Contradictions of capitalism exposed in legal battle

   A Civil Action
   Book by Jonathan Harr
   Random House,1995
   
   The film "A Civil Action," which is a dramatization of the events
   documented by this book, opened on 8 January 1999. This review
   originally appeared in MIM Theory 12, "Environment, Society, &
   Revolution." Hey, we read the book already, if you've seen the movie
   and think it adds or detracts something important, send us your
   review!
   
   A Civil Action is an entertaining read for anyone with an interest in
   corporate destruction of the environment and the law. Jonathan Harr
   followed the case starting in 1986, through an extravagant discovery
   process, 5 months of trial, lavish settlement meetings and the
   beginning of an appeal process to write this non-fiction account. The
   book is fascinating largely because what would seem to be cinematic
   exaggeration -- lawyers spending $20,000 to set up two-day meetings
   for 3 people, paying $150,000 for one day's worth of investigatory lab
   tests, and then expecting several millions of dollars in payment at
   the end of the casework -- is all documented and true.
   
   A Civil Action explores in detail some of the contradictions of
   capitalism exposed by Amerikan law. The objective of the law is
   ostensibly to right social wrongs, to provide balance among
   individuals' and organizations' conflicting interests. But lawyers who
   spend their time petitioning for legal judgments require money in
   exchange for their time -- so the proceedings then have to serve two
   purposes: right whatever is wrong and remunerate the lawyers for their
   time. This means that lawyers frequently decide which social wrongs to
   attempt to set right according to which ones they think will yield the
   biggest reward.
   
   The legal process also acts out some contradictions inherent to
   capitalism. In this case, the pressure to dispose of waste cheaply, to
   quicken the production process and decrease overhead was the direct
   cause of environmental destruction. Under socialist planned
   production, we will not see many cases like this one in which
   producers have taken short cuts to increase profits and are attempting
   to avoid correcting their errors. Under socialism, production planning
   will take environmental factors into account and profit will not be
   the sole judge of successful production. Instead, production for a
   healthy society will be valued.
   
   The facts here are astonishing for being a product of First World
   circumstance. The plaintiffs Woburn were poisoned and then developed
   cancer and died mostly within 10 years of when they had first gotten
   sick. In Amerika we are used to seeing people poison themselves
   intentionally with cigarettes and with fat- and preservative-filled
   foods among other causes. But we do not frequently notice people
   poisoned by their drinking water because pollutants are so regularly
   exported to the Third World to get around environmental restrictions
   designed to protect the imperialist country citizens.
   
   In reading accounts like this one, MIM focuses not on the horrors of
   the individual medical accounts, but on the industrial context in
   which they occur. Under imperialism, the highest stage of capitalism,
   the unequal distribution of wealth occurs evermore along national
   lines, as does the unequal distribution of labor and of damage to the
   environment. So while socialist planning would demand an accounting of
   total resources and direct stresses to the places that could most
   easily bear them, capitalism simply uses and destroys the areas which
   are farthest from its center of operations. The capitalists use up the
   resources which are not in their own backyards and save their own
   immediate surroundings -- partly in response to labor aristocracy
   demands. This is conscious planning on the part of imperialist
   administrators and not mere accident. The fact that people in the
   First World clearly have the capacity to buy and therefore use more
   polluting resources than people in the Third World should make this
   clear: someone is making sure that pollution is separated from
   consumption.
   
   Socialism -- not personal injury law
   
   Personal injury law, while it can shed light on some nasty goings on
   in the corporate world, is an oddly decadent outgrowth of the Amerikan
   legal system. It has some romantic notions attached -- personal injury
   lawyers usually work on a contingency basis, collecting fees based on
   their expenses and a percentage of the award in the case only when
   they win. This arrangement gives personal injury lawyers the
   appearance of doing legal work for "free" for people who can't afford
   lawyers, and going up against big nasty corporations in favor of less
   privileged people.
   
   But in the end, the law is set up to focus on big rewards, not on
   long-term assistance to poor people.
   
   MIM does not look to the Amerikan legal system to correct capitalism's
   mistakes or to mitigate the harm it does to the masses. We devote our
   time and resources to building independent institutions of the
   oppressed and to supporting the just anti-imperialist struggles of
   oppressed people the world over. We know that only a dictatorship of
   the proletariat -- of the majority over the minority -- will alleviate
   the pain caused by capitalism and guard against it for the future. MIM
   calls on all people concerned with environmental destruction and
   irresponsibility to work with us to build organizations that can seize
   proletarian power and restore and protect the environment for the
   world's people.