PB2.0 - Why Social Justice Matters

As promised, here are my initial reflections (or intellectual masturbation, as PLuk would say... works for me too!) on the conception of social justice that I think PB2.0 should promote and apply to whatever structure it ends up having.

A quick response to Paul on the intellectual masturbation:

"In 'why I write', George Orwell claimed that all writers were motivated by some mixture of four motives. The first was 'sheer egoism', which must to some be present if (as Orwell assumed) a 'writer' is not someone who is not content to write but wants to publish. The second was 'aesthetic enthusiasm', which Orwell took to be some concern for the form of one's work. The third was 'historical impulse', or, more broadly, 'the desire to see things as they are.' The last was 'political purpose' -- using the word "political" in the widest possible sense. Desire to push the world in a certain direction, to alter people's idea of the kind of society they should strive after."

That's a quote from Brian Barry's book, Why Social Justice Matters, which inspired some (but not all) of the reflections below.

Again, my thanks to Lambert for offering me this opportunity.

I am one of the people who thinks that PB2.0 should be both about substance and structure. Both topics deserve posts of their own but in this post, I focus more on substance: a basic conceptualization of social justice.

What should PB2.0 stand for ?

I think, in the past two weeks, in the previous PB2.0 posts, we have spent a lot of time discussing what went wrong with Pb1.0 and how we got where we are. I do not wish to revisit these issues as I think the different aspects have already been explored pretty thoroughly and continue to be on a daily basis at Corrente. My personal diagnosis is that the Progressive Blogosphere has been fractured irremediably by the primary and there is no turning back. Those of us trying to lay the foundations for PB2.0 have to decide what we want, what we stand for, and how we want to relate to PB1.0.

This is my -- as mentioned social-democratic / sociological / European / French -- perspective on "what now?" I have already mentioned that social justice is a central concern and major organizing principle of my life. After all, my demographics should have put me squarely in Obama's camp: yes, I'm a woman, but I am a Ph.D holder, an academic, not even 40 yet. But here's the kicker: I come from a very low social class background and I only moved up the social ladder because I grew up in a country that offers such opportunities: college is free in France, all the way to the Ph.D level. I received educational and housing benefits. I never had to worry about health care and I finished my education without a dime of debt... because some people, over time, made political decisions to promote social justice.

So, seeing inspirational vapidity replace clear progressive policy agenda did not sit well with me. The dismissal of women and working class folks as non-entity at best, idiotic nuisances at worst. Personal narratives, the focus on individual stories of choices and responsibilities are all parts of conservative / right-wing frameworks that deny the social constraints that shape our lives (whether we want to admit it or not) and obscure the omnipresence and weight of social privileges and disadvantages.

It is my view that PB2.0 should make visible such social privileges and disadvantages and promote corrective policies to offset the devastating effects of the latter. I would argue that, in denying the reality of such constraints (by deriding gender and social class considerations), PB1.0 engaged in what sociologist Pierre Bourdieu called symbolic violence. More on that below.

But let me first be more specific with what I mean with social justice. The way I see it, justice can be quality of individuals. Social justice refers to the institutions of society and the idea that we should challenge said institutions when they fail to deliver a just society (when talking about culture, that might mean "shoving the Overton window left"). And yes, social justice has a strong connection to social-democratic redistribution and Rooseveltian (FDR) ideas. As John Rawls puts it, the subject of justice is "the basic structure of society."

My view is that indeed, PB2.0 should fight against what we call social closure , that is, the freezing of the social ladder, and the increasing gap between the haves-a-lot and the rest of the population. I have several individual posts backed up on this topic, so, I won't develop here. But my general point here is that by endorsing Obama, PB1.0 endorsed a liberalist elite conception of justice where the bread-and-butter (AKA "ramen issues) issues are not as important for a cohort of people (the OFB, as we call them) is relatively economically and materially secure. Hence the derision towards Lambert's ramen post and HRC's windfall gas tax. Incidentally, I would consider reproductive rights a bread-and-butter issue as well.

To be even more precise, social justice concerns itself with rights, opportunities and resources and treats social institutions as means to get things done. I would argue that libertarianism focuses almost exclusively on rights at the expenses of the other two (see the health care issue).

Rights , here, are defined as "not being prohibited from having or doing something." Ok, so, you may have a right to healthcare but if you don't have the money for it, what good is that right to you? Same for education. No one is legally prohibited from pursuing an education. We all know things get complicated... hence, we need to consider as well...

Opportunities, that is, the capacity to obtain what I am not prohibited, by right, from pursuing. A disabled person may not be prohibited from going to the movies but if theaters do not provide ramps and other accommodations, that right means zilch. Women may have a right to abortion but if there are no providers within hundreds of miles, then, that right is insignificant. Disability accommodations (or planned parenthood clinics) provide the opportunities to exercise a right.

Resources are the external factors that improve our chances of exercising our rights, given the opportunity to do so. Bourdieu would refer to this as the different forms of capital that our birthplace / birth position on the social ladder endow us with:

We are all more or less endowed with certain amounts of each. They are the resources we possess but mostly did not earn that constitute our packages of social privileges and disadvantages.

The goal of social justice is to make sure that we do not stop analysis at the level of rights (which libertarians tend to do, especially when it comes to property rights), especially that the analysis does not focus narrowly on "liberal" rights (speech, religion, property) but also includes socio-economic rights. Any political work towards social justice must promote redistribution of opportunities and resources (that's what UHC and single-payer systems are about and you'll notice that's what we've been told is politically unrealistic).

A society that is highly unequal, as the American society is, compared to other rich societies, is a structurally violent society. It is the violence experienced as denial of health care, of being unable to find a solution the equation of low wage, high gas prices, high child care costs, high educational costs, absence of decent public transportation and then to be blamed for being unable to find a individual resolution to what are structural issues... hence the hectoring of black fathers for their supposed irresponsibility without considering that art equal income level, black fathers are no more irresponsible (even the term is questionable) than white fathers.

PB1.0 revealed during the primary its relative indifference to structural violence and engaged itself in symbolic violence through insults, demeaning writing / posting and a general exhortation for "some people" (women, older people, low classes) and a general dismissal of their issues as less important the goal they had defined as significant. These categories of people were basically told to keep their place and "trust the Man." Or else.

Now, to be sure, you can find outstanding social class analysis on the blogs, Ian Welsh comes to mind. But the narrow focus on electoral politics pretty much guarantees that social justice issues, because they are issues of the underprivileged, are always brushed aside as not relevant to the goal at hand (getting more "Ds" elected... never mind that some might be DINOs). The goal of electoral politics is to gain access to the structures of social power. Ideally, the next step would be to use the political institutions to promote social redistribution (of rights, opportunities and resources), but somehow, that does not happen. Social justice gets brushed aside again, whatever rationalization du jour is used.

Which is why the next step for PB2.0 would be to promote its own progressive economics plan: I can't remember in which thread I suggested that we might want to consider things like micro-lending (Kiva does that in the Global South, Southshore bank does that as well, in the US) or other forms social businesses.

I think that there are things that PB1.0 does well so, we should devote our energy to other causes, that might be one. PB1.0 is good at electoral mobilization (even the results suck, the process seems to work... ActBlue), FDL excels at governmental analysis (these threads on congressional hearings are great). But again, this is Village politics. But frankly, these modes of action have shown their limits.

So, let me summarize:

Our goal: a more just society here and globally. Reducing /eliminating structural violence. Avoid symbolic violence (the lowest form of which is the use of demeaning nicknames).

The challenge is to find the structure to promote this far and wide.