The authoritarian offensive of the State is based today in France on a justice system put at the service of political repression. This is the observation of the lawyer and activist Elsa Marcel, who recommends renouncing the illusion of a “rule of law” respectful of its own principles and reconnecting, instead, with the strategy of political defense practiced at the time of decolonization, then the post-1968 movements.
The lawyers of litigants targeted by state repression – immigrants, activists, simple demonstrators or citizens implicated for crimes of opinion – experience an increasingly formal democracy, where the principles displayed fade away in the face of the balance of power imposed by those in power. There is an authoritarian offensive, a justice system which regularly responds to the orders of those in power. But the majority response of organizations of the judicial left and lawyers engaged in the defense of freedoms, which consists of invoking the rule of law and urging the regime to respect its own rules, is doomed to impotence.”
These are the observations at the starting point of the reflection of Elsa Marcel, lawyer and activist of Permanent Revolution, author of the rule of law, bourgeois order: reconnecting with the political defense and guest of #JulienThéry for this new episode of We allow ourselves to think (OSAP). “I designed this book as a practical and political manual for the activist generation who, since the establishment of the state of emergency in 2015, have taken to the streets against the multiple facets of neoliberal offensives while facing an ever more authoritarian state,” also explains Elsa Marcel at the beginning of her work.
Lawyers from the working classes and oppressed minorities often find themselves helpless in the face of the accelerated democratic degradation of the last two decades. This is because they remain prisoners of the myth and artifices of “the rule of law”, the sole guarantor of public freedoms while it is also and above all the architect of liberticidal devices, explains Elsa Marcel. To break the deadlock, according to her, we must draw on the heritage of the anti-colonial struggles and the revolts of the 1968s which were able to push back power by assuming a resolutely political posture in the courts.
