Private and public aspects of Trespass : problems of theorising law.

The need for the concrete analysis of Trespass is dictated by current
struggles over the conditions of land possession in the conjuncture.
Whilst only a Marxist approach is capable of accounting for the
complexity of the totality of Trespass and related law, the principal
general theories of law and the State are prevented from doing justice
to this task by their common rationalist conception of the
abstract/concrete relation and their consequent inability to
satisfactorily ground concrete socio-legal analysis. The proper
understanding of Marx's method of investigation in Capital, however,
can provide the basis for such analysis, through the specification of
a concrete-abstract- concrete methodological trajectory which respects
the specificity of the particular object of study. The point of
departure for the analysis of Trespass is its simplest and most
irreducible expression in concrete social practice: The equal right
to exclude the world from interference with the possession of land.
The concrete particular is analyzed through scientific Abstraction,
which further accompanies the movement from simple to ever more
complex aspects of the object until the concrete totality of law
securing relations of ownership, possession and separation is explained in its complex form and function. Finally the broadest
Concrete Totality of Trespass and related law is revealed in the full
context of its political and socio-economic determinations in the
conjuncture: The fundamental pre-condition of the transformation of
Trespass in the 1970's is the crisis of capital accumulation, as
mediated through domestic and industrial crises and the phenomena of
squatting and factory occupations which have threatened existing
relations of possession and the institutions of exclusive property
right. Law is ultimately revealed as a terrain of struggle that has
enabled the greater possessors to resolve the legal and socio-economic
crisis to their own advantage at the expense of lesser possessory
interests.