The Hopeless Trial: A Day in Class Court


Imagine Kafka had written his book from another perspective; imagine Joseph K. was a young lawyer who decided to put the economic system in Prague on trial. It is a shame that Kafka wrote from the neurotic perspective, we've all done something. But going a bit further with this alternative universe, what would a trial of the fundamental crime on which our economies are based look like? Would some form of the assertion of the gap between the ontic and the ontological work severely against any such action? I think so; It seems the grand jury would filter it out, claiming that one needs to be more specific, one needs facts, facts, positive facts.

Courts seem to exist in order to legitimate one crime by prosecuting so many others and obliquely defining that one out of existence. The extraction of surplus value is the unthought of parliamentary legal thinking, it is the founding crime, one committed every day that the law can offer us no protection against, that the law offers protection against us if we ever rose up to stop it. This same structure daily opposes the idea of reparations for slavery. The legal system wants to be able to put one homogeneous entity on trial for a crime, not a heterogeneous multiplicity.

If Josef K. decided to prosecute the unthought crime, he would probably have to do so by defining a homogeneous entity to tack it onto, by giving it some defined ontic content, by selecting an individual capitalist or corporation and suing them. Such a concession would end up with Josef prosecuting some partial object, some individual capitalist as the whole, some corporation as the entire system of domination, this type of displacement would perform an inoculation and allow the system to continue running, possibly stronger than before. You know, picking out a bad apple. This is the case because the courts respect the exnomination of the bourgeoisie as a class, they would not recognize the legitimacy of that name as a designator of a heterogeneous multiplicity. The nomination of the bourgeoisie is a directly political action that strikes at the very foundations of multi-national capitalist society.

However, if a number of such cases were filed coupled with calculated propaganda campaigns the explicate the connection between the partial object and the legal apparatus, there may be some hope. If Josef decides to hit the courts and demand that the charters of certain corporations be revoked, in coordination with some other media articulation like a magazine newspaper or blog, he may have more hope. If he does something like this then the courtroom will be radically opened and the plasticity of the law will overwhelm its other personalities, either that or law will destroy its credibility by sticking to its class background and alienating the masses.