Law and Politics

Paper rules verses the real rules

Law should be looked at the same way that the “bad man” would induce to. As Holmes described it, the bad men of society care not ‘of two straws for axioms or deductions’, but what is permissible to escape gaol time: Holmes, Page 349, 1897. If the courts take a harsh approach to criminal activity then those who wish to deal in nefarious undertakings will be less fervent to participate. Thus, rules are nothing more than abstract fictions that the court analyses to construct a verdict. Realism is very similar to Austin’s command theory, in that, it draws heavily upon rudimentary scientific doctrines. Hart draws his distinction as an allegory of a game. Players, without the aid of an umpire, determine whether there are justifications to change, modify and eradicate the games rules as they fruition. An umpire, unless corrupted, takes the rules, applies them and continues in a standpoint outside that of the game. The players view is a constant apprehension of the umpire’s perception, but as the umpire has official status, just like courts, the decision is final regardless whether the players conceive that absurd miserable nonsense has taken place.

Postmodernism

If abstract art requires the viewer to decipher the impossibility of the self, so does postmodernism encourage the depth of understanding to range from cultural music, literary theory, lexicology and cultural inter-diversity. The key principle is anti-foundational in that it rejects all hitherto grand theories as nonsensical, as Lyotard famously conjectured, ‘I wage ware against all totality’, which was war against all prescribed precepts. Postmodernism gives voice to those marginalised in differing terms from ethnicity, gender and sexual preference. As all viewpoints are captured from the standpoint of the perceiver it is therefore perspectival. Hence, as Foucault theorized: power and knowledge are the polarized opposites of a coin. Through his analysis of genealogy he follows the fallacies of what is considered truthful in diverging discourses. He uses examples from Bentham’s Panopticon and that of the institutionalism that has been advanced throughout nearly every form of corporation, school and prison. Foucault, as a homosexual psychiatrist, saw from his own background the isolation, oppression and marginalisation suffered due to his sexuality. This exclusion, as he was to find, came through the universalism of heteronormativity, and propaganda of fear about the ‘outside deviant’.

Betwixt Foucault and Lyotard is Derrida as a poststructuralist. As meanings are unstable, conflicting and ever changing, the very meaning of texts cannot be authoritative but, as he asserted, all held the same veracity. Therefore, whenever an author writes he can be assured that the connotations that he envisaged will be relatively differing to those deduced when reread and the only real reason we even understand one another is through an illusory process of binary opposition. This infirmity of language being fluid poses invariable risks to those within academia and required to interpret law. The only real way we interpret is through the linear obligation to the other: maleness is not femaleness, and vice versa. This convergence of ideology allows for a deeper understanding of the fundaments of philosophy, and allows for furtherance’s in the field of dispensation.

Marxism and Law

When people change their occupation, so do the laws required in governing them. Whether feudal lord, who stands watch over the workers fields, or the capitalist, monitoring work on through video capture; both restrain equally in their forcefulness to control the individuals mind, body and soul. Marx’s work on historical materialism can be attributed to the economical systems that drive workers today. The force of production gives rise to certain levels of production, and their power of control, and from this, the corollary: domination and exploitation. Hitherto, all past situations are nothing more than class struggles. But economical value, as Marx understood, was not purely the only driving point. To be able to legitimize the legal system there was required distractions; religion, politics, ideologies and cultural experiences. In other words, keeping those who were unsavoury uneducated and happy enough to continue production for those in power. Peradventure, the greatest ploy in history amounts to this commonplace principle of dull compulsion. The monotonous tasks, which people for a lifetime, are forced to endure for minimal wage. Rather than being captive slaves, they become captive slaves to the minimal fundaments of Maslow’s lower higherachy. Without law the individual rights of property to those capitalists would be lost, and anarchy would consume their property and their exploitation domination. Which is a terrifying constituent to those in power.

Law does not represent itself as an exploiter, oppressor and marginalize, but rather an impartial vindicator for all individuals. Rights, such as property are portrayed as benefiting everyone in society. What a derisory concept this is, it even manages to make capitalism seem a plausible moral practice. Labour power is nothing more than a fiction: freedom of contract obscures and masks this blunt injustice. Power is given to the capitalist to who wishes to buy wage-labourers, and this binding of subservient control encourages further inequalities. Comparatively, these inequalities should amount to individuals of the exploited class’s rebelling, but, as they have been taught to accept as true, the law appears to be non-partisan, and justice rather than being a clear tool, conceals the elements behind the veil of uncertainty. If you have appeared in court you can empathize with the situation that there is a feeling of helplessness, out of body experience, in that, not only does justice seem befitting to the judges yardstick, it all occurs void of sentiment.

Therefore, the law is an infiltrator to maintaining the exploitation of the proletariat (worker) by the bourgeois (capitalist). Nothing more than exploitation can occur through the injustices done from the yardstick of capitalist legislating. For, as already seen in postmodernism, people rarely look outside the scope of their peripheral, and, if they did, why would they care for the exploitation of a class beneath them.

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