"Is not the setting up of a neutral institution standing between the people and its enemies, capable of establishing the dividing line between the true and the false, the guilty and the innocent, the just and the unjust, is this not a way of resisting popular justice? A way of disarming it in the struggle it is conducting in reality in favour of an arbitration in the realm of the ideal? This is why I am wondering whether the court is not a form of popular justice but rather its first deformation" (2).
"In all the great uprisings since the fourteenth century the judicial officials have regularly been attacked, on the same grounds as have tax officials, and more generally those who exercise power: the prisons have been opened, the judges thrown out and the courts closed down. Popular justice recognises in the judicial system a state apparatus, representative of public authority, and instrument and class power" (6).
"Now this idea that there can be people who are neutral in relation to the two parties, that they can make judgments about them on the basis of ideas of justice which have absolute validity, and that their decisions must be acted upon, I believe that all this is far removed from and quite foreign to the very idea of popular justice. In the case of popular justice you do not have three elements, you have the masses and their enemies. Furthermore, the masses, when they perceive somebody to be an enemy, when they decide to punish this enemy -- or to re-educate him -- do not rely on an abstract universal idea of justice, they rely on their own experience, that of the injuries they have suffered, that of the way in which they have been wronged, in which they have been oppressed; and finally, their decision is not an authoritative one, that is, they are not backed up by a state apparatus which has the power to enforce their decisions, they purely and simply carry them out" (9).
- Has me thinking about how the Internet has changed the concept of popular justice. In the 1700s, people banned together, met in groups to discuss the injustices of the state and finally rebelled against the state to make changes that brought those in power to their knees. This brought about a restructuring in France and in the US (just to name the first that pop into my head). Today, however, people are constantly streaming their ideas on the Web for the world to see. We blog, twitter, facebook about issues that bother us. There is much more mobility, but because everybody is doing it, I wonder/worry it all comes across as static. There's definite power to be had online, but I think acquiring that power--getting the attention of the masses--may be all the more difficult now that everybody has a voice. The question is in learning how to have your voice rise to the top and be heard.
"The history of the judicial system, of judicial practices--of what has in fact been a penal system, of what been systems of repression--this is rarely discussed" (14).
"On the one hand it is a factor in 'proletarianisation': its role is to force the people to accept their status as proletarians and the conditions for the exploitation of the proletariat. . . . On the other hand, this penal system was aimed, very specifically, against the most mobile, the most excitable, the 'violent' elements among the common people" (14-15).
"It was these 'dangerous' people who had to be isolated . . . so that they could not act as a spearhead for popular resistance" (15).
"The third role of the penal system: to make the proletariat see the non-proletarianised people as marginal, dangerous, immoral, a menace to society as a whole, the dregs of the population, trash, the 'mob'" (15).
"For the bourgeoisie the main danger against which it had to be protected, that which had to be avoided at all costs, was armed uprising, was the armed people, was the workers taking to the streets in an assault against the government" (16).
"The principal contradiction among the masses is the opposition between egoism and collectivism, competition and combination, and that it is when you have combination, that in, the victory of collectivism over competition, that you have the working masses, and thus a unity among the proletarianised people, and that then there will be a mass movement" (19).
"The court, dragging along with it the ideology of bourgeois justice and those forms of relations between judge and judged, between judge and the parties to the action, between judge and litigant, which typify bourgeois justice, seems to me to have played a very significant role in the domination of the bourgeoisie" (27).
"This is why I find the idea of a people's court difficult to accept, especially if intellectuals must play the roles of prosecutor or judge in it, because it is precisely the intellectuals who have been the intermediaries in the bourgeoisie's spreading and imposing of the ideological themes that I'm talking about" (27).
"The masses will discover a way of dealing with the problem of their enemies, of those who individually or collectively have harmed them, methods of retribution which will range from punishment to reeducation, without involving the form of the court which--in any case in our society, I don't know about China--is to be avoided" (28).
"Information which has been withheld from the masses was seized from the bourgeoisie, from the colliery management, from the technical staff. Secondly, the means for distributing information is in the hands of those in power, and the people's court made it possible to break this monopoly on information. So two important kinds of power were put into effect here, the power of knowledge of the truth and the power to disseminate this knowledge" (34).
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