/leftypol/ - Leftist Politically Incorrect

Today most legal systems nominally reject collective punishment, emphasizing individual responsibility. It is also prohibited in armed conflict under international humanitarian law, including the Fourth Geneva Convention. This was not always the case. The Athenian Draco is remembered for harsh laws, from which we get the word "Draconian" but one of his major reforms was to replace private blood feuds with state-administered justice. Before his code, killings were often avenged by the victim's family, leading to cycles of retaliation.

The shift from collective punishment and presumptions of guilt toward individual responsibility and the presumption of innocence was gradual rather than revolutionary. In many ancient and medieval societies, families, clans, villages, or entire communities could be held liable for the actions of one member, and accused individuals often had to prove their innocence through oaths, ordeals, or social standing. These proofs were often ritual in nature and lacked scientific rigor. Over centuries, especially under the influence of Roman legal principles, canon law, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and liberal constitutionalism, legal systems increasingly emphasized that guilt should be based on evidence against a specific individual rather than group affiliation. Thinkers such as Beccaria and Blackstone argued that protecting the innocent from wrongful punishment was more important than maximizing convictions, leading to higher standards of proof, formal rules of evidence, due process, and the modern principle that the prosecution bears the burden of proving guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. Despite these legal prohibitions, governments and armed groups have at times been accused of imposing measures that amount to collective punishment, especially during wars, occupations, and counterinsurgency campaigns. Whether a specific case qualifies is often legally and politically disputed.

The transformation from collective punishment and presumptions of guilt to individual liability and the presumption of innocence was driven largely by changes in state capacity and legal administration. As governments became stronger, more centralized, and more bureaucratic, they relied less on kinship groups to police their own members and more on professional courts, investigators, and judges. Improved record-keeping, forensic methods, written legal codes, and standardized procedures made it increasingly feasible (but not necessarily easy) to determine who actually committed an offense, reducing the perceived need to punish families or communities collectively. At the same time, expanding commerce and more diverse populations required legal systems that were universalist in nature, and treated strangers as individuals under uniform rules rather than as second class citizens, gradually making individualized justice and procedural safeguards the foundation of modern law.

From a class and economic perspective, the shift from collective punishment and presumptions of guilt to individual responsibility can be understood as a consequence of the rise of market economies and capitalist social relations. Collective liability was well suited to feudal and kin-based societies, where obligations were shared by households, villages, and estates, but it impeded commerce by making contracts and property rights unpredictable. As merchants, urban aristocracy, and later industrial capitalists gained influence, they demanded legal systems that treated people as autonomous individuals capable of owning property, entering contracts, and being held liable only for their own actions. The resulting legal order replaced inherited collective responsibility with individualized rights and duties, not simply out of humanitarian concern, but because wage labor, private property, investment, and impersonal markets functioned more efficiently when legal responsibility was attached to discrete individuals rather than families, classes, or communities.

However, there is a problem which persists. Engels' concept of "social murder" refers to the idea that when a social and economic system predictably produces premature death through poverty, unsafe working conditions, malnutrition, or inadequate housing, those deaths are not mere accidents but the foreseeable consequences of institutional arrangements. Under this interpretation, responsibility is diffuse rather than individualized: no single capitalist or official commits murder in the ordinary legal sense, but the ruling class collectively maintains a system whose predictable effects include preventable deaths. Should the ruling class be collectively punished for this crime, potentially undermining or reversing the the historical changes described above? Furthermore, are not the proletariat themselves being collectively punished by the bourgeoisie for the crime of being poor?

One could argue that this represents a functional return of collective punishment, despite the formal triumph of individualized criminal law. Modern legal systems generally reject punishing innocent individuals for another person's crimes, yet they often tolerate economic institutions that systematically expose entire classes to greater risks of illness, violence, and early death based on their socioeconomic position. In that sense, the poor may experience harms not because of anything they individually did, but because they belong to a structurally disadvantaged class. The "punishment" is not imposed by a judge but by social and economic arrangements.

Bourgeois apologists argue that collective punishment involves intentionally imposing penalties on innocent people for the actions of others, whereas poverty-related harms arise from impersonal market processes, policy tradeoffs, historical contingencies, or individual choices rather than a deliberate punitive intent. From this perspective, calling these outcomes "collective punishment" obscures important distinctions between legal sanctions and structural inequality.