"social justice"

social justice

Social justice, sometimes called civil justice, is a concept largely based on various social contract theories. Most variations on the concept hold that as governments are instituted among populations for the benefit of members of those populations, those governments which fail to see to the welfare of their citizens are failing to uphold their part in the social contract and are, therefore, unjust. The concept usually includes, but is not limited to, upholding human rights; many variants also contain some statements concerning more equitable distributions of wealth and resources.
The term "social justice" is generally so phrased in order to distinguish this particular concept from concepts of justice in law — some of which, according to their critics, are decidedly unjust in a social sense — and from concepts of justice as embedded in systems of morality which may differ between cultures.
Social justice refers to the overall fairness of a society in its divisions of rewards and burdens.
"Social Justice" is also one of the Four Pillars of the Green Party upheld by the worldwide green parties. As stated by several local branches, this is the principle that all persons are entitled to "basic human needs", regardless of "superficial differences such as economic disparity, class, gender, race, ethnicity, citizenship, religion, age, sexual orientation, disability, or health". This includes the eradication of poverty and illiteracy, the establishment of sound environmental policy, and equality of opportunity for healthy personal and social development.
See also social injustice

Criticism of the notion of Social Justice

Social Justice sometimes is thought to mean the promotion of equality through comprehensive government action. In practice this intervention has not often produced equitable results, resulting in favoritism towards classes of people, restrictions of personal liberty and excessive regulatory burdens. Many critics regard the guarantee of equal outcomes implicit in many social justice movements antithetical to the notion of equal opportunity, as it frequently requires special, favored treatment to arbitrary classes of people. Actual justice, they argue, holds all persons to the same standards and does not penalize success nor reward failure, but holds all persons to the same standards regardless of their race, ethnic origin, financial condition, religion or beliefs.
People concerned with social justice may hold some or all of the following beliefs:
- Historical inequities should be corrected by governmental action until the actual inequities no longer exist.
- Temporary favoritism towards some classes of people is acceptable if it advances important public policy goals.
- It is government's responsibility to ensure a basic quality of life for all it's citizens.

People who are critics of this notion may hold some or all of the following beliefs:
- Favoritism as a policy is inherently unjust.
- Those that succeed should not be penalized by being compelled to support those who do not.
- Personal liberty is more important than government's social policies.
- Social Justice is just a cover for social engineering, which is expensive and always fails.

social justice

Social justice, sometimes called civil justice, is a concept largely based on various social contract theories. Most variations on the concept hold that as governments are instituted among populations for the benefit of members of those populations, those governments which fail to see to the welfare of their citizens are failing to uphold their part in the social contract and are, therefore, unjust. The concept usually includes, but is not limited to, upholding human rights; many variants also contain some statements concerning more equitable distributions of wealth and resources.

The term "social justice" is generally so phrased in order to distinguish this particular concept from concepts of justice in law — some of which, according to their critics, are decidedly unjust in a social sense — and from concepts of justice as embedded in systems of morality which may differ between cultures.

Social justice refers to the overall fairness of a society in its divisions of rewards and burdens.

"Social Justice" is also one of the Four Pillars of the Green Party upheld by the worldwide green parties. As stated by several local branches, this is the principle that all persons are entitled to "basic human needs", regardless of "superficial differences such as economic disparity, class, gender, race, ethnicity, citizenship, religion, age, sexual orientation, disability, or health". This includes the eradication of poverty and illiteracy, the establishment of sound environmental policy, and equality of opportunity for healthy personal and social development.

See also social injustice

Criticism of the notion of Social Justice

Social Justice sometimes is thought to mean the promotion of equality through comprehensive government action. In practice this intervention has not often produced equitable results, resulting in favoritism towards classes of people, restrictions of personal liberty and excessive regulatory burdens. Many critics regard the guarantee of equal outcomes implicit in many social justice movements antithetical to the notion of equal opportunity, as it frequently requires special, favored treatment to arbitrary classes of people. Actual justice, they argue, holds all persons to the same standards and does not penalize success nor reward failure, but holds all persons to the same standards regardless of their race, ethnic origin, financial condition, religion or beliefs.

People concerned with social justice may hold some or all of the following beliefs:

- Historical inequities should be corrected by governmental action until the actual inequities no longer exist.

- Temporary favoritism towards some classes of people is acceptable if it advances important public policy goals.

- It is government's responsibility to ensure a basic quality of life for all it's citizens.

People who are critics of this notion may hold some or all of the following beliefs:

- Favoritism as a policy is inherently unjust.

- Those that succeed should not be penalized by being compelled to support those who do not.

- Personal liberty is more important than government's social policies.

- Social Justice is just a cover for social engineering, which is expensive and always fails.

^^

https://pasteboard.co/RcRm6tBSFSq3.jpg

By golly thats authentic DC nonprofit gibberish

https://pasteboard.co/RcRm6tBSFSq3.jpg

increasingly having trouble navigating the tensions between being a true believer and wanting to vomit at promising projects lathering up with all my least favorite vocabulary

“Compassion”, “vision”, “stewardship”, “community”, “belonging”. “Intentional communities” and “alternative economies”. I feel sick to my stomach.

a year after leaving my intentional community the verb "co-create" still makes my shoulders tense

At least they're not curating the learnings

fair

part of my problem is i lived with a nonprofit middle manager who had a verbal processing disorder who often spoke in reams of buzzwords trying honestly to get their difficult point across. a thousand word facebook post just went up describing some changes to the collective, and it links to a two thousand word google doc which is twice as long and somehow doesn't make anything any clearer. i've been very oversteeped

the word folx appears 11 times

if this is where we make our confessions, I can no longer bear the word 'solidarity'

or 'comrade'

those are probably more UK-specific tho

After watching The Young Karl Marx (which everyone should watch it's very good!!!) I only say "cumraids" now like Engels does in the movie

"Visioning" is pretty bold imho

encrusting simple ideas in a carapace of jargon is one way to fend off competition for the few highly-coveted paid-lobbyist jobs in the social justice field

The revolution will not be funded &c &c

For a while it seemed like "equity" was the new "social justice." But now "justice" is a higher good than "equity" according to some graphics involving trees or kids peering over fences.

I think a lot of the flaw in all of this stuff is not so much the particular terms as the misplaced fetishization of the terms themselves as a substitute for what they are supposed to represent.

or 'comrade'

― imago, Friday, 29 April 2022 17:29 (four hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

shock horror .. posh as fuck public schoolboy smirks at the idea of the hoi polloi expressing support for each each other during a period when a lot of them are suffering genuine hardship that he will never get remotely close to experiencing. Yes, fuck off dickhead.

i was criticising gratuitous, showy social-media grandstanding, obviously i would never mock those who show support to each other in situations of hardship

the sentiments behind those words are excellent obviously but the words themselves are overused and abused, and indeed often used quite narrowly, to exclude rather than include, to demarcate a chosen few. solidarity and camaraderie should be common to all who have a share in society, surely

and since we are all comrades, there's no need to say it ;)

imago, I believe what calzino is struggling to convey is that he doesn't harbor comradely feelings toward you. it can be hard to sniff this out amidst to the fumes of burning sulpher that hover around his posts.

Politico or somewhere had an article about Orwell yesterday, with a bunch of stuff excerpted from The Road to Wigan Pier where he laments the language of socialists, how far removed they are from the speech of actual working people; so while they might agree with the principles of socialism - they generally don't like socialists.

I think the American left is often guilty of this same kind of.. well, misreading the room

aw leave calz alone, he's lovely really. please nobody FP him for what he just said to me, it's fine and I probably deserved it for my flippancy

you simply can't talk about about the complexities of working class solidarity when you are living off a trust fund. And shut it aimless, you are even more tedious and predictable than me.

i'm really, really not living off a trust fund fwiw. i've had to rely on government financial support before too, more than once, admittedly more than ten years ago. the financial crash was brutal on graduates regardless of where they'd been

that said, point taken - those words probably do have their uses, and as i say i'm criticising certain usages of them, aesthetically, rather than what they mean, which is probably pointless grousing on my part and equally annoying

"admittedly more than ten years ago"

lol, ask imago for benefits advice and why comradeship is bad!

comradeship is great, the word 'comrade' itself has become annoying in certain contexts

in the same way, i am sure BIG HOOS is a big fan of folx, if not 'folx'

Is that folx as in “We tortured some folx”?

what? contexts where you imagine it's bad that people sometimes look out for each other + offer support in hard times. You really should find something more important to get annoyed about during your life of travel + leisure!

context of the above: i admitted to having taken a short holiday in portugal three years ago

also as i keep saying, it is very good that people can look out for each other in hard times, i have absolutely no problem with that at all! my quandary is about annoying social media grandstanding, for example the use of 'comrade' to mean 'true believer'

Yeah, I don't think people struggling through some shared hardship are calling each other 'comrades'

Maybe on the battlefield?

I think "comrade" has been out of favor since the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact.

Nah, it is often used on UK twitter amongst the precariat/hoi polloi, and it really annoys imago

I wouldn't really trust imago to be the judge of what is social media grandstanding and genuine heartfelt comradeship. Especially after reading nearly a decade of his appalling politics posts.

a battlefield is an apt analogy tbh. 'solidarity' probably earns my suspicion by being used as a means of self-selecting class division - solidarity only with OUR VERY SPECIFIC SIDE - so there's none for me as i'm clearly a class enemy. really i just crave the sweet embrace of solidarity but they have solidarified against me. team sports. in a panic i turn and flee into the warm embrace of elon musk. my tesla hums me into a narcotic bliss. i am the ubermensch

at least you've finally admitted that you are living off a trust fund!

some days i am living off the music of the band 'trust fund' so probably accurate

my 'appalling politics' in full: voted full corbyn at every opportunity, joined labour so i could vote for the socialist candidate rebecca long-bailey in the leadership election, quit soon after when she was sacked from the cabinet in a nakedly political piece of opportunism. now a green member. maybe that's the bad bit, they're probably ecofascists or something

"...his appalling politics posts." is what I actually posted, so don't try your bullshit on me.

one thing they are not, is comrades! the greens are FOREST FRIENDS geddit right

voted full corbyn at every opportunity, joined labour so i could vote for the socialist candidate rebecca long-bailey in the leadership election

my reading of calz is those aren't really the kind of politics he wants to see from you.

oh crap do i have to cultivate a pencil moustache and subscribe to the spectator now

Well folx

let me tell you about comradeship, imago. I got some advice off a comrade and now I'm paying zero council tax and got a £468 refund for too much I was previously paying. I believe in comradeship and don't want to even judge people who use the term a bit more freely than you can deal with, because it is a good concept to start with.

aimless not getting it as usual, a clueless cunt who only reads his own posts.

xp well that's obviously great. as i have repeatedly said the concept is not only important, it is the glue that holds our lives together. it was my mistake for having a specific aesthetic criticism that i voiced without making the specific terms clear. expecting nuanced understanding while giving no nuance myself

as it stands many council tax rates are absolute theft obv and the more people helping you fend off the rapacious designs of our cruel and terrible government the better

that wasn't meant to sound as libertarian as it probably does lol. tbc i am referring to lower-band rates

how many pixels to the right have you moved imago

"LOL"

i have moved exactly 19 pixels left, but the solidarity of my comrades has distorted spacetime with the result that the entire spectrum is now officially Fucked and i have been chosen as commandant in my local justiciary

lol it's not like tax evasion, imago. As a carer for two disabled adults the rules are I'm not meant to pay it - it's just that they don't advertise this and sometimes you need a comrade who understands this intricate minefield of council bureaucracy to help you because they don't make it easy to apply for it. The online form didn't even allow for a dual carer of two adults to apply for it and this comrade of mine was a true comrade when I needed one.

what do you call someone who helps you in the exact same way but is not a comrade

that is what i mean though, i know it isn't evasion, but you and millions of others are or were (if no friendly advice is at hand) paying way too much given living circumstances, they obfuscate and make things difficult, knowing full well that a lot of people in those bands will struggle as a result of them. honestly in your circs you deserve a full living-wage income and under a decent government you'd get one

(as do the other two adults in your household)

and if you call whoever helps you what you want that's fine. it's a good and accurate use of 'comrade' and i'm sorry for besmirching it with my blanket scorn above

today i voiced my cynicism, a comrade rebuked me for it and i learnt my lesson etc

"what do you call someone who helps you in the exact same way but is not a comrade"

Is that a question?

i mean the long-established answer is surely 'a good samaritan'

'comrade' in my narrow view is some kind of political fellow traveler, a partisan confederate I guess.. but that word isn't used my in the U.S. unless it's facetious

*much*

political, but it can easily be varied for other uses as well. when i first met my best friend, 9th grade, we called each other comrade, first as an inside joke but then later as an indication that we were fellow travelers, as Andy put it.

For my generation (X), it's closely associated with the USSR.

In certain circles, "compañero" can be used unironically.

xp calzino sure

i was trying to figure out if you think that only a comrade (in the political sense) could be capable of helping you like that, or if it was more of a personal description (like my post just above). you said "a true comrade when I needed one" which suggests to me the latter, but i am constantly misunderstanding things

some of the people who have helped me in recent years who work for charities like Carers Count have been uber middle class melts, but basically decent to the core people. But with the lousy politics you often see on here. But I would only be mildly rude to them about their politics. I had an advocate called Carol who helped me through a very bad period, her politics where very Lib-Dem but I liked a lot her a lot as person and we did have some bantz about the brief left-wing resurgence in the UK. But we did intersect on some lols, like seeing a mumsnet poster quoted on a wall of inspirational quotes from including Ghandi and MLK at a Ravensthorpe SureStart centre. But a comrade is ultimately someone who wants the same changes as you do - as an extending self-interest group.

no one uses 'comrade' where i am in the us afaict but 'solidarity' is an important keyword for identifying people and organizations who, like calzino is saying, share common values (or who at least appear to).

In certain circles, "compañero" can be used unironically.

― immodesty blaise (jimbeaux), Saturday, April 30, 2022 12:26 AM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

"Compa" was big in Texas once upon a time

Yeah, that's a Mexicanism. When I lived in Peru, using "compañero" pretty much marked you as a leftist, unless you were drunk and/or singing.

Two things I'd point people to on the substance of comradeship for people's behavior and way of thinking are the documentary Seeing Red which is on YouTube, and Jodi Dean's book Comrade.

SR was made in the mid 80s, a sequence of interviews with people who were members of the CPUSA during its 30-60 heyday. Seeing these people, with the benefit of decades of hindsight, reflect on their organizing days puts a lot of meat on the bones of comradeship for me.

Dean's book --

In short, Dean describes the ‘comrade’ as a generic term functioning as a mode of address bearing expectations of solidarity among those belonging to the same side in the emancipatory struggle for an egalitarian world free of racial and patriarchal capitalist exploitation. In contrast to individualistic notions rooted in the rhetoric of self-care, comrades accept the discipline necessary to build the political capacity required for this shared struggle. While she concedes at the outset, that the expression seems out of date in our current politics, nonetheless she holds it worthy of recovery.

'comrade' in my narrow view is some kind of political fellow traveler, a partisan confederate I guess.. but that word isn't used my in the U.S. unless it's facetious

― Andy the Grasshopper, Friday, April 29, 2022 5:11 PM (two hours ago)

uh, I see it a lot used sincerely where I live in the U.S. (though I live in a very comrade-ly area). I think it's actually useful as a signifier and it has only two syllables so brevity is also going for it.

'solidarity' probably earns my suspicion by being used as a means of self-selecting class division - solidarity only with OUR VERY SPECIFIC SIDE

heh there is some definite pass-agg usages of solidarity ... also, as a means of saying "STFU" to people who might have criticism or concerns about a particular position, tactic, treatment of a person or group.

https://pasteboard.co/RcRm6tBSFSq3.jpg

― BIG HOOS aka the steendriver, Friday, April 29, 2022 9:11 AM (ten hours ago)

I think there is a comma missing after "vision" ... is this "jam" a literal fruit preserve like one might have on toast or is this the man-bun type of "jam"?

perhaps a good moment to pause and recall that 'actions speak louder than words'.