There’s always a set of assumptions implied by these types of questions that people tend to miss when answering them. We have to start by talking about those before we talk about anything else. The first is the implicit connection between morality and criminality. Slavery was legal. The Holocaust was legal. The current ethnic cleansing in the US, and the genocide in Gaza are both legal.

The state exists to maintain a specific order, a specific acceptable direction of violence. This is non-consentual hierarchy isn’t just bad for the people being oppressed, it changes the oppressor. Arguments against slavery mostly centered the violence carried out against people, but some talked about the ways in which enacting violence also destroyed the person committing the violence.

The whole Epstein thing isn’t some weird artifact of the current time. It’s how power works. The dynamic of powerful men sexually abusing children goes back to Rome, at least. Sexual violence and power is intimately connected, and it extends from the locus of power in the king/president/dictator/elite class through society as patriarchy, racist violence, etc. Illegitimate hierarchy, in and of itself, infects the whole society manifesting as “crimes” and “things that really should be crimes but are never actually prosecuted.”

This happens to also be connected to the military question (which I’ll come back to in a bit) by the concept of “sovereignty.” There can be no such thing as a system that can both create and modify rules and constraints itself with those rules, formally speaking. That’s basically what Kurt Gödel proved. So every “constitution” that “protects rights” is fundamentally snake oil, at best.

Sovereignty is the supreme power, that which is above the law, and it is a fundamental property of all states. “National Sovereignty” is simply a property without which a state cannot exist. There must be something above the law, and that thing tends to be the worst people. Legal systems and militaries exist to maintain that fact.

The criminal legal system is a system of violence. It does not prevent violence, or protect people. It maintains a specific type of violence and a specific direction of violence. Everything else it does is a cover. If you happen to know what a “clearance rate” is, then you know what a thin cover that is. If you understand recidivism rates, you start to realize that prisons are not simply unhelpful but that they actively harm society. They create “crime.” But why would a society use prisons if prisons create “crime”? Because prisons are tools of political violence. I’ll prove it.

Restorative justice is one of the myriad of systems that exists as an alternative to punitive criminal legal systems like those in the US. It is far more effective at reducing anti-social behavior, and has been widely studied. This works, it works well, even for violent crime. Some places even do use it for non-violent crime like petty vandalism. It’s cheaper than punitive measures and it works, why is it not being used now?

You know what else reduces “criminal” behavior? Free breakfast programs, free child care, lead abatement, the list goes on. All of these programs are cheaper than prison. In terms of return on investment, the criminal legal system is an absurd waste of money. It doesn’t fulfill it’s stated goal at all, and there are actually efficient and tested things that do. But what does this system do? Well, it maintains the political system by heaping so much trauma on vulnerable people that it’s hard to organize, and it kidnaps and isolates political organizers. The purpose of a system is what it does. The criminal legal system is a tool of political repression.

So then, what do you replace the cops with? If you got rid of cancer, what would you replace the cancer with? You don’t. You’re cured of cancer. The treatment, that is, building this society, is the process of systematically challenging these hierarchies and dismantling them. The foundation of a solarpunk society is built on systems that address the causes of anti-social behavior - that help people heal from abuse, that help people see their internal biases, that help people hold themselves and others accountable for their actions, that help people grow into the types of people who can live in a solarpunk society.

But what about defense? Now we’re back to talking about sovereignty. You can’t have sovereignty without hierarchy, and you can’t “conquer” a people without sovereignty. This is kind of the whole point (as I understand it, the book is still on my reading list) behind James Scott’s The Art of Not Being Governed. In order for governments to conquer people, they have to first create a government to conquer. This has been the pattern for thousands of years. In Indonesia, the Dutch (VOC) systematically built governments among indigenous people and then turned those people against each other in order to control them. The England took 400 years to conquer the Irish because they had to force them to have a government first. Compare that to the Blitzkrieg taking over unwilling people in days by simply seizing the seat of power, or Russia taking over the US government without even declaring war.

Centralized governments are actually a vulnerability, not a strength. Decentralization actually gives you a pretty significant natural advantage. This advantage grows even more when you shift to irregular warfare. The US, with the most powerful military in the world, still has no good way to manage asymmetric warfare. And they never will. Because it’s actually impossible. Cybernetically speaking, a decentralized asymmetric actor has greater variety than a centralized one. Any entity that can leverage that advantage will always beat centralized power. That’s not even a new insight, Machiavelli even talked about this. Basically, if you want to rule a population that doesn’t want to be ruled you essentially have to commit genocide (thus the Russian approach to Crimea, the English approach to Northern Ireland, the Israeli approach to Palestine, and the American approach to Turtle Island).

Even then it’s simply a matter of time. Colonial societies are permanently at war with themselves. Entropy takes care of all empires, on a long enough time scale. And that’s kind of the reality of it. Hierarchy is a high energy system. It is always working against entropy. Given enough time, entropy always wins. Decentralization just takes less energy.

We are living through a brief period where agricultural abundance cascaded into fossil fuel abundance, during a relatively calm and stable climate. Hierarchy is ending that stability and abundance. I don’t expect hierarchical systems to be the biggest things to worry about, because I don’t think they can actually survive in the world they are creating.

But, they can create a lot of havoc before they collapse (like the Nazis did). So a solarpunk society should be able to use decentralized tactics to speed up that collapse as much as possible. That looks like drones and tunnels attacking oil infrastructure and other logistics.

IIRC, PLA just doesn’t biodegrade unless it’s exposed to high temperature. It’s “biodegradable” but only under specific conditions.