So, genuine question: under anarchism, what would be the societal response to, say, someone abusing their partner, or a serial killer or something?
this post was submitted on 14 Jan 2026
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If you thing that currently, cops are protecting people being abused, you are misinforms. This is not something we have to thing for after the revolution; we have to solve it now. And this is not the sole respectability of anarchists or activists.
In my organisations, we do. We have a procedure to listening victims and gathering their needs. Most of the time, their is material need (and we have a solidarity fund to response), and keep away the aggressor from the place the survivors evolve. If He/sh comply, we start a mediation in order to not let the aggressor alone and let him evolve. If not, that personne is warn that he/she is not welcome in thoses places.
If we threat the survivor again, or if force himself into those places and refuse to leave, we may make him to, by force. If you think that could make us like cops, our comrades could agree, and we may have to justify ourselves in front of our community.
This one of many point of view one "how to deal with violence". Their is not common solution, each place need to inform and try out. We need to be better than fascists with guns and no accountability to the people; that leave a lot place.
So basically vigilante violence with zero standards and regulations is your grand idea of replacing an actual police force because you think they lack a proper amount of standards and regulations? Can't make up this clownery
What? It's almost like you think burning witches at the stake and hanging people from trees based upon their skin color is a bad thing. Don't you know that large groups of random people are always the most logical and best thinkers the human race has to offer.
They're an oxymoron because they simultaneously advocate for and against mob justice without a hint of irony
I said the exact opposite. Read again
Your comment was pretty hard to read with all the typos, but I still think I got the core of it just fine. What you're proposing is already the case with modern police forces. The only difference is that the police now common standards and regulations they must follow nationwide, but under anarchy there will be no oversight at all.
The community itself deals with it. This could be a rotating group of mediators with the ability to escalate issues as needed for resolution. The process is almost always democratic and when involving the whole is unreasonable or impractical, a rotating committee-based system is generally used. For example, when a jury, verdict, or punishment is needed.
"We don't want police, we want a chartered committee that is authorized to use violence to impose the will of society!"
So how do you think it should be handled when one community protects their criminal who has attacked another community? What if one community becomes richer than another and therefore the other communities are unable to project justice onto them for being assholes?
This might sound like an excuse (community deals with it), but human is wired to live in self-organized ~100 people groups. It gets nasty only if the groups get much bigger.
Problem is, in a modern society, you can't leave every decision (like, what to teach) to the group only. Which means you need a framework in which the groups are embedded. And that framework needs mechanisms against abuse and to enforce some decisions. Which then again is a state.
I don't think their could be anarchists society with keeping inequality. So I do agree we could not solves issue link to wealth inequality. But those inequality have to solve first. This is a common point view among libertarian communists, anarcho-communist and anarcho-syndicalists.
Ofr the inter-communities issues, the whole thing is to create common interests :
- if a place have more funds, the production have to be split. To make this solution acceptable, the work needed could be equally distributed among thoses communities. The idea is to prevent wealth accumulation, create link among communities, and make the live more comfortable for everyone. Other solutions may be used, like cultural one to gather people from many places (physical activities, free party, ...)
- Some working places need people from different places to be run. Like hospital, university, or power plant. This common need may prevent those agressions, but otherwise, if one community refuse mediation, some non vital production may be stopped. Like electricity, radio, or other cultural stuff
Again, their is no common recipe. This stuff have to be experiment from now to get more and more efficient.
Ok interesting, thanks for the answer. I'm also curious what exactly "community" envisions? Does it just refer to existing towns/cities/city divisions? Or would it be necessary for the existing areas to be "broken up" into smaller, closer communities? My thinking is that in large cities there are often a huge number of people, and yet very little sense of community between them, so I am doubtful how well a community driven system could scale?
I’m not personally convinced the model is scalable. It has worked in small, mostly rural autonomous zones — provided there wasn’t a bigger, better armed government murdering them for having the gall to be independent — but I can’t imagine any way in which it scales up and remains stable.
Anarchists will generally acknowledge this issue and argue the theory that zones need to remain small and independent and must cooperate with other independent zones each with certain specializations. For example, one zone might have certain types of medical care expertise and another might grow certain types of crops and another might focus on energy production. I’m sure there are many more theories for how an ideal anarchist society would structured, but that’s the one I hear the most.
So a police force...
..... You're kidding, right? Are you 5, or something? It's a serious question, I'm trying to understand how someone can write that down and be serious about it.
You will always need police, because there will always be misbehaving elements in society. Be it due to mental illness or plain psychopaths, doesn't really matter, you need a trained group of people designated to be the ones to keep society nice. Let's call them "police"
From the mad ramblings of what you wrote, it sounded like the description of police and a judge / justice system only much, much worse. You want random untrained idiots to decide on justice matters? I'm sorry no.
I want a judge who has been trained and learned how to be ethical and impartial. I want police that has been trained, especially in de-escalation, who have been checked for not being psychopaths.
There is nothing wrong with the basics of current police systems (not you US, you're fucked up) we just need more focus on police being trained better (or, in case of the US, trained at all), being monitored better by independent groups to ensure abuses stay at a minimum.
We need changes like limiting net worth. If we limit net worth to (just an example) 1 million dollar and any income after that goes 100% to taxes, we don't need to change anything else. Nobody can be super rich anymore, nobody can have crazy bad influence anymore, we'd literally be all the same.
Governments get huge tax incomes that can be used for free healthcare, free education, universal basic income, even. It's a simple single change that will have the most impact.
I answered the question accurately and good faith based on anarchist theory and actual implementations by anarchist autonomous zones like Mexico’s Zapatistas. If you don’t like the answer or agree with it philosophically, that is entirely on you.
So I enjoy good discourse, and I think most of your post is reasonable, but is it really necessary to start it off with insults and condescension?
If you're interested in how a society without police could look like, there's a good book by Ursula K. Le Guine, called " The Dispossessed". If you're interested about more theoretical work on why the police is a problem, you can search for "Abolition" or "Restorative Justice". Especially for the latter there are loads of Videos explaining how to deal with unjust behavior of individuals. There is a ton of theoretical work about how to resolve conflict and harm done without involving the police or the penal system. Its a very interesting subject and just imagining a society without police and penal justice can make for good utopia's to strive for. Maybe it doesn't work, but working towards a society that doesn't need those systems is worth it in any case.
Anyways, hope you have a wonderful day! Cheers
Here's the issue with joke ideologies like anarchy, they only ever work in theory. They're so deeply flawed that they collapse in on themselves any time they're attempted in real life. Therefore, these ideologies only ever exists in fiction books and philosophical theories that revolve around unrealistic hypotheticals. In other words, anarchy is as a concept is nothing more than a thought exercise because it's too fundamentally flawed to be anything more.
..... You're kidding, right? Are you 5, or something? It's a serious question, I'm trying to understand how someone can write that down and be serious about it.
I was answering a question I know the answer to, not proselytizing. But you stay classy, eh?
I you okay that police kill us fro moving from a place to another, getting food, or just by racism, I'm not interested in your opinion. But I've got another question : why shall we care of the life of someone who clearly don't give a shit a ours ?
>"I'm not interested in your opinion" >Proceeds to ask for their opinion anyway in the very next sentence
That's the beauty of anarchism. If someone is beating their wife, that's not your problem and you don't have to care.
/s... maybe
A lot of them unironically believe that abusers like that will magically stop after the revolution because they think that things like wife beating are caused by capitalism and the state
This is like asking who is the CEO of pollution.
Humans are humans.
Poor cop 😔 it must be exhausting to work hard like that. ^/s^
My instance has been having trouble with the new AVIF image format and incidentally turned the comic into a surreal glitch-art:
But seems to have posted just fine. I think your device is trying to communicate with you personally.
So, whose to stop criminals establish gangs and gang up on people? Having crack pipe dreams doesn't relate to real life!
The point is: it's pointless
Anarchists might actually be dumb enough to uniting believe that cops are an idea invented by the wealthy and that everybody will magically work together and be nice without them.
I think Anarchists are just psychopaths who are tired of society stopping them from doing what they want. All of the plans for how things will work out always conveniently ignore the existence of psychopaths.