cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/12421194
Continuing a discussion on an old thread, perhaps we can ask: "Will there be police and prisons under socialism?"
I'm sure there will be a number of different answers from socialists, but this is c/abolition, so of course the answer would be no.
But wait, one might say, weren't and aren't there police and prisons in "actually existing socialism"? Yes, but for varying reasons, the "socialism" of these projects was merely the political ideology of their ruling parties, not in terms of their mode of production. All of these countries had wage-labor, proletarianization, money, commodities, et cetera—all features of a capitalism. Because they had these features of capitalism, these state socialist projects necessarily needed police and prisons to enforce the rule of state capital.
When Marx talked about socialism, he most clearly outlines it in his Critique of the Gotha Program where he uses the term "lower-phase communism" that Second International Marxism and later pre-Bolshevized Comintern Marxism interpreted as "socialism." In socialism or lower-phase communism, the state is already abolished because classes are already abolished. In doing so, we can necessarily expect the cruelest features of the state like police and prisons are necessarily also abolished.
Police and prisons are historically contingent to class society. They serve as a mode of upholding class society. Across Europe and North America during the development of capitalism, police and prisons were used to enforce the rule of wage-labor and force previously non-proletarian peoples into proletarianization. These institutions would drive people off their land, enclose the commons, and then impose regimes of terror to enforce class society.
But how about, a socialist might ask, the enforcement of class rule of the proletariat? The dictatorship of the proletariat? First, it is important to note that the dictatorship of the proletariat is not yet socialism. It is the transition period to socialism. Second, the dictatorship of the proletariat is indeed a class dictatorship, just like the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie we currently live under. Third, the class dictatorship of the proletariat cannot look like previous modes of class dictatorship because it is a class dictatorship for the transition from a class society to a classless society, not a transition from a class society to another class society. Previous modes of class dictatorship used the terror of police and prisons to transition from a monarchist system to a republican system, or the class dictatorship of the aristocracy to the class dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. The proletarian class dictatorship is different in that it is a class dictatorship that abolishes class distinctions, the most important of which is proletarianization. Logically, if proletarianziation needs police and prisons to be enforced, then the class dictatorship to abolish proletarianization likewise does away with police and prisons, simply because one cannot use the enforcement of proletarianization to do away with proletarianization.
However, the crucial feature of class dictatorship is its dictatorship, the ability for a class to enforce its will on all other classes. We have previously noted here that previous modes of class dictatorship does this using police and prisons. How is proletarian class dictatorship supposed to do this without police and prisons? Very simply, the power of a proletariat as a class-for-itself does not come from the barrel of a gun or a ballot box, but by their ability to subvert what they are as proletarianized beings. This does not mean that there will be no violence, far from it, but that this violence is ordered towards subversion of class society rather than reproducing it. Commonly, Second International Marxism, especially as embodied by Lenin in State and Revolution, advocates for a whole armed proletariat as opposed to special bodies of armed force (e.g. police and prisons). For whatever reason, Lenin disregarded this when the Bolsheviks took power in Russia, thus reproducing class society and all that that entailed, leading the Soviet Union down a path of an unambiguous class society where the proletariat continued to be proletarianized.
Abolition communism means moving beyond this failure to abolish police and prisons under a transitional period and forwarding abolition and communization in its place.
So no, there would not be police and prisons in socialism nor in the transitional period to it, unless of course that transitional period was not transitioning to socialism at all but back to capitalism.
How would you prevent a police class from forming through people's natural or situational preferences?
Even with a whole armed society, is a new mother going to put as much violence-backed pressure towards ensuring her vision of justice gets realized as a rabble-rousing 18-year-old with Ideas? What stops the hottest heads from prevailing and using recklessness to walk over others?
Or in common parlance, what prevents this from devolving into mob justice?
It seems possible that you could prevent it, but it's not a matter of good faith and not even of (post-)proletarian consciousness. You would actually need commonly agreed upon rules or structures that draw power away from those most eager to wield it. You need people willing to defend the rights of those who later turn out to be guilty of heinous crimes, people willing to protect people guilty of some crimes from excessive violence, etc.
USSR justice wasn't just bad because it was classist, there was also a general disregard for due process, with few people willing to stand up for those accused and many eager to treat them with extreme prejudice. It was very easy for people to end up in a self-reinforcing downward spiral of general opinion that lead to extreme punishment even if their guilt was never properly established.
I don't really know the argument for abolishing prisons entirely. Using them for punishment is dumb, but there are people who will actually engage in violence against innocent others. What would you do with a serial killer or a rapist who doesn't yet believe that what they did shouldn't be repeated? How else are you going to handle that 1/10,000th of the population?
The question about "what about the dangerous people" is an abolition 101 question. I invite you to ask this question again on abolition@slrpnk.net. For now, what I can say is that the idea of a person being willfully violent for no reason is baseless. Yes, rapists and serial killers may exist, but they exist in a context, one that is historically contingent. Under different contingencies, they would not be violent. I'd invite you to read up on transformative justice and restorative justice. A lot of the literature already deals with creating life-ways where bodily or sexual violence becomes unthinkable. Moreover, human society is diverse and plural. Over the thousands of years and millions of different contexts, only in the few hundred years did we see prisons and police take their current forms. People all around the world and across history had found ways of dealing with harm in a healthy way. Much of this is repressed by capitalist and statist societies that suffocates different life-ways into the margins.
As for your first question, policing forms under specific circumstances. Just because everyone has capacity to deal violence (even at different capacities) does not mean that this will naturally devolve into mob justice. Remember that 19th century socialist, anarchist, and communist theory drew from anthropology on Indigenous peoples in the Americas who showed these white men that they did not need to live in the historically contingent ways they lived at that moment. The idea of communism was possible because people had real experiences of the commons, an experience that communist theory seeks to elevate to communism. In the same way, we can look to anthropology to see how people deal with harm in a healthy way, in a way that is restorative and transformative. Even today, Black, Indigenous, Queer, feminized, and criminalized peoples live in the margins of society wherein they cannot turn to police to guarantee their safety. So what do they do? They develop ways to deal with harm without resorting to a special body of armed men. We can learn from these practices that already contain within them the seeds for abolition.
Oh hey, a noble savage. It's been a while since I've seen one this blatant. Historically, the answer to rape for most people between 10,000 years ago and 200 years ago was "It's awesome, as long as you do it to lower class people, spouses, or foreigners", and the answer for murderous tendencies was "Finally a real man. Earn glory in battle, and have fun raping and pillaging out there. Just don't do it to us or we will send more murderous people after you to torture you to death".
Those are a lot of ways of saying "Don't look right now but there's an explanation behind the curtain, please go bother someone else".
Given the sort of language you're using, you seem to be to describing a vague cultural osmosis version of the Iroquois confederacy. So let me be specific: the Iroquois executed people that were considered too dangerous to be left alive. Prisons would be an improvement on that, now that we have more resources to spare and a better understanding of psychiatry.
I wrote my comment in order to learn. You have given me nothing except vague statements about knowledge existing elsewhere that we can learn from. Do you actually know anything yourself?
It doesn't seem like you're here to learn. You're here to argue and win meaningless internet points. I could say a lot of things, like might makes right is just as fallacious as the noble savage, or that abolition isn't about romanticizing Indigenous practices but learning alternative life-ways from them, but it won't matter. You're here to bicker. Go pound sand or something.
I just want to point out that the "noble savage myth" trope is only false in that it has always been a racist canard to attack anyone who suggests that we should treat indigenous people with respect. The mere suggestion that they have a functioning society and would actually be better off if we didn't ~~genocide~~ civilise them is met with this retort that you have fallen for the "noble savage myth". It is a deliberate mischaracterisation that people somehow still accept as truth.
It rests on the listener accepting that "savages have no nobility, therefore the notion of a noble savage is absurd". As soon as you question that basic tenet, it falls apart. What is "nobility", why is it good, and why is it the sole province of so-called civilised society? Why are they called "savage" in the first place?
I think the basic refutation of "noble savage" is that both words are lies. Nobility is a false pretence to cover the fact that nobles are nothing more than human beings, and savage is the opposite, a dehumanisation to cover the fact that so-called nobles ordered the slaughter of nothing less than human beings.
The noble savage trope works because even if you somehow catch one of these lies, it's hard to catch them both.
Update: I took you up on the invitation and asked questions in the abolition community and I got banned and my comments removed without reply, lol.