-----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>
>In our argument on outlawing/not outlawing the Nazis and KKK, you seem to
>think that the First Amendment, a law, is more than "nice words" or "The
>Sermon on the Mount" ( Ten Commandments ?). What is the difference between
>the First Amendment and International Human Rights Treaties and Conventions
>in your legal realist theory ?
The First Amendment has been enforced on behalf of people without direct state power, however imperfectly. The UN Conventions never have.
While there are obviously lots of areas where the First Amendment has failed, we do have many cases where government censorship of leftwing papers in this country has been overruled by judges. We have the Pentagon Papers case, we even have a Revolutionary Communist Party member winning the right to burn a flag.
The difference is not the perfection on enforcement on behalf of the 1st Amendment, but that there has been any enforcement at all - something that cannot be said about the UN conventions.
>Also, your support for the U.S./NATO action seems to be in part based upon
>alleged Serbian violations of the nice sounding words of international law
>against genocide (UN Convention, Nuremburg Principles), or no ?
No, they are based on the alleged Serbian actions of brutality and ethnic clensing, irrespective of empty legal rhetoric. I will admit to occasionally raising such conventions in response to those arguing for NATO "illegality", but only to note the ideological incoherence of this network of non-enforced laws who can only maintain such incoherence precisely because they never face real tests of enforcement.
>But once the change in law was achieved by an enormous physical struggle,
>the idea was not to treat the new words on the books as unimportant and to
>continue to only rely on physical means to enforce the new ban on slavery.
>The idea was to use the habit of most people obeying the law to achieve an
>end of slavery by a "moral" struggle , in Douglass' terminology; not to
>mention to use the backup of even the bourgeois state force for its laws,
>ever diligent that the ruling class would seek to erode that legal/moral
>method of enforcement.
Law is a form of mandatory mediation; once two sides come to an agreement based on their relative power in time, they agree to avoid non-legal means of conflict for resolution, since having tested each other's strength, they are confident the result will not be too different from what the law will deliver. That is the principle of agreeing to legislation as well as signing a union contract at the end of strike.
Until relative forces change, both sides will abide by the agreement and avoid the waste involved in non-legal conflict. The law in that sense is a time and resources saver in a society that knows the strength of its different parties. So yes, law is to be respected for that reason and for its imperfect reflection of democratic will, but I don't believe in fetishizing it. That seems an odd position for a socialist under capitalist law.
>You seem to be trying to out vulgarize the list vulgar materialist.
Maybe you are less vulgar than you think? :)
>Don't you see World Government as a long term goal of the International
>progressive/Left movement ? Aren't the UN and its conventions and treaties
>a first step toward that, though as in all struggles, with an ebb and flow
?
Yes to the first question, only a little bit to the second. In its reactionary way, the WTO, the IMF and other trade agreements are much more the road to world government, precisely because they have enforcement mechanisms. There are some fascinating international agreements being made connected to global enforcement of tort claims. A few activists are trying to target corporate-connected genocide against indigenous peoples through such laws. But note, these agreements are happening outside the UN as part of the trade regime.
So I am a vulgar Weberian as well as a vulgar Marxist. If the state "law" and institution in question does not have a monopoly on the use of legitimate force in the issue addressed, it is not government or law but, as I said, merely nice words.
I don't like the WTO since the words are less pretty than in the UN conventions, but it is far more a world government than anything coming out of the United Nations.
--Nathan Newman