Issues with Social Justice

Political Philosophy
1

For some background, I am a former anarchist and still consider myself a libertarian socialism-adjacent democratic socialist. I believe in freedom and equality for all people. I also believe that all people have a range of positive rights including:

  • A right to possession based on use (but not a right to private property)
  • A right to housing
  • A right to food and water
  • A right to an education
  • A right to health care
  • A right to participate in the democratic control of all the organizations and polities in which they work or live
  • A right to live in the country where they were born (the reason why I do not say a right to live anywhere is this could be used to justify colonialism)
  • A right to use their native language in all circles of life
  • A right to practice their religion so far as they do not impose themselves on others

I also believe that all people are born (or ‘socialized’, which is relevant later) morally equally, and are responsible solely and entirely for their own commissions and omissions (and are certainly not responsible for actions by others belonging to groups into which they were born or ‘socialized’ over which they have no realistic control, also known as collective responsibility).

To me the idea of collective responsibility is particularly odious, and has often been used to justify things such as genocide. If an idea suggests collective responsibility it is a good sign that that idea is wrong.

I am specifically against hierarchies in general, even inverted ones (this is relevant later). Taking a hierarchy and placing those who were on the bottom on the top and those who were on the top on the bottom makes it no less a hierarchy.

So… The concept of social justice is very popular in many circles, and sounds good. After all, you want justice for all people, right?

However, I have come to find that many forms of ‘social justice’ directly conflict with the idea of freedom and equality for all, the idea of individual responsibility solely and entirely for one’s own commissions and omissions, and the concept of personal agency.

To start off, consider the concept of ‘privilege’ foundational to many forms of ‘social justice’, including feminism and anti-racism. It can be considered as unearned position. Unearned position is bad, correct?

But to hold privilege against people goes specifically against the idea that all people are born (or ‘socialized’) morally equally, as to do so specifically considers that some people are born morally inferior than other people. By this new hierarchies are erected in the place of the old traditional hierarchies.

For instance, consider feminism. Despite what some feminists may claim, much of feminism considers women as a category morally superior to men as a category, by considering men to be more privileged than women, and thus establishes a new hierarchy with women on top.

Of course, the idea that a poor Black man with few opportunities is somehow more privileged than the likes of Cheryl Sandberg is a cruel joke. This by itself shows how bankrupt the idea is.

Some feminists will get around this by saying that people are born equal, but are ‘socialized’ to be unequal, but this is really just rhetoric that amounts to the same thing.

Furthermore, very many feminists believe in collective responsibility for men. This is immediately apparent from when reads comments by self-identified feminists that men need to police other men ─ this logic directly leads to collective responsibility by making men responsible for other men’s commissions and omissions, and hence responsible by omission if they are not able to effect such control over other men.

Would you support this logic when applied to other groups? If someone said “Jews need to police other Jews” (in reference to the crimes of the Israeli state), would you consider this logic acceptable in the very least? Or is it just that men are an acceptable target while Jews are not? (That said, I hope you do not believe that Jews also are an acceptable target ─ the idea that Jews have responsibility for the actions of other Jews is a key idea that has fed the anti-Semitism that ultimately resulted in the Holocaust.)

If this logic were followed consistently, this would lead to the idea that the same poor Black man ought to somehow police Donald Trump by being a fellow man, and by being unable to do so is somehow in part responsible for Trump’s many crimes. This goes to show how the idea that ‘men need to police other men’ is bankrupt.

Some feminists will say “but this is not what feminism stands for”, but that essentially amounts to a No True Scotsman, as plenty of self-identified feminists do indeed believe that men are morally inferior to women, that men are predators, that individual men are responsible for the actions of all men regardless of their own agency or lack thereof, and so on. If you do not believe this, just do a bit of reading on feminist groups online.

Looking at from a different direction, consider anti-racism. It divides people into oppressors and oppressed, e.g. in an American context White people and Black people respectively. These are categories which are assigned based on birth (or ‘socialization’) rather than one’s own deeds and misdeeds.

This then leads to the problem that by this logic one can oppress someone else simply by doing nothing beyond being born (or ‘socialized’), and by the logic of some people (such as those pushing the ‘White fragility’ idea some years back) one will oppress other people no matter what one does or does not do, i.e. that one’s status as an ‘oppressor’ is intrinsically inescapable. This denies people’s agency and directly conflicts with the principle that one is responsible solely and entirely for one’s own commissions and omissions.

Of course, the idea that Clarence Thomas is oppressed and a poor White trans woman is an oppressor by birth or ‘socialization’ (even if they do nothing in their entire life to actually oppress anyone, and never have the opportunity in their life to prevent anyone else from oppressing anyone) goes to show the validity of this logic.

All of this said, you will bring up Black feminism and intersectionality in response to this, and yes, they address much of the above.

However, the idea of intersectionality when considered uncritically brings its own issues. This is because it boils people down to a combination of moral pluses and minuses attached to adjectives that can be assigned to people. This results in things such as ‘cis straight sane White Christian men’ are considered morally inferior to ‘trans queer mentally ill Black Muslim women’, i.e. the infamous ‘Oppression Olympics’ where a new hierarchy is erected with the most oppressed on the top of the hierarchy and the least oppressed on the bottom. Anyone who is opposed to hierarchy ought to oppose this if they seek to be logically and morally consistent. This goes to show that naive intersectionality is just as bankrupt as much of conventional feminism and anti-racism.

So what are your thoughts?

2

I would have edited my OP but I seem to not be allowed to, so I am posting a correction here: I had misspelled the name of Sheryl Sandberg as “Cheryl Sandberg” in my OP.

4

Seems like you have bought, at least in part, into institutional DARVO employed by the right. Why?

Social justice is about leveling the playing field. Full stop.

5

I believe in liberation for all people, regardless of social class, sex or gender, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, and so on.

Yet at the same time I reject much of liberal ‘social justice’ as it seeks to uplift people of some given category while ignoring people of other categories. Liberal feminism seeks to uplift women while ignoring social class or race, and is commonly a bourgeois White women’s phenomenon. Liberal anti-racism seeks to uplift People of Color while ignoring social class, women, or like, and is commonly a Black men’s phenomenon. Liberal intersectionality tried to do better and tries to embrace all categories… but conveniently often overlooks than social class or claims to seek to uplift working class and poor people while overlooking why they are working class and poor.

6

At some point you have to focus on the specifics of any given category. It doesn’t logically follow that in doing so, one is necessarily “ignoring people of other categories”. That there remain so many categories shows the immaturity of both society and mankind as a whole.

7

The key thing is that different sorts of liberal ‘social justice’ commonly fail to seek the liberation of people beyond a certain social set, and of course, they all ignore the fact that the vast majority is working class (in the socialist sense of the word) and that social liberalism will ultimately fail to liberate them.

You cannot truly have liberation without socialism, and not Marxist-Leninist ‘socialism’ either, which ultimately results in more oppression despite the best intentions of its followers.

Of course, I do firmly object to the problem converse of liberal ‘social justice’ to those socialists who loudly proclaim “No War but the Class War!” as a way of shouting down liberatory struggles beyond the socialist one. Freedom is not freedom if only half of humanity is free (i.e. working class liberation without women’s liberation), for instance.

8

You seem to have ignored the main point of my post. I can flesh it out if you really need me to.

9

The thing is that liberal ‘social justice’ movements not only consistently address certain portions of society, but due to their roots in cultural liberalism consistent ignore the economic dimension of oppression.

Take liberal feminism for instance and let’s overlook the fact that it only seeks to liberate half of humanity from the get-go for a moment. It still, even if fully actualized, would only liberate a small portion of those it seeks to liberate, as the vast majority of women are working class, and even if the burden of oppression based on gender were thrown off they would still be subject to oppression and exploitation by capitalism.

10

It’s as if you have the expectation that no member of a given categegory be allowed to speak about the specifics of that category without also speaking about every other category as well. It’s an absurd expectation.

12

The key word is ‘liberal’ (which I did not make clear enough in my OP).

For instance, my objections to bourgeois White liberal feminism do not extend to anarcha-feminism, and many of them do not extend to working-class Black or Chicana feminism.

Edit:

When I use the term ‘liberal’ here I do not mean “everything left-of-center that is not Marxism or anarchism” but rather the politico-economic ideology of liberalism characterized by the combination of a focus on individual rights, rule of law, representative government, and private capitalism.

I used Sheryl Sandberg in my OP as an example because she personally embodies modern bourgeois White liberal feminism and what is wrong with it better than anyone else that I can think of off the top of my head.

16

I had to delete a few posts because a very low quality post gained a chain of replies. Please stay on topic from now on, and take your questions or complaints about moderation to the Feedback category.

Thanks.

17

From what I gather Sandberg adopted the feminist label as a marketing ploy which is akin to Nazi Germany having adopted the socialist label as a marketing ploy. Is it valid for detractors of socialism to point to Nazi Germany at all? Why are you pointing to Sandberg at all? For that matter, why are you pointing to social justice at all?

Also, you still haven’t actually addressed the following:

18

Social status is complex and involves intersecting factors of identity, power, economics, culture, and context. It’s not just simple gender and not just simple race. And no sophisticated understanding of social justice would make an assumption that a woman is disadvantaged beside all men simply because of gender. This would ignore class, race and other factors.

I have no theoretical model for social justice and no doubt it is easy to find annoying activist cocksuckers in any movement. Along with simple-minded and erroneous understandings of what people believe in this space.

19

Sandberg exemplifies the most careerist, pro-capitalist extreme of liberal feminism and thus is a good example of what is wrong with liberal feminism.

Of course, your argument is that Sandberg is No True Feminist.

(That said, the reason why saying that National Socialism is not socialism is not an example of No True Socialist is because the underlying principles of socialism, e.g. seeking social ownership of capital, seeking liberation of workers from oppression and exploitation regardless of categories such as race and ethnicity, were well-established before National Socialism, which directly contradicts these principles, came on the scene.)

You seem to believe that people can engage in particular identitarian struggles completely isolated from the greater politico-economic scheme of things or from others’ identitarian struggles.

I believe such isolation is impossible, and as I have stated in this thread there are politico-economic positions and negations of other struggles at least implicit if not explicit in the sorts of social movements that are the topic of this thread.

‘Social justice’, being a liberal movement overall, has in the very least an implicit support or at least acceptance of capitalism, and hence negates the workers’ (and hence the majority of humanity’s) struggle for liberation.

Furthermore, individual sub-movements within the ‘social justice’ movement have their own negations of other people’s struggles, as mentioned. Conventional liberal feminism, for instance, negates the struggles of Black men for liberation in so far as it projects men as being privileged oppressors and thus unworthy of liberation (more sophisticated feminist analyses will rationalize this through the concept of the Patriarchy, but I have seen many self-identified feminists directly state that men are predators and men who refuse to agree with them are ‘incels’).

20

(I should add that in the case of feminism versus Black men, there is a sordid history of Black men being regarded and wrongly accused as rapists, especially of White women, and like, so one cannot say that the relationship between White feminism and Black men is neutral by any means.)

(Of course, White feminism and Black male anti-racism have largely negated the struggles of Black women.)

21

Regarding Sandberg vs. Nazi the point is that adopting a label is not necessarily the same as actually being what the label denotes.

Regarding the “liberal social justice movement”, “social justice” is an umbrella term used to categorize many distinct movements. There is no central leadership. As such, references to a “social justice movement” is a reification error as it cannot possess intent. Adding the word “liberal” only compounds the fallacy.

Are you going to sidestep these points as well?

22

Of course there is no central leadership to ‘social justice’, just as there is no central leadership to many other categories of people and movements; there is no central leadership to ‘capitalists’ or to ‘socialists’ or to ‘Christians’ (except for to individual Church structures such as the Catholic Church) or to ‘atheists’ or to ‘racists’ or to ‘anti-racists’ or to ‘sexists’ or to ‘feminists’, and so on. But that does not mean that one cannot speak of these categories and movements of people as quantities that can be identified and characterized.

23

As such you cannot reasonably fault any given distinct movement for not seeking to address the issues of other distinct movements which is what you keep doing.

24

My issue is not that that they simply omit to address the issues of other distinct movement, but that they explicitly negate other movements’ own struggles for liberation. I have seen in many places feminists specifically dismiss Black men’s struggles by stating that Black men are ‘privileged’ (or other similar words), despite having either the lowest or the second-lowest (above Native Americans and Alaskans), depending on who you ask, life expectancy out of any major demographic group in the US, the highest incarceration rate out of any major demographic group in the US, and so on. If that is ‘privilege’, I don’t know what ‘privilege’ is.

25

Can you point out some examples for us?