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Wherever he may live in the world, the individual is a subject of a nation-state. A citizen he may be in name but a citizen in fact he is not. A State is merely the political embodiment of those who - directly or indirectly - own or control the power and resources within it. The individual (either singly or collectively) does not control the State in which he lives: the State controls him. He is subject to its laws which are there to protect the State (the ruling rich) from him (the powerless poor): and not the reverse.
State law is thus simply a vessel of containment for the labouring poor. As such, the law is indeed of merchantable quality. It is indeed fit for the purpose for which it is intended. However, this is not the purpose for which it ought to exist. This is not the purpose for which most who are subject to it are led to believe it exists. They seem to think that its purpose is to guarantee fairness and equity between all - irrespective of means and influence. They seem to believe that its purpose is to expedite justice. But if this were so then the law is decidedly unfit for its intended purpose.
All manufacturers - from lone artisan to multinational corporate - must, by law, make all their goods of what the law calls 'merchantable quality'. All manufacturers, that is, with the glaring exception of the manufacturers of the law itself. They apply the same law of merchantability to astronomically complex computer software that they do to a vacuum cleaner. But they conveniently absolve themselves of all responsibility for lack of quality, harmful side effects and consequential damage their 'product' may cause to any individual on whom it is uncompromisingly enforced.
The State employs a judiciary to apply its law to its subjects. However, this judiciary is not financed by the State. All its proceedings have to be paid for by those to whom - in the event of a dispute or violation - it is applied. But the cost of applying the law is far beyond the means of the labourer. Nevertheless, it can be well afforded by those with means, namely, the rich and the corporate. The legal system of a State therefore functions as nothing more than a mechanism to enable the State, namely the rich and corporate to resolve disputes between themselves and to enforce without opposition their wills and agendas upon their hapless subjects.
If the law of the State - inadvertently or otherwise - denies any individual the use of enough of the planet's resources to transform his labour into his needs of life, and it offers too little compensation in the form of wages or social security payments for having done so, then the natural bio-social laws which are built into his mind, render him duty-bound to his dependants to violate the offending law of the State to gain his needs of life.
If, as it will, the State views this violation as a crime and punishes the labourer for what he has done, then it is the State, and those whose interests it serves, who are the real criminals. Nevertheless, whether it be just or not, it is always the law of the State which prevails. This is because only the State commands enough capital to buy the power universally to enforce its laws. For this purpose it employs a portion of the dispossessed of whom each, in return for his subsistence, undertakes unconditionally to prostitute himself as an instrument of enforcement of the law, no matter how unjust that enforcement may be when executed upon any particular individual.
Those so employed are known collectively as the police. Of course, when a young idealist joins the police, his view of the State law is of a just arbiter. But once he is ordered to evict a starving family into the winter cold, will he be able to salve his conscience by saying 'Well, I was only doing my job'? No. I believe each human being is at all time ultimately responsible for the justness of his intents and actions towards another. If, in any circumstance, to expedite the law of the State would inflict a gross injustice on another, he alone must choose whether or not he will, in that circumstance, be that unjust law's instrument of enforcement.
As a subject of the State, the dispossessed individual is caged within a framework of law which he is able to have no part in devising. It serves not his interests but those of a capitalist minority to whom he is nothing more than an economic resource. Yet he is forced by the omni-present threat of overwhelming physical violence to adhere to its every dictate.
Throughout history, war has been a frequent feature of the relationships between the nation-states of Planet Earth. In every case it has been the rich and the corporate (those who control their respective nation-states and the terrestrial resources within them) who have instigated war to extend or defend their own selfish interests. Yet it has always been the landless labourer of each respective nation-state who has been sent to do the fighting. Labourer against labourer. Forced into bloody conflict not of their own free and unpressured volition, but by the threat of starvation, imprisonment or even execution by their respective masters.
Furthermore, the elite of each respective nation-state uses a means of persuading their dispossessed masses to fight their wars for them which is even more effective. In war, as in peace, the best means for controlling the mass-mind is the spin-machine. In war it is used to plant into the conscience of common man a fundamental obligation to defend a land in which he has no part, no vested interest and no inheritance. The elite of each nation-state thereby successfully constrains any who would dare to question to a single choice: to stay and face ostracism and rejection by their own, or to go to be killed by a stranger in a strange land. The dispossessed thus suffer the ultimate humiliation of being forced to defend the possessions of those who dispossessed them.