To End Racism and Police Brutality, End Capitalism!

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172. Not making a case...

it's not about me. On the other hand there are some cases to be made for solid analysis Marxist or not.


Toward a Marxist Interpretation of the U.S. Constitution

by Bertell Ollman

http://www.nyu.edu/projects/ol...

(Snip)

"When Moses invented ten fundamental laws for the Jewish people, he
had God write them down on stone tablets, Lycurgus, too, represented the
constitution he drew up for ancient Sparta as a divine gift. According
to Plato, whose book, The Republic, offers another version of the same
practice, attributing the origins of a constitution to godly
intervention is the most effective way of securing the kind of support
needed for it to work. Otherwise, some people are likely to remain
skeptical, others passive, and still others critical of whatever biases
they perceive in these basic laws, and hence less inclined to follow
their mandates. As learned men, the framers of the American Constitution
were well aware of the advantages to be gained by enveloping their
achievement in religious mystery, but most of the people for whom they
labored were religious dissenters who favored a sharp separation between
church and state; and since most of the framers were deists and
atheists themselves, this particular tactic could not be used. So they
did the next best thing, which was to keep the whole process of their
work on the Constitution a closely guarded secret. Most Americans know
that the framers met for three months in closed session, but this is
generally forgiven on the grounds that the then Congress of the United
States had not commissioned them to write a new Constitution, and
neither revolutionaries nor counter-revolutionaries can do all their
work in the open. What few modern-day Americans realize, however, is
that the framers did their best to ensure that we would never know the
details of their deliberations. All the participants in the convention
were sworn to life-long secrecy, and when the debates were over, those
who had taken notes were asked to hand them in to George Washington,
whose final task as chairman of the convention was to get rid of the
evidence. American's first president, it appears, was also its first
shredder.

Fortunately, not all the participants kept their vows of silence or
handed in all their notes. Bit it wasn't until 1840, a half century
after the Constitution was put into effect, with the posthumous
surfacing of James Madison's extensive notes, that the American people
could finally read what had happened in those three crucial months in
Philadelphia. What was revealed was neither divine nor diabolical, but
simply human, an all-too-human exercise in politics. Merchants, bankers,
ship-owners, planters, slave traders and slave owners, land
speculators, and lawyers, who made their money working for these groups,
voiced their interests and fears in clear, uncluttered language; and,
after settling a few, relatively minor disagreements, they drew up plans
for a form of government they believe would serve these interests most
effectively. But the fifty years of silence had the desired
myth-building effect. The human actors were transformed into "Founding
Fathers." Their political savvy and common sense were now seen as
all-surpassing wisdom, and their concern for their own class of property
owners (and, to a lesser, extent, sections of the country and
occupational groups) had been elevated to universal altruism (in the
liberal version) or self-sacrificing patriotism (in the preferred
conservative view). Nor have we been completely spared the aura of
religious mystery so favored by Plato. With the passage of years and the
growing religiosity of our citizenry, it had become almost commonplace
to hear that the framers were also divinely inspired."

(Snip)

"What is in danger of being lost among all the patriotic
non-sequiturs is the underside of criticism and protest that had
accompanied the Constitution form its very inception. Not everyone has
been satisfied to treat this product of men as if it came from God. Even
before the Constitution was officially adopted, many people, known to
history as Anti-Federalists, questioned whether what was good for the
property-owning factions that were so well represented in Philadelphia
would be as good for those who owned little or nothing. Then as
subsequently, the main questions raised dealt with the limitations on
suffrage, the inadequate defense of individual rights and freedoms, the
acceptance and even strengthening of the institution of slavery, and the
many other benefits given to men of property."

(Snip)

" What still needs to be stressed—chiefly because even most critics
ignore it—is that on all three levels of analysis and throughout the
entire two hundred years of its history, the Constitution has been a way
of understanding reality as much as it has served to shape it. And it
has succeeded in ordering society in part through how it has made people
think about it, just as these practical achievements have secured
widespread acceptance for the intellectual modes that they embody. In
sum, an important part of the Constitution's work is ideological. As
ideology, the Constitution provides us with a kind of bourgeois fairy
tale in which claims to equal rights and responsibilities are
substituted for the harsh realities of class domination. Through the
Constitution, the struggle over the legitimacy of any social act or
relationship is removed from the plane of morality to that of law.
Justice is no longer what is fair but what is legal, and politics itself
is transformed into the technical wrangling of lawyers and judges. The
Constitution organizes consent not least by its manner or organizing
dissent. The fact that two-thirds of the world's lawyers practice in the
United States is not, as they say, a coincidence. The main ideologists
in the American system are not teachers, preachers, or media people, but
lawyers and judges.

Unlike political theory, the Constitution not only offers us a picture
of reality but through the state's monopoly on violence it forces
citizens to act, or at least to speak, "as if." Acting as if the rule of
law, equality of opportunity, freedom of the individual, and the
neutrality of the state, all of which are inscribed in the Constitution,
are more than formally true inhibits people's ability to recognize that
they are all practically false, that the society set up with the help
of the Constitution simply does not operate in these ways. It is not a
matter of reality failing to live up to a set of commendable ideals but
of these ideals serving to help mask this reality through
misrepresenting what is legal for what is actual, what is permissible in
law for what is possible in society. When does an ideal become a
barrier to the realization of what it supposedly promotes? When people
are encouraged to treat the ideal as a description, however, imperfect,
of the real, as in the claim that ours is a society ruled by law, where
whatever actually exists that goes counter to this claim is relegated to
the role of a passing qualification. Viewed in this way, the dynamics
of who is doing what to whom and why, together with the structural
reforms needed to change things, can never be understood."