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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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
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.
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.
..... 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.
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?
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.
The point is: it's pointless
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.
Poor cop 😔 it must be exhausting to work hard like that. ^/s^