January 23, 2006: Socialists and the Law
In his famous 1963 "Letter from a Birmingham Jail" Martin Luther King, Jr. argued that "an individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and willingly accepts the penalty by staying in jail to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the very highest respect for law." The question I want to pose is: how should socialists regard the law? As the French philosopher Etienne Balibar has argued, we should think less in terms of "civil" disobedience and more in terms of "civic" disobedience to unjust laws. In other words, our opposition is not simply to individual unjust laws but to an entire juridical structure that is sustained by, and in turn sustains, capitalist social relations. We want to bring into existence a new mode of production in which the gap begins to close between formal and substantive rights.
