The signature of modern leftist rhetoric is the deployment of terminology that simply cannot fail to command assent. As Orwell himself recognized, even slavery could be sold if labeled "freedom." In this vein, who could ever conscientiously oppose the pursuit of "social justice" -- i.e., a just society?
To
understand "social justice," we must contrast it with the earlier view
of justice against which it was conceived -- one that arose as a revolt
against political absolutism. With a government (e.g., a monarchy) that
is granted absolute power, it is impossible to speak of any injustice
on its part. If it can do anything, it can't do anything "wrong."
Justice as a political/legal term can begin only when limitations are
placed upon the sovereign, i.e., when men define what is unjust for
government to do. The historical realization traces from the Roman
senate to Magna Carta to the U.S. Constitution to the 19th century. It
was now a matter of "justice" that government not arrest citizens
arbitrarily, sanction their bondage by others, persecute them for their
religion or speech, seize their property, or prevent their travel.
This culmination of centuries of ideas and struggles became known as
liberalism.
And it was precisely in opposition to this liberalism --
not feudalism or theocracy or the
ancien régime,
much less 20th century fascism -- that Karl Marx formed
and detailed our popular concept of "social justice"
(which has become a kind of "new and improved" substitute
for a storeful of other terms -- Marxism, socialism,
collectivism -- that, in the wake of Communism's history and collapse,
are now unmarketable).
"The history of all existing society," he and Engels declared, "is the
history of class struggles. Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian,
lord and serf ... oppressor and oppressed, stood in sharp opposition to
each other." They were quite right to note the political castes and
resulting clashes of the pre-liberal era. The expositors of liberalism
(Spencer, Maine) saw their ethic, by establishing the political
equality of all (e.g., the abolition of slavery, serfdom, and
inequality of rights), as moving mankind from a "society of status" to
a "society of contract." Alas, Marx the Prophet could not accept that
the classless millennium had arrived before he did. Thus, he revealed to
a benighted humanity that liberalism was in fact merely another stage
of History's class struggle -- "capitalism" --
with its own combatants:
the "bourgeois" and the "proletarian."
The former was a professional or a business owner,
the latter a manual laborer.
Marx's "classes" were not political castes but occupations.
Today
the terms have broadened to mean essentially income brackets.
If Smith
can make a nice living from his writing, he's a bourgeois; if Jones is
reciting poetry for coins in a subway terminal, he's a proletarian.
But the freedoms of speech and enterprise that they share equally are
"nothing but lies and falsehoods so long as" their differences in
affluence and influence persist (Luxemburg). The unbroken line from The Communist Manifesto
to its contemporary adherents is that economic inequality is the
monstrous injustice of the capitalist system, which must be replaced by
an ideal of "social justice" -- a "classless" society created by the
elimination of all differences in wealth and "power."
Give Marx his due: He was absolutely correct in identifying the political freedom of liberalism -- the right of each man to do as he wishes with his own resources -- as the origin of income disparity under capitalism. If Smith is now earning a fortune while Jones is still stuck in that subway, it's not because of the "class" into which each was born, to say nothing of royal patronage. They are where they are because of how the common man spends his money. That's why some writers sell books in the millions, some sell them in the thousands, and still others can't even get published. It is the choices of the masses ("the market") that create the inequalities of fortune and fame -- and the only way to correct those "injustices" is to control those choices.
Every
policy item on the leftist agenda is merely a deduction from this
fundamental premise. Private property and the free market of exchange
are the most obvious hindrances to the implementation of that agenda,
but hardly the only. Also verboten is the choice to emigrate, which
removes one and one's wealth from the pool of resources to be
redirected by the demands of "social justice" and its enforcers. And
crucial to the justification of a "classless" society
is
the undermining of any notion that individuals are responsible for
their behavior and its consequences. To maintain the illusion that
classes still exist under capitalism, it cannot be conceded that the
"haves" are responsible for what they have or that the "have nots" are
responsible for what they have not. Therefore, people are what they are
because of where they were born into the social order -- as if this
were early 17th century France.
Men
of achievement are pointedly referred to as "the privileged" -- as if
they were given everything and earned nothing. Their seeming
accomplishments are, at best, really nothing more than the results of
the sheer luck of a beneficial social environment (or even -- in the
allowance of one egalitarian, John Rawls -- "natural endowment").
Consequently, the "haves" do not deserve what they have. The flip side
of this is the insistence that the "have nots" are, in fact, "the
underprivileged," who have been denied their due by an unjust society.
If some men wind up behind bars, they are (to borrow from Broadway)
depraved only because they are "deprived." Environmental determinism,
once an almost sacred doctrine of official Soviet academe, thrives as
the "social constructionist" orthodoxy of today's anti-capitalist left.
The theory of "behavioral scientists" and their boxed rats serviceably
parallels the practice of a Central Planning Board and its closed
society.
The
imperative of economic equality also generates a striking opposition
between "social justice" and its liberal rival. The equality of the
latter, we've noted, is the equality of all individuals in the eyes of
the law -- the protection of the political rights of each man,
irrespective of "class" (or any assigned collective identity, hence the
blindfold of Justice personified). However, this political equality,
also noted, spawns the difference in "class" between Smith and Jones.
All this echoes Nobel laureate F.A. Hayek's observation that if "we
treat them equally [politically], the result must be inequality in
their actual [i.e., economic] position." The irresistible conclusion is
that "the only way to place them in an equal [economic] position would
be to treat them differently [politically]" -- precisely the conclusion
that the advocates of "social justice" themselves have always reached.
In
the nations that had instituted this resolution throughout their legal
systems, "different" political treatment came to subsume the
extermination or imprisonment of millions because of their "class"
origins. In our own American "mixed economy," which mixes differing
systems of justice as much as economics, "social justice" finds
expression in such policies and propositions as progressive taxation
and income redistribution; affirmative action and even "reparations,"
its logical implication; and selective censorship in the name of
"substantive equality," i.e., economic equality disingenuously
reconfigured as a Fourteenth Amendment right and touted as the moral
superior to "formal equality," the equality of political freedom
actually guaranteed by the amendment. This last is the project of a
growing number of leftist legal theorists that includes Cass Sunstein
and Catharine MacKinnon, the latter opining that the "law of
[substantive] equality and the law of freedom of expression [for all]
are on a collision course in this country." Interestingly, Hayek had
continued, "Equality before the law and material equality are,
therefore, not only different, but in conflict with each other" -- a
pronouncement that evidently draws no dissent.
Hayek
emphasized another conflict between the two conceptions of justice, one
we can begin examining simply by asking who the subject of liberal
justice is. The answer: a person -- a flesh-and-blood person, who is
held accountable for only those actions that constitute specifically
defined crimes of violence (robbery, rape, murder) against other
citizens. Conversely, who is the subject of "social justice" --
society?
Indeed yes, but is society really a "who"? When we speak of
"social psychology" (the standard example), no one believes that there
is a "social psyche" whose thoughts can be analyzed. And yet the very
notion of "social justice" presupposes a volitional Society whose
actions can (and must) be held accountable. This jarring bit of
Platonism traces all the way back to Marx himself, who, "despite all
his anti-Idealistic and anti-Hegelian rhetoric, is really an Idealist
and Hegelian ... asserting, at root, that [Society] precedes and
determines the characteristics of those who are [its] members" (R.A.
Childs, Jr.). Behold leftism's alternative to liberalism's "atomistic
individualism": reifying collectivism,
what Hayek called
"anthropomorphism or personification."
Too obviously, it is not liberalism that atomizes an entity (a concrete), but "social justice" that reifies an aggregate (an abstraction). And exactly what injustice is Society responsible for? Of course: the economic inequality between Smith and Jones -- and Johnson and Brown and all others. But there is no personified Society who planned and perpetrated this alleged inequity, only a society of persons acting upon the many choices made by their individual minds. Eventually, though, everyone recognizes that this Ideal of Society doesn't exist in the real world -- leaving two options. One is to cease holding society accountable as a legal entity, a moral agent. The other is to conclude that the only practicable way to hold society accountable for "its" actions is to police the every action of every individual.
The
apologists for applied "social justice" have always explained away its
relationship to totalitarianism as nothing more than what we may call
(after Orwell's Animal Farm) the "Napoleon scenario": the
subversion of earnest revolutions by demented individuals (e.g.,
Stalin, Mao -- to name just two among too many). What can never be
admitted is that authoritarian brutality is the
not-merely-possible-but-inevitable realization of the nature of "social
justice" itself.
What is "social justice"? The theory that implies and justifies the practice of socialism. And what is "socialism"? Domination by the State. What is "socialized" is state-controlled. So what is "totalitarian" socialism other than total socialism, i.e., state control of everything? And what is that but the absence of a free market in anything, be it goods or ideas? Those who contend that a socialist government need not be totalitarian, that it can allow a free market -- independent choice, the very source of "inequality"! -- in some things (ideas) and not in others (goods -- as if, say, books were one or the other), are saying only that the socialist ethic shouldn't be applied consistently. This is nothing less than a confession of moral cowardice. It is the explanation for why, from Moscow to Managua, all the rivalries within the different socialist revolutions have been won by not the "democratic" or "libertarian" socialists, but the totalitarians, i.e., those who don't qualify their socialism with antonyms. "Totalitarian socialism" is not a variation but a redundancy, which is why half-capitalist hypocrites will always lose out to those who have the courage of their socialist convictions. (Likewise, someone whose idea of "social justice" is a moderate welfare state is someone who's willing to tolerate far more "social injustice" than he's willing to eliminate.)
What is "social justice"? The abolition of privacy. Its repudiation of property rights, far from being a fundamental, is merely one derivation of this basic principle. Socialism, declared Marx, advocates "the positive abolition of private property [in order to effect] the return of man himself as a social, i.e., really human, being." It is the private status of property -- meaning the privacy, not the property -- that stands in opposition to the social (i.e., "socialized," and thus "really human") nature of man. Observe that the premise holds even when we substitute x for property. If private anything denies man's social nature, then so does private everything. And it is the negation of anything and everything private -- from work to worship to even family life -- that has been the social affirmation of the socialist state.
What
is "social justice"? The opposite of capitalism. And what is
"capitalism"? It is Marx's coinage (minted by his materialist
dispensation) for the Western liberalism that diminished state power
from absolutism to limited government; that, from John Locke to the
American Founders, held that each individual has an inviolable right to
his own life, liberty, and property, which government exists solely to
secure. Now what would the reverse of this be but a resurrection of
Oriental despotism, the reactionary increase of state power from
limited government to absolutism, i.e., "totalitarianism," the absolute
control of absolutely everything? And what is the opposite -- the
violation
-- of securing the life, liberty, and property of all men
other than mass murder, mass tyranny, and mass plunder? And what is
that
but the point at which theory ends and history begins?
And
yet even before that point -- before the 20th century, before
publication of the Manifesto itself -- there were those who did indeed
make the connection between what Marxism inherently meant on paper and
what it would inevitably mean in practice. In 1844, Arnold Ruge
presented the abstract: "a police and slave state." And in 1872,
Michael Bakunin provided the specifics:
[T]he People's State of Marx ... will not content itself with administering and governing the masses politically, as all governments do today. It will also administer the masses economically, concentrating in the hands of the State the production and division of wealth, the cultivation of land, the establishment and development of factories, the organization and direction of commerce, and finally the application of capital to production by the only banker -- the State. All that will demand an immense knowledge and many heads "overflowing with brains" in this government. It will be the reign of scientific intelligence, the most aristocratic, despotic, arrogant, and elitist of all regimes. There will be a new class, a new hierarchy of real and counterfeit scientists and scholars, and the world will be divided into a minority ruling in the name of knowledge, and an immense ignorant majority. And then, woe unto the mass of ignorant ones!
It
is precisely this "new class" that reflects the defining contradiction
of modern leftist reality: The goal of complete economic equality
logically enjoins the means of complete state control, yet this means
has never practically achieved that end. Yes, Smith and Jones, once
"socialized," are equally poor and equally oppressed, but now above
them looms an oligarchy of not-to-be-equalized equalizers. The
inescapable rise of this "new class" -- privileged economically as well
as politically, never quite ready to "wither away" -- forever destroys
the possibility of a "classless" society. Here the lesson of socialism
teaches what should have been learned from the lesson of pre-liberal
despotism -- that state coercion is a means to no end but its own. Far
from expanding equality from the political to the economic realm, the
pursuit of "social justice" serves only to contract it within both.
There will never be any kind of equality -- or real justice -- as long
as a socialist elite stands behind the trigger while the rest of us
kneel before the barrel.
Further Reading
The contemporary left remains possessed by the spirit of Marx, present even where he's not, and the best overview of his ideology remains Thomas Sowell's Marxism: Philosophy and Economics, which is complemented perfectly by the most accessible refutation of that ideology, David Conway's A Farewell to Marx. Hayek's majestic The Mirage of Social Justice is a challenging yet rewarding effort, while his The Road to Serfdom provides an unparalleled exposition of how freedom falls to tyranny. Moving from theory to practice, Communism: A History, Richard Pipes' slim survey, ably says all that is needed.
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