EmanuelaBrolandi posted:

That "source" page you screenshotted is a list you could find in wikipedia and a dude saying "stalin made all this shit up as he went along dreaming up his vision to be barely worse than hitler"

if you do not have a better source, say so.

in order that these objects may enter into relation with each other as commodities, their guardians must place themselves in relation to one another, as persons whose will resides in those objects, and must behave in such a way that each does not appropriate the commodity of the other, and part with his own, except by means of an act done by mutual consent. They must therefore, mutually recognise in each other the rights of private proprietors. This juridical relation, which thus expresses itself in a contract, whether such contract be part of a developed legal system or not, is a relation between two wills, and is but the reflex of the real economic relation between the two. It is this economic relation that determines the subject-matter comprised in each such juridical act.

This is why private law is determinate in the last instance in the bourgeois legal field while public and criminal law are secondary.

2. The enforcement of bourgeois rule by means of a monopoly on force.

the state arose from the need to hold class antagonisms in check, but because it arose, at the same time, in the midst of the conflict of these classes, it is, as a rule, the state of the most powerful, economically dominant class, which, through the medium of the state, becomes also the politically dominant class, and thus acquires new means of holding down and exploiting the oppressed class

which becomes increasingly its only character as the class struggle grows.

after every revolution marking a progressive phase in the class struggle, the purely repressive character of the state power stands out in bolder and bolder relief

this means that by the time of revolution, only the violent class rule of the law remains and this is the legal apparatus the working class 'inherits'.

3. The state is an ideological apparatus that mediates class conflict.

in order that antagonisms and classes with conflicting economic interests might not consume themselves and society in fruitless struggle, it became necessary to have a power seemingly standing above society that would alleviate the conflict, and keep it within the bounds of order; and this power, arisen out of society but placing itself above it, and alienating itself more and more from it, is the state

This means that the law can be thought of as one of many ideological apparatuses in bourgeois hegemony and a fundamental part of all of these apparatuses depending on how you define law. If you define law as the judicial functioning of the state than clearly it's the former, but if you define the law as the ossification of concepts like 'innocent until proven guilty', 'freedom of speech' etc as you seem to do than the law becomes far more broad. Marxism has always used the former definition since this corresponds to how law actually functions in bourgeois society and differentiates between 'law' and 'administration'. But if you want to make the latter argument than make it, but you have to deal with the entire Marxist conception of law and not just fall back on bourgeois ideas that are 'common sense'. They are not common sense here.

Extra Credit:

Engels points out the fundamental contradiction of the law:

law must not only correspond to the general economic position and be its expression... an expression which is consistent in itself, and which does not, owing to inner contradictions, look glaringly inconsistent

think about this if you want to maintain a socialist rule of law.

Edited by babyhueypnewton (March 12, 2016 10:12:05)

EmanuelaBrolandi posted:

In the very first days of the war, Comrade Stalin called upon the Soviet people to wage a Great Patriotic War, to rout the enemy, to wage a self-sacrificing struggle for victory. In his appeal to the people on July 3, 1941, he revealed the true character of the war we were waging, exposed the myth about the invincibility of the hitlerite army, foretold its inevitable defeat, drew up a clear program for the defeat of the German fascist aggressors and formulated the tasks of the people and the army in the war. Comrade Stalin called upon the Party and the Soviet people to reorganize all their work and put it on a wartime footing, to subordinate everything to the interests of the font, to the task of organizing the defeat of the enemy, to dispute every inch of Soviet soil, to wear down the enemy and to foment partisan warfare in the enemy’s rear.
Everybody also remembers the great mobilizing force of the historic speech Comrade Stalin delivered in the Red Square in Moscow on November 7, 1941. That speech breathed indomitable faith in our victory. As is known, the situation at that time was extremely grave. The enemy was at the walls of Moscow and Leningrad. Every Soviet citizen was filled with anxiety concerning the fate of our Motherland. In this grave situation the voice of our leader rang out, full of deep confidence in our victory, in the triumph of our just cause. Can there be any doubt, Comrade Stalin asked, that we can and are bound to defeat the German invaders? The devil is not as terrible as he is painted. Fascist Germany will collapse beneath the weight of its crimes, he said.
Comrade Stalin’s speech raised the spirit of our people and roused unprecedented enthusiasm among our troops. “Stalin is with us. Stalin says we will win, and if he says it, it will be so,” said our soldiers and our people in those days of war.
A month later, in the Battle of Moscow, our troops gained a brilliant victory over the hitlerite army. Comrade Stalin himself directed the whole course of that gigantic battle. He it was who inspired and guided the military operations of our units and formations.
During the Battle of Moscow, Comrade Stalin’s wisdom and courage were displayed with exceptional force. Notwithstanding the grave situation at the front, Comrade Stalin saw to it that the reserves were not prematurely expended. Knowing that General Headquarters had large reserves at their disposal near Moscow, the Commander-in-Chief of the Western Front asked for reinforcements, but Comrade Stalin ordered him to hold up the enemy with the forces at his command. Soon, the wisdom of Comrade Stalin’s decision became evident. Comrade Stalin held those reserves for the purpose of launching a decisive counteroffensive. At the proper time, the front received these reserves in the necessary quantity, and this was the decisive factor in the defeat of the enemy near Moscow.
In the subsequent course of the Great Patriotic War, Comrade Stalin’s genius was displayed with even greater depth and brilliance. This is shown by the results of gigantic battles like those fought at Stalingrad and Kursk and the offensive operations in 1944, and, in particular, the operations conducted for the liberation of the Byelorussian S.S.R. and its capital Minsk from the German invaders, which ended in the rout of the central group of the German forces and in the almost complete extermination and capture of its personnel, the winter offensive in 1945, and the final operation of the war—the Battle of Berlin—which was an immense triumph of the Stalin art of military leadership.
Executing Comrade Stalin’s orders, our Navy served as a faithful assistant of our land forces, and in the course of the war it sank numerous enemy ships on the enemy’s lines of communication, thereby inscribing new pages in the book of Russian naval glory.
All the operations during the Great Patriotic War were planned by Comrade Stalin and were carried out under his guidance. There was not a single operation, in the working out of which he did not take part. Before sanctioning any given operation, he subjected it to thorough analysis and discussion with his immediate comrades-in-arms. He made it a rule to hear the opinions and proposals of front, fleet and army commanders and in this displayed his characteristic sensitiveness and attention to all the comments and proposals that were made.

i asked you for a source that said stalin did not exercise dictatorial power over the military, such as for senior promotions. you respond with propaganda saying stalin was personally responsible for planning every military operation?

babyhueypnewton posted:

the predominance of private law over public and criminal

feudal systems also had private law, so it's not a specifically bourgeois characteristic. for example villages manorial courts overseeing hte open field system

babyhueypnewton posted:

the repressive character of the law becoming predominant in times of crisis or revolution

whereas stalin's laws were extremely compassionate?

predominance of bourgeois ideology in the legal field

begging the question. you only say rule of law etc are bourgeois because stalin didn't practice it. i say rule of law is compatible with socialism.

babyhueypnewton posted:

because the law must be internally coherent, all of these functions are dialectically related and cannot exist without the other. This is why you cannot pick and choose which parts of bourgeois law you like any more than you can pick and choose which parts of capitalism (profit, the market, etc) you like and discard the rest

this is easily refuted by considering different capitalist countries today have different legal systems (eg inquisitorial vs adversarial, common law vs napoleonic, separation of church and state vs anglican establishment, separation of powers vs supremacy of parliament)

Panopticon posted:

what does saying "if the interventions of such institutions are not present then it doesn't make sense to talk about any of these conditions as an expression of bourgeois law" contribute?

it was a direct response to the post you made. you presented a list of particular historical contexts that did not involve the intervention of legal institutions and suggested that i - or other posters in this thread - were explaining these situations as expressions of bourgeois law

i contested that nobody in this thread was making that point, because expressions of bourgeois law are exclusive to the mobilisation of legal institutions. none of your examples involved the mobilisation of legal institutions

now you're acting as if my response was somehow addressing another point you made, even though i directly quoted what i was responding to you. surely you recognise how disingenuous this is

Panopticon posted:

i've tried going through lines of argument with you before, blink. when i asked why production for exchange should be abolished you responded by saying it's a bad question. you argue for the sake of arguing. you don't seem to have a value system that you are defending. it's pointless.

you're being disingenuous here again. my response is that if you are asking that question in such a way that can only be answered by the provision of a moral principle you are asking the wrong question, not that asking "why" is a wrong question in itself

i actually made several attempts of some length to answer this "why". i'm working on writing even more elaborations on this concept. these are explicit defences of a theoretical perspective.

Edited by blinkandwheeze (March 12, 2016 10:35:37)

blinkandwheeze posted:

did not involve the intervention of legal institutions

how can you say the encomienda system did not involve the intervention of a legal institution

Panopticon posted:

how can you say the encomienda system did not involve the intervention of a legal institution

jfc this is the post i responded to with that point

Panopticon posted:

imagine seeing a gang of belgian mercenaries in the congo cutting off the hands of random villagers to terrorise them into working on the rubber plantations
"ah yes, this random and chaotic violence is a clear expression of the class nature of bourgeois law"

then you see a 19th century factory where the workers are on the verge of starvation thanks to the mass of unemployed peasants (driven off the land by enclosures) competing down wages, who dont unionise or strike because they will be deported to australia or ridden down in the streets by dragoons
"ah yes, this formalised violence is a clear expression of the class nature of bourgeois law"

then you see a 21st century construction worker who has migrated to france or britain from poland who gets paid less than the value of his work but whose only contact with the state is that taxes are deducted automatically from his pay cheque
"ah yes, this obfuscated violence is a clear expression of the class nature of bourgeois law"

when a phrase can describe so many situations it's pretty bad for real analysis.

which one of these examples involved the encomienda system. i directly quoted from this post and responded to it. how can you possibly interpret as me somehow replying to another post you made

Panopticon posted:

deportation to australia: no intervention from a legal institution at all

the implicit threat of the expression of a legal institution is not the same thing the actual expression of a legal institution, no

Panopticon posted:

those were two sets of examples i posted to try to explain why "bourgeois character of law" is a meaningless phrase unworthy of a marxist. i tried to show that the specifics were so different that something other than ideology had to be responsible for the outcomes. ie, the material conditions

i legitimately don't understand what you aren't getting here. i am affirming that the mobilisation of legal institutions have nothing to with the examples you suggested. nobody ever suggested that they did, except for you, in that post. you were the one who presented a legal system as responsible for conditions that did not involve the mobilisation of the legal system, and then accused everyone else of making that argument

blinkandwheeze posted:

the implicit threat of the expression of a legal institution is not the same thing the actual expression of a legal institution, no

i legitimately don't understand what you aren't getting here. i am affirming that the mobilisation of legal institutions have nothing to with the examples you suggested. nobody ever suggested that they did, except for you, in that post. you were the one who presented a legal system as responsible for conditions that did not involve the mobilisation of the legal system, and then accused everyone else of making that argument

there were plenty of times this legal institution was "mobilised". the tolpuddle martyrs is the most famous.

blinkandwheeze posted:

Nobody itt has ever identified anything as an expression of bourgeois law except for the mobilisation of legal institutions

i have no idea where you managed to get the idea that anyone was describing anything outside the mechanisms of legal institutions as explainable as the expression of bourgeois law

cars posted:

how can you analyze law without considering its class character? you end up like ron paul voters talking about how shitty the drug war is and QQing that black voters won't line up behind them. well no shit because you could legalize every drug and then all you'd need to change is every other law on the books & the class structure of the united states, then you'd be fine.

cars will have to explain what he meant by class character, then.

blinkandwheeze posted:

how about you explain to me why you think that this post by cars is suggesting that events outside of the intervention of legal institutions can be explained as "expressions of the class character of bourgeois law"

how about you explain what the fuck "class character of laws" even means then?

blinkandwheeze posted:

Panopticon posted:

replace "who dont unionise or strike because they will be deported to australia" with "who get deported to austrlia because they tried to unionise". it doesn't change my argument in the slightlest. this is what i meant. you are arguing for the sake of arguing.

i'll try and hold your hand through this again

your argument was that the idea of the class character of bourgeois law is "meaningless" because, supposedly, it is being used liberally as an explanation of particular events and conditions to a degree that it becomes useless. you illustrated this by listing a series of situations and accused others of applying this explanation to them. i pointed out that nobody had shown any indication of presenting the kind of explanation you had suggested they were

if people are exclusively using this argument within the context of the particular mobilisation of legal institutions under bourgeois dominated society, and not in fact applying it anywhere near as broadly as you suggest, then surely this undermines your objection that it is meaningless because it is being too widely used?

you're the one that was liberally applying the concept. nobody else was. the deficiency you pointed out was just a product of your imagination. you're right that changing one example doesn't change your argument, because it's still incoherent

Panopticon posted:

how about you explain what the fuck "class character of laws" even means then?

you're the one who suggested that this cars post was making the argument that the class character of bourgeois law is being applied to contexts outside the actions of and within legal institutions. you explicitly drew that conclusion, you should be able to explain it

you're right, cars did not provide any explanation or examples of what he meant by "class character of law".

blinkandwheeze posted:

huey has already quite patiently explained the concept to you

i did not read this. i will read it now

babyhueypnewton posted:

Marx and Engels trace out three functions of the law:

1. Ensuring the functioning of the capitalist mode of production.

in order that these objects may enter into relation with each other as commodities, their guardians must place themselves in relation to one another, as persons whose will resides in those objects, and must behave in such a way that each does not appropriate the commodity of the other, and part with his own, except by means of an act done by mutual consent. They must therefore, mutually recognise in each other the rights of private proprietors. This juridical relation, which thus expresses itself in a contract, whether such contract be part of a developed legal system or not, is a relation between two wills, and is but the reflex of the real economic relation between the two. It is this economic relation that determines the subject-matter comprised in each such juridical act.


This is why private law is determinate in the last instance in the bourgeois legal field while public and criminal law are secondary.

marx wasn't addressing the wider legal system, though. he says this commodity exchange can happen with or without a developed legal system. if your implication is that present day legal systems are integral with the capitalist mode of production (as in, taking any part of current bourgeois systems ensures you're taking a part of the mode of production with you), i think your conclusion is a non-sequitur. modern day bourgeois democracies have universal adult suffrage, but marx demanded it in the manifesto as well, so there's no reason to believe it has a fundamentally bourgeois nature.

babyhueypnewton posted:

2. The enforcement of bourgeois rule by means of a monopoly on force.

the state arose from the need to hold class antagonisms in check, but because it arose, at the same time, in the midst of the conflict of these classes, it is, as a rule, the state of the most powerful, economically dominant class, which, through the medium of the state, becomes also the politically dominant class, and thus acquires new means of holding down and exploiting the oppressed class


which becomes increasingly its only character as the class struggle grows.

after every revolution marking a progressive phase in the class struggle, the purely repressive character of the state power stands out in bolder and bolder relief


this means that by the time of revolution, only the violent class rule of the law remains and this is the legal apparatus the working class 'inherits'.

i would like to see some kind of evidence for this before i believe it. there was a lot of violence from the bourgeois states against their own citizens in marx's day. but thanks to the actions of socialists in government this tendency has been reversed. for example most of the platform marx demanded in his communist manifesto have been implemented (universal suffrage, social welfare programmes, universal schools and hospitals)

now maybe you can argue that the bourgeois character of law has been replaced over time with a socialist character... but that's a good argument in my favour that we should take modern day legal institutions as guide for the future, only improving them to stop the remaining abuses (like the police brutality example we went over before)

anyway, the idea of a monopoly on force is extremely good for human wellbeing, if the entity with the monopoly has the right attributes. the attributes i believe would be best are democracy and rule of law.

babyhueypnewton posted:

3. The state is an ideological apparatus that mediates class conflict.
in order that antagonisms and classes with conflicting economic interests might not consume themselves and society in fruitless struggle, it became necessary to have a power seemingly standing above society that would alleviate the conflict, and keep it within the bounds of order; and this power, arisen out of society but placing itself above it, and alienating itself more and more from it, is the state


This means that the law can be thought of as one of many ideological apparatuses in bourgeois hegemony and a fundamental part of all of these apparatuses depending on how you define law. If you define law as the judicial functioning of the state than clearly it's the former, but if you define the law as the ossification of concepts like 'innocent until proven guilty', 'freedom of speech' etc as you seem to do than the law becomes far more broad. Marxism has always used the former definition since this corresponds to how law actually functions in bourgeois society and differentiates between 'law' and 'administration'. But if you want to make the latter argument than make it, but you have to deal with the entire Marxist conception of law and not just fall back on bourgeois ideas that are 'common sense'. They are not common sense here.

i'm not sure what the quote and heading has to do with the conclusion. those seem to be part of the monopoly on force idea

anyway i don't believe ideas like innocent until proven guilty are part of all the ideological apparatuses in bourgeois hegemony. for example i'd say racist hierarchies were and remain an ideological apparatus of some instantiations of capitalism, but they don't have any ossification of the ideas i believe in like fairness and equality.

babyhueypnewton posted:

Extra Credit:

Engels points out the fundamental contradiction of the law:

law must not only correspond to the general economic position and be its expression... an expression which is consistent in itself, and which does not, owing to inner contradictions, look glaringly inconsistent


think about this if you want to maintain a socialist rule of law.

idgi

Panopticon posted:

i have explained why i think saying law has a class nature is a meaningless buzzword. you haven't addressed any of my specific points, you have just written off the argument as trolling.

you explained in a frivolous way, and blink then counter explained rigorously and fairly, what this term means. It's a pretty core claim of Marxism. Social superstructure is primarily determined by the material base. Why are you on a Marxist discussion board if you aren't keen on the basic ideas underpinning Marxist analyses of society? Which this is.

We turned over the Stalin rock here and got more than we bargained for