Glory and Honour to Stanley and Susan Rosenblatt, lawyers for the class
action against tobacco capital in winning the judgement today from a
Florida Court of exemplary punitive damages of $145 billion for 700,000
sufferers!
No matter that the companies will haggle, if allowed, for the next 75 years.
No matter that this is a victory entirely in the realms of bourgeois right.
Except that the right to bring a class action allows ordinary working
people occasionally to outface the workings of a legal system in which
justice always tilts its hands towards money.
No matter that Florida has enacted a ceiling on punitive damages lest it
bankrupt a company. Contesting that will only reveal more clearly the class
nature of the justice system.
No matter that it is a victory won in a bourgeois court by non-violent
peaceful means.
No matter that this victory will be diluted in practice. It is a bench mark
of public outrage against capitalist control of the means of production.
Marx said the following in his address to the founding congress of the
Workers International
"After a thirty years' struggle, fought with most admirable perseverance,
the English working classes, improving a momentaneous split between the
landlords and the money-lords, succeeded in carrying the Ten Hours Bill. ....
Through their most notorious organs of science, such as Dr Ure, Professor
Senior, and other sages of that stamp, the middle class [bourgeoisie] had
predicted, and to their heart's content proved, that any legal restriction
of the hours of labour must sound the death knell of British industry,
which, vampire like, could but live by sucking blood, and children's blood
too...
The struggle about the legal restriction of the hours of labour raged the
more fiercely since, apart from frightening avarice, it told indeed upon
the great contest between the blind rule of the supply and demand laws
which form the political economy of the middle class, and social production
controlled by social foresight, which forms the political economy of the
working class. Hence the Ten Hours Bill was not only a great practical
success; it was the victory of a principle; it was the first time that in
broad daylight the political economy of the middle class succumbed to the
political economy of the working class."
Chris Burford
London
