The critique of law as a fetishised form of bourgeois relations maintains its importance, so does the use of law as a tool of struggle against the bourgeoisie. One mine, which remains underexploited though, is to make socialist experiments with law, to toy with its possibilities in order to configure a different future here and now. Isnt, for instance, building a workers cooperative an exercise to write new rules of participation and management? When you think about the most advanced collective bargaining agreements by trade unions (at least the ones I did have a chance to read) they limit themselves to the workers economic and social benefits, safety issues...etc. whereas one can use those documents as a way to make changes in the very flow, organisation and technology of the work itself by the workers. It would not be possible to implement all desired rules right now, but it is still possible to imagine and concretely write utopian documents to regulate how a day in which work time and leisure time are not separated, how specific technologies would reduce work time, what kind of division of labour would emancipate people. I am talking about local and modest experiments specific to sectors or even workplaces, where individuals would pose the questionhow would I organise work, technology, human labour, time and leisure in a way to achieve a socially useful and individually emancipatory ouutcome? Thinking about those things and transforming those into specific legal rules could be a great learning source. The bourgeois have been making laws for centuries, it is one of the most powerful ways by which they learnt how to govern us. Shouldnt we dare to govern ourselves by our own laws? By imagining, writing, re-writing, contesting and reshaping them?
Posted on: Mon, 27 Oct 2014 23:12:14 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015