-----Original Message-----
From: Charles Brown <CharlesB at CNCL.ci.detroit.mi.us>
To: lbo-talk at lists.panix.com <lbo-talk at lists.panix.com>
>People and liberation movements and those (most) that represent the rule of
>the ruling class. For example, the Bill of Rights, the 13th, 14th, 15th,
>19th and other Amendments to the Constitution have a lot of value for
>progressive struggle. They are the opposite of those laws you list above.
An >important thing a leftist in law school should do is draw this line.
It was the 14th Amendment "Due Process" clause that was used to give corporations "personhood" under the Constitution and was used to strike down minimum wage, child labor, and worker safety laws by the Supreme Court in the name of corporation's due process rights. It could not prevent the resegration of the South and the return of all-white rule in that region.
What ended first the so-called "Lochner Era" pure corporate rights era and later Jim Crow were not legal changes but the mass mobilization of unions and civil rights activists. Law in the abscense of continual mass mobilization of the working class and communities protects almost nothing; without that mass mobilization, the corporate elite will appoint its judges, twist the law to its purposes, and use the exact words we fought for in those laws to fuck the people.
Just look at the wording of the anti-affirmative action Prop 209 in California. It sounds like a Civil Rights law and with a different set of judges might be enforced as such, but with a rightwing tilt to the judiciary, those words just mean oppression, just as the words of the 14th Amendment were used at the turn of the century by the Supreme Court to oppress workers.
>As I said, the UN centered law is very progressive relative to the U.S.
law. >The international law pertinent to the war on Yugoslavia is
progressive in >this context. Another example is the UN Convention for
Prevention and >Punishment of Genocide. It is more progressive than U.S.
law.
The Soviet Constitution was more progressive in words than US law. So what? Law only has meaning in how it is enforced, and the UN "laws" are enforced about the same way the Sermon on the Mount is enforced. It sounds nice on Sunday, but on Monday it's back to business.
>Charles: You don't argue that the government can be trusted. You argue that
>freedom is a constant struggle, and the government will not do right unless
>the People are vigilante and ultimately are self-governing and take it over
>from the bourgeoisie. In 1999 , the U.S. government is very unlikely to do
>something militarily correct, because it is the major imperialist power.
I agree, just as it is unlikely to do right by tax policy or health care policy or any other policy. But because we are in constant struggle, whether by health care activists on health issues, or human rights activists on military policy, we occasionally do get policies even in the military sphere that have a progressive character. Rarely, I agree, and more rarely than on domestic policy, but in the case of Kosovo, a lot of human rights agitation for over a decade finally forced the issue onto the agenda. Before we went into Kosovo, I can point to a whole list of left human rights folks pushing for intervention; I doubt those opposing the intervention can find many business magazines or rightwing forces advocating intervention. Some of the rightwing has signed on in support now that the conflict has started in the name of "maintaining US credibility" but it was OUR FOLKS struggling who pushed this issue onto the political agenda.
>If you want the true
>source of murder and oppression based in Europe, don't look at NATO, look
at
>the World Information Property Organization (WIPO).
-Charles: There is some good law in this area in the New World Information -Order . I'll have to look at the UN Conventions. The National Lawyers Guild -has a standing committee in this area.
The New World Information Order rules are again nice words passed by the UN with no enforcement mechanism. The WIPO and Trade Related Information Policy (TRIPs) parts of the GATT are enforceable and are enforced every day.
I guess I have a positivist definition of law. Law is what the state is governed by and the way power is exerted over the people. If "laws" like most UN law does not restrain that government power, it is not law but merely religious catechism.
>God, when did leftists become law-and-order types arguing "the law says so"
>is an adequate response to a moral challenge to the law.
-Charles: Goddamn, does it not occur to you that the Left has always been
-struggling to institute laws ? How do you think the victory of the Civil
War
-was preserved but especially in Constitutional Amendments ? Don't you
-realize that the working class victories of the Thirties were codified in
-the New Deal laws ?
I've noted how unsuccessful the 14th Amendment was in preserving most of the victory of the Civil War. It mostly upheld the victory of the capitalist class in expanding the power of corporations over the whole country.
Of course laws matter; they are the contours of struggle, the line marking the DMZ between class forces. Like any such deal, it encourages stability and structures the conflict so the society can progress in other areas even as the struggle continues.
But don't talk to me about how the law has preserved the struggles won by unions in the 1930s. One out of 20 workers are fired in every goddamn labor struggle, strikers are replaced, gutting the so-called right to strike, almost 50% of workers -- agricultural, "supervisory", independent contractor, subcontracted - are barred from organizing into any kind of union against their employer. Elections under the NLRB can take years, sometimes almost a decade. A lot of labor activists would trade off all the law we have for the "lawless" period that existed before the passage of the Wagner Act and its subsequent anti-labor amendments.
>Charles: The idea of lawless and orderless socialism is an anarchist >inspi
red caricature of the Left, used by the bourgeoisie to discredit the >Left.
The bourgeois legal system, and more and more. We aim to institute a
>socialist legal system, don't you know ? The socialist state doesn't
whither >away until there is no more capitalism in the whole world.
Don't get me wrong. I am an absolute believer in the rule of law, especially under any socialism I imagine. But the rule of law is like what Gandhi said of Western Civilization, "We should try it some time."
--Nathan Newman