In his article, Revisiting the Constitution, Supreme court Advocate Junayed Chowdhury argued that a preamble to any constitution ought not only to be instructive, but also persuasive. In support of this view, I shall argue that the ideas of socialism and nationalism are not only outdated -- but wholly unpersuasive as any sort of basis for law, regardless of geographical or historical circumstance. And I believe, as Mr Chowdhury seems to imply that in re-envisioning the constitution we should choose our words carefully, and refrain from legislating around such abstract “isms” altogether.
The following is not a lecture in jurisprudence, but an account of my own experience of trying to understand the concepts since I became “politically aware” in the early 1990s.
I remember it acutely -- the advent of the war in former Yugoslavia and the mass murder of the Muslims of Srebrenica. I couldn’t believe such horrors could still exist, in the heart of Europe and so close to my home in Sweden. Genocidal racism-cum-nationalism had once again reared havoc in Europe demoralizing the world, myself included. Until then I had not understood the dangers of nationalism -- its potential for driving entire nations insane. I had seen it in films and accounts of Nazism in WW2, but I was a kid and this was ancient history.
It was much later that I understood the dangers of these ideas. Growing up in Sweden in the 70s and 80s -- the idea that socialism could be a danger was not obvious at all. On the contrary I was brought up with a narrative drummed into my head that socialism was a good thing and could indeed be a good basis for law. In order to explain how I came to change my mind, I ask the reader to join me on a trip down my own memory lane, beginning with a slight departure from the topic of legal reform.
My mother’s first job when young was to care for an elderly woman who had been sold into servitude as a young girl. Sweden at the turn of the 20th century was such a poor, oppressive and class ridden country that about a third of its population emigrated to the USA in a sort of mass exodus. As per laws of the Ancien Regime people belonged to the land, and the land to the aristocracy.
My father was Polish, and in his youth was sent by his mother to live in what was then Ceylon with my grandfather. This was to avoid being drafted by the USSR in the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. My paternal grandmother was traumatized by war and wouldn’t have her son risk his life for the Soviet Union. When my father returned to Poland in 1970 to finish university he was nearly expelled for “imperialist” attitudes and failure to embrace Marxism in his essays. By that time my mother had been sent home to Sweden, and my father followed her there soon after.
Sweden in the 1970s was at the height of its own socialist transformation, and Sweden gave moral and financial support to developing countries with similar revolutionary aspirations such as Tanzania, Nicaragua, and regrettably, in the buildup to the genocide, also Pol Pot’s Cambodia.
While my parents would both join the protest rallies outside the US embassy during the Vietnam war, they didn’t always agree on politics. My mother supported socialism, but for my father socialism meant oppression, brainwashing and dogmatic ideological nonsense in the strictest sense of the word -- to the dismay of friends and classmates at Stockholm University.
Looking back at my childhood; one of my earliest memories of TV was a cartoon program called “Jon Blund,” who was a sort of Peter Pan that entered children’s dreams to take them away in his futuristic space-ship. But unlike Peter Pan the destination of children’s dreams was not neverland but instead the glimmering skyline of a futuristic Moscow. This sort of overt state propaganda was considered acceptable TV programming. Nobody questioned it.
Most of what I learned of socialism I learnt from my father, who believed Marxism and its ideological incarnations to be no less harmful to the morale of humanity than Nazism. I would argue with him as a youngster to say that Marx’s idea was good, but that the Russians and the Chinese had just interpreted it wrong -- referring to Stalin’s and Mao’s reforms that caused starvation which killed some 40-50 million.
He disagreed. The idea itself was wrong. Since I was young and had not yet attempted to read Das Kapital, he patiently explained to me that we simply cannot share everything equally, as much as we would want to.
The ideas of socialism and nationalism are not only outdated -- but wholly unpersuasive as any sort of basis for law
Mountains, lakes, animals, and indeed wives could not be shared evenly, even though the Soviets tried it. I would try to argue that most of the world believes in it, so it must somehow be good. He would respond with humour, noting that simply because a billion flies eat poop, that doesn’t make it a good idea.
Then he would more seriously note that it was entirely possible for whole nations to go insane falling for socialist and nationalist dogmas via state propaganda. Moreover, he suggested to me that most people in the world are just mean and stupid; a very small fraction of the world’s population have any sense at all, which was why wars persisted.
I would get upset with him and call him a bloody fascist. He would chuckle and tell me: “Ok get out in the world and see for yourself.”
Before the fall of the Berlin wall, we would visit Poland in the summers, then still part of the Soviet bloc. My paternal uncle was a joker and updated my father on the developments of government policy using an odd form of satire which made my father laugh hysterically, but which I didn’t really understand. One particular pun of his comes to mind: “It is now expected of every young student to be a Marxist revolutionary, but if they still preach revolution after the age of thirty, they have to go to jail.” Satire and humour were apparently a polish coping mechanism to deal with the absurdity, paranoia, and constant threat of excommunication at the very hint of a different opinion.
One of Poland’s most prominent Marxist scholars, Leszek Kolakowski, wrote in his seminal work, Main Currents of Marxism (1976), that Marxism had become “whatever the party said it was.” His historical and philosophically exhaustive three-volume publication was banned and he was forced out of Poland, later to gain some fame as a lecturer at universities such as Yale, Berkely, and Oxford.
Kolakowski, as many others in his generation, originally believed that socialism was compatible with democracy and it would somehow naturally emerge in time. Later in life he concluded that the cruelty of Stalinism was not an oddity, but a logical end-product of Marxism.
Curiously, Kolakowski died a Catholic but as a critic of its dogma and hypocrisy too. He was fanatical about the right to exercise his freedoms of speech and wrote with great humour and satire about the modern church’s convenient removal of the devil during sermons:
“Am I only a part of the language, a fairly unimportant decoration which can be changed from day to day like a tie? Is Satan only a rhetorical figure, loquendi modus, une facon de parler? Or else, gentlemen, is he a reality, undeniable, recognized by tradition, revealed in the scripture, commented upon by the church for two millennia, tangible and acute? Why do you avoid me, gentlemen? Are you afraid that the sceptics will mock you?” And, “It does not matter to me that my existence should be acknowledged, what matters is that the job of destruction should continue. The belief or disbelief in my existence does not affect the scope of my serious work’ (excerpt from Shorthand Transcript of a Metaphysical Press Conference Given by the Demon in Warsaw, on 20th December 1963).
It is my firm belief that allowing everyone to satirize the “establishment,” the state, tradition, power holders and to poke fun at orthodoxy and dogma is a vital ingredient of the concept of free-speech in a democracy. We should keep this in mind as we re-examine the idea of “contempt of court.”
Moreover, that socialism ought not to be a pillar of law. It is useful only to understand the excesses of capitalism and should be reserved for academic debate. Its ideological origins (eg dialectical materialism -- the belief that opposing forces or underlying social structures will mutually evolve towards communism) has no basis in observation.
For young people unfamiliar with Marxism, it can be seen as a form of “truism” comparable to Samuel Huntington’s famous Clash of Civilizations (1996) that becomes true if we believe in it. His work was influential during Bill Clinton’s time and subsequent administrations.
The notion of ‘class’ is comparable to the idea of ‘race’ which is also a form of ‘political fiction’ -- useful to nationalists and politicians, but wholly without scientific merit
If we look around the world today and consider the Western view of Islam as one “civilization” we are reminded that this vile self-fulfilling prophecy is still being propagated at a global level -- reaping havoc and destruction everywhere. During Clinton’s time, Muslims in Srebrenica were ethnically “cleansed” by Serbs. Today, Palestinians by the state of Israel.
As foundations for law -- “Marxism-Communism-Socialism” are inappropriate and shamelessly “tautological truisms” (meaning that its conclusions are found in its premises, as opposed to observation). You either believe that there are classes of people that somehow exist, or you don’t. But it cannot be shown empirically, in a court of law, that A belongs to one class while B belongs to another, without specifically defining it first. If we were to define it, we would simply be re-enforcing such beliefs and making it so by means of legislation. That would seem to defeat the purpose altogether.
The notion of “class” is comparable to the idea of “race” which is also a form of “political fiction” -- useful to nationalists and politicians, but wholly without scientific merit. There are no races until such time that we adequately define it. Cave drawings from South Africa have recently been dated to some 90,000 years ago suggesting that humans have been doing the “hanky-panky” and mixing blood (DNA) for such a long time that any notion of some homogeneous race anywhere is just ridiculous.
In the animal kingdom species are distinguished from one another based on whether or not they can produce offspring. But extending the logic to races of humanity is political fiction. Members of the German National-Socialists attempted to do so leading up to WW2, measuring sizes of skulls and whatnot of races. But it is nowadays generally accepted that these empirical attempts failed.
When she was little my daughter asked me what race she was. I thought about it and wanted to answer her seriously, but since her four grand-parents were Swedish, Polish, Japanese and Bangladeshi -- I told her that she had none. What was I supposed to say?
Just as socialism, nationalism will be abused by politicians to justify theft (nationalization of private property) and violence if they keep it as a pillar of law. This has already been shown in the brief history of Bangladesh. They will use it to mobilize hate-speech and the repression of plurality of thought and opinion. It will continue to be used as a proxy term for race, and force the subjugation of minorities. These “isms” are not only dangerous -- they propose that we include in our laws entities that do not exist!
Needless to say, perhaps, a preamble of constitutional law should avoid, as much as possible, poetry, metaphors, and vague academic abstractions. Citizens and jurors have to be able to read the fundamentals of law in a more literal and indeed “common” sense. Socialism and nationalism is the stuff of politics, not law -- and should be dismissed from any proposed preamble to the constitution -- as alluded to by Supreme Court Advocate Junaid Chowdhury.
Jens Stanislawski is an independent researcher.
