Doug Henwood wrote:
>Didn't stop the cops from breaking in, did it? Doesn't stop the cops from
>harassing and killing mainly black & Latino kids every day in NYC and
>elsewhere?
guess what? i live in low income [minority] housing. when i lived in a lower middle class white neighborhood cops were called for the same reason, only that time there really was a need for them to be there. they didn't come busting into the house though, no gunz, no search. isn't the real problem class/racism and not some deficiency in the 4th amendment?
besides doug you know that it was *really* cause they saw the shelf full of commie pinko books by the door and the four library cards in my wallet. that's when they decided to search the place.
If our constitution protects our precious liberties, why do we
>criminalize more behavior and jail more people than just about any other
>country on earth?
because we have the most highly developed form of capitalism on the planet?
relatedly, because we have the most individualistic ethos on the planet? because prisons are cheaper than schools for warehousing the surplus army of reserve labor? and, how about because the US is a capitalist juggernaut at full bore in the nearly complete absence of civil society and a vital public sphere?
as for why so much is criminalized? it's pretty much a basic sociological insight that, the less informal social control (norms) you have, the more formal (juridico-legal) social control. why increasingly less informal social control? answer: capitalism: alienation, commodity fetishism, individualism, the valorization of negative freedom, apathy, ad nauseum. all that's solid melts into air, all that's holy is profaned. capitalism unmoors us from the social bonds of feudal traditions that once kept us in check, which is largely a good thing, but it replaces those bonds with *nothing* else and all we have to turn to is the state and/or the market.
this is why you might want to take the civil society argument a bit more seriously than you do, doug. and no, not the crap that tikkun dishes out and whoever else you were on about last summer. there *is* something to be said for CS because, in its absence and in the absence of a public sphere, people turn to the state as a remedy for every ailment.
that the constitution was created for the purposes of furthering and extending the power of capital is insufficient grounds for tossing the constitution and/or the *idea* of *a* constitution out the window. the public education system, to use your words, "has no small amount to do with capital's power in the U.S." oh sure you can point to some emancipatory potential, but mostly it trains ppl to become obedient and docile workers and apathetic citizens, no? and it's definitely part of the state. so, on your logic, we ought to toss the idea of public schooling and institutions of higher learning right into the recycling bin of history.
all that *I* have been arguing for, doug, is the retention of *the idea* of a constitution, not *the* one we have now necessarily, but *a* constitution. you apparently don't like the one we have or constitutions in general i'm not sure exactly which, so what's your alternative? and that's also what i've been bitching about. the relentless critique crowd never seems to have anything else to offer, accept some vague claim that it'll be all better once we get rid of capitalism.
these arguments against the constitution are based on an incredibly crude and under-theorized notion of the state as some sort of monolithic, univocal entity. it's rather undialectiacal and typical of what marx called 'crude socialism' to think that we shouldn't concern ourselves with the practical politics of such things because they're ick! the stuff of bourgeois liberalism. [see marx's letter to arnold ruge 1843]
bitchin' kisses, kelley
Q: Are you an academic? Q: Who says? Q: And that's enough for you, is it?