The 'Social' Question
When did social justice go from a fight for material justice to one based on identity?
When I was in second year of undergrad, I read Hannah Arendt’s On Revolution. In it, she refers to ‘the social question’, by which she means the question of how society will distribute its material resources. I was struck by this, because I thought of the term ‘social’ in a 180° opposite fashion. Doesn’t ‘social’ justice specifically mean issues related to justice on issues of identity? It turns out that what I considered ‘social’ is a relatively new phenomenon and that in the past when people talked of the ‘social question’ they were referring to issues surrounding the distribution of material goods.
So when did this change of meaning occur?
Surprisingly to me (someone who is only 26) the near ubiquity of this new meaning for the idea of something like ‘social justice’ is relatively new. I was curious to see the evolving use of the term, so I fired up Google Scholar and looked decade by decade for the last 100 years to see how the term ‘social justice’ had evolved over the years.
Up until 1960 it basically uniformly refers to issues of materiality. The idea is mainly put forward by writers with socialist/Marxist leanings, arguing that the current social (see: material) organisation is unjust, with workers getting less than is their due. Capitalist systems, by their nature, reward those with capital unfairly compared to those who sell their labour, and so any attempt to remedy this unfair system is an issue, not just of class relations, but of justice, and because this justice is not legal, it is social.
In the late 60s are when things start to change. America is seeing protests over the unfair treatment of African-Americans and the Vietnam war boil over, and a new radicalism is beginning to take hold. This radicalism specifically sees the working class as its enemy: it is a class that supports the war and is the main impediment to racial progress. Outside black churches, one of the main bases of support and mobilisation for this movement is college campuses, a place that typically sees people enter a professional class that doesn’t need to worry about the plight of the worker. The cracks are forming in the alliance of intellectuals and the working class, and articles begin to move away from an economic view of social justice.
In the 70s, the idea of social justice still remains predominantly one of economic justice. However, academic articles are beginning to trickle in claiming that we need to “broaden” our understanding of social justice. Focusing on income misses the various other ways people in society are denied their due, particularly racial minorities.
In the 80s – ironically perhaps the era where many of trends that have led us to the historic levels of inequality we now know – this new view of social justice really began to take hold, and be used for the first time without caveat. However, it appears mostly in articles about the specific challenges faced by women and racial minorities. Articles on the welfare state still use it in its original manner.
The 90s is the decade that saw a new understanding of social justice consolidated. I read an author claim that her definition of social justice “seems obvious” when she speaks to others about the issue, and then proceeded to give a definition that focused on the fight for equal treatment for gender, racial and sexual minorities. In the 90s, social justice only referred to economic issues amongst those who were ‘old school’. The 90s were a decade when the Democratic Party – the party of most intellectual elites – embraced a leader who regularly spurned the party’s working class base and cosied up to financial interests. Clinton was not raised with a silver spoon in his mouth, but he undoubtedly brought the Democratic Party closer to monied interests.
By the 00s, the new conception of social justice was ubiquitous. One book I scanned about social justice and health policy noted that “a black male born and brought up in some area” had a lower life expectancy that someone from Bangladesh. When discussing issues of justice, the person’s race is relevant, but where he’s from – presumably an urban ghetto – is referred to as ‘some place’ and his class – likely one of underemployment – is not even gestured towards.
The Triumph of Neoliberalism
A (if not the) father of neoliberalism, Friedrich von Hayek, was a critic of the idea of social justice. Hayek pooh-poohed the idea of a just distribution of goods in a free market. He claimed that justice was an attribute of individual action, and in a market economy, material benefit or loss is not the result of anyone’s deliberate action, therefore the whole concept of social justice is incoherent. The criminal justice system, the health system, or the education system can all be the subjects of enquiry, because those systems involve actors making choices, but the market is so beyond anyone’s control that talk of justice is incoherent.
“to expect from an impersonal process, which nobody can control, to bring about a just result, is not only a meaningless conception, it’s completely impossible”
By no longer dealing with soaring inequality as a case of injustice, I worry that we are accepting a pernicious part of Hayek’s framing: that the market is a kind of organisation that is inherently beyond human control, and that to speak of fairness in the market is a conceptual error. Markets and their set up are never neutral. They do not spring out of the ground, untouched by human intention, and any suggestion that they operate outside of human intention misses the mark. Accepting this framing is fatal to any form of politics which seeks to challenge material inequality in society, and putting issues of social justice (in its original sense) on the backburner allow the market to operate unchallenged.
Identity Politics and Unworthy Victims
If you look at a chart of the usage of the term ‘identity politics’ in books, it takes off in the 90s, when the Democratic Party began to view themselves as the party of professionals and minorities, rather than the party of working people.
The problem with a political party based on these new issues of identity is that it is much harder to unite people with disparate identities through a platform of ‘fighting prejudice’, as these groups don’t always have the same interest. Groups like the Nation of Islam may say they are fighting for social justice for African-Americans, but as a group they have had many problems with antisemitism. It’s not clear how a party could realistically include both the NOI and still be the party that fights against antisemitism. All in all, it’s not clear to me why we should assume that the various interests of the minority groups that social justice advocates all share a common interest.
But more than that, this new concept of social justice focuses on what are typically immutable characteristics that people cannot/should not be expected to change. Whereas someone who is black will always be black, working class people could ascend the class ladder, even if such occurrences are increasingly rare. Instead of just fighting for whoever is downtrodden, social justice advocates now only fight for those who they see as unfairly downtrodden. Working class whites in Appalachia are not worthy victims - they don’t need advocates, they need to better themselves.
But working class people do need advocates, social justice warriors shouldn’t be a punchline. Society is not just a mixture of a different identity groups. Society is also a system of material production and distribution. To be just, a society needs to do more than treat minority groups with equal respect, it also requires that work is dignified and workers are treated and compensated justly. We should try to keep this in mind when we think of what constitutes ‘social justice’.
I shouldn't be quietly saying 'wow' because a young writer is charting the replacement of material emancipation by a beauty contest of 'marginalised' and 'minority' groups, but there we are. Thank you for bringing a non-addled mind to bear on this issue.
Excellent piece. One note: the Democratic Party has long been close to financial elites, at least since Roosevelt. But they could also co-exist with organized labor. That began to change in the 1970s. See “Right Turn,” by Ferguson and Jenkins.