WORLD WORLDWIDE EUROPE FRANCE - news journal UPDATE - (en) France, Monde Libertaire - Ideas and Struggles: Anarchist Lawyers (ca, de, fr, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

 "Towards New Concrete Utopias" ---- Anarchist Lawyers... "What a

provocation! What an oxymoron!" ... Readers riveted to the title of this
work published by Classiques Garnier under the direction of six dashing
lawyers or political science specialists will say. Catherine Malabou,
professor of philosophy, in her preface, takes up this astonishment:
"How can these two terms be compatible?" ---- For those who are
resistant to the notion of anarchy, it is obviously a designation of
disorder, cacophony, and absolute license. Our preface writer emphasizes
that anarchism is a project, a set of practices, a history, a
proposition. A specialist in Proudhon, she recalls that for him,
"freedom is anarchy, because it does not admit the government of the
will; but only the authority of the law, that is to say, of necessity."
(Excerpt from What is Property?)

Recourse to Contracts

Mutual aid dear to Peter Kropotkin, therefore mutuality, solidarity,
requires contracts, rules, arbitration of conflicts, jurisprudence, or a
succession of decisions to resolve these conflicts. So justice? Be
careful, not that of the central State but from federalism. This
federalism is one of the foundations of anarchism. At the local level
with cooperatives, common goods, shared resources and at the
international level so as not to depend on the domination of States, or
even Empires. Proudhon is still there with The Federal Principle.

In their introduction, the editors emphasize that "Anarchist jurists
intend to escape from this dominant representation of a law that would
only be a superstructure, a strict reflection of the relations of
domination, assimilated to order." Too often traditionalist jurists lock
themselves in their certainty and their lack of imagination. Any
innovation is perceived in their eyes as a source of confusion. It is
enough in the secrecy of the offices and other offices to reject any new
idea, this one rejecting an old, worn out and inappropriate system to
stagnate in a State, a State that reproduces its inadequacies. For its
innovative angle of attack alone, the work Les Juristes anarchistes is
salutary.

The construction of concrete utopias

The interest of the work lies perhaps in the construction of concrete
utopias "in the service of mutuality and cooperation, not war". Words of
great topicality. We must renew ourselves, rely on the ideas that guided
anarchist activists to respond to the determining requirement, "that of
thinking and at the same time implementing the organizing dimension of
freedom, that is to say the power of the future", concludes Catherine
Malabou.

The approach is most original. This is one of the rare works in which
jurists attempt, from the legal discipline, to reflect on anarchist
utopias of free association and not domination. Proudhon relies on
contract law, that which comes from the civil code, the agreement of
wills including on a political level. "The political contract is what I
call a federation" (Du principe fédératif).

Enriching one's reflection

Three areas are addressed: property law, dispute resolution, public law.

What method should be adopted with regard to the commons? By relying on
social law as proposed by Edouard Jourdain? Claire Annereau reflects on
a real estate property of use favoring the self-management of
collectives of inhabitants.

The judge? Can he focus on a dispute resolution? Should he leave his
place to arbitration? How to bring in the principle of direct democracy?
And the interest of jurisprudence more flexible than the law but also
more fragile and more uncertain?

Finally, the encounter with public law is very interesting especially
since it is often perceived as an unequal law favoring the public
person, responsible for the general interest and endowed with
prerogatives of public power. The contributors work around the notion of
communalism. The risk in public law is that of formalism. The authors
debate and from their exchanges, the reader will only be able to enrich
his reflection whether he is a lawyer and/or anarchist.

* Collective
Les Juristes anarchistes
Ed. Classiques Garnier, 2024

https://monde-libertaire.fr/?articlen=8155
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