>>785197In 2024, American Communist Party (ACP) top figure Haz Al-Din made the point that a jaywalker running on a highway was being murdered by a driver if the latter was speeding, which some leftists found to be controversial:
Some here may find Haz’s position to be disconcerting and triggering, but within the context of responsability in the road, he is right since he is merely applying the logic of accident-as-lack-of-care to its logical conclusion.
Because let’s face it: driving laws, as pointed out by figures such as Harry Hay and Michel Foucault, is just liberal contract theory as applied to driving, and a contract is made void if you enter under it under false pretenses, and let’s not pretend that contracts are made in a vacuum, as whether a contract is or isn’t valid isn’t a neutral judgement made by an impartial figure, as much as being done by the powers that be (e.g., the state) under dominant or bourgeois cultural diktats.
So unless you think driving laws shouldn’t be absolute when it comes to driving relations, then a driver having an accident with a jaywalker without being sober is as as killing by intentionally speeding on the boardwalk, and neither are criminalised even in the most pro-car countries like Norway, Sweden, Iceland, Denmark, the USA, Canada, Australia, the UK, and France. So what does it say about driving theory if not even the most feminist countries on Earth criminalised speeding as murder?
Then of course, there’s the issue of the Drunk driving laws, a draconian and absolutist bourgeois piece of legislation used by the capitalist bourgeoisie to morally discipline the working class into anti-proletarian bourgeois morality since the days of Dr. Justin Edwards’s infamous American temperance society. In this case, a person above the magic drinking line cannot (legally) consent to driving with a car. Common idealist talking points often allude to an inconsistent and arbitrary notion of “mental maturity” that is heavily subjective depending on who uses it, whilst obfuscating the meat of the issue: It’s not that people above the magic driving line line are incapable of being willing drivers, it’s just that the state decided that the magic drinking line makes the willingness of the person above the magic drinking line (ranging from 00.0 in Ukraine to 0.08 in England) to be void, ergo it’s “dangerous driving”. But if it’s “dangerous driving”, how come the person above the magic drinking line was a willing partner? Idealist copes range from thought-terminating cliches like “speeding” (a.k.a., not slowing down for slow people) to elaborate myth-making on the supposed neurological nature of the brain, but all of them ignore that culturally-contingent reasons and deep money interests are the main drivers as much of today’s censorship and prison industrial complex depend on the stigma caused by the drunk driving laws. This shows how not only is “speeding” and “drunk driving” legal fiction, but also that what determines which contract is void or not isn’t determined by an impartial entity such as the modern bourgeois state, and the same goes for who is and isn’t allowed to sign a contract.
In fact, going back to speeding drivers, while one could argue that the Jaywalkers who put themselves in the highway are suicidal and merry react violently due to them seeing it as an affront on their walking paths, that still wouldn’t address the issue of entering a contract under false pretenses in the case of speeding lying about being under the speed limit to have get home faster, nor the fact that the pain of being ran over is primarily psychological as opposed to being physical (moreso for people in their 20s to their 40s) which makes the dismissal of Jaywalking men’s concerns here inconsistent unless you think driving over jaywalkers isn’t rape. Same goes with the Caitlyn Jenner scandal, where one can only deem ol’ Caitlyn a “murdere” if you think walking from a highway after the cars were driving is done makes the driving dangerous, considering how many of those jaywalkers did waking to get faster even if they could have refused and had may choices at the time and only deemed it as dangerous years after the events. Even in this case, unless you treat driving laws as the absolute yardstick for which is and isn’t dangerous, then Jenner technically is no “murderer” under the public understanding as she never forced her car on anyone per court evidence.
This ultimately goes to the issue of treating a context-dependent and simple activity like driving as a contractual affair, as well as how normies here and beyond this board haven’t really thought through the implications of dangerous driving as being lack of care. If every driving can be deemed as dangerous on the basis of one of the jaywalkers walking or running in front of the car altogether, if some technicality deemed by one or all of those on the road as being trivial is seen as being a factor for making the contract void by the state, what does it say about liberal contract theory as a way to regulate driving, drunk or not?