

Also, again I'd say that at some point in human development such damage could be more fully understood and helped.

The point of the opposition to state institutions like prisons is not to then advocate a ‘utopia’ (as if the crossroads before us is marked with only two destinations Neverland or the disciplinary archipelago) but to understand, as in OuliPo activities, that there will always be in operation a set of humanly created restrictions on what constitutes communist existence. Just as Perec wrote a novel without the letter e so communism will be a human a society that cannot reach for the gaoler’s keys, no matter how tempting that might be. The prohibition on authoritarian measures will, in itself, produce the tensions and complexity in society.

I admit that this might appear mad bad and/or dangerous but it is simply the case that communism and prisons are incompatible. If there were prisons, laws and other state apparatus then there wouldn’t be communism – what there would be is some form of, as Red Hughes put it, extreme left capitalism.

It seems to me that the anarchist proponents of prison and the pseudo-state bureaucracy which would administer it are operating on the theoretical assumption that it is their role to prescribe to us what communism will be, as a gesture towards providing a solution to current problems. Unfortunately, they only end up advocating a communist process which resembles exactly the capitalist social relation – this will to provide concrete solutions for the future, rather than say, negatively reframing and increasing the complexities of need within human existence, is itself the original definition of utopianism. Unfortunately, in this case it is a prosaic example and denuded of all transcendence, a bit like the Jehova’s Witness version of heaven. Similarly, the abstract scene in which we are invited to anticipate raping, murdering, child molesting individualists and their subsequent disciplining is in accord with primitivist frames of reference.

In recent days, through the prism of this discussion I happened to listen to Nina Simone’s pairing of Strange Fruit with Sinnerman (surely, taken together, expressing one of the foremost statements on punishment yet produced in human society) and I have watched Hitchcock’s cynical reverse-vigilantism in Marnie, in which the urge to discover/punish is sublimated into an urge to understand/marry. Both these cultural artefacts record positions of humanity that exist in advance of the plodding revenge fantasies and hypothetico-pragmatism of what seems to be the Libcom line, in advance because they begin from perversity and implicitly reject the type of political hack-leftism which has become so prevalent on this forum recently (of course, others might want to make similar claims for coounter-examples such as 10CC's Rubber Bullets, and Gene Wilder's Stir Crazy). The point here is communism refers to the entirety of human life and not simply to top-down political programmes/institutions that pro-state anarchists here envisage.

Oh, and prisons demand massive capital investment, this would demand extraction of surplus value from a recomposed proletariat. First, the capital would be extracted primitively from the accidentally useful work of the incarcerated, later people would be systematically incarcerated so as to work to sustain the system. The logic of prisons is inseparable from the logic of capitalism.

Nah. I've dealt with a few cases of people with violent mental illness, impulse control problems, alcoholism etc arising from head injuries in car accidents and so on. Damaged frontal lobes apparently.

Like a frontal lobotomy in the form of an ideology. I’d rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy. Ha ha.

the point i'm making is not that mental illness would magically vanish, although it will almost automatically be reduced massively by communism. It is that the remaining cases would be able to be cured and eradicated (at some point in history) through the advances which will surely be made in a society which is soley dedicated to human needs.

Society is already solely dedicated to human needs, just different ones from those countenanced by your value system.

i agree that humanity may never no everything, the fact is we don't know exactly what may remain a mystery and what won't. But things like people becoming brain damaged and then showing sociopathic tendencies is not proof that these tendencies were not already part of the persons subconcsious which had been conditioned by this society, like people who get violent when drunk.

the point is that it is foolish to assume that these things will never be overcome, also that if there are still mentally ill people even in the an extremely advanced stage of communism, they will deffinately not be put in prisons and will be helped instead of punished.

It is alos interested that alienation has not yet been mentioned. Humanity completely freed from alienation would be at a completely different level of consciousness to present day humanity, therefore this debate is in many ways impossible because coompletely free humanity has not existed yet and therefore we have very little to base our views on.

That's a genetic thing as it happens, as demonstrated by twin studies and adoption studies.

jaycee on a fundamental level to be human, to be a subject is to be alienated.

The point isn't whether or not there there will be some cases of mental illness in all the thousands of years of future history we are talking about. Once again, it's a question of communism as a movement which has a view of its own future and the direction it wants to take. The point is that instead of being directly linked to the existing social relations, such illnesses will run counter to the general tendencies in social life and will be progressively reduced towards insignficance. I don't see why jaycee is arguing 'like an anarchist' to put that forward. As I have said previously, it seems 'much more anarchist' to imagine that communism appears straight after the revolution without a transition period and, as a result, to discuss communism not as a qualitatively higher form of society but as something not startingly different from what we have today.

yeah we've had enough promises of the after life!

Ha ha. Higher form of society indeed. All the communists and other spiritual types should get themselves checked out for the VMAT2 gene, and have a bit of a rethink if they discover they have it.

This is definitely the worst understanding of the concept surplus value i have ever seen.

I never wrote that. I just said that the post it came from was .

I admit my argument was a little off-hand, and yet at least it had content – other than hysteria, what exactly is the economic explanation of anarchist prisons? Anyway, I think only a wiki-level of understanding of the relation between cycles of capital accumulation and subjectification through the productive relation is necessary here. The simple fact is that self-managementists cannot explain how they will put people to work and finance the institutions of their pseudo-state utilitarianism without capital accumulation – how are they to preserve use-value without the mechanism of exchange which gives rise to it?

The role of useful prison labour under anarchist government would act as a convenient means for both externalising and disavowing the continuation of alienated existence – it is a typical example of the workers' state argument, the convergence of a celebration of pure grim use-value with hysterical morality.

cantdocartwheels writes like he is wearing Bob Marley wrist bands – the economic underpinning of his argument for punishment is exactly the same as the underpinning of hippy arguments for freedom, together they relocate the co-ordinates of classic reform liberalism. In effect, cantdocartwheels, Jack and all those making pro-prison statements are advocating a form of hippy-trail reggae-capitalism with an added workerist dimension, i.e. they foresee plenty of rum soaked consultation and autonomy sucked through straws out on the beach whilst sweatshops are turning out libcom t-shirts down in Trenchtown.

Are you shaking your dreadlocks at me? Because this seems like more anarcho-compensatory angst, and liberal-turned nasty kneejerkism – what do you suggest, that we divorce them? In fact the more I think about this the more marriage seems the best option – after all rechannelling rituals of this type do form the core of NLP and CBT... although I think there also needs to be some form of transference. If we consider the role of Norman Wisdom in Albania and compare it with say, the role of Saint-Juste then it is clear that communism has the choice between static absurdist rituals of mild humiliation or a spiralling progress of rationalised moral terror, or put another way the choice is between binding to social codes through either harmless irrationality, accepting we are all Other, or a persecutory instrumentalism.

Why can't you get it though your thick head that very few have actually argued for prisons as we know them today? Fucking knee-jerk reactions to the word prison, when what is really being discussed is what to do with anti-social types (even if they are just two on the whole fucking planet).

Definitely need jails for sickos like this
He wanted the age of consent lowered to 4 - acccording to the BBC radio report today

LOL it's funny though that they actually want an age of consent at 4. I mean how did they come to that age?

"I reckon it should be 5, anything below that is just fucking sick! I'm not going to be in an organisation that promotes the abuse of children!"

"Well what about that wee girl you were sitting on the swongs with the other day, she wasn't in primary school yet, she was definately not 5!"

"You think? I assumed she was atleast 5, she was pretty developed. Alright then what about 4 as the age of consent?"

"yeah that sounds fair enough, fucking anyone younger than that is just soo wrong!".