Law and Class

A detailed Summary of Law and Class

The selections in this chapter address the problem of the historical specificity of law as a form of social regulation. Why does law appear so conducive to the rule of capital? Readers should be aware that this basic question leads quickly to a region that until recently was theorized as ' reform or revolution?' Some writers have suggested that by its very nature law is an inherently bourgeois form of social regulation. If this is true, then the attempt to provide legislation with a socialist content is a self-defeating strategy for the socialist movement. On the other hand, if law is an arena of active class struggle in which gains and losses can potentially be made by any of the contending classes, then legal struggles under capitalism are of immense importance.

In 'Property, Authority and the Criminal Law" the historian Douglas Hay offers us a brilliant interpretation of the subtle interplay between property, forms of personal dependence, and criminal law in 18th century England. Hay shows us how law assumed such unusual dominance in England as the main legitimising ideology that displaced the religious authority of previous centuries. Why was it, he asks, that the number of capital offences for crimes again

The next essay is a detailed historical analysis of piece of legislation and the rise of organized labour, and the profound effects that these wrought on the political economy of the US. In 'Judicial Deradicalization of the Wagner Act and the Origins of Modern Legal Consciousness, 1937-1941' Karl Klare examines the deradicalization and incorporation of the American working class through, and as revealed in, the Supreme Court's early Wagner Act decisions. Klare stresses that the initial history of the Wagner Act must be understood as a radical and democratic device. Klare shows that the Act represents real gains for the working class in that it guaranteed certain aspects of labour activity and collective bargaining. The Act was enacted only after arduous working class struggles against the interests of capital and despite its bitter opposition. But Klare also reveals how the subsequent judicial interpretation of the Act by the Supreme Court was adapted to the needs of capital. The question of which readers ought now to be aware, as Klare warns, is whether collective bargaining established in law can ever be anything other than an institutionalised structure, not for the expression of working class interests, but for controlling and disciplining the labour force and for rationalizing the labour market.

Because legal reform culminated in the consolidation of the oppression of workers, Klare leaves us with the conclusion that capitalist law is an expression of the same alienation that characterizes capitalist social relations in general: 'one cannot expect that work will be emancipated from its alienated character without the abolition of the social relations, including legal relations, that produced that character.

Thompson provides us with a compelling and prov

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Approximate Word count = 1196
Approximate Pages = 5 (250 words per page double spaced)

Category: Miscellaneous