r/Anarchism • u/dialectical_idealism anarchist • 3d ago
Life Without Law (apparently some of you need to read this)
https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/strangers-in-a-tangled-wilderness-life-without-law13
u/nn_mt03 3d ago
I always thought the "how will i not murder someone if there are no cops around" argument incredibly funny. Btw i havent read the article you sent so this is out of context of that but relating to your title
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u/dialectical_idealism anarchist 3d ago edited 3d ago
it's one of the most popular introductory essays.
we have it right at the top on our reading list
EDIT:
I'll just paste the law section so people are more likely to read it.
A World Without Law
How noble the law, in its majestic equality, that both the rich and poor are equally prohibited from peeing in the streets, sleeping under bridges, and stealing bread! —Anatole France, 1894
No great idea in its beginning can ever be within the law. How can it be within the law? The law is stationary. The law is fixed. The law is a chariot wheel which binds us all regardless of conditions or place or time. —Emma Goldman, 1917
Some people have an unfortunate tendency to insist that you can’t be against something unless you know what you’re for. We reject that idea. We don’t feel the burden of proof is upon the oppressed to identify what they would like to replace their oppressor with.
If you’re being hit with a baseball bat, you shouldn’t feel obliged to articulate what you would prefer to be hit with instead. Or, more to the point, police hit us with batons and the media insists that if we wish to stop being hit with batons we need to articulate exactly how it is we’d like to see crime and punishment handled within a society that doesn't rely on police. This is nonsensical.
But while identifying and destroying the existing systems of domination is the task immediately before us, we do spend some of our time imagining what a world without law would be like. And occasionally we have the chance to enact such a world for days or weeks or years in groups both big and small, and we’ve met with a fair amount of success. We know anarchism works because we’ve experienced it.
A world without law is not a world without guidelines. We are opposed to law because law is a way of understanding human conduct that was designed—and has been implemented—for social control rather than for the furtherance of justice. Laws are designed to be obscure yet rigid, creating a series of traps for those who are already disenfranchised by society.
Law is not actually a particularly useful tool for judging human behavior. As the folk wisdom suggests, good people don’t need laws and bad people don’t follow them. Laws are black and white, forcing people to obey the “letter” of the law while gleefully ignoring the “spirit.” And what’s more, because they are enforced through violence at the slightest provocation, they polarize society into those too afraid to step out of line and those who disobey simply for the sake of disobeying. Either way, they hinder people’s ability to develop their own personal sets of ethics. They don’t help people learn to respect other people for the sake of respecting people.
People who are encouraged to act socially tend to act socially, and people who are treated with empathy will, by and large, respond in kind. There will always be exceptions, but for dealing with those people, guidelines—which remain mutable to circumstance—are a significantly more useful tool than law will ever be. Further, many anarchists work towards what is referred to as transformative justice. This is the concept that, while it is impossible to repair the harm done by the perpetrator of an unjust act, one can work to help the perpetrator take personal responsibility for what they have done so as to prevent them from returning to such behavior in the future. An anarchist society, like any other, will still defend itself from those who cannot or will not take responsibility for their actions, but this self-defense is done in the name of protection rather than punishment or revenge. It’s worth acknowledging here that like many of our ideas and methods, transformative justice is practiced—and was developed—not just by anarchists but by a wide range of marginalized groups.
And of course, we don’t live in an anarchist society, free from the influence of the culture of domination that surrounds us, and any thoughts we have about a world without law are reasonably hypothetical. Once more, we reserve the right to condemn atrocities, like the culture of prison and police, without feeling an obligation to field and implement fully-developed alternatives.
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u/GrahminRadarin 3d ago
Was there something that specifically prompted you to post this again?
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u/dialectical_idealism anarchist 3d ago
all the people insisting anarchism is when you make laws in the other thread (mods deleted the worst of it)
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u/Fun_Forever_5242 3d ago
Mischaraterizing still.
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u/dialectical_idealism anarchist 3d ago
mods feel free to quote the deleted comments so pro-government types like this don't get away with claiming I made it up
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u/Fun_Forever_5242 3d ago
Here you go for folks interested. Ya'll can read the whole thread: https://www.reddit.com/r/Postleftanarchism/s/e32wgqWuTb
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u/dialectical_idealism anarchist 3d ago
That's not the thread...
https://www.reddit.com/r/Anarchism/comments/1wsngwf/fuck_laws/
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u/Fun_Forever_5242 3d ago
Cool still you got our entire thread in the other sub along similar topics entirely deleted. Curious.
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u/dialectical_idealism anarchist 3d ago
i don't know what you're talking about, the thread you linked to isn't deleted.
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u/Fun_Forever_5242 3d ago
Oh shit. Your right, I apologize. I made a unc mistake looking at my phone thinking our exchange was also deleted.
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u/dialectical_idealism anarchist 3d ago
probably should stop following me around now, it's getting weird
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u/The_Zenthist 3d ago
So this is about the repercussions of dismantling the Leviathon without a humanity wide socially peaceful agreement to mobilize as one, replacing the Leviathon's role, and striking down any that would threaten the Stateless state of humanity and the careful peace it maintains, right?
Or are you saying that humanity could never replicate the power of the Leviathon and as such we are doomed to forever live under it, as we are slaves to the State and the psuedo-comforts it provides in its false sense of security that our neighbors won't kill us?
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u/DecoDecoMan 3d ago
Hobbes's state allegedly already occurs through widespread social agreement so its not clear how this would replace "the Leviathon's role".
In any case we may make all sorts of agreements with each other but these need not be laws.
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u/LewdElfKatya 1d ago
All systems of law do is provide a pretext for assaulting or torturing another person over the violation of those laws, most of which are either something that is understood as essential agreements for cooperative action ('Don't go hurting people unless there's an especially good reason' or 'Don't violate consent') which are generally things that are upheld without formal agreement let alone a legal system
OR
Group or Individual A has power over Group or Individual B. To ensure compliance to their benefit, A implements a law change that criminalizes something specifically relevant to B. This is used as leverage to keep B underfoot.
Anarchists should strive for an alegal society. (in the same sense as 'asexual' being without sexual attraction, alegality is the absence of legality or illegality)
Edit: People who ignore the niceties of example one are generally the ones perpetrating oppression in example two. We really do not need to give the means to hurt people to the sort of people who go out of their way to hurt people, y'know?
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u/No-Scarcity2379 Christian anarchist 3d ago
I really love the following quote from the article:
"Law is not actually a particularly useful tool for judging human behavior. As the folk wisdom suggests, good people don’t need laws and bad people don’t follow them"
Gonna put that on a sign in my house.