What are the cultural ethics you want to see after the revolution?

Question

In other words, what ethics will maintain a non violent and just society, while still allowing for ethnic and/or cultural diversity? Also, what prevents us from promoting, and more importantly modeling those ethics today?

Answer 1

aside from being uncomfortable with the way your question is posed (the assumption of a single set of ethics, the assumption of nonviolence and justice, or anything else, as unequivocal goods, and the assumption that ethics are the most significant factor in maintaining a society), just taking the final question as an interesting jumping off point is pretty huge.

i don't anticipate a nonviolent future. i want a world where violence is more human-sized. where fists are more likely than guns, for example, and there are no bombs from above. what keeps us from doing that today? an entire cultural mechanism that tells us that the police and the justice system are the (re)solvers of conflict.

i'd like a world where there is actual diversity, instead of rainbow colors shellacked on a monoculture. what keeps us from doing that today? the well-known culprits of sexism, homophobia, etc, but also binary thinking in general, cultural appropriation, and of course, most significantly genocide, including not just killing entire cultural groups, but removing them from their culture and vice versa (think stealing indian children and schooling them far from home, language disintegration, english only laws, etc).

in other words, your last question assumes that ethics are a thing that individuals can effectively change on our own. (depending on how you define ethics, that's of course true. but that level of individual ethics has been pretty much proven to be irrelevant to world-change.)

Answer 2

The values of being "non violent" and "just" are actually in the forefront of disallowing ethnic and/or cultural diversity. If you'll excuse the paraphrase of Marxism, these dubious/undefined/legislatively reinforced values are  the ruling ideas because they are the values of the ruling class.

The ruling class reserves *for itself and its agents* the sole legitimate use of violence and the complex machinery of implementing justice, so of course they will constantly bombard the rest of us (both literally and metaphorically and rhetorically) with the lofty notions of non-violent conflict resolution and a search for equal justice before the law (or some such). Let the police take care of interpersonal problems, especially if those problems involve property; let the courts take care of punishing deviants.

As dot mentioned, the magical utopia ATR will not be non-violent; the scale of violence will be leveled, de-institutionalized, and therefore intimate. The consequences of too much of that will be quick and definitive -- just as they are in non-statist cultures around the world. Whatever ideas of justice exist without legislative and punitive institutions will certainly look a lot different from the bourgeois versions that exist all around us in the Global North.

The short list of questions are shallow, short-sighted, and (perhaps) unconsciously reinforce the ideology of the ruling class. Using the terminology, assumptions, and unexamined rhetoric of the dominant players in class society is not usually a good way to elicit decent answers from those of us who wish to destroy that society.

Answer 3

The above two answers are great. I just want to add something in response to your last question.

So we can obviously see things we like and behaviors that make sense to us from the vantage point we are situated in now, capitalist civilization, for example 'mutual aid,' 'solidarity,' etc. It's fun and interesting to think about how those things could frame the way a better world could be created. However, we run into one problem when we think this way: we risk creating the old society within the new one.

Perhaps think about it this way: Anarchism is a response to capitalism. It could not exist without it. In this way, anarchism carries capitalism in it. The ideas of justice, non-violence, etc do the same thing. Because it's a shitty society riddled with violence, some people think that the opposite is the solution, that being 'non-violence.' Because there are so many things that upset everyone, we like to think there is a singular ethical utopia, that of 'justice,' where everything would be okay by everyone. But we are carrying the framework of the system that creates our distaste in the first place when we think about things in that way.

So some anarchists see their project as an entirely 'negative' one; in that there is no point in thinking of 'after the revolution' situations because we don't want to carry over said values. Instead we should only focus on how to destroy this society. The idea being that only when those old needs are negated, in that they are rejected, 'superseded', or simply impossible to function anymore; only in that space can we start creating something new to meet our needs.

Personally, I think this mindset works best as something to consider and keep in the back of ones' mind, and not something to obsess over, which some anarchists definitely do.