While there are many uses for law, two are fundamental: to enforce and maintain the barrier between those who own property and those who do not, and to perpetuate the illusion that a world of rich and poor is inevitable.
Most workers still have only occasional contact with the law, but when they do it is often a nightmare experience. Every day courts throughout the world haul workers before them and put them through a most degrading experience, treating them like animals — even locking them up in cages.
A common tourist attraction in London is the Old Bailey, one of the traditional sights conveniently near to St. Paul’s, to which it is remarkably similar. The latter is a monument to the cowering of the working class by the means of a very old, but still potent, myth. The former has the same purpose, but uses more direct means of coercion. Whereas most tourists go into St. Paul’s, few bother to enter the Old Bailey. If they did, they would find every day a bizarre sight — members of the working class (the jury) condemning other members of their own class. And for what? Mostly for offences which beside the large-scale crime that goes on every day — the theft by the capitalist class of the wealth produced by the workers — are positively trivial.
In the Thorpe case, for example, a working class jury carefully listened to the arguments, patiently sat through the speeches and (almost on the instructions of the judge) like good dogs, did not bite their masters. Next door, meanwhile, the swindler, bank robber or housebreaker was getting different treatment. Few people were watching, and even the jury who usually convict without too much persuasion were often inattentive. In the magistrates courts where most cases are heard, there is not even a jury. Sometimes magistrates convict on the word of the police alone.
Juries
Historically, there is some evidence to suggest that jurors used to be far more conscious of working class interests. Juries were not always mere sops, dutifully doing as the representatives of the authorities told them. They would frequently refuse to convict, especially where they knew that savage penalties would follow. But it was not just the cases of ‘hung for a lamb’ where juries asserted their independence. Right across the board they would try to redress the balance of savagely repressive laws by acquitting the ‘guilty’ as well as the ‘innocent’. This must not be exaggerated; many a poacher, for example, suffered death or transportation even though poaching was common and in some areas absolutely essential for families to exist at all. But juries, at least on occasions, provided some sort of buffer against the savageries of pre-capitalist and early capitalist legislation.
By contrast, juries now seem more docile. That could mean that the rule of capital has become even more effective as it has increased its insidious power over the minds of those it exploits. But if times are hard, then the efforts to counteract the prevailing ideas must be stronger. No amount of pleading, no amount of reforming, marching, demonstrating is going to alter the fact that capitalism is a society of haves and have-nots, rich and poor, owner and non-owner. From this follow all the problems faced by workers, including problems of spending part of their lives in cells or, in some parts of the world, of being officially murdered on behalf of those whose rule and property some workers appear to threaten. There can be only one verdict on capitalism — guilty: and only one sentence — death.
Ronnie Warrington
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