One of the principles we need to carry into the liberatory society is anti-cruelty. This matters precisely because liberation requires us to confront people, institutions, and movements that may be actively hostile to liberation. We are going to encounter reactionaries, authoritarians, fascists, racists, queerphobes, misogynists, and people who want to preserve systems of domination. We need to be capable of stopping them. But the fact that somebody has become our political opponent does not suddenly make cruelty ethical.

Anti-cruelty is not the same thing as absolute pacifism. That distinction is important. We can recognize circumstances in which force may be necessary to protect ourselves or other people without turning suffering itself into a political objective. If somebody is attacking another person, physically preventing that attack can be justified even though force is involved. If a community is under violent attack, defending that community may require coercion or violence. The ethical purpose in those situations is stopping the threat and protecting people, not maximizing the suffering of the attacker.

That gives us a more mature understanding of nonviolence than simply declaring that all force is always morally equivalent. Violence used to dominate someone and force used to stop domination are not necessarily ethically identical. At the same time, recognizing that distinction cannot become an excuse for cruelty. Once force becomes necessary, anti-cruelty still asks us questions: How much force is actually necessary? Can the threat be stopped without causing additional suffering? Are we protecting people or taking revenge? Are we still responding to a danger, or have we begun enjoying the opportunity to punish someone we hate?

Those questions matter because political movements can become extremely dangerous when they convince themselves that cruelty becomes virtuous once the victim has been categorized as an enemy. History is full of ideologies that began talking about justice and eventually developed categories of people toward whom almost anything could be justified. We should establish a very simple ethical warning sign: if our political philosophy logically concludes in a gulag, concentration camp, death camp, torture chamber, disappearance program, or machinery for deliberately inflicting misery on defeated opponents, something has gone catastrophically wrong with the philosophy.

The liberatory society cannot be constructed through the principle that the correct people should finally have permission to be cruel. Liberation is supposed to abolish relationships of domination, not merely reverse the direction of domination. Replacing “they are allowed to brutalize us” with “now we are allowed to brutalize them” does not transcend the underlying logic. The categories have changed, but the political relationship remains ruler and ruled, punisher and punished, human being and dehumanized enemy.

This is particularly important when dealing with far-right and reactionary politics. We absolutely do not have to permit someone to organize harassment, threaten minorities, recruit people into violent movements, or sabotage a community simply because we oppose cruelty. Anti-cruelty does not require political helplessness. We can remove someone from a community. We can deny them a platform. We can establish boundaries. We can prevent them from exercising power over other people. We can defend people being attacked. We can dismantle institutions that allow reactionary movements to dominate others. What anti-cruelty changes is why and how we do those things.

If somebody is removed from a community because they repeatedly threaten its members, the purpose should be protecting the community. The purpose should not be discovering the most psychologically devastating way to humiliate them first. If someone has to be restrained because they are committing violence, the objective should be ending the violence. The objective should not become inflicting additional pain after they are no longer a threat. If a political movement loses its ability to dominate people, our objective should be preventing that domination from returning, not inventing new forms of collective punishment against everyone who once belonged to that movement.

Accountability and cruelty are therefore different concepts. Accountability is concerned with behavior, consequences, protection, restitution, changed conditions, and preventing further harm. Cruelty is concerned with suffering. When suffering itself becomes the reward, when we begin thinking that somebody deserves pain and therefore causing pain becomes emotionally satisfying, we have moved away from accountability and toward retribution.

That distinction does not require us to believe every person can be reconciled with immediately. Some people remain dangerous. Some people refuse accountability. Some people may need to be separated from particular communities for long periods. Some forms of political organization may need to be actively prevented from exercising coercive power. Anti-cruelty does not require naïveté about those realities. It simply refuses to make unnecessary suffering the solution.

We should also resist reducing every human being to the worst political category that can be applied to them. Someone can hold reactionary beliefs and still be a human being whose consciousness developed through family, culture, fear, propaganda, social conditions, trauma, institutions, and personal choices. Recognizing that complexity does not excuse harmful beliefs. It gives us a better understanding of where those beliefs come from and therefore a better chance of preventing them from reproducing themselves.

If our only political theory of reactionaries is that they are intrinsically evil people who deserve suffering, then we have learned almost nothing about reactionary politics. We have no explanation for recruitment, radicalization, social alienation, economic insecurity, nationalism, racial hierarchy, authoritarian psychology, or the institutions that manufacture these beliefs. We simply have a category of human beings we hate. That may satisfy anger, but it does not produce liberation.

A political culture that says “once you have ever believed the wrong thing, you are permanently contaminated” gives people very little reason to abandon harmful beliefs. If leaving a reactionary movement means being treated forever as an irredeemable monster by everyone outside it, the movement itself gains another mechanism for keeping people inside. Anti-cruelty gives us room to say that harmful behavior has consequences while still allowing transformation to be possible.

This does not mean reconciliation is owed to everyone. A person harmed by someone else has no obligation to personally forgive them. A marginalized community is not required to become a rehabilitation program for the people who attacked it. Boundaries remain important. Compassion should never be transformed into compulsory access to victims. Someone can be treated humanely while simultaneously being told, “You cannot remain here because your behavior makes this community unsafe.”

That is part of what mature anti-cruelty looks like. We can protect ourselves without becoming sadistic. We can have boundaries without humiliation. We can impose consequences without making degradation the objective. We can recognize somebody’s humanity without giving them political power over us.

Our understanding of violence should follow the same principle. We should not romanticize violence, but neither should we pretend that every situation can always be solved by politely requesting that domination stop. There are circumstances in which people have to defend themselves. The mature position is neither “violence solves everything” nor “violence can never be justified.” It is that force requires ethical justification, should be proportionate to the danger being stopped, and should end when the necessity ends. Anti-cruelty becomes the ethical boundary surrounding that judgment.

We should distinguish between protective force and punitive violence. Protective force asks what is necessary to stop someone from causing harm. Punitive violence asks how much suffering someone deserves because they caused harm. The first can sometimes be necessary within an imperfect world. The second can very easily reproduce the authoritarian morality we are trying to escape.

The same applies at larger political scales. If the liberatory society has institutions responsible for protecting people, those institutions should be designed around safety, prevention, restoration where possible, and humane containment where necessary. They should not be designed around vengeance. We should not simply inherit prisons, police structures, political purges, camps, and punitive bureaucracies and repaint them with the colors of liberation. Otherwise we have not created a liberatory society. We have created another state that claims its cruelty is justified because its ideology is correct. That is precisely the danger we should be trying to avoid.

Communalism, libertarian municipalism, and democratic confederalism give us another way to think about political power because they move authority toward communities and democratic participation rather than concentrating it in an institution standing above society. But decentralization alone is not enough. A local community can also become cruel. A democratic majority can also mistreat a minority. An assembly can also become vindictive. That is why the liberatory society needs ethical principles alongside democratic structures. Anti-cruelty should be one of those principles.

Democracy tells us something about who should participate in power. Anti-hierarchy tells us something about how power should be distributed. Mutual aid tells us something about our responsibilities toward one another. Anti-cruelty tells us something about what we refuse to become while exercising power. These principles reinforce one another.

We want a society capable of defending queer people without building institutions of revenge. We want a society capable of stopping racist violence without constructing new racial categories of collective guilt. We want a society capable of preventing fascist organization without developing secret police and political prisons. We want communities capable of defending themselves without turning domination into a permanent profession.

This is also why our politics cannot be based exclusively on identifying good people and bad people. People do good things and harmful things. Institutions encourage particular behaviors. Social conditions shape beliefs. Power changes incentives. People can radicalize in terrible directions, and people can also leave those beliefs behind. Political ethics should therefore focus heavily on actions, relationships, structures, accountability, and protection rather than imagining that we can perfectly divide humanity into morally pure and morally contaminated categories.

That does not require moral relativism. We can say racism is wrong. We can say fascism is wrong. We can say queerphobic persecution is wrong. We can say authoritarianism is wrong. We can organize against those things with enormous determination. What we reject is the additional proposition that because someone’s politics are wrong, cruelty toward that person therefore becomes good.

Cruelty does not become liberation merely because we believe the target deserves it. That is one of the tests we should apply to our own politics constantly. It is easy to oppose cruelty when it is directed toward someone we love. The meaningful ethical test comes when cruelty is directed toward somebody we despise. Can we still recognize unnecessary suffering as unnecessary suffering? Can we stop somebody without becoming fascinated by hurting them? Can we defend ourselves without building an ideology around revenge? We should be able to answer yes.

None of this means we have to become emotionally neutral about oppression. Anger is legitimate. Anger can reveal that a boundary has been violated. Anger can motivate people to defend themselves and others. The problem is not anger. The problem is allowing anger to become an ethical theory in which whatever hurts our enemies must therefore be good. Our anger needs principles. Anti-cruelty gives it boundaries.

That matters especially as we move toward the liberatory society, because the institutions we build during political struggle can shape the society that emerges afterward. If we organize through rigid hierarchy, secrecy, unquestionable leadership, dehumanization, punitive discipline, and cruelty, we should not be surprised when those relationships survive into whatever institutions follow. We cannot repeatedly practice domination and simply assume liberation will spontaneously appear at the end.

We therefore have to practice the social relationships we actually want: democracy, solidarity, mutual aid, accountability, compassion, autonomy, boundaries, and resistance to domination. That does not mean pretending conflict will disappear. It means learning how to engage in conflict without allowing conflict to erase our ethics. The liberatory society has to be capable of saying both “you are not allowed to dominate us” and “we will not construct our identity around making you suffer.” Those ideas belong together.

We are not trying to create a society incapable of defending itself. We are trying to create one capable of defending itself without becoming what it is defending itself against. That is the mature relationship between nonviolence, force, and anti-cruelty that we need. We prefer peaceful resolution because unnecessary suffering is undesirable. We establish boundaries because permitting domination is also harmful. We use coercive or defensive force only where it is genuinely necessary to protect people, and we constrain that force by proportionality, accountability, and the recognition that even an opponent remains human. And when the danger ends, our justification for violence ends with it. No torture. No camps. No cruelty as entertainment. No political sadism. No fantasy that liberation means finally getting our turn to stand over somebody else.

The liberatory society is not the moment when the oppressed inherit the machinery of domination and operate it more virtuously. It is the project of dismantling that machinery and creating social relationships in which fewer and fewer people have the ability to dominate one another in the first place. We should be strong enough to stop oppression without needing cruelty to prove our strength. We should be compassionate enough to recognize humanity without surrendering our boundaries. And we should be politically mature enough to understand that those are not contradictions. They are necessary parts of liberation.