A quick note from some friends

We are often asked how an anarchist society would deal with, for instance, murderers. Who would stop them without the police?

Most murders are crimes of passion and therefore unpreventable by police or anyone else. Hopefully, however, in a saner, less frustrating society such `crimes' would be less common.

Our rulers claim to be protecting us from each other. Actually they are more interested in protecting themselves and `their' property from us.

If we, as members of a local community, owned and shared all resources it would become absurd to steal. An important motive for crime would be abolished.

These local communities would need to develop some means of dealing with individuals who harmed others. Instead of a few thousand professional police there would be 51 million in the `United Kingdom' alone. Ultimately, our only protection is each other.

Prisons fail to improve or reform anyone. Local people aware of each others' circumstances would be able to apply more suitable solutions, in keeping with the needs of the victim and the offender. The present penal system, on the other hand, creates criminal behaviour. Long term prisoners are often rendered incapable of surviving outside an institution that makes all their decisions for them. How is locking people up with others of an anti-social turn of mind (the worst of whom are the screws) supposed to develop responsibility and reasonable behaviour? Of course it does just the opposite. The majority of prisoners re-offend.

In this society of course, work is a torment. Naturally, we hate it. This does not mean that we are naturally lazy, it means that we resent being treated like machines, compelled to do mostly meaningless work for someone else's benefit. Work does not have to be like that - and if it were controlled by the people who had to do it, it certainly would not be.

Of course some jobs just have to be done, and there are few methods in sight of making collecting rubbish a fun occupation. Everybody would have to take a share and everybody would have to see to it that nobody got away with shirking their responsibilities.

A further pointworth making is that unemployment is only a problem created by capitalism. In a sensible world there would be no unemployment. Everyone would have a shorter working week, because they would only produce things that were needed. If we were to get rid of the parasitic ruling class, we would be free of most of the economic pressure to work.

If you still need to be convinced that an anarchist society could solve the problem of people failing to meet their responsibilities, then imagine yourself being compelled to face a meeting of the whole community you live in and being publicly discussed as a problem. Ugh!

 

Think outside the box