ABSTRACT
What is to be done? As I have argued and shown with supporting evidence, American society is coercively bound by a legal order that benefits only a portion of the society — the capitalist ruling class. The existing legal system can do little more than assure the perpetuation of the capitalist order. That we have looked to the capitalist legal system for the creation of a better world, as well as the attainment of basic human rights, reflects the lack of a critical intelligence. We must now begin to think about an alternative existence. Our goal is a world that is free from the oppressions produced by capitalism. We must go beyond the existing society — with its supporting legal system — in the search for a better society. It is to a society based on socialist principles that we turn. Notions about crime and law that follow from this alternative conception of society are considerably different from capitalist thinking about legal order. And in the process of such critical thought, we create lives in which our ideas and our actions become one. Theory and practice are united in creating a new existence.
