On Social Justice and Political Struggle

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http://human-nature.com/nibbs/04/swartz.html

"On Social Justice and Political Struggle
By
Omar Swartz*

This essay argues the necessity for political struggle by questioning and confronting the way in which legal and moral authority are conceptualized currently in the United States. Through such questioning, Americans are encouraged to take a critical view of their own feelings for the society in which they live and to reject the limitations of much mainstream political thought, which are hegemonic, anachronistic, and subversive to the noble American ideals of freedom, justice, and equality for all. Stated bluntly, my goal is to encourage Americans to demand fundamental changes in the interests of a just political and economic system.

The notion of social justice championed here embraces an equitable distribution of social resources, including nutrition, shelter, health care, and education. These resources can be reconceptualized as public goods so the ultimate aim of the state is to ensure that all people enjoy access to these goods. My call for social justice is not limited to the United States. Rather, my thesis is that social justice must be enacted on both the domestic and international levels and that the United States' legal system often interferes with these goals. In rejecting nationalism, we realize that the United States can no longer privilege itself at the expense of other nations. The American ideals of equality and freedom are meaningless if they do not denote substantive equality and freedom from suffering for all human beings. No one should profit from the suffering of another. Human identification can be grounded in a morality of inclusivity and the goal of culture is to devise social and economic institutions to achieve this on an international level. As Richard Rorty notes, the goal of critical analysis is to wake “us up to the possible obsolescence of the vocabularies in which we conduct our moral and political deliberations and frame our utopian visions.” <1> The old vision, that of free-market wealth raising all boats, needs to be reassessed. With close scrutiny, we may acknowledge that “a rising tide will raise all boats only if the government constantly interferes to make sure it does.” <2> In this regard, the government often needs prompting.

More specifically, “social justice” means a political and structural commitment by society to direct the resources of modern civilization to benefit all people, particularly those “who are economically, socially, politically, and/or culturally underresourced.” <3> An implicit assumption of a social justice perspective is that the integrity of any community suffers when some of its members are systematically deprived of their dignity or equality and that structural poverty is a major contributor to this condition. <4> Structural poverty is defined as the institutionalized condition in which the social and economic marginalization of hundreds of millions of people throughout the world is the logical and anticipated end of government and intergovernmental policies that maximize tremendous wealth for a privileged few. <5>

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