Addressing the legal system as an obstacle to successful social struggle

The excellent informative articles most recently published by NB Media Co-op in the wake of the recent social forum prompted the following opinion I would like to share with fellow readers and supporters of the Co-op.

At best, a class divided social system is a hybrid between ownership rights and constraints on the exercise of economic power. But as competition between the members of the owning classes results in increasing concentration of ownership, the historically evident tendency is for political power to be shared by a declining proportion of the population, increasing the ruling class’s socio-pathic and environmentally destructive behavior, including the undermining of social regulations and human rights, where these previously existed.

The legal system in a capitalist society, like those of the feudal and slave societies that preceded it, is most accessible to those who wield the greatest economic power. Any thought that rights are equally and permanently distributed across the population must be recognized as an illusion, one naturally fostered by the members of the ruling class themselves and, especially, by their mercenary representatives in the educational, communications, and political institutions they have created for this purpose.

The legal and electoral systems, like all the other institutions the capitalist class has created to support its continuing rule, comprise the primary obstacle to the success of the people’s struggles for a more peaceful, socially just, and ecologically sustainable future. Moreover, the institutions created by our ruling class are part of the historical core of the imperialism that is behind the genocidal and ecocidal wars and global ecological destruction that threaten the very existence of humanity.

The success of our struggles against imperialism and for alternatives to the institutions it has created is intimately connected with the success (or otherwise) of our struggle for a necessarily (by definition) revolutionary transformation of the legal and electoral system from one whose primary purpose is the defense of private property to a legal and electoral system whose primary purpose is the defense of human rights. This framing of the challenge recognizes the present system as a capitalist system of private property relationships between people and with nature. The immediate alternative is a socialist system, one in which the politically dominant forms of private property ownership are replaced by social ownership (finances, natural resources, and monopolistic privately owned enterprises) and the legally obligated responsibility of all economic and political units in society to incrementally replace all remaining private property by communal ownership, in the form of equality of human rights to decision-making over their disposition (communism).

The first stage of revolutionary transformation is dependent on the determination of the working class in the final days of capitalism to (1) assume the obligation of democratic management by the current employees of all enterprises large enough to do further life-threatening damage to nature and human social relationships and (2) subordinate all levels of government to the democratically determined will of the people, necessarily excluding all the members of the current capitalist oligarchy and their mercenaries.

The primary reason for a gradual economic transformation is the time needed for the corresponding cultural transformation from the alienated forms of social and environmental behaviors conditioned by capitalist economic relationships to the more fully cooperative and trusting social relations needed for communal social relationships and commensal relationships with the rest of nature.

Charles Posa McFadden is a retired UNB Professor of Education, specializing in science education, and continuing author of published research and opinion in the natural, social, educational and environmental sciences, the most recent of which are included on the Green Social Democracy website.