Max Sawicky wrote:
> This seems a little bizarre. How do rights that facilitate popular
> struggle demobilize it? Because we are lulled into false
> consciousness? Do we need to be worse off in order to
> be better off? And why would the existence of these
> rights be necessary for the existence of U.S. federalism and
> the "machinery of government"? Couldn't we be left worse off
> without the BoR but still the other stuff?
>
> Rights are pretty elastic, for good or for ill. There is a 20-year
> campaign against U.S. "entitlement" programs because they
> confer rights to consumption, and a more general campaign against
> a purported proliferation of rights that have partially enfranchised
> minorities and others. Most real left organizing on the ground
> pertains to rights (the living wage, sweatshops, WTO, right to
> employment, welfare rights). Even the automatic anti-imperialists
> were saying the U.S. had no *right* to be in ghe Balkans. Right?
>
> I'd say we need more rights. Of the right kind, of course.
I'm with Max. I don't see how the guarantee of rights, of, say, speech and assembly, give the status quo "enormous power to reproduce itself". Quite the opposite.
The power of elites comes from their ability to limit those rights, through interpretation and the passage of new laws, not from the rights themselves.
And, as Max says, current struggle is always about the protection of basic rights and the creation of new ones, expanding the vision, so to speak, about just how limited the current form of rights are under bourgeois rule.
RO
> > rc-am wrote:
> > >that's my particular context at the moment. as for the discussion on the
> > >US constitution, i wonder why the US left has never argued for the
> > >abolition of the bill of rights.
> >
> > Quite the contrary - except for a few oddballs like my friend Dan
> > Lazare, the Bill of Rights is a sacred text to most American
> > leftists. Dan argues, among other things, that the BoR and the rest
> > of the U.S. constitutional structure has effectively demobilized
> > popular struggle: between the guarantee of "rights" bestowed by The
> > Founders and the obstacles to any troublemaking guaranteed by the
> > machinery of governance (the Senate, the mutually limiting three
> > branches of federal government, the whole structure of federalism and
> > localism), the status quo is given enormous powers to reproduce
> > itself. But it's never seen as such; most liberals, and even
> > gun-worshipping neo-libertarians like Alexander Cockburn, see the BoR
> > as the only bulwark against oppressive, centralizing state power.
> >
> > Doug