Endgame Volume I_ The Problem of Civilization - Derrick Jensen [167]
Chibli Mallat made the implications clear: “Judicial power wields, through the rule of law, the most sophisticated manifestation of state coercion. There is no rule of law without the state’s monopoly of violence.”301
My friend George Draffan brings it all home: “The modern state rests on the monopoly of legitimate violence and, consequently, on the monopoly of taxation. Moreover, the group that effectively controls means of organized violence also acquires the monopoly over the enforcement of rules of economic and civic life. A weak state, then, is one which has lost the ability to effectively maintain these key monopolies. In late- and post-communist Russia, a constellation of factors led, after 1987, to a progressive privatization of the state. The privatization of the state is understood here as the process whereby the function of protecting juridical and economic subjects was taken over by criminal groups, private protection companies, or units of the state police force acting as private entrepreneurs. The consequence of that can also be defined as the covert fragmentation of the state: the emergence, on the territory under the formal jurisdiction of the state, of competing and uncontrolled sources of organized violence and alternative taxation networks.”
It’s quite a scam, if you can get people to buy into it. Those in power make the rules, and those in power enforce the rules. If those in power decide to toxify the landscape, toxify they will, and part of the bargain we evidently agree to on being part of this society is that they can use violence to enforce their edicts, and we cannot use violence to resist them. When they are killing the planet this quickly becomes absurd.
Recently in Bolivia a group of Aymara Indians kidnapped and killed an extraordinarily corrupt mayor, after legal means of redress failed. Legal means of redress had never stood a chance: the mayor represents the state, and the legal system supports the state and its representatives. As one of the Indians said, “We would have been satisfied if Altamirano [the mayor] admitted he had made mistakes, or if he had proposed a punishment for himself, or if the authorities had fined him. But none of this happened. What else could we do?”302 Representatives of the state used this killing—which was definitely a fair execution according to Aymara justice, as well as their only real option for stopping the mayor’s thuggery—as an excuse to arrest the leader of a land ownership reform movement, although not even the prosecution claimed he was anywhere near the scene of the kidnapping or execution. The prosecution really had no choice but to pursue this case. Far more is at stake than the murder of one corrupt politician. The prosecution stated, “There is only one justice, the justice of the state, of the law, there cannot be another justice.”303
Of course a representative of the state would say that.
I disagree. There must be another justice, in fact many other justices. What is justice to the state, to the powerful, is not justice to the poor, to the land. What is justice to the CEO of ExxonMobil is not justice to the polar bears being driven to extinction by global warming. So long as we only believe in the justice of the state, of the law—made by those in power, to serve those in power—so long will we continue to be exploited by those in power. The rule of the state is always, hearkening back to the competing laws of Greek tragedies, in conflict with the rule of the people. And in a culture driven mad, the justice of the state will always be in conflict with the justice of the land.
Dear Abby’s advice to her readers was, in glorious all caps: “IF YOUR PARTNER SHOWS THESE SIGNS, IT’S TIME TO GET OUT.” We can say the same about the culture, and if all caps are good enough for Abby, then