Well-Regulated Militias, and More

rc-am rcollins at netlink.com.au
Sun Oct 31 21:23:15 PST 1999


which of the rights laid down in the US constitution are guaranteed in the US today? what guarantees certain rights is not whether they're written in the constitution, or even for that matter in laws (since the gap between laws and their enforcement is always significant), it seems to me.

also, struggles in the US may take the form of struggles for/against certain rights, but all that means is that this is the form those struggles take, not that there would be no struggles for a better/worse/different world if they did not take such a form. it just means that they would not be conducted via the idiom of 'the right to ____'.

i've no sense of how constitutions are changed in the US, but i would assume that it is harder to change the constitution than it is to change laws, in which case (and as you mention below in relation to the limitations on those rights), isn't the problem at the level of laws rather than the constitution? btw, how is your constitution changed? (we're about to have a referendum to change the constitution this saturday, and unless there's a majority of votes in a majority of states, there goes the republic... awful federalism; and a big wide yawn to the amendment. but, we have compulsory voting, so looks like i have to go scribble something on the ballot.)

Angela _________

roger wrote:


> 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.

max 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.
>
> mbs



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