– N. Ribar –
The highest respectability in any society based on the division of classes is respect for the law. But for this to be really social, really collective, the law must work for the most numerous classes. When this is not the case, when respectability is cast aside as just as baneful as the domination itself, when this respectability itself causes crises and anarchy and primes the situation for a new society, unveiled for all to see are the only legitimate laws, those objective laws governing the interactions between humans and humans, and humans and nature. These laws are scientific and determine that society always proceeds from the lower stage to the higher, that it proceeds through “leaps” and not gradual quantitative changes. When we speak of what are called “laws” today, we often fail to think about these ones — only about the ones imposed by the various ruling classes who have usurped power. The dawn upon us is the recognition that the new situation must have social laws proceeding from objective laws.
Every society will have to go through this process. These objective social laws are as universal as natural science. Do we procure the means for a new law-system by begging, in a utopian manner, the ruling classes and hoping with some magic they will change the situation in our favour? Our cause would be as frail as the gratuity of a benevolent ruler. Such a path has never succeeded. For the old medieval ruling class to give rise to today’s ruling class, the revolutionaries in their time seized the reins of humanity’s path by overturning the old law-system and replacing it with a new law-system in their favour. Everything engulfed with flames turns to ashes. Yet today, this ruling class preaches that its law-system is eternal, the pinnacle of human progress, and uses it as a means to demonize political opponents on the world scale. This was precisely the method of the medieval ruling classes. The truth that an idea in one era may be progressive and in another retrogressive is therefore confirmed.
At some point, laws get distorted by the new ruling class, which used objective laws to gain power and admitted them quite clearly, but at whatever point those laws conflicted with its self-interest as a class, new laws not based on objectivity succeeded them. The maintenance of the new law-system and its profit-making opposed to the objective laws become the motivation of the rising ruling class. This is the history of the overthrow of one ruling class by another. But neither is this cycle eternal — the progressive aspects of the present law-system brought about relations of dependence of the working class on itself. The miner scours the bowels of the earth, the steelworker forges materials, the various assemblymen put these together to create commodities for human consumption on the world scale. This law-system did this for the first time in history and gave impetuses to the working class to rely on itself fully, not on some ruling class to govern society in its name.
Again, every society will have to go through this process. Some have already done so. Some law-systems work, while most of the world’s ruling laws do not. Cuba is consistently on the side of the former: I have mentioned that objective laws transform into social laws governing society, and that the two are necessary side by side to fulfil human needs at this stage of development. These social laws spring into being, worked out by the whole society and not according to the whim of a sect of rulers claiming to be progressive. There is nothing more progressive than the development of Cuba today, which has gone through the process of transforming power and sending the old law-system to the dustbin of history. There is nothing more beautiful than its constantly renewing new phenomena in human relations.
When I think back about 2022, I think I will remember Cuba’s new Family Code. For the first time, the people themselves get to set the terms of what they mean by “family” in the official law-system. For the first time, discrimination of all types is brought to justice. For the first time, parents are legally required to provide their children with an emotionally stable environment. For the first time, the older generations and disabled people are treated with the due right to equality. For the first time, primary caregivers are to be recognized and compensated for their labour for their families. For the first time, sexual minorities are put on the same basis as the majority. Many new firsts did the Family Code establish.
Those days learning about what the Family Code represented remain indelible to me. I do not think words can accurately be penned to describe my excitement and enthusiasm learning about a country which is going forward, together with its people and the progressive people of the whole world. Perhaps my best memory of the year 2022 was personally congratulating the Cuban Ambassador to Canada on the success of the Family Code referendum, describing its work as history-making and epochal, expressing my own happiness and stating that Canadian progressive youth look upon it as a great accomplishment not only for Cuba, but for the whole world. It deserved no less. The President of Cuba, Miguel Diaz-Canel, said in those days that the Family Code was an appointment with the future. How right he was! One day we will all be right there with heroic Cuba, in the future which it is already living!
The peoples of the world have not shied away from these developments either. I was not exaggerating to His Excellency the Ambassador — one does not tire of the look of amazement when describing to someone else what the Family Code establishes for the people of Cuba. The exact words are heard over and over, ringing like a tune that cannot go away: “There is a country which guarantees this for its people?!” People here are so disillusioned with the lack of objective law governance that they find it difficult to believe there can ever be an effective government, in tune with the needs of the people. This is precisely what the so-called liberal democracies of the West promote to this day — that sure, we rule over you and you have no say in our policy positions, but have you considered you can vote? Have you considered that you have the universal franchise? You have this, which so many people fought for, so be grateful that you’re not like any of these so-called “dictatorial” or “communist” countries! Stating this does not decide any of the key problems facing the people, it does not proceed from the needs and realities of humanity but from laws based on so-called universal values that they have already decided, and have also decided how much they will even adhere to those values. The point is that in a social environment, only a social decision-making process can create the basis for the application of objective laws.
What is happening in Cuba is not fortuitous. It is based on the party-people unity, strong as steel and tempered in the mighty battles against imperialism and its lackeys. That is where Cuba finds its source of accomplishments. The people themselves rule, so when they want something — say, in this case, increasing and wide-ranging social rights and protections — the state expresses the people’s will and enshrines it into law. Millions of people had a direct say in their new 2019 Constitution, and the same is true with the Family Code. Then, after they had shaped the legislation, it was put to a referendum under which it succeeded by a very large margin. This is how social, objective governance proceeds. From the people, to the state. From reality, to our conceptions and construction of society.
When we discuss the new Family Code, it is also sometimes called a Family Law. All laws denote two aspects, the protective and the punitive. The protective prohibits one member of society from the negative effects of the actions of another or group of others. It is a measure which guarantees the rights and safety of the people. It also reinforces the feeling of social love, creating harmonious relations within society and flattening inequalities. This effect of law in this stage of society’s development must be primary. When law is primarily protective, the whole of society becomes more cohesive and less anarchical, it creates a feeling of mutual respect, and moreover, it serves the vast majority of people and not the few ruling class elites. In other words, law itself becomes a social entity, breaking such laws becomes harmful to the society and to each individual, including the one who breaks the law — the people on a mass scale really recognize laws as social and not some acts of King, Queens, Presidents, Prime Ministers and the like, but representing the best humanity has to offer and shaped in their own image. This all follows from their decision-making power; when the people are masters of the country, they aspire to and actually achieve unimaginable successes. In such societies, the primary effect of law is supplemented by the punitive, but there is a marked difference — protective and punitive become wholly dialectical, conditioned by that which the society itself demands. When one wrecks or breaks the social property owned by the entire people, is this not an anti-social act deserving of condemnation and consequences? When one undermines the people’s power, and especially so at the behest of imperialism, is this not an anti-social act deserving of condemnation and consequences? When an individual is the subject of a racist attack, fracturing the whole social fabric, is this not an anti-social act deserving of condemnation and consequences? When protective is primary and punitive is supplementary, it is the dictatorship of the majority against the minority of those who wish to exploit, it is the interests of the people against the interests of those who wish for them to no longer exist. This has nothing to do with those states primarily based on the punitive side of law and their theories that any instance of breaking the law “damages social fabric” — it is not the fact that they are laws which makes breaking them damaging, but because it damages the social fabric it breaks the law. The unity of law and social fabric in the new society cannot be compared with the disunity of law and social fabric in the old.
Punitive law has existed and will exist as a key function as long as the state itself does. Representing a certain interest, the state will have enemies who oppose its interests, and it utilizes repression against those opponents to maintain its power. When we speak of the punitive side of law, we immediately think of the consequences given to those who break the law. Those states based on exploitation of man by man, seeking to preserve an outdated order, have laws primarily for the punitive aspect — there are few “protections” and oftentimes laws are completely senseless. Laws not meant to protect, but to imprison. Laws meant to scare the workers and oppressed peoples into obeying the dictate of the ruling class. Laws meant to protect private property. Laws meant to ignore racist and fascist attacks. Through this, everything is turned into a matter of law and order and impunity, with the adage that might makes right. The dominant law is that of the ruling class and its narrow interests, and everything revolves around it. As one may imagine, such laws are highly damaging to the society and create animosity — all groups are marginalized, ghettoized and egged on to fight other groups over racial chauvinism and other savage pretexts. How can one have a society with a well-rounded social love while the criminalization of conscience remains a key component of the law-system? Anarchy, violence, crises and civil war are fostered by punitive law. Perhaps more precisely, punitive law is damaging to the whole society, even the ruling class. In their crazed mania to keep their profits and perpetuate this system, they even ignore the greatest self-interest of all, self-preservation.
One such example of the extremes of this punitive law is demonstrated by the U.S.: as that society descends into civil war, normal practices are turned into criminal matters on a daily basis. The most blatant example of this in 2022 was the illegalization of abortion in many states. This everyday practice which much of the world accepts as a necessity is banned because of the reactionary clamour that women need to be punished, that if they need an abortion they have an “attitude problem” which can be fixed with hard work and lifting themselves up by their bootstraps. Why has this been allowed to occur? Some make the argument that it is the Republicans who are wrecking all these rights and that the Democrats are powerless to change the situation. Other, more “leftist” personalities, make the claim that the Democrats are useless because they refuse to do anything. Both of these outlooks are incomplete because they proceed from the institutions to the people, not from the people to how we should shape institutions — even the most “progressive” force elected is hostage to the state and its ruling class interests due to their selection from above and not below. The point is not who is “good” and “bad,” the real source of the attacks on the people is the illegitimate law-system which does not represent the interests of the vast majority of the people and cannot ever do so; the problem being that the people do not control the state, that a small group of people, no matter their leanings, have all the control. They cannot accurately express the will of the hundreds of millions when their donor-masters are all found on Wall Street. What the people want to be enshrined into law does not come to pass because of this electoral block on development.
Meanwhile, the so-called “left” news media has not batted an eye to these gross human rights violations by the rogue American regime. CNN, MSNBC and other outlets are too busy screaming out their lungs about Ukraine, demonizing Putin as a Hitler and stirring up some new hoax about “Russian interference” to make the American people feel like they are under attack. And even when that is not the topic of discussion, it is a torrent of commentary on the events of January 6th, all of which miss the key point and do not discuss the law-system itself which led to the discontent of the events. Neither of these things is normal for any healthy society — they are aberrations, effects, created by a sick society and its dying system. Meanwhile, all the real problems themselves are ignored. They discussed the cruel anti-abortion laws for a whole two weeks and then dropped it. What of the tens of millions of women constantly groaning under the yoke of a state brutally oppressing them? Or is such demonization only reserved for official “enemies”?
Indeed, this was the story of 2022. While law and order are portrayed as natural at home, they are portrayed as even more natural abroad. The imperialist states never cease their slanderous talking points and epithets about the free Cuban people. Defying its enemies, Cuba passed the most progressive social law ever known in the history of man — and it did so thanks to the immortal resilience of its heroic people who willed it to be. Today, Cuba and other countries are continually and steadily building their new life liberated from oppression and exploitation. In the same year, the U.S. openly showed its face as one of the most backward countries on the planet by authorizing many of its states to ban abortion in their law, states where women are heavily persecuted and a regime of surveillance is imposed. The empire is self-destructing from within, it cannot see the impacts of its anti-conscious outlook and as a result is crumbling, attempting to take the American masses down with it. You may guess as to which country is called “free” and “democratic” and which country is called “dictatorial” and “repressive.” Where is the so-called “international community” of North America and Europe in condemning and sanctioning the imperialist superpower for brutalizing its people, incarcerating the highest number of people in the history of the world, open in its stance that it denies workers the rights they have achieved throughout the world? Maybe the laws, or “rules,” of the so-called rules-based international order are also arbitrary, punitive, illegitimate and unfit for humanity.
Side by side, separated by a relatively small body of water, is revolutionary Cuba and the imperialist United States of America. Nature itself could not have formed something so stark, such hope posited with such darkness. Cuba has its laws and passes new ones, all of which align with the views and interests of its people, and are primarily protective. The U.S. has its laws and passes new ones, ones which blatantly ignore the needs of the people — aside from the ultra-reactionary anti-abortion laws, we can take for example the fact that almost half of the upcoming 2023 budget will be spent on militarization, despite the fact that the people want peace. Their laws are primarily punitive. There is a choice: rights for the people or weapons of death to fund wars across the globe? It is beauty right beside the worst humanity has to offer. And beauty is more certain to win each year that passes.
(January 1, 2023)