Though Charles Dickens' Mr. Bumble, the beadle, is a figure of fun and hardly a role model, as a legal functionary he knew whereof he spoke when he declared the law to be "a ass". And no, this post is not about driving while under the influence; it's about the intrinsic limits of legal mechanisms for achieving political ends. As Leon Trotsky put it, our opponents have their morals and we have ours. We do not inhabit a circumstance of legality on one side and its absence on the other. For a variety of reasons, not least the demographics of class-based societies, lawyers are commonly chosen as power technicians, most particularly, of course, in states constructed on a legal basis. Because of the "binarity" of law things are, or they are not, allowed. This, though "binality", with its echo of the single letter variant term "banality" might have been the verbal coining of choice for Mr. Bumble. The results of law, however precise, inevitably violate the continuously fine-grained texture of life as it is lived, even if specific legal agents may be sensitive to the limitations of their trade. You can't blame a carpenter for thinking in the language of wood, but of course to a hammer everything looks like a nail or, otherwise put, an opportunity for hammering. Better than law, we argue, is the more aspirational flexibility of a charter,a mechanism particularly resonant in a Canada bound (loosely of course, but bound nonetheless) by a charter of rights and freedoms. Stay tuned to this space for more detail on a social economy charter for enterprise and a recognition that beyond all cultural mechanisms the directness of action is ultimately prime. A random directory of items such as Torontothebetter has the advantage, TorontotheBetter believes, of flexibility but within clear bounds.
# posted by Taodhg @ 9:47 am
