105. Civil Disobedience with Noëlle McAfee 

Why be an idealist about justice? The concept of justice is simply that the judgement of the law is in accordance with the law. There is no higher conception beyond it. Karl Held had some scathing things to say about the way socialists try to oppose class society with the ideal of justice: 'What sounds like a slight variation of the materialist accusation against exploitation and the political force organizing it - and also helps itself to the same material as evidence - expresses a completely different standpoint on the character of bourgeois rule. Anyone who ascribes the harmful effects of wage-labor and state coercion on the working class to the absence of rights, justice, and democracy holds, first, a good opinion of these forms of association in capitalist society; second, that they are something completely different than what they really are and accomplish; and third, calls for their realization as a political outcome, as if the democratic constitutional state is not at all what it is. And indeed it demands this in the name of the victims from the political power, whose ideology - its existence is as indispensable as it is beneficial for the subjects - it takes bitterly seriously. Yet not in a way that rejects this as a cheap idealization of political rule. The socialists of the twentieth century did not attack the demand for justice, which doesn't award some advantage to anyone who can't point to accomplishments and sacrifices on his part, as no more than the morality of class society. Instead of fighting the demand for fair treatment - which there is already enough of without the help of left critics: it is the point of view which goes along with submission in practice, reinterpreted into an assertive pounding on universally binding norms - as the false consciousness of capitalistic competition and its juridical management, modern socialists celebrate this affirmative discontent which does not want to believe that it is at its mercy. They don’t want to get it into their heads that the concept of equality - the same treatment of very different types of citizens or, to be precise, the submission of classes who are supplied with anything but equal means under the restrictions of the law - only makes sense in a society based on disparities. The real law, which puts equality and freedom into practice, thus everything whereby the state forcibly lays down the services of one class for the property of another - “to each his own!” - they disgrace before the ideal that they pass off as the “task” of the state. Measured by the “true” objectives instead of the real one, the political rule fails its task - and the degraded and offended have their advocates in the socialists, who promise the realization of their rights by means of the state."

Found the Lacanian 😉