key: cord-0052763-qlfzz955 authors: Baars, Grietje title: Writing in the time of coronavirus date: 2020-10-23 journal: nan DOI: 10.1093/lril/lraa014 sha: a54184a5c8a85eb230cd329f699f309086ea7be0 doc_id: 52763 cord_uid: qlfzz955 nan which is set to force us to adjust our narrow anthropocentric understanding of law and capitalism. Brabazon's The Criminalization of Dissent, also forthcoming and which surveys and theorises questions of strategy and tactics will be a welcome elaboration on the key points made by Robert Knox in his seminal article on this topic. 3 Danielsen's unrivalled work on the corporation, 4 with which I have been thinking for almost two decades, is soon to culminate in a monograph. It is set to become an instant classic-a must-read text-inevitably less Marxist, but more elegant and nuanced than my own. Marks's much anticipated A False Tree of Liberty shares my commitment to revisiting the archive to stimulate critique and steer current praxis in a more fruitful direction. 5 I am as grateful for these scholars' support as I am of the gentle yet firm critiques they offer. In this response, I will briefly address the 'lawness' of law and its limits, and sketch out my response to the 'then what?' question. I will start, though, with a note on praxis and the importance of choosing the stories we tell for the stories we long to create. As I write during the coronavirus pandemic, the deep structural, racialised and gendered violence of global corporate capitalism is coming into sharp relief-or even sharper relief-to ever more people. In the face of communities hit by a debilitating and deadly illness, it has become clear that resistance against the old order, and what is already touted as the 'new normal' of a hyper-precaritised police state, is our only option. We have known for a long time that the world produces enough food to feed its population many times over, and yet people starve because of the structural dynamics underlying global inequality. While these dynamics may have previously seemed complex and opaque to many, the current situation makes them impossible to ignore. That the pandemic affects Black, Indigenous and People of Colour disproportionately-globally but also within Europe and North America-is immediately obvious from data on who has died and who is forced (back) to work 6 -in healthcare/elderly care, public transport, delivery and warehouse work, farming, 7 manufacturing and meat packing, 8 -as well as on who is incarcerated or killed, 9 or whose homes are destroyed. 10 More people are starting to realise that in the face of a state that can but won't ensure adequate PPE for frontline workers, we only have each other. 11 In the UK alone, 4,000 mutual aid groups have sprung up, through which people support one another with essential shopping and pharmacy trips. 12 People in the UK are sitting at their kitchen tables en masse sewing nurses' scrubs from old bedsheets. 13 In the US, arms factory workers have autonomously decided to switch production to the provision of ventilators. 14 In France, fast food chain workers shut down a restaurant to distribute food to the community. 15 A worker-occupied factory has started producing soap for refugee camps on the Greek islands. 16 Frantic work is ongoing to ensure even basic survival in a new normal where essential and non-essential workers alike are unceremoniously sacrificed-in the global north but, as usual, especially in the global south. 17 Those who can fight to keep open spaces (community, public educational, arts, social centres and others) in the system where resistance is possible, breaking open new ones. Together we shall co-imagine and co-create the new in the rubble of the old. I am writing this from the privileged position of fulltime employment in the higher education sector, working from home in relative comfort and without children. As a neoliberal responsibilised subject, I have just completed my employer's survey on the reasonable adjustment of my kitchen chair (add a pillow in the small of your back, it says) and am writing while at the same time engaged in frantic conversations with my union's rank and file on our strategy for advancing the demands behind our recent strike. We quickly moved from the biggest universities strike in UK history to full pandemic closure in one eventful week in March and now face unprecedented cuts to already shoestring budgets. We negotiate the old world's demands in a new and entirely more precarious context. I interrupt my writing with periodic mutual aid deliveries, while organising an online discussion on how and why to set up solidarity funds (radical income redistribution, replacing the welfare state from below), preparing a funding bid on scaling up the cooperative economy post-pandemic, and completing a zine on alternatives to calling the police when faced with violence in the street or at home. 18 The ubiquity of mutual aid networks that have so have quickly emerged everywhere (spontaneously and/or backed by existing mutual aid projects 19 ) shows that we can manage our survival ourselves, because we built this world. We have seen unprecedented labour organizing, including global wildcat militancy, in the past two months. 20 In the US, tenants are gearing up for the largest rent strike since the 1930s, while 30 million have filed for unemployment. 21 New unions and solidarity funds have been set up by those on the pandemic frontline, including cleaners and childminders. 22 There is a time for theory and a time for action, but if ever there was a time to take to the proverbial, virtual, and actual streets, this is it. Brabazon has told me about her organizing to defend quality public education and research in the face of Covid-19 with her Canadian labour union. Pal has inspired me over the past couple of years with her experiences organising on her hometown's roundabout with the Gilets Jaunes. This we discussed also at public meetings at the Common House in London, the Autonomous Centre of Edinburgh and the Historical Materialism Conference in Athensthe latter with veteran French activist academic (public intellectual, or philosopher on the barricades) Frédéric Lordon, with the idea of subverting the dominant (negative) portrayal of the Gilets Jaunes movement even in the left media. Radical anti-racist, migrant and queer groups' participation in this movement was one factor warranting our engagement with this movement that merged into the massive General Strike movement, 23 poised to reengage once the lockdown ends. 24 There is a time for theory and a time for action, but if ever there was a time to take to the proverbial, virtual and actual streets, this is it. Despite the world suddenly looking quite different since the start of the pandemic, The Corporation, Law and Capitalism will remain relevant and useful, especially in understanding both corporate capitalism's role in creating this crisis and spreading the virus, and in formulating our response to corporate bailouts, corporations cashing in on the crisis, and the rest of what Corporate Watch and others have already termed Corona Capitalism. 25 It will remain relevant not least because it offers a perspective now embraced by more and more people: that reformism is insufficient and nothing short of revolution/systemic change will do. Capitalism is beyond saving through a #JustRecovery or a New Deal, green or otherwise. For those still wavering in this regard, the book offers a catalogue of reasons to help reach that conclusion. Critics such as Brabazon have rightly pointed out that, while expansive in its reasoning on why corporate capitalism needs to end, the book is thin on the 'how' and 'then what'. Its focus is dismantling the mainstream and leftliberal hobbyhorses of corporate human rights accountability and the possibility of a responsible, sustainable capitalism. My next book will address the obvious, urgent and complex concomitant questions: what's the alternative and how do we get there? Such questions require grappling with the role of law (if any) in a post-capitalist world and in the transition to such a world. The present situation has taken us several steps closer, and the pandemic has revealed the need to construct that alternative all the more urgently. A crisis also accelerates collaboration, resourcefulness, and strategizing. 26 The resistance is in full swing, and the foundations of the alternative (some already built by previous generations) are solidifying. Marks's A False Tree of Liberty reminds us of the importance of interrogating the 'official' or hegemonic back story to mainstream discourse, while also recognizing the presence (and prescience) of other stories relegated to gather dust in the archives but now warranting an airing. 27 In her comment in this symposium, she traces the birth of the corporate legal person from The Case of Sutton's Hospital to the corporatization of everyday domestic life through three generations of the Coke family. Legal personality is the corporation's most potent feature, without which we would not have had corporate capitalism today. My book explores the broader context of this trespass case concerning the estate of John Sutton, the once-'richest commoner of England', against his heirs, who had been arrested on the site of the yet-to-bebuilt hospital. The case illustrates how justice Coke and the King's Bench judges-who were also the governors of Sutton's charity, to which Sutton had (in the judges' view, successfully) transferred the contested property. Thus, Sutton had used a legal person to evade liability (here to his natural heirs), and a 'futures contract', the creation of wealth in the present (which can then be used/passed on) based on a speculative future gain, was thus upheld in this case. Today we call this use of a legal person 'entity shielding', which together with 'asset shielding' and the optimization of corporate group structures (networks of legal persons) are the bread and butter (toast and foie gras) of corporate lawyers. By deciding this case in their own favour, and establishing the 26 general legal principle of corporate separate legal personality, the King's Bench/charity governors significantly increased their wealth and that of their class, as it enabled corporate capitalism to take off. 28 In his contribution to this symposium, Danielsen also asks about the agency of the 'global capitalist class'. Returning to The Case of Sutton's Hospital, we don't know if the judges would have come to the same decision if the case had not concerned their own charity, or whether different judges would have decided the same way. Ultimately, though, the current system of global corporate capitalism is constructed through millions of individual decisions made by individual people who are moved to make these decisions (or who have this freedom denied) through their material circumstances: 'men make their histories themselves, only in given surroundings which condition it and on the basis of actual relations already existing'. 29 My book not only describes the structure of capitalism but also pays attention to the agency of the lawyers that play a part in constructing the structure, as individual and collective human actions do matter. I look at the individuals (who often, but not always, act as members of a class or in alignment with class interests) involved in giving substance to company law, at the individual lawyers involved in the Nuremberg and Tokyo Trials, and at individual human rights lawyers-as well, of course, as the individual accused and victims in international criminal trials and the way their arguments helped shape political responses and eventual big-picture outcomes. While not everyone has the same range of choices open to them (an understatement, certainly), the stories we (or more often our parents and teachers, thought leaders, hegemons, influencers) tell and those we chose not to tell have a major impact on how we understand, and therefore interact with, the world and what possibilities we can imagine, and what we hope and fight for. Marks also makes this argument in A False Tree of Liberty, which reclaims 19th-century agrarian reformer Thomas Spence as a human rights activist, allowing us to reimagine and reinforce sustainability and food sovereignty as political demands today. Since its very beginning, corporate capitalism has also been resisted. As Marx and Engels famously wrote, all history is the history of class struggle, 30 and my book highlights this struggle and resistance against corporate capitalism through the ages. Inspired by Marks, as well as the urgency of the pandemic moment, I looked for another story around Sutton-the person, the property, the phenomenon-that foregrounds this resistance, struggle and alternative ways of organizing social life. Sutton, a coal mine owner and moneylender, lived his later years and died in Hackney, in a house located on what is now called Sutton Place. 31 Next door we find Sutton House, a 16th-century mansion mistakenly named after Sutton, which was, at various times, home to merchants as well as schools. It passed to the National Trust in 1938 and was used as a centre for fire wardens during the Blitz and, in the 1950s, served as headquarters to a trade union. 32 The house was progressively used for more collective, communal purposes and, in the 1980s, as a site for class struggle organizing. In Thatcher's Britain, when the coalmines introduced by Sutton and others were closed, resistance grew. Squatters occupied (and apparently saved!) the derelict Sutton House, giving it new life as a home, café/social centre and music venue. Amongst the many events they hosted was a benefit gig for the anarchist group Class War's 'bust fund' on 21 September 1985, following the 'Bash The Rich' march from Camden to Hampstead earlier on the same day. 33 The squat was evicted in the mid-1980s as anti-squatting laws were tightened and police repression intensified. 34 The National Trust (originally founded to (re-)open green spaces to the poor, although with a controversial track record 35 ), was pressured by the community to abandon its plans to sell to luxury flat developers, and now operates the house as a museum. 36 As a direct result of the Thatcher government's neoliberal policies, Hackney has seen massive gentrification and deepening inequality, with the average two-bedroom ex-council 31 Anne Walker, wife of Anne Lister (fellow coal magnate), lived at Sutton Park in North Yorkshire, but I could find no immediate link between 'our' Sutton and the two Annes and so decided this was a tangent best left for another, less hectic, time. flat now costing upwards of half a million pounds, while in the very same area young people grow up in poverty without prospects for the future. 37 On the 50th anniversary of the decriminalization of sodomy, the National Trust decided to unearth some of the stories we don't normally tell, such as that of Hadrian's boyfriend. 38 Although in corporate capitalism LGBT stories are often leveraged in aid of gentrification, Sean Curran, curator of Sutton House Queered, 39 tried to subvert this by, amongst others, excavating the radical past (and possible future potential?) of Queer Squatting. 40 Hackney is the borough in London worst affected by the coronavirus pandemic, and Sutton House is a two-minute walk from the Homerton Hospital, recipient of those scrubs hand-stitched by people on their kitchen tables and the organizing ground of radical nurses. 41 Can we tell one story without another? What does queer squatting have to do with corporate legal personality? I am pleased that Jones, in her comment, outed the book as Queer. From a queer perspective on things-looking at the world from a queer angle-new aspects come into view, new stories become relevant, new meanings emerge, and new futures become imaginable. A queer view makes it easier to de-naturalise the abstractions that capitalism runs on. Queer squatting, The Blue Room, and contemporary spaces such as the GRASS squatted social centre and mutual aid hub, 42 are the antithesis of the social relations in the Sutton courtroom that resulted in the abstraction of the corporate legal person, and their antidote. Turning from the kinds of stories we tell to the 'lawness' of law and its limits, I would argue that the question of (capitalist) law, posed by Danielsen, is not just one of semantics. Evgeny Pashukanis understood there to be a categorical distinction between pre-capitalist feudal, roman, etc. 'law' and law properly so-called. Law properly so-called is capitalist law, which came about as a result of the class struggle between feudal lords and their subjects and was fundamental in the transition to capitalism. The logic of the legal form is the commodity form. I discuss this in chapter 2 of the book in some detail and I recommend reading Pashukanis' Law and Marxism: A General Theory for the full story. 43 Following Pashukanis' argument, one can expect that a communist society will have no law. Communism involves the abolition (or smashing, or withering away) of both state and law. By abolition of law I mean much the same as Stefano Harney, Fred Moten and the editors of Invert Journal when they write of prison abolition. They mean 'not so much the abolition of prisons but the abolition of a society that could have prisons, that could have slavery, that could have the wage'. 44 Abolition of the state and law post-capitalism would include abolition of prisons, private property, the family, and gender, among other things. 45 Emancipation's promise lies not in legal reform and contestation but in counter-systemic organising, building alternative modes of production, and abolitionist, restitutive, restorative and transformative justice work. In response to Brabazon, I would strongly agree that alternative approaches to justice are indeed a necessary part of dismantling capitalist social relations. These days I am inspired not only by present company, but also by the rapidly expanding Queer Marxist and radical transfeminist work on imagining such futures in new open access journals such as Spectre, Pinko and Invert Journal-the work, for example, of Nat Raha and Mijke van der Drift, and radical queer, trans anti-racist text that emerges out of the margins of the academy and world. 46 Queer Marxist work on racial capitalism theorizes the racialized and gendered nature of corporate capitalism, 47 which no one can now un-see, in order to bring about its downfall. Most of all, I am inspired by I Watched the Neighbourhood I Grew Up in Get Gentrified', Vice The changing face of Hackney: new documentary tackles gentrification in the borough Standing Tall by Hadrian's Wall See the event 'Queer(er) Squatting: an evening of discussion Nurses United UK', The Action Network, https://action network.org/groups/nurses-united-uk. See also the video 'Nurses block Westminster Bridge demanding proper PPE Law and Marxism: A General Theory (Ink Links The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Studies Full Surrogacy Now: Feminism Against Family Radical Transfeminism: Trans as Anti-static Ethics Escaping Neoliberal Encapsulation This Land Is Not Our Land', forthcoming in University of Chicago Law Review. the work of those actively engaged in building effective counter-power: on the streets 49 Without an external, overarching body to govern, monitor, supervise, and discipline societies and communities, our regulation will be the result of largely local-level, consensus-based decision making. The alternative forms of relating, producing, and distributing existent in post-capitalist society would give rise to horizontal agreements and normative practices including transformative justice. Indeed, communities have employed, and still do employ alternative, non-legal normative frameworks for dispute resolution and accountability, as with certain indigenous communities. Moreover, communities have developed such frameworks by virtue of exclusion or self-exclusion from the state-see for example the work of the Audre Lorde Project's Safe OUTside the System Collective. 50 One recent example of the collective development of alternative normative frameworks is QueerCare, whose Covid-19 protocols have been adopted by mutual aid networks around the UK. 51 Autonomy erupts at the margins, in the cracks. 52 In the all too obvious gaps left by the state, people in crisis are taking back control. 53 Danielsen predicts 'experimental appropriation, adaptation, redeployment and subversion of existing institutions and forms in increments of better and worse'. 54 Yes! But this and, eventually, the smashing of the state and appropriation of the means of production Introduction SoS are 'devoted to challenging hate and police violence by using community based strategies rather than relying on the police'. See 'Safe Outside the System An Organic Crisis Is Upon Us', Spectre Insurrection & Infrastructure: a Dual Power Guide for Leftists in Britain Sin Patrón: Stories from Argentina's Worker-Run Factories new independent media, new housing co-ops, new worker co-ops taking back the means of production, food sovereignty/autonomy projects, new grassroots unions, new radical income redistribution mechanisms, 56 new land occupations, new squats. 57 We need to be ready for, and to resist, the flood of evictions that is to come, the resurgence of far right ideology, and the further death and destruction that the virus of capitalism will cause, and be ready to rebuild much of this world on a very different foundation the Goose Green Mutual Aid website Will A New Wave Of Squatting Begin As Retail Goes Under?', It's Going Down What can academics learn from the Lucas Plan?