There are a few very simple points that have to be made about the Oz verdict.
Firstly that we all know perfectly well this is no isolated incident. We all now know, or should know, the whole series of acts of legal repression. We all know that although these incidents may reflect no master plan or plot that they all express the response of bourgeois society to anything which makes it feel uncomfortable and insecure. Any tampering with the domestication of children makes it feel iust like that - that is why the Schoolkids issue or the Little Red Schoolbook have been in the front line. The same reaction, actually or imminently, faces the black population, the squatter, the demonstrator, the Irish. the industrial militant, police harassment, lengthy legal cases, fines, Imprisonment, suppression of publication, deportation.
All this certainly goes some way to unmasking the realities of class rule. It forces our rulers to undermine their ideological power by using nakedly their material power. But legal repression too has its cargo of ideology: judicial impartiality. "the rule of law", innocent until proved guilty. the right to be tried by ones peers. In general the liberal outcry that follows legal repression does not challenge this ideology. Thus Judge Argyl is not really typical of the bench, we are told; just as we were told that Judge Stevenson was exceptionally severe over the Cambridge Garden House Affair; or those recent obituaries of Justice Goddard insisted that one relish he envinced in administering punishment was quite unusual. The simple truth is that the great majority of judges are and have to be deeply reactionary custodians of the interests of the ruling class. Similarly, juries are overwhelmingly middle class and middle aged in composition. The antique practices of the law have been refined over the centuries to provide all necessary protection to property and public order. It is as urgent to attack and unmask this pillar of bourgeois power as it is to expose the workings of the capitalist economy. Indeed legal repression is a speciality of bourgeois democracy and is increasingly resorted to when the ruling class has to abandon all its preferred patterns of rule and openly use its monopoly of legitimate violence.
Fortunately much of this is common ground on the Left and among all those groups which are now the targets of legal assault. The time is already overdue for some kind of common front against repression which would not stop at protesting individual decisions but would expose the real workings of the system as a whole - paying attention to everyday harrassment as much as to the more casily publicised episodes of judicial vengenance. We should seek to encourage the growth of a popular invigilation and investigation of the police, the courts. the judiciary and the prisons. Those immigrant communities "who took the law into their own hands" by forming self-defence groups, were showing the direction we should be moving. If even minimal surveillance could be instituted over the constitution and methods of the legal machinery we would be in a better position: both to expose it and, though this will rarely be possible, to check its more flagrantly arbitrary acts.
James Whitefire COLLABORATORS FROM BANGLADESH It's like inmates of a concentration camp being ordered for the benefit ef faiting dimitines to hold a sage show extolline the virtues of being prisoners. Yuhya Khan's military regime following its atrocious operations in Bangla Deal, which resulted in hundreds Red Mole AGAINS