Rethinking Mythologies

By SETH SANDRONSKY

Myths that enhance private and state power are blooming in the current political moment. Take President Trump’s case for a “national emergency” at the Mexico-US border.

There is a history here. Author Michael E. Tigar unpacks it in Mythologies of State and Monopoly Power (Monthly Review Press, 2018), though sparing ink on the 45th president.

In five chapters, Tigar’s essays focus on racism, criminal justice, free expression, worker rights and international human rights.

Tigar defines mythologies as “structures of words and images that portray people, institutions, and events in ways that mask an underlying reality.” The reality that undergirds his critique is capitalist social relations of a minority that wield power over a majority, economically and politically.

I want to bring your attention to chapter three. I consider it the most important in the book.

Tigar, citing Karl Renner in The Institution of Private Law and Their Social Functions, cuts to the heart of capitalist property relations. “Thus the institution of property in the sense it came to have in bourgeois law posits a person (persona) and a thing (res), joined by the legal norm called property of ownership.”

In other words, there is a mythology of a nonexistent social relationship between people, namely owners of private property and everybody else. This human relationship is the foundation of our social system.

Similarly, mythologies of racism bid to justify the unjustifiable. Tigar dissects the Japanese Internment and “Separate but Equal” legal theory and practice which relied upon demagogic fear and hysteria. Does this rhetoric sound familiar to you?

Racist mythologies dovetail with a criminal justice system that locks up more nonwhite citizens per capita than any other nation-state on the planet. Black mass incarceration, for instance, did not appear out of nowhere, a noxious feature of a system that depends on control of the labor force, employed or not.

One mythology of criminal justice is the plea bargain system that nine of every 10 pretrial detainees makes with the state to settle their legal case, based on the misleading doctrine of informed consent. Like the mythology of private property between and a person and a thing that ignore domination of an upper class over other classes, informed consent conceals the unequal conditions that defendants face when dealing with state power.

Taking up worker rights, Tigar cites legal cases that show how capital is in the driver seat over labor in workplace conflicts. If you work for a living as most of us do, I recommend reading the court cases he explains.

If you wonder how news media ended up in the hands of a handful of giant corporations, Tigar’s book is instructive. Spoiler alert: the state intervened on behalf of capital to the public’s detriment.

Wrapping up, Tigar turns to global human rights. We learn in part how foreigners killed by US drones received “due process” because a White House committee approved the strikes.

Tigar writes clearly in jargon-free prose. His half-century of experience as a human rights activist, lawyer and professor packs a wallop.

Seth Sandronsky lives and works in Sacramento. He is a journalist and member of the Pacific Media Workers Guild. Email sethsandronsky@gmail.com.

From The Progressive Populist, February 15, 2019

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