Bill of Rights

[Mythbuster]

Hello folks, I am sorry I haven't been on in a while.

Anyway, I am debating with someone on the Bill of Rights and why they are important. I'm not allowed to post outside links and unsure how to continue with this debate.

Thanks.

ps. I am arguing FOR the bill of rights.

[Black Sheep]

ps. I am arguing FOR the bill of rights.
Why?



Anyway, I am debating with someone on the Bill of Rights and why they are important.
They're not that much..

[Jimmie Higgins]

I don't know if you'll get much help here, sorry.

While I think there are parts of the Bill of Rights that provide workers with something to struggle around - freedom of speech for example which the IWW and of course the New Left of the 1960s used as a rallying point - ultimately, I do not think the document itself was really designed to protect regular people or has ever been enforced that way without the government being pushed from below to respect the rights we are supposedly granted.

When you break the document down to its historical context, it's really a document by large landowners and merchants to convince small farmers that rule by the rich landowners and merchants is better than British rule or a new revolution.

Howard Zinn in "A People's History" (sorry, I know you can't cite anything, but it wouldn't help your case anyway :lol:) goes through the Bill of Rights really well and cites numerous examples of how when it comes to our rights, the document isn't really that clear. There have been constant first amendment cases and Supreme Court decisions over the decades whereas the pro-business parts of these documents are never really in question. Just the fact that we have freedom of speech but right off the bat there are tons of slaves who don't have any real freedom of speech exposes some of the problems with the document.

Anyway, if you back it up a bit, I think a case can be made for the usefulness of a "bill of Rights" in the abstract. Rule of law is better than rule by decree of some aristocrat, for example. Or if there was a working class revolution, workers might decide to make some kind of written points of agreement or statement of unbridgeable rights... it might include freedom to strike, freedom from prohibition on personal behaviors that don't infringe on others (like freedom from sexual prohibitions)... freedom of speech, etc. But the document itself wouldn't be the thing that ensure these rights, it would be maintaining real working class democracy that would ultimately make or break a "proletarian bill of rights".