'Their honours' (1975)

From the August 1975 issue of the Socialist Standard

One of the many unpleasant aspects of a society divided into owners and non-owners (i.e. class society) is the consequent existence of governors and governed and rulers and ruled. The majority of people accept private property and therefore agree to the systems of governments, rulers, bosses etc., and this means having some people elevated to the position of “judges”.

The concept of a group of people sitting in judgment on their fellows is anathema to the Socialist who wants a free society. Socialism as a voluntary society with no private wealth to protect will not need to disguise old men with wigs, gowns and legal mystique in order to frighten elements of the population into submission to the interests of a small minority.

One of the strangest points about the idea of judges is that instead of their jobs being regarded as odious, they are looked upon with respect not only by the capitalist class (who need them to preserve their monopoly of wealth and to sort out disputes between various competing sections of their class) but by workers too. Everyone under capitalism is “judged” from birth to death by their “price tag” i.e. the size of their wage or salary, or their ownership of wealth. Partly because judges have such a high price-tag, their lengthy boring) speeches in and out of courts of law are listened to with awe and reverence.

The tragedy is that they have nothing to say of any interest to the working class. They can’t even help administer capitalism very well. Witness the controversy the House of Lords (the highest court in the land) recently caused over the law of rape. However, "I thought she consented” is the capitalist’s apology for exploiting everybody. When a judge freed a double rapist on the grounds that he had strong sexual urges, he gave voice to the “human nature” justification in which capitalism is only expressing the strong acquisitive urges which we’ve all (likewise) got.

When tin gods come out of their natural environment (law courts) and comment on all sorts of things, the fun really starts. For example, what child would suggest a solution to the traffic problem on these lines:

Lord Salmon Lord of appeal in ordinary has hit on a way to fight the menace of juggernaut lorries in his home town of Sandwich, Kent without breaking the law. He says citizens should sail boats constantly on the river Stour, which would force authorities to keep the town’s swing bridge open and effectively jam all road traffic. (Sunday Times, 20th October 1974)

What a way to analyze a social problem springing from profit-motive society.

The real function of judges is to help in the dirty job of keeping the workers in subjection. This is made clear when they attempt to analyze society. For example, Lord Devlin was reported in The Times (26th June 1975) giving an address whose theme was a rejection of criticism “that the English judiciary was torpid, inactive and unwilling to develop the law to fit changing times”. But the same article reported Devlin as saying:

Those who took up the law . . . tended to be of the same type who did not seriously question the status quo and who wanted to serve the law and not be its master. Lawyers were not naturally interested in social reform.

Those people who “serve the law” know full well whom the law serves—the owners of wealth. It is the instrument by which their monopoly is preserved. Devlin is merely saying the law and those who practise it are going to do their best to maintain that system. And he makes it perfectly clear that he wants the boundary between the haves and have nots to remain just where it is:

The first mark of a free and orderly society was that the boundaries between the rulers and the ruled should be guarded and that trespasses from one side to the other should be independently and impartially determined.

Devlin argues that it is not the judge’s job to change the rules of capitalism. Another judge, Lord Lawton recently argued the opposite case. Describing what the judges learnt from seeing poor wretches brought before them he said:

This experience enabled judges to give a lead to public opinion in many matters affecting the lives of ordinary men and women . . . (Law Society Gazette, 18th June 1975)

One wonders how any one who has ever been in the frightening, artificial atmosphere of a law court can seriously suggest as Lawton does:

Judges learned from the cases they tried how people lived and the attitudes they held in every part of England and Wales.

The judge’s message soon became clear. Judges are not there to change society but to preserve it. In some thing of an understatement he says of judges:

They tend to doubt the wisdom of tearing institutions up by their roots and starting afresh.

Clearly proud of a system of society that has produced nothing but wars, poverty, unemployment, shortages, pollution, mass starvation etc. on a scale no previous society could match, he comes out with the oldest of fallacies:

Crime would continue to increase until it was recognised that its prime cause was wickedness . . .

Nothing like a well-fed judge to blame the workers for all the problems around and call them wicked. We can only suggest to this one that he analyze the class basis of society. This would show him that people are the products of the society in which they live and a society based on the common interest of all could not produce the sort of “wickedness” (e.g. thefts of private property) that he talks about.

In Shakespeare’s Much Ado, Conrade when confronted with an officer of the law, says “Away. You are an ass, you are an ass”. We would add, that people should retort “Away!” with the outdated social ideas the spokesmen of the capitalist class foist on them. And next time that puny objection to Socialism is brought up, “Who will do the dirty work in a Socialist society?” you might remember that a good deal of it such as the work of police forces, armies and judges, won’t need doing at all.

Ronnie Warrington