Read on Twitter
I finally read @n_hold's response to Klare. I recommend it. I particularly like his bit at the end about games and the difference between playing and changing the rules. I think it's the place where it's easiest for me to pinpoint my disagreements. https://twitter.com/mddimick/status/1333957436714213384
I wish I could say more but here's a short version: the transition from feudalism to capitalism didn't happen entirely through collective action. It happened partially through shifts in the content of (and relative importance of) law as we now know it.
@n_hold is on to something I think, though he doesn't say it outright, that political change through adjudication will generally be stepwise, incremental and bounded.
But of course, the move from feudalism to capitalism was stepwise (in the UK albeit not in France), and some of the steps were legal steps and in part the transformation was of something legal and legal actors had some agency.
Change the rules of the game enough times and it's not the same game.
So why must we imagine that in the move from capitalism to some less oppressive alternative that stepwise transformation is foreclosed? And if it stepwise transformation is not off the table, how can we be so sure that none of those steps will be "legal"?
It seems to me that Klare is still veers too close to the idea of political transformation as legal transformation per se. But it seems just as much a mistake to say that law is only ever playing the game, never really changing it.
