Word: walzer
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Citizenship may negate revolution in the state, but citizenship in the state does not generate corporate citizenship. Walzer forcefully insists on a right of revolution against corporate authority. Judged as a political community rather than a piece of property, the corporation is an authoritarian system, "The issue is not ownership but what ownership entails...
...black movement illustrates the unstable leadership which results from its haphazard process of virtual representation. For better or worse, community control has come to mean internecine warfare. Walzer clearly believes in black solidarity and worker solidarity, at least as some transcendent precipitant of social division, but he indicates how hard it is to represent this solidarity through legitimate, democratic process...
Activists may be obligated to push the masses faster than they wish to go-but how fast can an oppressed minority proceed against a majority? Walzer immediately rules out revolution, no matter how great the popular oppression, so long as the democratic rules can be exploited with some success. Democracy, as he defines it, involves mutual respect for the freedom to act. The activist need not fully respect the rules, but he must not undermine them...
...perennial borderline case, the polity may recognize the oppressed as full citizens, honestly, count their votes, and consistently defeat their candidates. Here is a stalemate. The activists have acquired competing obligations both to the system and the system's victims. A radical himself. Walzer is uncomfortable with the paradox he has presented. His discomfort expresses a denial that "imperfect justice should be endured as long as possible." In a burst of patriotic optimism, he argues that in a democracy the hypocrisy of the majority can be exposed...
ACTIVISTS must live with tension in Walzer's state. They work simultaneously to raise the consciousness of the oppressed, keep open the possibilities of democratic action, and yet accept concrete improvements which may dampen that consciousness. All disclaimers aside, Walzer in fact asks frustrated activists to accept an incremental politics. "Equal rights cannot be won by a revolutionary attack on the social structure within which rights are being sought." Only a truly drastic oppression generates total freedom from the restraints of civility. Formally equal in law, the American poor and black have incurred some obligations to civility...