[lbo-talk] Noam 1, Israelo-apartheid 0

[brad]

>'Cuz that's what you have to do, unless your argument is that any particular
>sense of justice is fundamentally situated in time, space, specific material
>power relations and ideological conditions... at which point you're with
>Foucault.  Its not like justice is ever tied to anything idealist and
>transcendent like Truth, The American Way, the universal Scales of or
>anything.


>Modifying wikipedia, justice is either tied to organic harmony, divine
>command or natural law - read transcendent - or it is defined by power,
>mutual agreement or utilitarian consequences - read, as above, appropriate
>to Foucauldian analysis (in the present instance where we're taking either
>Chomsky's or Foucault's side).
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That is not really what is happening in this debate.  Chomsky is
critical of Foucault's assumption that the prols have some ingrained
goodness outside of a practice of justice.  He is not calling forth
some higher form of justice.  Foucault is actually the one claiming
that because of their prior exploitation and oppression the prols in a
post revolutionary society will implement a more just form of society.

 Chomsky is rightly critical of this and is instead offering a theory
of justice based on practice, or actual human, material power
relations... Foucault is not arguing that prol justice will be the
product of the manner in which the prols conduct themselves, but is
instead offering a naturalistic understanding of how power
automatically produces a subject that is more just in its resistance.
He is actually the one with the transhistoric and transsocial theory
of justice, not Chomsky.

Brad