On Criminality

This is an excerpt of a conversation on the Discord server "ma pona pi toki pona." It has been edited.

What if something criminal happens? How do people know what’s criminal and what’s not?

Like I said in my original response, the punishment-as-justice system is ineffective at ultimately achieving justice. What justice I want is the justice of prevention. Proponents of the punishment-as-justice system say that ultimately that reduced so-called crime but this is not true if you look at the data. Recidivism in the US is around 40%, which is far too high to demonstrate success in the system for prevention..

I am what you would call a prison abolitionist (by definition, all anarchists are too). The punishment that US-style prisons, for example, induce is hard to reconcile with the fact that in such systems the vast, vast, vast majority of crimes are property offenses or victimless.

Even in the Scandinavian model, the vast majority of punished crimes are property crimes, and I believe that property crimes are actually good for society.

Finally, while I can't speak for collectivists, I am an egoist. I believe in myself and I believe that others should believe in themselves too.

What is a crime?

Well, in the current usage, it is something that society's culture (well, ostensibly the state and thus the dominant socioeconomic class's culture) views as "bad"

In an individualist view, what should be a crime? Things I view as bad. It is a crime to spend tax money on vanity projects while we have starving children. It is a crime to organize a genocide against our Brown neighbors and to participate in the government which has allowed and encouraged it. It is a crime to murder innocents, and that includes for their meat.

All of this is to say that the projects I work on are ones that have preventative models against these things that I do not like. ICE watches, attacks on the slaughter core with the hope to dismantle it, attacks on settler colonialism both here and abroad (again with the intent to dismantle it), etc.

Ultimately, the idea of "crime" can be sorted into four categories:

• victimless crime

• property crime

• treason against the state

• violent interpersonal crime

The system is, if anything, made to encourage the fourth category there (see: Epstein, but also the racism that leaves White murderers unpunished, but also the mass systematic discrimination and abuse against minorities that subconsciously leads people to believe (often correctly) that they can get away with interpersonal versions of those discriminations such as abuse and rape)

However, the fourth category is the only one I am against. How can one be against property crimes? A a property crime necessitates the belief that property is something that should be protected by a higher power. "No", I say, and so Proudhon says: La propriété, c'est le vol !—Property is theft!, and Stirner: Meine Macht ist mein Eigentum. Meine Macht gibt Mir Eigentum. Meine Macht bin Ich selbst und bin durch sie mein Eigentum.—My power is my property. My power gives me property. My power am [sic] I myself, and through it am I my property.

The only rightful form of ownership is that which can be protected. And even this is not "riteful" in a moralist sense.

Violence against the state, meanwhile, I cannot be against, as it is self-defense! When my government is executing us in the streets (AND THEY ARE), it is my civic duty to execute our government in the streets!

Finally, to be against victimless crime in and of itself is a crime. To be against one's bodily autonomy is the very antithesis of "good".

Ones who have the ruling class's ideas of crime as a problem and punishment as the solution need to get it out of their heads.

Ultimately this is no reflection on you, as your willingness to learn about our politics is the sign that you are open to better things. My message to you?

Do not let the state decide what you believe is normal. You speak of criminal punishment and of regulatory bodies as if these are necessary, at the very least something that needs replacement. But this is not true. We can make a better world.