In the state of nature, if someone does you wrong, it’s up to you and your mates to deal with it. This often means violence.
For most of English history there was no police force. Republican Rome had no police. There was law, but it was often privately enforced and often families and friends would take vengeance for wrongs. This led to rather a lot of violence and death, as well as feuds, where violence would continue long beyond the original offense.
Private justice; private vengeance thus comes with huge downsides, so in many societies we give up our right to use violence to right wrongs. We give that right to government in some form, and we reap the benefits of safety and that, in principle, stronger groups can’t bully those who are too weak to obtain their own justice.
The benefits are huge and everyone with sense recognizes that going back to private justice, to saying “they did me or mine wrong, I should beat or kill them” will mean a huge loss of public safety.
But whenever there’s a situation where changing from the status quo entails a huge cost there will be those who say “in that margin, I can benefit. All I have to do is take just a little less than the cost of change.”
How many people does private insurance and denials of care kill? It’s certainly, at least, in the tens of thousands.
What happens is simple enough. Some people, rich and powerful, get the right to harm others for money: the government doesn’t go after them for killing or hurting people. This is true of private equity buying companies, larding them up with debt then running them into bankruptcy so that many of their employees wind up impoverishing and homeless, for example. It was true of bankers causing a financial crisis. It is true of pharma jacking up prices or bosses stealing employees wages and water companies in the UK dumping sewage into the river and giving the money intended to clean sewage to their executives and investors.
None of this is punished by the law, yet people suffer.
But the cost of going back to private justice is HIGH and the transition cost, where the police and courts will charge those who enforce private justice with crimes, while not charging those who kill thousands with crimes, is awful.
So the bet by those who commit what has come to be called “social murder” is that they can get away with it: the cost of private justice is too high.
Still, there’s always the temptation to take a little more, then a little more and then a little more. To think, “well, I’m so rich I can have bodyguards and travel by helicopter and private jet and armored limo. The peons can’t get to me.”
But slowly (then all at once) ordinary people realize it’s not a good deal for them. Americans come to realize that Putin and Xi aren’t their real enemies, because their real enemies are those who are actually going to kill them or make them homeless, and those people are the rich and powerful in their own country.
Elon Musk, right now, is trying to cut Social Security and Medicare. If he succeeds a lot of people will wind up in pain, homeless or dead who wouldn’t have otherwise. He’s a direct threat to many, many people.
Putin isn’t going to make you homeless or kill you or deny you health care.
And when this switch flips, well, perhaps people decide that the high cost of going back to private justice is worth it and that when they gave up their right to private justice, they gave up their power. It was a good deal, as long as they could keep control of government and use government to control the wealthy and powerful, but once government control was lost, well, the power they gave up was used against them.
And this is, maybe, where we are. If more and more executives, CEOs and politicians wind up targets of extra-judicial justice, we’ll know it’s happened.
This isn’t, of course, an endorsement. It’s analysis. It’s in no one’s interest for the situation to become so awful that ending the state monopoly on violent justice makes cold hard rational sense for millions of people.
But that appears to be where we’re heading, if we aren’t there already.
Madame Blatvatsky
It’s a very interesting topic. I think that notwithstanding the downside of increased general violence, if there was a more even distribution of it, it might be worth the sacrifice. Or is that just punching oneself in the nose to spite face?
The lionising of a certain vigilante might lead to interesting outcomes, I guess.
bruce wilder
Yes.
Revelo
USA (and Canada and EU) are very far from a situation of peasant revolt. Peasant revolt requires starvation or other imminent catastrophe that makes it more worthwhile to risk death than accept suffering. Lack of health care is certainly not an imminent catastrophe for majority of able-bodied (hence able to revolt) population anywhere. How much healthcare currently for poor people in Phillipines, Bangladesh or Africa?
Furthermore, peasant revolts are only successful if security forces are on their side, meaning starvation or other imminent catastrophe has to be universal. Otherwise, revolt is brutally repressed. If peasants are mostly useless eaters whose death will not impact societal functioning, and that is true for most people nowadays due to mechanization to speak nothing of coming wave of AI/robotics automation, then the brutality will be machine gunning from helicopters or gassing.
More likely is gradual decay of society combined with increasingly repressive police state. Each terrorist incident will result in more surveillance and more spending on security apparatus. Everyone will eventually have to carry an electronic device that reports their location at all times, with strict penalties for disobedience. Bloggers who discuss revolt will be monitored thereafter, maybe warned by police, maybe taken away to prison without warning or trial (England is almost at this point, Canada trailing, USA the laggard due to its greater tolerance for violence and chaos). Security forces will eventually comprise huge proportion of work force, at which point low level security forces will begin to sabotage the system because they are also victims. Managers will collude in sabotage as part of bureaucratic in fighting with other managers.
Once system is sufficiently rotten, starvation or other imminent catastrophe mentioned above will appear, due to some random set of circumstances, probably including natural disaster or military/terrorist attack by other government hungry for natural resources. That’s when successful peasant revolt occurs, because security forces will be on board with the revolt.
Duncan Kinder
So you want to reduce Zoro to a math problem?
Oakchair
There are two questions. How far can the ruling class go before there is a revolt? Can said revolt succeed or will it be stomped to blood and bones?
The ruling class has already inflicted 3% of children with Autism and half the population with a chronic illness, addicted the country to opioids, engaged in trillions of dollars in forever wars, engaged in mass censorship of dissenters, caused mass homelessness, and forced people to take a product that –literally according to the manufacturer– increased their chance of dying, being hospitalized and becoming ill. What else could they do that ignites a revolt?
As to the second question it looks like by the time it occurs –if it ever does– the masses will be too ill, addicted and impaired to do much but set fire to the ashes of society.
Andre
There is one thought that keeps coming back to me when I hear news about Luigi Mabglione. Is this not like Israel knocking off the top person in the many ways they’ve done it, Hamas, Hesbollah, etc? I don’t know how that relates to what is being expressed here, but it reminds me of the Obama days with his extra-judicial assassinations and their relationship (in my mind) to all the (what seemed to be) ‘extra-judicial cop killings at that time. I have a hard time wrapping my head around ‘public and private’ violence as you describe it here. What would a lynching be, in the old days???
Ian Welsh
Lynching is private violence. There’s a reason why no one really wants to go back to private violence and why elites have been able to get away with so much.
mago
The olds hit hardest by a fractured social service network lack the oomph to fight back, but their strapped offspring lacking resources to support mom and pop might find the collective outrage to drone the overclass.
Hope I live to see it happen.