>>> Wojtek Sokolowski <sokol at jhu.edu> 01/24/00 11:47AM >>>
In response to various postings in this thread:
1. Justin & all other who think that the criminal justice system is used to opress the working class - how many union & labor rights activists are jailed for their political activism in this country? I have not heard of any - can you show me otherwise? That is NOT to say that our labor laws are not heavily skewed in favor of employers - but that is an entirely different pair of shoes.
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CB: The U.S. ruling class covered this for itself during McCarthyism when the Communists were jailed or removed from jobs, and all the left and communist led unions were purged in Reutherism. Then radical unionists are weeded out by the opportunists who have dominated the AFL-CIO for fifty years. Also, the bourgeoisie have minions who have extensive scientific methods of using their hiring and firing power to keep militants out of the rank and file. The lack of Bill of Rights on corporate bosses means that employer sanction is a main arena of excercise of state power in social control every bit as effective as the state power in classical form of police and prison terror. A job is a necessity for living in bourgeois society, so a firing is a well chosen violent metaphor. See article on Mike Hamlin for a glimpse of the low intensity class warfare that goes on at the point of production; see also, "going postal" as an expression today). So, it is not necessary for the bourge! oisie to violate their own liberal standards to keep the trade unions from practicing militant class struggle trade unionism. You must recall that the bourgeoisie use finesse in their exercise of state terror. They only use fascist or anti-liberal methods strategically or when in crisis or panic, as in the assassinations of JFK, RFK, MLK, Black Panthers, Malcolm X period for example. These were summary executions without even arrest and jailing. So, they were superviolations of bourgeois legality. But on the whole , the bourgeoisie use state terror limitedly and covertly in the normal form of bourgeois rule, the bourgeois democratic republic.
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CB