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Social Justice: Code for
Communism
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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 the 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 unsellable).
"The history of all existing society,"
he and Engels declared, "is the history of class
struggles. Freeman and slave, patrician and plebian, 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 millenium 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 "proletariat" and
the "bourgeoisie." The former were manual laborers, the latter professionals and
business owners. 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 priviliged" -- 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 underpriviliged," 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 irresistable 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 Catherine 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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