Why should the left fight for legality?

From its Jacobin origins during the French National Constituent Assembly, which functioned between July 9, 1789, and September 30, 1791, the left has never harbored much sympathy for the idea of ​​legality. After all, legality has always been analyzed as the legality of the bourgeois order established upon the ruins of the feudal mode of production and the Old Regime.

Karl Marx was largely responsible for systematizing the idea that the formal legal apparatus responsible for drafting laws would be a constitutive part of what the author of German Ideology He defined it as superstructure, that is, the ideopolitical elements of the social totality that would express a certain objective structure of exploitation/domination of one class over another. Countless generations of communists and socialists in every corner of the planet were formed and helped to reproduce the maxims arising from Marxist thought, between the 19th and 21st centuries, that the dominant ideas in an era are always the ideas of the economically dominant class and that human rights in the capitalist mode of production are nothing more than the rights of the bourgeois class. It would be up to the British Marxist historian Edward Palmer Thompson, in a book entitled Gentlemen and Hunters, in its Brazilian version, the task of carrying out a updating From the conceptions elaborated by Marx regarding laws—conceptions that would be reproduced throughout the 20th century by a large part of Marxist thought, mostly in an anachronistic way, that is, devoid of the sense of historicity so dear to Marx himself—the alternative presented by Thompson in relation to a Marxism devoid of a sense of historicity, but also to liberalism that views laws as impartial entities, finds its synthesis in the notion that law is a field of conflict, in which, to the same extent that the dominant need the law to oppress the dominated, the latter need it to defend themselves from the oppressive fury of the former, thus constituting an authentic struggle around the law. By addressing legality based on the principle of contradiction, the author of the classic The making of the English working class He reached two conclusions:

Firstly, as the law mediates existing class relations for the benefit of the dominant, it also mediates these same class relations by imposing restrictions on the actions of the dominant; that is, if laws can disguise the realities of power, they can also restrain that power and contain its excesses.

Secondly, there is a vast difference between the exercise of arbitrary extralegal power and the existence of the rule of law. The regulation and reconciliation of conflicts through the rule of law therefore represent a cultural achievement of universal significance, since there is no comparison, for those situated in the most subordinate sectors of society, between the exercise of force by oppressors without legal mediation, on the one hand, and the use of mediation through the forms of law, on the other hand, even if such mediation may legitimize existing class relations, crystallizing and masking them.

Well, at a time when we are going through four emergencies in Brazil (health, social, economic and political), the defense of the established legality in our country, enshrined in the 1988 Federal Constitution, has never been more necessary.

Exaggerations aside, the struggle of all sectors of the Brazilian left cannot be entirely separated from the defense of the fundamental principles of the rule of law, otherwise we will soon find ourselves facing a fight against "the exercise of force by oppressors without legal mediation."

There is no room for ambiguity, much less for tergiversation, given the gravity imposed by the current political situation. Legality cannot escape us. The survival and expansion of our future struggles for the radicalization of democracy and human rights depend on its maintenance.