Page:Wilhelm Liebknecht - Socialism; What It Is and What It Seeks to Accomplish - tr. Mary Wood Simons (1899).djvu/21

 there be talk of justice in the midst of conditions which in whole and in part, in their nature and in their appearance, strike the smallest demand of justice in the face? Only hypocrisy or thoughtless inconsistency can find that punishable in an individual which either is a recognized practice and moral in the state and society, or is the necessary result of the neglect of duty by the state (defective education) and the wrong social organization (poverty). The present fundamental injustice of the state and society at once stamp what is called justice as injustice (ungerechtigkeit). Is this right? Socialism insists that justice shall become rightness; and it creates the essential preliminary condition for this in the free democratic state for which it strives.

As the rghtright [sic] to make and carry out the laws belongs to the people, so likewise they have the right to administer the law.

The giving of judgment and also legislation, rule and administration must be taken from the hands of privileged persons, positions and classes, who sacrifice the general justice and interest to their own peculiar interest. Until an intelligent natural organization of the state and society has removed the cause of the so-called crimes and misdeeds, which in reality, when not arising from physical sickness, are only social illness, socialism demands the popular court (civil and criminal so far as possible) and free administration of justice. The popular court which we insist on is as different from the present jury as the present state is different from the people's state. The jury shall not be the monopoly of the propertied class, not the stage setting for the performance of a shameful farce on justice—class justice, where the deputies of the propertied class sit in judgment over those of the disinherited people and hide their class hatred and interests under the toga of law.