"That the Pinochet situation also provides opportunities for entrenching juridical neo-imperialism such as it is today should concern us. But let's also stay in touch with people fighting for justice on the ground."
Tom is right that one of the touchstones for leftists and marxists orientating themselves in such a complex moment is whether they can identify with and unite with the feelings of the people fighting for justice. I suggest any self-declared marxist who cannot, should engage in rapid reflection.
I will be interested how Louis Proyect, who is on record with a statement of respect for Tom's personal and political integrity, could comment on this and the other points Tom makes practically and dialectically in this reply to Jim Heartfield, while at the same time sneering in a personalised and uncomradely way at the positions I have argued. LP is on record as having dismissed these events as the product of a maverick Spanish judge, and did not see the more powerful underlying dynamic, which is merely expressed through individual actors. In particular politically he has been insisting as a matter of permanent revolution on the permanent irrelevance of making any marxist distinction between sections of the bourgeois and sections of their representatives. Indeed not just the irrelevance but in his view the culpable revisionism of even discussing such a difference of politics and practice.
Concretely now the next most important decision on Pinochet will be taken by Jack Straw in whom Tom Kruse has promoted reformist illusions, by encouraging us all to contact him (so LP if he were consistent, would have to argue.) As a principle of permanent childishness Louis Proyect must insist marxists make *no* distinction between the presence in the Home Office of Jack Straw rather than Michael Howard at this point.
The decision of three British law lords to two in a stuffy reactionary chamber of the oldest imperialist power in the world, is literally a defining moment in world history. This is a time when the phrase is no mere cliche. The commentators are not wrong in this. Every individual who might be accused of being a dicator, and of crimes against humanity, whether they are Pinochet, Castro, the leaders of the Communist Party of China, or Clinton for bombing a pharmaceutical factory, may potentially be held to account for violations of bourgeois democratic rights internationally. The full highly contradictory implications of this battle will take long to work out but they strengthen the role of an international court, which the US is so keen to restrict. In the immediate context, this precarious decision is a triumph for the people of Chile and the people of the world.
The left revisionist views of Louis Proyect (I suggest we no longer accept that ultra-leftists may have free fire to denounce anyone label as having rightist deviations as a revisionist, as if there is not also a revision of marxism to the left, to dogmatism, and sectarianism, and idealism)... are related to his undialectical views on the state, and in this case the law.
I urge all subscribers with an interest in the implications of the Pinochet case to turn to Engels's letter to C. Schmidt 27 October 1890:
"Similarly with the law. As soon as the new division of labour which creates professional lawyers becomes necessary, another new and independent sphere is opened up which, for all its general dependence on production and trade, still has also a special capacity for reacting upon these spheres. In a modern state, law must not only correspond to the general economic condition and be its expression, but must also be an *internally coherent* [emphasis by Engels] expression which does not, owing to inner contradictions, reduce itself to nought. And in order to achieve this, the faithful reflection of economic conditions suffers increasingly. All the more so the more rarely it happens that a code of law is the blunt, unmitigated, unadulterated expression of the domination of a class..."
[plus further interesting stuff about the effects of pressure by the proletariat on the legal system, even while under the hegemony of the capitalist; and then, for the current context in which the British law lords have preferred the bourgeois democratic rights of the citizens of the world, to the interests of capitalist trade relations with Chile, this remarkably thought provoking passage:]
"The reflection of economic relations as legal principles is necessarily a topsy-turvy one: it goes without the person who is acting being conscious of it; the jurist imagines he is operating with a priori propositions, whereas they are really only economic reflexes; so everything is upside down. And it seems to me obvious that this inversion, which, so long as it remains unrecognised, forms what we call *ideological conception*, reacts in its turn upon the economic basis and may, within certain limits, modify it."
Eat your cold heart out, left revisionists: the people of the world are celebrating a victory!
Chris Burford
London