Yoshie:
A question may be asked: what can the Bill of Rights mean in a socialist country where the judiciary is not independent, all lawyers are state employees, and the means of production, including the means of cultural production such as the media, are all directly or indirectly owned by the government?
consider a specific type of socialism, e.g., Charlie Andrews' "labor republic" of competing not-for-profit agencies, then the role of the judiciary vis-a-vis the state wouldn't be that different from that in the US nowadays. (See his FROM CAPITALISM TO EQUALITY at www.laborrepublic.org.) Currently, one might say that "the means of production, including the means of cultural production such as the media, are all directly or indirectly owned by the government." After all, the capitalists couldn't control the means of production if not for the coercive agency of the state. The state also defines the specific meaning of "private ownership" of these means of production (i.e., the details of what rights and responsibilities an individual owner may or may not have and the extent to which these rules are enforced). They couldn't get together to decide on common goals and programs without the government. It's a mistake to think of the state and society as totally separate. Rather, there's a unified class system, with a division of labor between the capitalists (mostly running production) and the state (mostly controlling the means of coercion). BTW, I do not ignore the role of legitimation. But I left it out above to keep things simple. -- Jim Devine / "In economics, the majority is always wrong." -- John Kenneth Galbraith
