Down by Law 1: Asylum for Mankind

We are excited to announce that we are launching a brand new series called “Down by Law.” In it, we are going to talk about how laws and legal systems that create and enforce them are put in place to serve the ruling class, while producing a spectacle of “justice” to distract and pacify the masses. We believe that, despite the law’s ultimate impotence to bring about the type of revolutionary change needed to ensure collective survival for humanity, it is important to understand how the law functions in society. This series is our attempt at political/legal education, jumping between various areas of law that purport to regulate behavior in “civilized nations.”

It is certainly true that the legal system - from statutory legislation to the vast regulatory state to the judiciary - does impose restrictions on actors at all levels of the socioeconomic pyramid. We are not implying that the wealthy and powerful are entirely unfettered by the law. That would be an overstatement and would not reflect reality.

But the law, too, operates as spectacle. And to a larger degree than most lawyers, government bureaucrats, and policy wonks would like to admit, the real function of the law is spectacular. It serves to inflate the illusion of justice. In reality, the legal system plays referee between factions of the ruling class, while ensuring that overall control of the systems of power remain in the hands of that same class. 

We start our legal dig site with a dig into immigration and the modern legal regime for asylum. Even though you’d never guess it by the federal government’s utter lack of regard for human rights in the administration of the immigration system, the USA is a party to the 1967 protocol to the treaty on the rights of refugees. That means it is “the supreme law of the land” - with which even the federal government must comply as with the Constitution itself - to afford broad rights to asylum-seekers in danger of death or serious harm in their home countries.

We recorded this before the DC National Guard shooting put asylum into the headlines, but the issue is more salient than ever. As Trump essentially seeks to end asylum as we know it, we trace the bipartisan roots of the whittling-away of immigrant rights, spiking especially under the Obama administration. Put on your lawyer hats, it’s time to get down by law.