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Antimulticulture
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Posted: Thu Mar 29th, 2007 02:30 pm |
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Social Justice: Code for Communism
http://www.discoverthenetwork.org
By Barry Loberfeld
February 27, 2004
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" --
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
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
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
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
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
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
**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.
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