Social Justice

[Deadpan]

This seems like the most fitting place around here to talk about what's been happening in my little corner of the world.

 

The WKR ball (renamed to Academic's ball in a PR move) is a yearly gathering of Europe's far right hosted in Vienna. The head of our own right-wing populist party, Strache, is a regular attendee, and folk like France's Marine Le Pen and the Netherland's Geert Wilders have previously used the opportunity to connect with other protofascist figureheads and mingle with the more openly racist among their followers (the connections to various unsavory people and publications, think our local Stormfront, are manifold and well documented) under the guise of a fraternity meetup (which have a highly antisemitic history around here). Which is all very depressing, I suppose, but the point that sparks the protests is that, rather than meeting in some damp cellar somewhere, these people are given access to the most prestigious and stately location available, the Hofburg, former residence of Austrian royalty.

 

I talk about this in part because of how frequently folk around here suggest to just not give these people any attention: while it's true that they really get a kick out of feeling like victims (Strache last year referred to attendees as "the new jews" in terms of being persecuted and this year talked about "the SA marching in the streets," later clarifying that he meant that to stand for Socialist Antifascists, of course), they also really don't mind being left alone so they can continue setting fire to asylum seeker's residences or something. It's also pretty gross to see how much of the coverage and political punditry revolves around the supposedly bad light the (peaceful) protests cast on our country. For the sake of appearances, I guess a lot of people would sooner stop talking about a problem than just fix the problem. Like, it's not the many people in the streets giving the rest of the world the idea that we're hosting a Nazi ball, it's the fact that we're hosting a goddam Nazi ball.

 

So, to spite those concerned, upstanding citizens, let it be known to you fine folk that Vienna is full of racist fucks. And yet, at the same time, it has a very strong antifascist tradition and community. It was quite heartening to see how many people were out protesting yesterday.

[Reyturner]

This is related to the Mattie Brice piece tbreton linked in the Feminism thread as an orthogonal response to the Jonathan Chait article and subsequent discussion.  

 

I've got a lot of feelings swirling around these issues and I'm not sure if they form a cogent argument, but I respect the opinions of the people on these boards and, if nothing else, would like to see where I'm going wrong. 

 

Specifically, the issues surrounding the assertion that calls for Nonviolence from mainstream progressives are, in and of themselves, violence inflicted on marginalized people. 

 

Even more specifically, the trend of people saying some form of "I don't believe the Charlie Hebdo killings were justified, but..." To me, there isn't a whole lot of daylight between a statement like that and "I'm not a racist, but..."

 

To be clear, I’m not saying nor do I feel like those killed at Charlie Hebdo deserved to die. Rather that, freedom of speech as a value is one that can only be broken by governments, not people, and it’s telling that minoritized postcolonial people are being targeted as ‘opponents of the freedom of speech.’

 

The idea that the killings at Charlie Hebdo were not an assault on the value of free speech is obviously wrong. It was perpetrated with the explicit aim of punishing speech the perpetrators found offensive and to terrorize others into silence. The fact that it wasn't a standing government's masked gunmen who executed those people is immaterial. That leads into another weird area that gives me the creeps. 

 

The idea that violence is only illegitimate if it is perpetrated by an oppressor. That violence in the service of seeking justice should be acceptable. 

 

From what I can see, the white liberal front really, really wants movements like #BlackLivesMatter to be completely and utterly nonviolent, despite that the police are acting violently against them...

...

The call for nonviolence is really a power grab for the privileged to set the pace and direction of social justice, not for the benefit of the oppressed.

...

Freedom of speech and nonviolence are central to liberal progressivism, and they are utilized in a way that completely disarms the marginalized and gives those already in power the majority influence of what and how to change.

 

I disagree that calls for nonviolence "completely disarms the marginalized". It is better today to be just about anyone than it was 10 years ago. And 10 years ago it was better to be just about anyone than it was 100 years before that. There has been progress, even if the oppressors have not all been deposed and pilloried. Maybe that is the problem? That things have gotten better for marginalized people without it getting worse for oppressors? 

 

And to say that radicals differ from mainstream progressives in that "[the former] critiques the system as a whole and aims to completely change it." is a hell of a white wash. What does Brice think completely changing the system entails if not chaos and blood shed. If not machine gunning those who's words you find dangerous and disagreeable? 

 

You know something that DOES effectively disarm and silence marginalized people? Violence. And by accepting the axiom that violence is permitted if you're really really sure you're on the right side, then you're just throwing your hat into the same violent, might makes right contest for power and control humans have been wallowing in for thousands of years, your ideals be damned. It seems, to me, to be no different than any other toxic mythologizing of righteous killing. 

 

If there common ground I share with Chait in my discomfort towards the religious certainty that "pc culture" imparts, or maybe reflects, in its radical adherents. The ones who are you to tell they that they don't condone specific violent acts but fall short of condemning violence completely. And I say religious because, in my mind, the major innovation religion brings to ethics is not an external standard of morality (since pretty much every major religion's ultimate message is just some variation of the Golden Rule, plus a few arbitrary rituals and woo) but a list of offences that permit those who espouse those standards to engage in immoral activity.  

 

Call out culture embraces the mentality that permits otherwise sensitive and thoughtful people to treat others like shit. 

 

I'm sure a few of you are fuming or rolling your eyes at this point, but I'm just trying to get my own emotional reality straight and I'm very willing to hear everyone out. 

[Merus]

I don't think there's very much difference between calling for non-violence from marginalised people and calling for them to, say, wear purple. It's not the message that's the problem, it's the assumption that their opinion should matter.

[Gaizokubanou]

I too dislike the callout culture but that makes me really reluctant to callout the callout culture.  And that's not meant to be sarcastic.

 

So outside of delving into another possibility for calling out those who are calling others out, I would just like to say... I haven't lived long, but I've seen some weird variety of fucked up people in my short life thus far.  Best not to start fight on every tiny infractions because then the fight never ends and there is noone left worthy to protect.

 

Just going to quote Soren Johnson on this subject because I think it is relevant (as I think ideologies are core part of the calling out)...

 

 

I personally despise ideologies because they inevitably lead to a belief that there is one set of solutions to the world’s problems. One set of solutions means all other options are heretical, which means they must be controlled. Ideologues put ideas above people, which is the beginning of terror and oppression. People are more important than ideas.

Of course, discouraging rigid thinking is not the only reason I make games, but it is the best answer I can give to [the] question. If I ever get to release my dream strategy game, this idea will be clearly be at the center of the design.

[clyde]

I don't have much to say about this issue, but I'm hoping that it becomes a discussion about "When is violent action is legitimate?" 

I know that it sometimes is, but I don't know how to tell the difference.

[tberton]

I disagree that calls for nonviolence "completely disarms the marginalized". It is better today to be just about anyone than it was 10 years ago. And 10 years ago it was better to be just about anyone than it was 100 years before that. There has been progress, even if the oppressors have not all been deposed and pilloried. Maybe that is the problem? That things have gotten better for marginalized people without it getting worse for oppressors?

 

I have a ton of reading to do for school tomorrow, so I can't respond to your whole post, but I did want to take issue with this specific statement. "It is better today to be just about anyone than it was X years ago" represents the core at the problem of "progressivism" and I use that term specifically to mean "a belief that the human experience continuously improves as time advances."

 

There have been countless books and articles tackling the issues with that belief, so I don't pretend to be able to articulate them here, but I'd like to present some food for thought, as it were.

 

1) By what measure do we determine that it is "better" to be somebody today than X years ago? Life span? Education? Income? I'm not saying those are bad measurements, but you have to pick measurements and whichever you pick are your to reflect a particular view of what the "good life" is. Not everybody will agree on that definition. So for people who pick different measurements, life very well might not be better.

 

2) To borrow a phrase from Apple Cider in another thread, the world is not a monoculture. While you may be able to prove that a given measurement of "quality of life" has improved in aggragate since a given period in the past, that will always be an aggregate figure. Aggregate measures are great for policy analysis, but people experience life individually, so telling somebody who's suffering that the world is better overall doesn't really mean much.

 

3) Likewise, it doesn't mean much to tell people that things were worse 100 years ago. None of us were alive 100 years ago. Again, this might be useful if your developing a theory of history (although then the previous two points come in), but it doesn't mean anything in the here and now.

 

4) When you say "things were better X years ago" you implicitly draw a line between then and now that connects the two in an ever-rising slope on the graph of the "good life." But that's not how things work. Even when those slopes do trend upward, they zig and zag all over the place. So 100 years ago things might have been worse by X degree. But 99 years ago, maybe they got even worse than that. And then 98 years ago, they got slightly better. Those zigs and zags are important.

 

5) This type of "progressivism" is also implicitly inevitable. It seems obvious to anybody that of course things are better now, in general, than they were 100 years ago. But it ignores that change only happens because people want it to. Nothing comes naturally. And thus, as I mentioned in the feminism thread, calls for civility and non-violence that cite historical progress ignore the causes of that progress, which were often quite violent.

 

I'd like to also state that I am ardently passivist. I don't think violence is ever justified except in situations of self-defence. But I can still see the validity of criticisms of calls for non-violence from protesters, most of whom were not violent anyway or were only violent in self-defense. Also, these calls for non-violence are often against destruction of property, which I don't consider to be violence in the same way as attacking people is.

 

EDIT: Christ, this is long, but I'd also like to respond to that quote from Soren, because while I like the sentiment behind it (and thought the article that it concluded was quite good), I think it's valuable to remember that, to a certain extent, ideology is unavoidable. You can't ever really escape the assumptions that colour your thought. You can be reflexive and self-critical, but you'll always be seeing the world through a lens and you shouldn't forget that. It's the invisible ideologies that are usually the most pernicious.

[Bjorn]

On the violence of the oppressed, something else to think about is scale and perception.  The violence from the oppressed is often magnified and blown out of proportion and used to discredit all activism, while the violence from the dominant culture is nearly invisible, and when it is noticed, its role in systematic oppression is obscured.  So by discussing or turning the focus of a conversation to the violence from the oppressed, it can help to keep the much larger violence invisible.  Obviously that's not always the case, but it often is. 

 

So when people express frustration with the violent vs non-violent activism conversation, I think a portion of that frustration lies with the decades (and ongoing) blindness turned towards the violence of the dominant culture. 

[Argobot]

I have a ton of reading to do for school tomorrow, so I can't respond to your whole post, but I did want to take issue with this specific statement. "It is better today to be just about anyone than it was X years ago" represents the core at the problem of "progressivism" and I use that term specifically to mean "a belief that the human experience continuously improves as time advances."

There have been countless books and articles tackling the issues with that belief, so I don't pretend to be able to articulate them here, but I'd like to present some food for thought, as it were.

1) By what measure do we determine that it is "better" to be somebody today than X years ago? Life span? Education? Income? I'm not saying those are bad measurements, but you have to pick measurements and whichever you pick are your to reflect a particular view of what the "good life" is. Not everybody will agree on that definition. So for people who pick different measurements, life very well might not be better.

2) To borrow a phrase from Apple Cider in another thread, the world is not a monoculture. While you may be able to prove that a given measurement of "quality of life" has improved in aggragate since a given period in the past, that will always be an aggregate figure. Aggregate measures are great for policy analysis, but people experience life individually, so telling somebody who's suffering that the world is better overall doesn't really mean much.

3) Likewise, it doesn't mean much to tell people that things were worse 100 years ago. None of us were alive 100 years ago. Again, this might be useful if your developing a theory of history (although then the previous two points come in), but it doesn't mean anything in the here and now.

4) When you say "things were better X years ago" you implicitly draw a line between then and now that connects the two in an ever-rising slope on the graph of the "good life." But that's not how things work. Even when those slopes do trend upward, they zig and zag all over the place. So 100 years ago things might have been worse by X degree. But 99 years ago, maybe they got even worse than that. And then 98 years ago, they got slightly better. Those zigs and zags are important.

5) This type of "progressivism" is also implicitly inevitable. It seems obvious to anybody that of course things are better now, in general, than they were 100 years ago. But it ignores that change only happens because people want it to. Nothing comes naturally. And thus, as I mentioned in the feminism thread, calls for civility and non-violence that cite historical progress ignore the causes of that progress, which were often quite violent.

I'd like to also state that I am ardently passivist. I don't think violence is ever justified except in situations of self-defence. But I can still see the validity of criticisms of calls for non-violence from protesters, most of whom were not violent anyway or were only violent in self-defense. Also, these calls for non-violence are often against destruction of property, which I don't consider to be violence in the same way as attacking people is.

EDIT: Christ, this is long, but I'd also like to respond to that quote from Soren, because while I like the sentiment behind it (and thought the article that it concluded was quite good), I think it's valuable to remember that, to a certain extent, ideology is unavoidable. You can't ever really escape the assumptions that colour your thought. You can be reflexive and self-critical, but you'll always be seeing the world through a lens and you shouldn't forget that. It's the invisible ideologies that are usually the most pernicious.

I don't understand the value of evaluating from an individual level. How could you ever discern changes in the world? If you look at individual, everyone will have a period where their life is worse, leading them to conclude that the world in general is worse off. There's is a nativity that comes with saying we are living in the best possible time, I agree, but that seems less harmful than encouraging everyone to look at the world through the incredibly myopic view of their specific experience.

[Gormongous]

On the violence of the oppressed, something else to think about is scale and perception.  The violence from the oppressed is often magnified and blown out of proportion and used to discredit all activism, while the violence from the dominant culture is nearly invisible, and when it is noticed, its role in systematic oppression is obscured.  So by discussing or turning the focus of a conversation to the violence from the oppressed, it can help to keep the much larger violence invisible.  Obviously that's not always the case, but it often is. 

 

So when people express frustration with the violent vs non-violent activism conversation, I think a portion of that frustration lies with the decades (and ongoing) blindness turned towards the violence of the dominant culture. 

 

That's a really good point to make. In the discussions surrounding Ferguson, one thing that was repeated over and over was that the victims of police violence shouldn't have been doing anything illegal if they didn't want to get shot, which invokes this extremely Weberian vision of the state as a monopoly of violence. I've been helped recently by the observations of an acquaintance online, who pointed out that the state is inevitably violent, as all rulership is in the Machiavellian sense, and therefore it's less useful to conceive that the state reserves the right to harm you if you break its laws than that the state reserves the right not to harm you if you obey its laws. At its basest level, the state is an engine for the legitimization and application of violence, which is why the use of violence against it, even by a single member of a group, is automatically rejected as illegitimate, regardless of the reasons or outcome.

 

I don't understand the value of evaluating from an individual level. How could you ever discern changes in the world? If you look at individual, everyone will have a period where their life is worse, leading them to conclude that the world in general is worse off. There's is a nativity that comes with saying we are living in the best possible time, I agree, but that seems less harmful than encouraging everyone to look at the world through the incredibly myopic view of their specific experience.

 

I don't think he's arguing an individualized view of progress as a totalizing paradigm, just that the aggregate is functionally useless to anyone's actual experience of living and is used overwhelmingly to paper over existing issues in favor of a generalized narrative of ever-increasing good. Obviously, the aggregate has a place when talking about issues of inequality and oppression, but alongside community- and individual-focused perspectives that do less to obscure the fact that, say, the likelihood of a black youth being shot to death in the street has not decreased (and in some regions has even increased) since half a century ago, just because violence as a whole has decreased in the United States.

 

This comes from my history background, but broadly speaking, I think the idea of "progress" is one of the most toxic cultural concepts in Western civilization. Since its popularization in the seventeenth century, it has been used almost exclusively to guide short-sighted policy decisions, silence dissent, and justify the status quo in society.

[tberton]

EDIT: This is in response to Argobot. Gormongous got in there while I was posting. And said what I wanted to say better than I do.

 

Fair enough. I may have harped the "individuality" angle too hard, because I agree with you that you can't only look at the world through the lens of your own experience. My larger point was that when you say "Things are better now than they used to be," you have to ask: what things? better how? for whom? and why does that matter? Where you come down on those questions is up to evidence and argument, but they shouldn't be pushed aside.

Sorry, I don't mean to start a tangent in this thread from a tangent I started in another thread. These things are just on my mind a lot because I read about them all the dang time.

[Gaizokubanou]

Gormongous I agree with the observation about the nature of the state, but don't see how that conclusion follows.  Maybe I'm thinking of different notion of 'right' here.  Could you clarify please?

[Gormongous]

Gormongous I agree with the observation about the nature of the state, but don't see how that conclusion follows.  Maybe I'm thinking of different notion of 'right' here.  Could you clarify please?

 

I guess I just mean "ability" when I say "right." The idea that the state is innately nonviolent and only uses violence to keep select members nonviolent, thereby making violence against the state invariably unjustified, misunderstands the nature of rulership. It encourages social quietism under the (almost certainly false) assumption that the state will recognize an excessive use of its violence as a defect in its systems. Instead, I've come into the idea that the state is innately violent and only uses nonviolence to keep select members nonviolent, which justifies violence against the state under circumstances in which oppression is so widespread or egregious as to make the monopoly of violence essentially meaningless.

[Gaizokubanou]

Yep, that clears things up.  Much appreciated.  Although I suppose I don't quite agree to the extent of the conclusion still (I just hold a more chaotic view on state as just a common idea that is held together mostly by inactivity of people more than anything), but I can follow the chain of thought clearly now.

[Gormongous]

Yep, that clears things up.  Much appreciated.  Although I suppose I don't quite agree to the extent of the conclusion still (I just hold a more chaotic view on state as just a common idea that is held together mostly by inactivity of people more than anything), but I can follow the chain of thought clearly now.

 

Yeah, I'm not really saying that we go smash the state. I'm saying all this as another argument that the conception of a state as an inherent limiter of violence, which should never be attacked or upset, has ideological repercussions that are dangerously self-legitimizing and probably ought to be re-examined.

[Deadpan]

The idea that the killings at Charlie Hebdo were not an assault on the value of free speech is obviously wrong.

 

To be honest, I think you're already going on a limb there. Here's a passage that I quoted in the original Freeze Peach thread, that still mirrors my thoughts in a lot of ways. I mean, to be clear, if people wanted to shut down those cartoons, gunning down the cartoonists was the absolute worst thing they could have done. It led to their widespread circulation all over the world, turned the artists into martyrs in the eyes of a lot of people, and generally caused folk to lionize their work even if they might feel a little iffy about the content.

 

That result was easily predictable. It seems strange to assume that the gunmen themselves wouldn't have seen it coming, or that whatever shadowy figures are pulilng the threads in this "war" have any illusions about being able to kill ideas with bullets. Sure, maybe they haven't, maybe they still thought it was worth it, there's a lot I don't know about such a warped worldview. However, whatever they might have thought they were doing, it's pretty clear to me that what they did had little to no effect on free speech, only on the increasing divide between muslims and an increasingly islamophobic west. I'm not sure why we're allowing them to unilaterally define what this tragedy is about. Just because they made some weird monologue about it? Why is this the only kind of terror attack in which we unquestioningly parrot the announced motives of the terrorists? When Elliot Rodger's manifesto was linked, it wasn't to show the cause of his attacks, it was to show why he thought he was doing it.

 

So in short, I think there's a massive difference between the reasons and reasoning given by terrorists and the actual cultural meaning of an attack.

 

One thing that bugs me generally about these discussions of violence is that epistemic or systemic violence are not acknowledge as such, which leads to a pretty slanted view of who's commiting violent acts on who exactly. Police officers gunning down kids not being seen as murder is the most obvious example, but it goes all the way to much more mundane things like how constant beaurocratic hassles for trans folk aren't seen as microaggressions or harassment, just some depersonalized force of nature they have to endure. If you don't look at violence commited by states or agents of state, a brick through a shop window is going to look like a massive breach of peace, but if you do pay close attention to these many, tiny infractions it becomes hard to believe why people aren't rioting all the time (although, your insinuation that "changing the system" is a call for mass executions is pretty gross).

[TychoCelchuuu]

At its basest level, the state is an engine for the legitimization and application of violence, which is why the use of violence against it, even by a single member of a group, is automatically rejected as illegitimate, regardless of the reasons or outcome.

I disagree (just to clarify, I didn't write that paper, I just agree with it). It's not really relevant to the larger conversation but this is one of my bugbears so I didn't want to let it pass without commenting on it.

[Gormongous]

I disagree (just to clarify, I didn't write that paper, I just agree with it). It's not really relevant to the larger conversation but this is one of my bugbears so I didn't want to let it pass without commenting on it.

 

It's an interesting article, but I don't find it absolutely convincing. It seems to be motivated principally by a desire for the state not to be coercive and violent by definition, alternatives for which he doesn't do a bad job of floating, but the arguments made in pursuit of that desire don't really pertain to any state in reality. It's especially striking to me that he sees laws and territory as fundamental to a state, even with something like the internet existing, but not the coercion or sanction that has upheld laws and defended territory since time immemorial. I don't know, I'll agree that the state isn't necessarily coercive and violent, else we're all fucked in the longest of runs, but I won't agree that the political reality of the state in the modern world isn't invariably coercive and violent.

 

But yeah, if we want to continue this discussion, we should dig up one of Clyde's old philosophy threads and get to work.

[Gaizokubanou]

State is social, deals with justice, warriors are violent, fits the thread title? XD

 

Quick summary of my take on it is this.

 

State are currently most widely acknowledged highest tier arbiter of social rules (certain religions and ideologies (which states are arguably part of) are close up there but differently).

 

When people have feuds, most of them refer to higher authority for quick and peaceful resolution. (this is the phase I previously referred as "inactivity of people", referring to our habit of going along with existing social norms, and this is how state actually get to exercise all of its power because its enforcers are also just people looking for guidance in exactly same fashion, IMO).

 

So people often refer to state authority for quick resolution as it is commonly agreed as the most powerful top-tier arbiter

 

For states to remain as this top tier arbiter of things, it needs the ability to enforce its demands in case of breach of this habitual existence.

 

And the best way to enforce demands in case of breach is it either threat of or use of force.

 

So it's not that states are actively violent (theoratically, I think no entity could maintain perpetually active violence up as it's core identity, including even the most violence oriented organizations like the military(EXCEPT for stars, those are constantly exhibiting ultra violence with all that fusion and heat and light...))... it's that by it's nature it is always prepared to resort to violence.

[Merus]

In capitalism, at least, the state's supposed to be the arbiters of the market, which doesn't have any kind of violence component.

 

Moreover, I think it's a bit reductive to talk about the violence inherent in the state when it's frankly kind of unusual that we've decided that regular creatures should not have access to violence. Violence is inherent to life on Earth, it's just that there's advantages to living in an environment where that's not really a concern.

[Gormongous]

In capitalism, at least, the state's supposed to be the arbiters of the market, which doesn't have any kind of violence component.

 

Moreover, I think it's a bit reductive to talk about the violence inherent in the state when it's frankly kind of unusual that we've decided that regular creatures should not have access to violence. Violence is inherent to life on Earth, it's just that there's advantages to living in an environment where that's not really a concern.

 

I don't know, if you don't think that the extraction and distribution of resources and services is innately violent or coercive in any way, I might have a bridge to sell you.

 

Also, the restriction of violence in some way or another is a basic concept of civil society, dating back to Aristotle's politics. It's exactly that society is not always violent, whereas it's almost universal in nature, that makes violence (or the occasional lack thereof) such an important and useful descriptor of the state. Of course, I have issues with the division of experience into "society" and "nature" as well, but you get the idea...

[Gaizokubanou]

In capitalism, at least, the state's supposed to be the arbiters of the market, which doesn't have any kind of violence component.

 

Moreover, I think it's a bit reductive to talk about the violence inherent in the state when it's frankly kind of unusual that we've decided that regular creatures should not have access to violence. Violence is inherent to life on Earth, it's just that there's advantages to living in an environment where that's not really a concern.

 

Right, it is a very abstract discussion but I think it ended up there because it went from the question of legitimacy of violence against state and Gormongous' point was that it should not be automatically disqualified as an option because state is violent by definition.

 

And I think the specific and abstractness is warranted because most of us are discussing this under the assumption that default state of group of people is that they are non-violent towards each other, and on top of that the social norms of our current ultra high density civilization demands that most of remain even less violent than ever before, so the question is about exception, which should be quite narrow.and abstract.

 

Maybe that assumption of mine is totally off though, cause every time I read Gormogongous' post, the vision of state I have in mind based on his/her post is where bunch of people are commiting ritualistic violence every day and occasionally takes few days off.  I assume it's just a breakdown in communication somewhere because that would be too strange of a claim.

[clyde]

I've come into the idea that the state is innately violent and only uses nonviolence to keep select members nonviolent, which justifies violence against the state under circumstances in which oppression is so widespread or egregious as to make the monopoly of violence essentially meaningless.

This is an interesting perspective. For a long time I've thought that the purpose of nonviolence in dissenting groups was to encourage the State to act with less violence and exemplify to the populous how egregious State violence is. It makes sense that the State would be doing the same thing.

Personally, I think social justice is rooted in property-rights and I see the State's legitamacy coming from being the arbiter of those rights, so it seems like a good place for the discussion.

[clyde]

Maybe that assumption of mine is totally off though, cause every time I read Gormogongous' post, the vision of state I have in mind based on his/her post is where bunch of people are commiting ritualistic violence every day and occasionally takes few days off. I assume it's just a breakdown in communication somewhere because that would be too strange of a claim.

The State maintains a threat of violence in order to enforce laws. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, but I would consider it violent to put someone in a cage against their will or threaten to do so.

[tberton]

Personally, I think social justice is rooted in property-rights and I see the State's legitamacy coming from being the arbiter of those rights, so it seems like a good place for the discussion.

 

I'm interested to hear your position on this, since defense of property rights is often something that runs counter to a lot of social justice and socialist movements, at least in my understanding.

[clyde]

The pattern I see is that the distinctions which are used to identify us, such as racial ethinicity and gender, are used to gerrymander popular support in order to gain enough power to attempt to legitimize and determine property claims. So for instance, Native Americans were classified as savages so that their rights to property would be considered invalid. From what I hear about Israel and Palestine, the main conflict is between the violence of legitimatizating particular property-claims rather than others and the terroristic attacks that are trying deter the State in power from continuing that process. I've heard that similar methods are being used to disenfranchise the Romani people. 

 

When the rights of a group to the means of labor and wealth (property) are removed, that group becomes impoverished. Then the dominant power amplifies the the voices claiming that the disenfranchised are inherently selfish and that they just want things given to them rather than jumping through all the hoops (labor that benefits of the system that came into being in order to disenfranchise them). My understanding of social-justice is that it is a matter of understanding this pattern and alleviating it so that we can all have tons of opportunity to be awesome regardless of the identities imposed on us by larger society.