>
>No matter how some individuals might act, it's hard to
>say that the kind of anti-authoritarian critique
>anarchism presents will die, esp. as long as there are
>unjust power relations between men and women, humans
>and state, people and private power, between folks of
>different cultures & races, etc.
Yet you have not explained what you mean by unjust power relations. I can't imagine that you are in favor of what is done in the name of criminal or retributive justice. But you want our political practice (not punishment standards) guided by an ideal of justice--this despite your sympathy for Nietzsche.
And isn't your position surprisingly conservative: you call for anti authoritarian resistance only to unjust institutions, i.e. institutions which can be shown to be unjust in some objective class neutral or transcendent sense.
But aren't you then forcing us to remain within the closed totalizing horizon of juridical moral rules and norms?
Or perhaps you have a concept of justice which you acknowledge that reason cannot compel the opposing class to accept? A messianic concept of justice? Derrida?
After all...the employing class can claim to exchange an equivalent for an equivalent with each individual worker.
True enough, if a capitalist begins with an outlay of $10,000 which returns annually with a surplus value of $2000 but he now consumes yearly $2000 out of that $10,000 which he had saved or plundered, then after five years his capital will be nothing but capitalized surplus value, and through formal exchange the capitalist class will be in a position to withhold the fruits of the workers' own labor until they agree to perform unpaid labor again.
Yet how will you argue that the capitalists' holdings are the result of illegitimate behavior? Nozick will remain a bee in your bonnet.
Yes Marx the great satirist succeeds in what is called today immanent deconstructionist terms in sending up bourgeois claims to justice but even he can't complete the argument.
The relations of reciprocal exchange will only be formal after successive rounds of economic reproduction, but in terms of each individual wage bargain justice will on average be realized exactly because each party will have the legal right to with-hold from exchange until equal value can be secured. That is, capitalism ideally does achieve formal justice which in turn guarantees (a kind of) material justice. The employer will also scoff at the possibility that he has somehow committed an injustice against a class though he has not--as Marx himself seems to say--treated individual workers unjustly.
Individuals are treated justly in this sense. Especially if the employer does not have the right to with-hold wages for an inordinate amount of time or to demand criminal penalties for a worker's breach of contract. Justice can inform good reformist practice (say the abolition of wage withholding and criminal penalties); workers now have these rights in the name of justice. The demand for justice remains however conservative or presentist.
The oppressed have to be ready to fight for more even if they can't wave the banner of social justice.
Talk of social justice is obsolete verbal rubbish, Marx insisted.
But while Benjamin and Derrida agree to a point, they write of a spectral messianic justice which is beyond right, vengeance and calculation. Its spectrality disallows positive definition, I suppose, but even someone as sympathetic as Simon Critchley throws up his arms at this point.
Mysticism? Surely Marx would have thought so. And of course that does not settle it.
Rakesh