The 'Justice' System: Bedrock of Class Rule

The so-called justice system is rife with hypocrisy. Its ideal of impartial and universal justice stands next to the grit-and-grime reality that laws are shaped by material class interests. The legal system is truly stacked in favor of the capitalists, to the detriment of the youth, workers and pensioners.

The workplace is shared by worker and capitalist, so it is the defining arena of our legal rights and physical existence. At work we either make a wage, or we make profits -- thus forming the antagonistic yin and yang of the system. While an employer has the right to pay low wages, there is, take note, no right for the worker to claim a living wage. There is no right to employment at all.

Young adults in in countries such as Spain, Greece, and Italy, suffer unemployment rates of 40 to 50 percent. The figure for France is 24 percent; and in the UK it is 17 percent. Unemployment in the US is over 10 percent (when 'discouraged' workers are counted). Many working poor in the US rely on food stamps, which provide corporations like Walmart a public subsidy for their low wages.

Could there be a more ringing indictment of capitalism? It no longer bothers to feed its slaves, which points to its impending ruin.

Class Bias

There is no legal right to affordable education in most capitalist countries, but there are rights for raising tuition fees to what the market will bear ('locking out' the poor). There are no guarantees anymore of decent healthcare, but there are rights for patenting expensive medicines ('locking in' profits). There is no right to affordable housing, but there are rights for evicting tenants.

The housing situation in the developed world is, in fact, a mockery of justice and morality. When rough encampments and overpasses provide shelter for the homeless in forgotten rust belts; when inflated rents exist side-by-side with millions of empty homes in countries such as Britain, Spain, the USA and China, the bell is tolling for a tottering social system.

But the 'impartial' judges continue to rubber-stamp foreclosures against homeowners (who have lost their livelihoods through no fault of their own). They fill prisons with minority youth on account of petty crimes. Yet all the while they pamper the ruling class -- delivering a pat on the wrist, and no jail time at all -- to criminal legislators, bankers, insurance executives, and hedge fund managers who brought the world economy to its knees in 2008 with swindling casino capitalism.

Class Struggle

The courts and the police enforce the laws of the bourgeois state. They are also keen to minimize resistance to the existing social order.

This is why the state felt threatened by Occupy Wall Street in 2011. The rebellious youth who occupied the squares had the audacity to call a spade, a capitalist spade (affronting petty trespassing laws in the process).

The slogan 'Occupy Wall Street' has the whiff of revolution and is anti-capitalist to the core. It brings to mind imagery of the Paris Commune of 1871, or of Red October in 1917, when workers took the power from the ruling class, if only temporarily. They did this by 'occupying' the seats of power in the economy and state, and they created new forms of self-government such as the commune, the popular assembly, and the workers and farmers councils.

State security is also troubled by 'Shut it Down' as vocalized by the Black Lives Matter movement. This slogan also seethes with revolutionary content, sending shivers down the spine of the profit system. It points to the decisive role of people power in forcing change. It raises class consciousness and fighting spirit. It echoes the tactic of the general strike or the sit-down strike, to bring the system to a grinding halt. It highlights the latent power of the youth and workers so it is dangerous for the system. For as the farsighted saying goes: "Not a light bulb shines, or a wheel turns, without the kind permission of the working class."

This legal system of the rich, then, is a mask for class oppression. It passes judgments in favor of the ruling class, in favor of private property and profits, and against the poor and laboring classes. It tries to hide this fact with an aura of bogus impartiality, so it wears robes of hypocrisy, which may fool the unaware. In some countries, it even dons ermine capes and powdered wigs, ridiculous trappings of degenerate genteel classes. These forms of burlesque and false piety, much like blind patriotism, and military glory, are meant to conceal, to shroud the rule of Capital under a halo of sanctity and tradition.