1 On popular justice: discussion with Maoists

  In the following discussion MichaelFoucault and some Maoists militants attempt to identify the
  basic issues in a debate which had been initiated in response to the project of June 1971, to
  set up a people's court to judge the police. 

pg 15, imposition, penal legislation, certain allegedly universal moral categories

  For the burgeoisie it is a matter of imposing on the proletariat, by means of penal legislation,
  of prisons, but also of newspapers, of 'literature', certain allegedly universal moral
  categories which function as an ideological barrier between them and the non-proletarianised   
  people. All the literary, journalistic, medical, sociological and anthropological rhetoric about
  criminals (and we are all familiar with examples of all these in the second half of the
  nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century) play this role.

pg 16, the revolution and radical eliminitaion of the judicial apparatus

  This is why the revolution can only take place via the radical elimination of the judicial 
  apparatus, and anything which could reintroduce the penal apparatus, and anything which
  could reintroduce its ideology and enable this ideology to surreptitiously creep back into
  popular practices, must be banished.

pg 20, imposition of values disguised as ...

  Among the methods employed some were of enormous consequence (as, for example, the morality
  taught in primary school, that is, the fradual imposition of a whole system of values 
  disguised as the teaching of literacy, reading and writing covering up the imposition of vaules)
  and some were rather smaller inovations, tiny and horrible machiavelianisms.

pg 22, on creators of penal law

  Penal law was not created by the common people, nor by the peasantry, nor by the proletariat,
  but entirely by the burgeoisie as an important tactical weapon in this system of divisions
  which they wished to introduce. That this tactical weapon was not based on true assessment
  of what the actual possibilities of revolution were in fact, and a fortunate one at that.

pg 23, proletarian ideology

  This judicial apparatus has had specific ideological effects on each of the dominated classes,
  and there is in particular a proletarian ideology into which certain burgeois ideas about
  what is just and what unjust, about theft, property, crime and criminals have infiltrated

pg 26/27, burgeois apparatus vs new forms of organisation

  Moreover, you say that there must be a revolutionary state apparatus in order to regulate
  unity between the proletariat and the marginalised people. Agreed, but you will also grant
  me that the forms of state apparatus which we inherit from the burgeois apparatus cannot
  in any way serve as model for the new forms of organisation.

pg 30, model for the people's court

  I would even say - though perhaps the analogy is a bit strained - that the court sets up
  again a kind of divisions of labour. There are those who judge - or who pretend to judge -
  with total tranquility, without being in any way involved. This re-inforces the idea that
  for judicial proceedings to be just they must be conducted by someone who can remain quite
  detached, by an intellectual, an expert in the realm of ideas. When, into the bargain,
  the people's court is organised or presided over by intellectuals, who come along to hear
  what on the one hand the workers and on the other hand the bosses have go to say, and to 
  pronounce: "This one is innocent, that one guilty", then the whole thing is infused with
  idealism. When it comes to proposing this as a general model of what popular justice 
  should be like, I'm afraid that the worst possible model has been picked.

pg 36, moral ideology

  And moral ideology - for what are our moral values but those which are over and over again
  associated and re-confirmed by the decisions of the courts - this moral ideology, just
  like the forms of justice operated by the burgeois apparatus, must be submited to the
  scrutiny of the most rigorous criticism.