>>> "Nathan Newman" <nathan.newman at yale.edu> 05/18/99 12:54P
Up until 1936, the words of the Constitution meant there could be no
national laws regulating wages and workplace conditions. Magically (i.e.
following a landslide victory for Roosevelt and sit-in strikes across the
country), the Supreme Court suddenly "found" that the text actually made
such laws perfectly Constitutional.
Not a word of text was changed in the Constitution during the 1930s (other than repealing Prohibition), yet our whole constitutional system was transformed more radically than during any period other than the Civil War.
Which goes to my point that "law" is not about the words in the text but their interpretation and enforcement under real existing systems of government and state power.
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Charles: This thread has moved some from the original exchanges, but to an extent , Nathan's last argument is residually aimed at what I said. On that , you got the wrong one, baby. As I have said elsewhere on , for example, a Constitutional Amendment for a right to a job:
The goal of full employment and the highest quality of life for all is at the heart of our struggle to make human rights more sacred than property interests. To accomplish this goal in the United States will take a mass, organized movement that through progressive stages and leaps reforms and ultimately revolutionizes our relations of production. An important aspect of this movement will be the legal forms that come to crystallize and institutionalize the fundamental economic changes won by the People.
The tactics and strategy in the economic struggle always necessarily include political and legislative goals. As our efforts address the most fundamental politicaleconomic issues, it is important that we have goals, strategy and tactics concerning the most fundamental law of the land , the Constitution, no matter how much the ruling class is above even that authority for now.
and
Because of its place in production, the working class must lead any victorious struggle to institute progressive property laws, rights and the dependent other human rights. To lead, the working class must be class conscious and organized for struggle as a result of objective and subjective experience. That consciousness must include awareness of legal goals, the consciousness taking organizational form as elements of a political program. Because constitutional amendment requires 2/3 majority of athe Congress or the state legislatures to propose an amendment and 3/4 majority of the states for ratification, it also requires building a mass movement to accomplish. It is a method for involving masses in making fundamental law as opposed to a few lawyers arguing before a few judges in courts. It is an inherently popular tendency in our jurisprudence. Without ignoring the slow pace of the left movement today and the somnolence of the People, we prepare this legal strategy for the day when again pro-working class majorities are active and conscious as in the 1930's.
and
Yet in considering what must be done to bring mass popular support for statutory and constitutonal change, we must emphasize that the overwhelming majority of U.S. judges interpret the law as denying these rights, notwithstanding that this interpretation is contrary to the spirit of America's best traditions as Ginger and Rosenwein argue. In a word, we must not only reinterpret the law /the Constitution, but change it.
Charles Brown