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Social Justice: Code for Communism |
By Barry Loberfeld
FrontPageMagazine.com |
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 (
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
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
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
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.