What does justice mean to you?

That's pretty dumb. Read John Rawls.

What like a private institution?

I think he means like a court system. But I don't know what would be objective about it; everything from jury selection, the evidence presented, the topics they can talk about, and even the dedication are all based on value judgements.

It's revenge dressed up in a uniform. People do bad things for reasons and punishment doesn't address those reasons. Believing that justice makes sense requires you to believe that people act against the interest of society because they are "bad people" and that you can make "bad people" into "good people" by doing bad things to them. Or worse, you would rather frighten people into compliance than address the reasons they are acting up.

Now if someone is an active danger to others, preventing them from doing harm is a completely different matter. I'm not against imprisonment.

You're not describing justice; that's retribution. Come on guys.

wasn't the left all about absolute freedom, justice, etc. at one point?

Justice is literally retribution carried out by a designated institution.

This isn't actually true though. What is just cant just be what you got out of revenge. It's getting what you're due – which doesn't necessarily have anything to do with retribution. Like if I say it's only just that the workers keep the fruit of their labor and it's an injustice that capitalist appropriate part of it – some asshole on here will probably say "that's spooky"– but it has nothing to do with retribution.

That's vengeance. People have just outsourced their desire for revenge to an impersonal institution.

The idea good deeds should be rewarded isn't the same as the idea that bad deeds should be punished. The only reason people think of these things together is because the justice meme conflates them. This is probably the case to distract people from the idiocy of "do bad things to bad people." If someone criticizes the idea of punishment, sheep can bleat "but then how would we reward good people?" This sort of ideological bundling is a major component of how religions and similar belief systems keep people from examining them too closely.

Since you brought it up, though, the workers keeping the surplus of their labor has nothing to do with justice. They create value in doing labor, and then the employer steals that value from them. The issue here isn't "the employer doesn't pay them enough wages - they're owed more." The issue here is that the employer steals the value produced in the first place. You don't need a concept of justice to see why theft causes problems, especially theft on such a large scale.

Things I never said. I also never said good people are owed good things. Everyone that is a person deserves the same amount of rights and responsibilities – these don't go away just because of some transgression against someone else. Even with crime, retribution isn't necessarily the only possible response and I'd say not even the just one – that's you're assertion. Rehabilitation and reformation seem like the more reasonable options for anti-social behavior. You've also decided that justice is only for crimes and punishment when it's a really much broader idea. Like fir Christians, the idea of "just love" refers to a healthy amount of love for someone and not, as you may believe, some form of romantic retribution.

And stealing from someone is an injustice.

...

A system of power relations interested in regulating its own particulars.

It doesn't matter if you said these things. This is what the word justice means.

No, it's the assertion made by the concept of justice. My assertion was that this is not the proper response. The idea that crime should be met with retribution is a core part of the concept of justice.

I see my point about bundling ideas together has not penetrated at all. This is the point where saying "It's a spook," would be enough, but this is too retarded to leave alone. I'm going to have to pick this bullshit apart. This is like saying "Family Values are a broad concept. Just because you've decided that it means opposing gay marriage (and definitely not some other group, while you are just observing their use of the concept) doesn't mean that's all it is. Family Values means that children should be raised in a loving environment."

What does justice have to do with loving someone? If you mean "just" as in "only" in which case you've gone from bundling ideologies together to committing a four terms fallacy. Otherwise, you seem to be combining ever more unrelated ideas into this "justice" bundle with nothing really connecting them. Why are punishment and reward tied in to the same concept? ''Why is love tied to this concept as well? What is the justification for any of this? I'm not disputing that these are people's beliefs. My point is that these beliefs are nonsensical and counterproductive.

According to this ideology. The point is there is no need for an ideology of justice here. Theft hurts people because they need resources to live. Attaching a particular name and a new set of abstract ideas to theft is unnecessary. All it will do is distract and alienate people from the material event of having their labor stolen from them.

How is justice supposed to work in a socialist society?

Until we live in socialism, it's hard to say. But with class society being destroyed, we're sure to pick some new identity of particular living that we will socialize into being categorized as criminal. What is endorsed under capitalism, then abolished in socialism and made criminal otherwise. Whatever the target though, the power relations will remain in a changed form, this time being produced chiefly by a proletarian subjectivity rather than a bourgeois subjectivity.

I think at the core of it, your usage of the word "justice" is idiosyncratic. I'm not saying you're wrong, but that this is just you using a word in a different way than I think most people do.

Justice is a vague concept that lends itself to idiosyncratic interpretation. My interpretation is that it's a nonsense idea. What I present is my observation of how other people interpret it.

Justice means examining any situation from the point of view of an egalitarian norm vindicated as universal.

In the idea of justice, equality is far more important that liberty, and universality far more important than particularity, identity, or individuality.

A spook.

Didn't liberalism at least give a good effort in developing concepts related to the state-to-citizen relationship like equality before the law, rule of law, checks and balances, social construct etc? Don't socialists need to go over this area much more? Don't they take this area for granted?

An effort indeed.
I would say yes to both questions here. For the average leftist (not even going into liberals and reactionaries) there's a lack of understanding how liberal capitalism functions in terms of basic epistemes that construct it, and then without that understanding they go on to critique it from a socialist perspective. This is a shame since it is liberal capitalism itself which provides its own contradictions that allow for a socialist alternative to even be conceived of.

Anarchists dismiss the various social contracts that attempt to legitimize state authority.

The aspects of law and state governance you're talking about was probably dealt with by USSR political theorists and philosophers. Maybe they haven't been translated – but I'd be surprised if there was nothing out there on it.

I don't know much but it just seems that anarchism is too negative and doesn't attempt to describe in detail how social life would be managed.

We need more socialists going into law, military etc.

Next you'll say we need more socialist cops and federal agents.

Hey yui, what type of socialist are you?

What I mean is that we need more socialists studying military in order to understand how it works and develop ideas

Far better would be mutinies from within the military itself.

There are a ton of anarchist literature on that stuff. Really; but it depends on the type of anarchist that you are. Mutualists, for example don't have the same issue because they could always turn to market models and just question where an-caps go wrong. The Anarchist FAQ touches on some of these issues and "anarchy works" by Peter Gelderloos goes into these things in depth. Luckily for anarchists, there is resources out there in prison/police abolishment from non-anarchists as well. Whether or not they read those authors is another issue.

More socialists in the military is not the worst idea. People may join the military for a lot of reasons that have nothing to do with patriotism, like some may need to go to college but can't afford it, need a job that doesn't require a ton of education, or even like helping less developed countries in times of crises. And many may come back dissolutioned with the political system anyway.

Cops are basically a lost cause. A class conscious cop who is still a cop, is still a cop.

A non-Marxist socialist, i.e. I still think that states are okay for leftist revolutionaries to use, but I'm against all the dogmas and failed elements that have encrusted themselves around Marxist ideology over the decades (Stalinism and Trotskyism being the biggest examples).

This is 100% true.

f

You're a self-described left Hegelian and a total fraud.

Would you mind clarifying what specific dogmas of Stalinism you find displeasing?

Or is it "Stalinism", i.e. the great imaginary ideology? In this case it is entrenched only in the imagination of non-Marxists, rather than in Marxism itself.

spoogs :DDDD

I am really enjoying this debate

Glad someone got something out of it. I think the other guy left.

Im pretty sure "Stalinism" just refers to Marxism-Leninism.

That would be even more enlightening.

You may not like ML for many reasons (most of them you being SocDem, Anarchist or simply non-Socialist), but to specifically point the whole thing out as one failed element is quite bold.