| Farmageddon said: Ignore the whole communism / capitalism angle, but you remind me a little of this, mostly the second part, about "the practical man": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jytf-5St8WU |
Yeah, one would have to "ignore the whole communism/capitalism angle" because you know which end of that spectrum I'm much closer to and it's not exactly the one you're implying.
But let us take Peter Kropotkin's example of the peasant revolts against serfdom and the feudal codes. In your video, he cites an argument between two groups of intellectuals, liberal men and radical men (he specifically says "man" nearly every time he describes a group of people), and concludes that the radical ones were correct in their position. It's fitting that that was is his viewpoint of how history works -- one faction or another of intellectuals winning a debate and history moving on the outcome -- given that Kropotkin himself was born into an aristocratic land-owning family. In this historical debate over the proper fate of the peasantry -- the people who actually formed the overwhelming majority of the Russian population at the time -- by neither sex nor class position would I have had a place in this academic debate. Rather, someone like me would've been would've been one of the illiterate commoners; one of the serfs themselves. And yeah, it doesn't get much more practical than that. The serfs I guarantee you were not idealists, they were survivalists. Survival is the natural ideology (if you will) of the working poor in any age. They rebel when they lose the ability to survive. And that includes against parties that would subject them to needless violence and death for the sake of ideals.
Take this from someone who, for my most of both my teenage years and adult life, counted myself an anarchist (like Kropotkin). In earlier times, asked to cite a type of criminal justice system I'd like to see here, I'd have referred you to what the Zapatistas of Chiapas or more recently the Kurdish-led rebels of Northern Syria have implemented. I used to believe that you could just train everyone in police work for six months or so and then have the general public enforce the law instead of a specialized institution called the police, that crime is basically just a form of mental illness that should be organized around mending the relationship between the culprit and the victim, this sort of thing. That's not ancient history either, that's like last year me. At the start of the protest wave over George Floyd's murder, I was on the fence bordering on support for the "abolish the police" line and argument. My change of opinion has been gradual, but skews recent and is largely the result of just being a serious feminist, tbh. While the general programs of the Zapatistas and of Northern Syria's Kurds are far superior to the alternatives that exist around them and would like to see them destroyed, I can no longer get behind the idea of applying their ideas about criminal justice here because I've watched them fail victims of social violence, and especially survivors of sexual violence, far, far too often. And frankly, the recent localized experiments we've seen in this country even just moving in that same general direction with steps like ending cash-bail or the mere threat of cutting funding for police departments has consistently yielded nothing but higher crime rates, including of violent crime. It's been a wake-up call that has caused me to realize that my view of humanity has been a bit too optimistic in the past; that my thinking has been too youthful and in need of an injection of more common sense.
Last edited by Jaicee - on 04 December 2021
