Argentina - January 8th, 2018

A Marxist position before the caste of life-tenure judges of the bourgeois state

In recent days, after the imprisonment and persecution of worker fighters, the discussion about the position that workers' currents must face in the face of bourgeois justice has been rekindled.
In the first place, the caste of judges, as with any institution of the bourgeois state, is neither neutral nor independent. Before a bourgeois tribunal no worker will ever find an "objective" and "impartial" justice, but rather a defender of the legality and order of the bosses, that is, of the exploitation and subjugation of the workers. As Lenin said, "the State, that is to say, every State, is an instrument for the oppression of one class by another. Therefore, the State cannot be neutral" (V. I. Lenin, "State and the Revolution").
The PO and the PTS are scandalized by the arbitrariness and lack of impartiality of judges Torres and Bonadio ordering the imprisonment of Arakaki and Ponce, when this is normal in bourgeois justice. A recent and disgusting example of the anti-worker character of the judges is the condemnation of the Las Heras workers in 2013 under orders of the imperialist oil companies, dictated by a videlista court on false charges and based on testimonies extracted under torture. Augusto Spies, one of the martyrs of Chicago, said in 1886 before the court that condemned him: "When addressing this tribunal, I do so as a representative of a class in front of those of another, enemy class."
Second, the caste of judges is one of the most reactionary and Bonapartist institutions of the Argentine State. The Supreme Court is located above the National Constitution, which it has the power to "interpret" without accountability to anyone of its judgments. The judges are in a life tenure in their positions and enjoy privileges immensely superior to those of any citizen.
Judges are linked to bourgeois governments, to big capitalists and their politicians by thousands of political, economic and social ties. The current Argentinian judges were appointed by the military dictatorship and the Radical and Peronist governments. They are who order the repressions, the evictions of factories taken by the workers, and command the intelligence services and the intelligence about the workers' organizations. They are a fundamental mechanism of the repressive apparatus of the bourgeois state.
No worker, and least of all a socialist, should recognize the legitimacy or authority of these judges, who represent the most oligarchic and reactionary of the Argentine bourgeois state. To submit to the Law of capitalists and their judges, as the PO has done by making Arakaki and Ponce available to bourgeois justice, and to present this as a "political struggle against the bourgeoisie", is to poison the consciousness of the workers. To recognize the judges authority over their own members is for PO to renounce the destruction of the bourgeois state and its courts, to openly deny the insurrection and the socialist revolution.