walkinginonit posted:

This whole "rule of law" thing is just obfuscatory. Any socialist government is going to be built on the local conditions of social relations. Trying to impose some kind of fixed Platonic ideal of Law and Order on the masses of people is as liberal as it gets.

this is such garbage. there's nothing inherently liberal about dividing powers and responsibilities between different groups. it's been done everywhere from the iroquois league to the roman republic.

babyhueypnewton posted:

2. The 'rule of law' under capitalism is ultimately the rule of private law. Private law, i.e. the right of property, is the foundation of public and criminal law in bourgeois society. Under socialism, public law is the foundation of all law, and it is this foundation that allows criminal law and public law to exist autonomously but in subordination. Obviously, this is an unstable relationship because the subordination of one form of law to another is in reality its nonexistence, or rather its existence as a mere facade. If public and criminal law only exist when they do not interfere with private law and private law trumps the other two when it demands it, then these are not really coherent legal systems but disguises for the cruelty of private property. If socialism is the reverse, than it is precisely in moments of the 'state of exception' when the facade of private law and criminal law fade and the true socialist 'rule of law' reveals itself. The purges reveal the essence of the socialist rule of law in the way that economic crisis reveals the essence of the bourgeois rule of law: the maintenance of that system by any means necessary

more bullshit. having laws which are non-retroactive, and enforcers of the law who have checks on their power, is far more public than the soviet system, which gave chekist troikas the power to shoot people with no evidence or jury trial

postposting posted:

and yet somehow this division of power and rule of law throughout history has done nothing to curb the systemic violence inherent in the economic system which promotes it. slavery and genocide can be perfectly legal and have been perfectly legal historically under the rule of law.

states with slavery (different classes of people having different legal rights) obviously did not have rule of law

Edited by Panopticon (March 10, 2016 19:58:53)

postposting posted:

the dictatorship of the proletariat is a historically necessary condition whereby the majority of humanity uses the state to impose its will on, and thereby crush, the previously ruling classes. this obviously includes the use of violence and repression.

the violence doesn't necessarily have to be arbitrary, secretive and unpredictable.

postposting posted:

to condemn the ussr because they 'used violence' is not only to completely fail to understand what a revolution is, but to fall into the reactionary trap whereby socialist states are judged against a perfect ideal instead of being evaluated dialectically in comparison to capitalist states as they should be.

let's compare the kulak campaign in 1937-8, which was officially sanctioned by the party, with police brutality in america. the actions of individual kulaks didn't matter in whether they were arrested or not. they were a class enemy. on the other hand the police brutality in america is in response to specific crimes. the fact the violence falls more heavily on one section of the population is officially coincidental. the democratic party is not laying out upper and lower bounds on the number of executions they are expecting from state governors.

maybe you aren't sold on the idea of being able to avoid state violence?

Panopticon posted:

postposting posted:

and yet somehow this division of power and rule of law throughout history has done nothing to curb the systemic violence inherent in the economic system which promotes it. slavery and genocide can be perfectly legal and have been perfectly legal historically under the rule of law.

states with slavery (different classes of people having different legal rights) obviously did not have rule of law

you are correct in a certain sense. but by historicizing the rule of law as a bourgeois creation you fail to see that it is a historically transient concept. As the young Marx says:

The establishment of the political state and the dissolution of civil society into independent individuals – whose relation with one another epend on law, just as the relations of men in the system of estates and guilds depended on privilege – is accomplished by one and the same act. Man as a member of civil society, unpolitical man, inevitably appears, however, as the natural man. The “rights of man” appears as “natural rights,” because conscious activity is concentrated on the political act. Egoistic man is the passive result of the dissolved society, a result that is simply found in existence, an object of immediate certainty, therefore a natural object. The political revolution resolves civil life into its component parts, without revolutionizing these components themselves or subjecting them to criticism. It regards civil society, the world of needs, labor, private interests, civil law, as the basis of its existence, as a precondition not requiring further substantiation and therefore as its natural basis. Finally, man as a member of civil society is held to be man in the proper sense, homme as distinct from citoyen, because he is man in his sensuous, individual, immediate existence, whereas political man is only abstract, artificial man, man as an allegorical, juridical person. The real man is recognized only in the shape of the egoistic individual, the true man is recognized only in the shape of the abstract citizen.
...
All emancipation is a reduction of the human world and relationships to man himself.

Political emancipation is the reduction of man, on the one hand, to a member of civil society, to an egoistic, independent individual, and, on the other hand, to a citizen, a juridical person.

Only when the real, individual man re-absorbs in himself the abstract citizen, and as an individual human being has become a species-being in his everyday life, in his particular work, and in his particular situation, only when man has recognized and organized his “own powers” as social powers, and, consequently, no longer separates social power from himself in the shape of political power, only then will human emancipation have been accomplished.

-On The Jewish Question

And he is even more clear in his critique of Hegel:

Hegel proceeds from the state and makes man into the subjectified state; democracy starts with man and makes the state objectified man. just as it is not religion that creates man but man who creates religion, so it is not the constitution that creates the people but the people which creates the constitution. In a certain respect democracy is to all other forms of the state what Christianity is to all other religions. Christianity is the religion kat exohin, the essence of religion, deified man under the form of a particular religion. In the same way democracy is the essence of every political constitution, socialised man under the form of a particular constitution of the state. It stands related to other constitutions as the genus to its species; only here the genus itself appears as an existent, and therefore opposed as a particular species to those existents which do not conform to the essence. Democracy relates to all other forms of the state as their Old Testament. Man does not exist because of the law but rather the law exists for the good of man. Democracy is human existence, while in the other political forms man has only legal existence. That is the fundamental difference of democracy.

-Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right

the rule of law means the existence of law as something outside the will of the people. it is impossible to have democracy and the rule of law, though of course by democracy Marx means the radical democracy of communism in which man is a species-being.

postposting posted:

You seem to be saying (correct me if I'm wrong) that the Rule of Law has never been adequately established in any human society. Yet you single out the soviet union under stalin as being uniquely bad in this regard without any comparative analysis of capitalist states during the same time period.

because this is the stalin thread. this seems like the most appropriate place to critcise stalin and the system he created.

thirdplace posted:

it was all very legal and human rights != rule of law

the universality/generality of the law is part of the rule of law

swampman posted:

You're saying that the purges in the 30s were not subject to "the rule of law." In a sense they were, it's just that the law did not deal with individuals, the law said, "xxx kulaks should die."

this made it a retroactive law, though. the people who owned farms during NEP and then lost them to collectivisation could be following the law perfectly and still be shot.

swampman posted:

Whereas in America, the law said exactly what kind of treatment youc ould expect, in every circumstance, all you gotta do is *thwap* read the laws buddy. And in fact it was known openly that the laws were not enforced fairly and that the laws discriminate against the poor, that this resulted in actual violence falling on the lower classes, especially racial violence, but to you this is more like the ideal "rule of law" than having a central authority ask local governing bodies to do what they think is fair.

"read the laws buddy" is more fair than "if we don't shoot you, stalin might think we don't fully support his dekulakisation campaign"

postposting posted:

are you really under the impression that Black people in the amerikan south during the 1930s were only subject to police and klan terror if they 'broke the law'?

this is not even to begin the subject of why you believe that a law which targets individuals based on race is somehow more in line with 'the rule of law' than one which targets individuals based on class.

i was talking about modern day america.

the law might be targeting people based on race if it were "possession of dark skin shall be an offence", but it isn't, it's possession of drugs, involvement in gangs etc. these are actions which people can avoid. the american police are thugs who don't care about the rule of law either, so obviously they shoot black people on a whim, but they have to pretend it's for drugs, gangs etc, whereas the nkvd were destroying "enemies of the people", not punishing specific crimes.

gyrofry posted:

Panopticon posted:
the police brutality in america is in response to specific crimes
what in the immediate fuck

well that's the official story yeah. that makes it qualitatively different than the kulak operation etc. the official story in 1937 was that kulaks were class enemies that needed to be destroyed.