Relational, structural and systemic forms of power: the ‘right to justification’ confronting three types of domination

Abstract

This article investigates the nature of intellectual critique and social criticism Rainer Forst’s critical theory of justification enables. I introduce a taxonomy of three forms of power – namely, ‘relational’, ‘structural’ and ‘systemic’ – and related to them types of domination, and assess the capacity of Forst’s conceptual framework to address each of them. I argue that the right to justification is a potent tool for emancipation from structural to relational forms of domination, but claim that Forst’s particular conceptualisation of power prevents him from addressing injustices generated by ‘systemic domination’ – the subjection of all actors to the functional imperatives of the system of social relations.

Keywords:

• Meta-rights
• power
• domination
• capitalism
• Marx

Notes

1. I introduce the notion ‘meta-rights’ in Azmanova 2016b, p. 7. Etienne Balibar and I develop the concept ‘right to politics’ in parallel and independently of each other. His conception arises from a concern with exclusion from membership in a political community and is a reformulation of Arendt’s ‘the right to have rights’ into ‘the right to politically institute all human activity in view of liberation and equalisation.'(Balibar 2014, p. 45). I develop the idea of a ‘right to politics’ as an answer to the depoliticisation that marks the context of neoliberal capitalism, as the TINA policy consensus enacted by bureaucracies has rendered politics impervious to democratic contestation (Azmanova 2013, Azmanova and Mihai 2015, Introduction). I view it as a presupposition of the ‘right to democracy’ and as a lever for the latter’s actualization (Azmanova 2016b).

2. In an earlier formulation, this is ‘the right to be respected as a moral person who is autonomous at least in the sense that he or she must not be treated in any manner for which adequate reasons cannot be provided’ (Forst 1999, p. 40).

3. ‘Relative’ rather than ‘relational’ would therefore be a more suitable term to describe such state of power relations but I have chosen to retain the formulation that Susan Strange has coined.

4. In previous work I distinguish between relational vs. structural domination (Azmanova 2012), and relational vs. systemic domination (Azmanova 2014, p. 353), in analyses that used the terms ‘structural’ and ‘systemic’ interchangeably. I have come to realise, however, that these are three distinct forms of power and domination each deserving proper attention.

5. Jurgen Habermas (1973), under the influence of structural-functionalism, reduces capitalism to the functional sphere of production, consumption and exchange of goods and services, thus deviating radically from the original Marxian conceptualization of capitalism as a comprehensive system of social relations, a comprehensive social order.

6. I am not sure whether Rainer Forst commits to such an ontology of the social order as a historically specific, institutionalised system of social relations. He has defined society as ‘an ensemble of practices of justification’ (2014, p. 5), which leads me to think that he subscribes to a much less sociologically-informed model of social relations.

7. For a similar line of critique see Amy Allen 2016.

8. This is a recurrent theme in the writings of the first generation of Frankfurt School authors, probably most acutely addressed in Marcuse’s One Dimensional Man as the formation of a pseudo-happy consciousness in the conditions of late capitalism, consciousness that endorses fully the parameters of the system. In recent commentary on Marcuse, Michael J. Thompson (2016, p. 39) aptly describes this as ‘desiccation of consciousness [which] is a basic consequence of the structural and functional dynamics of modern, administered, capitalist society’.

9. Kant speaks of the ‘scandal of reason’ in the preface to the second edition of Critique of Pure Reason and notes again the ‘scandal of ostensible contradiction of reason with itself’ in his letter to Christian Garve, 21 September 1798 (Kant 1967, p. 252).