Justice is impossible in the context of statist reformism
I don’t recall whether or not I’ve explained this before, but the principal reason for an anti-political approach, as I’ve come to see it, is basically a synthesis of socialist and libertarian thought, but one descended strictly from the free market libertarian theory of justice.
Justice, in the libertarian view, consists of responding to aggression by:
1) stopping the aggression…
-and-
2) compelling restitution.
Attempting to partly do one of those two in the context of statist politics is referred to as either “libertarianism” or “socialism”, respectively.
By merely reducing the amount of aggression going on while preserving the overall statist system, one doesn’t merely just fail to completely end aggression. One ignores the second component of justice — restitution to the victims of statism. There remains of a “subsidy of history” unaddressed by defending property claims across the board, and the state will never redistribute property based on the most accurate theory of property — that state transfers of property are not a legitimate source of a property claim. The state can’t do that.
Likewise, it doesn’t ultimately matter if a conscientious socialist can make the state provide restitution to the victims of statism by masking such claims in anti-market (rather than more accurate anti-statist) rhetoric if statist aggression continues and accelerates.
True social justice, in the sense of addressing wholesale injustice, can not be done through the principal source of injustice, the state. Reducing aggression in a statist context necessarily leaves restitution rights unaddressed. Making restitution for statist crimes in an ongoing context of continuing statism necessarily continues and accelerates statist aggression.
This is not an argument for disengagement from public political dialogue. Rather, such dialogue must be understood as the way to influence one’s peers rather than the establishment — to build a revolutionary class consciousness.
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