It's just rude to leave this post totally comment free.
... That is, all the inequality in the world is fine, ...
Actually it is saying some inequality in outcomes is fine not necessarily that any amount is fine.
... But while it's not a tradeoff, working on one kind of inequality doesn't necessarily make any progress at all on the other kind ...
Depends on what you mean by progress. Most people would find a prison system less objectionable if the prisoners are actually guilty rather than selected at random. Similarly most people will find a given amount of economic inequality more tolerable if it is distributed on some sort of rational basis. For example as a reward for hard work and good behavior.
Oh hey, there's a post down here. I endorse it, too.
I would add to the OP that certain American values are sufficiently pervasive that most people, including conservatives, often feel they have to pay lip service to social equality as a broadly good thing, even if they don't really care. Minority group rights can be fit into a pretty common American narrative of uplift and opportunity.
But many people feel no such compunction when it comes to economic equality. In fact, American values are generally no help here, as they are so strongly focused on individual effort that it's difficult to make structural arguments. There is a very powerful thread in this country that if you're poor it's your own fault, and you're probably immoral too.
The tension between the identity politics left and the economics left is tricky. It should be obvious that there's no inherent trade off but there's at this point a long history of not getting along. People who were active in feminist/minority/glbt politics in the 70s apparently spent a lot of time getting told by white male marxists that they should sit down and shut up ("Keep your eye on the ball. Focus on the proletarian revolution and the rest of that stuff will just take care of itself...somehow").
On the other hand, as a younger person my political lifetime has been dominated by folks who get the vapors at the mention of class. Heaven forbid you mention that the structure of the tax code was better from a liberal point of view in 1955:
"We should return marginal tax rates to what they were in the 50s."
"Oh! so you want bring back Jim Crow hugh? I bet you also want women to get back to the kitchen where they belong hugh? Hugh?!"
So there's a bit of a communication problem.
The tradeoff is real. There's a limited amount of progressive activism. An activist can direct his/her efforts towards cultural equality or towards economic equality. Most people aren't activists. The relatively few who are determine which progressive goals are worked towards.
In practice it's been much easier in this country to work for cultural equality. Only a few such activists have been murdered and almost none blacklisted.
If people really meant it, the equality-of-opportunity dodge wouldn't be as bad as it is, but they don't. They always want to be able to give their own kids a head start too. In the extreme case of public choice theory, which is pretty widely felt, every dollar which benefits someone else rather than me is the equivalent to stealing $3.3^-9 from me and giving it to the other person. So obviously, I don't want any of my tax money spent on anyone else's kid.
There's a limited amount of progressive activism.
Limited doesn't mean fixed -- everything's limited, in the sense that there are only seven billion people in the world with only twentyfour hours in the day to work on stuff, but there's not a fixed pool of man-hours coming out of that limited supply of labor that's going to go to activism. Someone who's an activist with relation to issues that affect them personally isn't stealing that activism from issues that don't affect them personally -- in the absence of whatever got them started moving, they probably wouldn't have been an activist at all. And once they're aware of political action as a possibility because of the issues they're personally interested in, they might devote some effort to something else. Someone who spends ninety percent of the time she does political work on liberal feminism and ten percent on economic justice is a profit, not a loss, for economic justice.
I don't think "equality of opportunity" is a coherent concept in the real world.
There is not a limited amount of progressive activism. The percentage of activists in the population isn't a constant. Both parties really like to have their base not-too-active, and the Republicans have been having problems with an overactive base this year, though they seem to have overcome them.
If it just happened to be the case that cultural issues were doing better than equality issues which the left was united, that would be one thing. But there are plenty of people on the so-called left who are indifferent or hostile to egalitarian politics, and plenty more who just dismiss them as impractical.
Whenever an equality leftist peeps a peep about cutting a bipartisan deal, social leftists raise an uproar about betrayal. But the betrayal of equality leftist by *some* social leftists, and not a few, is a done deal.
"Equality of infrastructure, physical, educational and social" is a bit cumbersome, but it captures the bullet points.
For straight, vaguely-guilty-feeling white people like me, the prospect of increasing racial/ethnic/LGBT equality is pleasant and encouraging, like a movie about attractive people who overcome adversity and win a bunch of Oscars: smiles and good feelings all around. In contrast, one associates the rhetoric of "class," "class-consciousness," "confiscatory estate taxation" and "everyone in [Sweden/France/Canada] goes to the same kindergarten/hospital/university" with (i) tedious, hectoring bores like bob, who in another age would have been whining about the Pope's cloth-of-gold stockings, (ii) white kids with dreadlocks and reproduction early '80s anti-Thatcher album cover t-shirts, (iii) disapproving Grundies who want nothing so much as to pull down everything rare, beautiful and special, leaving us in a sprawling Pyongyang, and (iv) Internet commenters.
Economic equality needs rebranding. I suggest "50% Marginal Tax Rate Fever! Catch it!"
The discrepancy/dichotomy has been around for a long time. Fred Engels. no less, went on record as saying something to the effect that you could judge how civilised a country was by how free its women were. On the other hand the SPD (in its 2nd International incarnation) had a live debate over whether advocating for women's suffrage was a diversion from the main struggle.
A lot of 2nd gen. feminist thought, at least in countries where the 2g feminists could call themselves socialists and still gain a hearing, was addressing this gap. We may be that much further forward.
[There's no point in discussing the gradations in white radicals' views on race in the 19th century. They were wrong, they were full of shit, forget it.]
While none of these remedies in itself is unsound, all have a fatal disadvantage. The programs have never proceeded on a coordinated basis or at a similar rate of development. Housing measures have fluctuated at the whims of legislative bodies. They have been piecemeal and pygmy. Educational reforms have been even more sluggish and entangled in bureaucratic stalling and economy-dominated decisions. Family assistance stagnated in neglect and then suddenly was discovered to be the central issue on the basis of hasty and superficial studies. At no time has a total, coordinated and fully adequate program been conceived. As a consequence, fragmentary and spasmodic reforms have failed to reach down to the profoundest needs of the poor.
In addition to the absence of coordination and sufficiency, the programs of the past all have another common failing -- they are indirect. Each seeks to solve poverty by first solving something else.
I am now convinced that the simplest approach will prove to be the most effective -- the solution to poverty is to abolish it directly by a now widely discussed measure: the guaranteed income.
. . . .
This proposal is not a "civil rights" program, in the sense that that term is currently used. The program would benefit all the poor, including the two-thirds of them who are white. I hope that both Negro and white will act in coalition to effect this change, because their combined strength will be necessary to overcome the fierce opposition we must realistically anticipate.
For all their flaws, American Progressives and Populists may have been, in practive, more advanced on women's issues than anyone else in the world except some of the very marginalized utopian socialists.
Christopher Lasch has described the split between the cultural left and the political left around 1915-20. (The New Radicalism in America). It can be amusing -- Big Bill Hayward was accused of becoming a socialite. But when The Nation published a state by state survey of politics in the United States, they assigned North Dakota to an active opponent of the Non-Partisan League, which in 1916 had elected the nearest thing to a socialist government that the US has ever seen.
They have been piecemeal and pygmy.
Racist.
I posted 14 (circulated by a friend on FB this morning) and agree with it 100%.
I also have had a tradition for the past few years of reading or listening to this sermon on MLK day. Which I'll pass on to you because I'm insufferably self-righteous. But, seriously, it's an amazing sermon.
A glimpse, via Rex Stout, of the admittedly brief days when market and capital power were a normal part of the conversation:
There was a full page ad in the Times, signed by the National Industrial Association, warning us that the Bureau of Price Regulation, after depriving us of our shirts and pants, was all set to peel off our hides.... As strategy, the hitch in it was that it would work only with those who already agreed with the NIA regarding who or what had got the shirts and pants.
There's a serious limit to what you can do
We each might make an assumed Veil of Ignorance our only guide to behavior.
Combine all children born each month into a pool and randomly distribute them to prospective parents.
I'm mostly just getting this straight in my head, but where I wanted to get to is that there's no necessary reason for that to be a tradeoff.
Me too, but I am not going to assume there is or has been no tradeoff in practice just because there may not be a necessary reason for one.
The question is how to avoid any hierarchies of claims without a totalizing universalism.
The only answer I have been able to approach is dialectical, in which every advance in an individual or group freedom is also a loss of freedom for that same individual or group. Every supersession a reproduction.
This is not a zero-sum analysis. That would be static, not dialectical.
"No one is free til all are free."
(No one has any freedom til everyone has total freedom. No individual can become "more" free, because freedom is absolutely social)
18: I love Rex Stout (and my imaginary boyfriend Archie).
The idea of "relative freedom", of a historical increase in freedom, of a freedom in comparison to an enemy, or others not yet free is exactly a totalizing universalism, a quantification of freedom.
It is the commodification of freedom, freedom, rights, equalities as exchange-values in the marketplace.
Ungood.
A timely post at the Campos blog:
http://insidethelawschoolscam.blogspot.com/2012/01/working-for-free-and-class-bias.html
22: Rex and Archie were, in the later novels, not exactly left-wing. Wolfe himself says some pretty harsh things about "Communist despotism" in The Black Mountain, which I was amused to hear echoed by people from the former Yugoslavia many years later.*
* People who lived under the Eastern European dictators really dislike Communism, oddly.
9: there's not a fixed pool of man-hours coming out of that limited supply of labor that's going to go to activism.
True, but I know of no reliable mechanism to increase the amount of activism. On the other hand, the authorities do know of reliable mechanisms to decrease the amount of activism. We saw quite mild versions deployed in the US in the late '40s-early '50s. Later, after the threat had been squashed, people regretted the excesses and blamed it all on some drunk. But one should take their regrets with a grain of salt.
26: And he cuts J. Edgar Hoover in, I believe, The Doorbell Rang. I dunno, dissing communists can be pretty left wing.
(But I'm not sure I've read any of the *very* late ones.)
25: Man, Campos may be a really challenging person on an interpersonal level (I've never met the guy) but he is doing yeoman's work on this issue. Bless him a thousand times.
In one of the really late ones, Archie tells Wolfe that a feisty young feminist P.I. of the sort who fills the "Mystery" shelves at today's local Barnes & Noble is "one of those," obviously rolling his eyes.
True, but I know of no reliable mechanism to increase the amount of activism.
There's no reliable mechanism to do any goddamn thing. Once you have set a goal, then you look for methods of attaining it.
I think* this juxtaposition between equality of outcomes and equality of opportunity goes back at least to the early 20th century, when class and economic inequality were things that got a lot of attention. Now that people are talking about economic inequality again, the right has, as they do, dusted off the old oppositional language. Of course there's no clear line between the two; it's just a set of moving goalposts to be deployed as needed.
*I can't think of any classic cites for it, and it's not that well represented (though it's there for the 1930s in a couple spots) on the quick google books search I just did for the 1900-1940, but I swear I remember reading about/discussing it in some historical context.
Wolfe complains about his income tax rate a lot too. Obviously I offer Stout not as a role model but as an indicator of the prevailing discourse.
There's a female detective Wolfe occasionally hires, Dol Bonner, given very short shrift by both Wolfe and Stout, but looking the character up, I found to my surprise that Stout wrote a full-length novel with her as the detective in 1937, The Hand in the Glove..
33: sounds a bit like "assume a canopener."
Wolfe was a job creator: Archie, Fritz, Theodore, the staff of Rusterman's, etc.
37: And supporter of the small, local farm.
36: Oh, for Christ's sake. What you're proposing sounds like rolling over and going back to sleep. There is, to begin with, no law of conservation of activism. That's just stupid. You pulled it out of your butt. The level goes up and down, and at any given time it's at the level it's at.
It's like you want me to wrap up a complete social movement and putting it on your lap before you'll acknowledge that it's possible.
I think that one reason why there's so little equality activism is, as you may have suggested, that it's more threatening than social-issue activism. A lot of people aren't willing to make enemies. Dick Cheney now supports gay marriage. Reagan supported abortion. None of those people care about those issues.
Once you have the commodification of social justice, obviously then you also have social capital(s) and the logic of accumulation.
There is a wider access to the methods of primitive accumulation, and thus women and minorities etc have the "seed capital" of having been lucky in their parents. Capitals are exchangable and interchangeable, so money will get you education, political office, status, and vice versa etc.
But it will follow the logic of accumulation, and those with capital will accumulate more, in an accelerating fashion, and those without one or more of the forms of exchangeable social capital will be ever more immiserated.
Capitals of course like to differentiate themselves in order to get "financing" from the markets and the fools who bet on them, so we have (supposedly) electronics, autos, etc. But that which accumulates inside sectors is universal...capital...and that which is exploited is categorized as local and specific...auto workers.
Thus it is also with identity capital, a supposed increase in social justice for UMC women in Northeast US is never directly associated with the status of women in rural China, because then there would be very little net increase. The differentiation is a marketable commodity.
36: 33 said you look for methods, not that you necessarily find methods.
What you're proposing sounds like rolling over and going back to sleep.
I support the Snooze Button Coalition.
So you can be jolted into reality more often?
It's consistent with my overall laziness policy.
30
In one of the really late ones, Archie tells Wolfe that a feisty young feminist P.I. of the sort who fills the "Mystery" shelves at today's local Barnes & Noble is "one of those," obviously rolling his eyes.
Archie was never any sort of feminist was he? I seem to recall in one book he describes some woman of like age 26 as being hopelessly past her sell by date (not in those words of course).
39:
It seems obvious to me that the powers that be have mostly not suppressed cultural activism and have severely repressed economic activism over the last fifty-sixty years. During the Depression, there were many economic activists. After the War, there was a period of repression: people were fired, blacklisted, lost their clearances, whatever. Since then, there has been little economic activism. Those relatively few people who do in fact want to make a difference in society (and in a time of relative material prosperity, these will be few) have been led to cultural activism. This is not a "law of conservation of activism." It is an empirical observation.
It is entirely possible that OWS will become the basis for a new round of economic activism. We can hope so. But neither you nor I know how to make that happen.
The tradeoff is real. There's a limited amount of progressive activism. An activist can direct his/her efforts towards cultural equality or towards economic equality. Most people aren't activists. The relatively few who are determine which progressive goals are worked towards.
"Limited amount of progressive activism" sounds like a prior condition to be accepted, rather than one of the things to be grappled with. Making it look like a budgeting problem just seems silly.
I also doubt that very many individual activists ponder the decision between the two types of activism and choose on the basis you say. Activists are usually recruited by activist groups whose goals are already set.
You're correct that equality activism gets more opposition and brings less success than social-issues activism. However, a high proportion of social issues activists seem to be fairly indifferent to equality activism and not the people who would normally be involved in it.
"Neither you nor I know how to make that happen?" what is that supposed to mean? Did I say that I knew, or that you did?
At this point I'm not sure what you're trying to get at.
On this day of days, it is important to remember the late MLK, that as he tried to apply his accumulated political capital to questions of economic justice and anti-militarism...he self dis-credited among large portions of his previous white liberal support and base, and gained new more dangerous young followers.
And then he was shot.
Just so you understand the deal you have made, the bargain struck with capital, which is actually an old enough deal to be uninteresting. I guess what is slightly interesting is the desperate justifications and the lip-service given care for the abject, which is part of the bargain.
This is no one is free until all are free. The winners are wholly owned by capital.
All of the following kinds of things happen alongside each other. I know someone in each category.
- A liberal or left-wing GLBTQ person who's been working on practical efforts to improve economic equality gets tired gay bashing and the like among the people they're working with, and begins to identify publicly as having this aspect to their nature. Enough of the people they've been working with are unpleasant enough about it that they say "Okay, you want me gone, I'll put the energy into something else", and they turn to some social justice issues.
- A liberal or left person who's been doing research to support hegemony-challenging economics or other scholarly work is raped or sexually assaulted. Many of their colleagues are fine support or at least no particular trouble later; a few are horrible, and at least one delights in pushing buttons via triggering jokes and the like, and does it in ways that skirt any disciplinary action their group is willing to hand down. They say "I can't do this", and start using their skills on behalf of some group concerned with rape, sexual assault, or some related issue.
- A liberal or left-wing person who has never really thought of themselves as anything but straight and cisgendered and who's been doing get-out-the-vote work on state propositions and campaigns concerned with economic justice finds themselves identifying differently, very likely through falling in love. They come out, and begin building a new life that matches their new sense of self. Phobic relatives find ways to use the laws of their jurisdiction to strip away their right to see their own children. Unable to get justice for themselves, they turn to supporting efforts to get justice for others similarly afflicted.
- A long-time activist for GLBTQ rights becomes disillusioned at the growing right-wing entrenchment in so much of government, and decides that their own niche will never be secure in the face of that. They drop out of orientation-focused activism in favor of living-wage and other campaigns.
- A basically apolitical conservative person comes to identify as GLBTQ, and hit in the face with the reality of homophobia, is willing to join efforts to change that aspect of society while continuing to feel that all this leftist talk is still just trash. Gradually they acknowledge that while the left has lots of phobe problems, the right regards it as a crucial part of their identity - they make David Brock's trip, basically. And they realize that curtailing the right-wing power requires dealing with all that stuff they used to dismiss. They get to it.
And so on through a lot of other permutations. People get active in this or that for all kinds of personal and general reasons, and a whole lot of it comes down to the specific individuals they're with in specific places at specific moments.
By the way, Jim, you're full of shit. Go look up the Transgender Day of Remembrance, murder and assault rates among people pushing for enforcement of racial equality laws, general and media treatment of people who've been raped, and a whole lot more. There aren't a lot of moments of mass death and violence to compare to, say, the fate of the Bonus Army or any of the great strike-breaking slaughters, but persistent ubiquitous violence sanctioned by authorities is something that faces a whole lot of people attempting serious social change.
There's not only no logical reason why there should be a tradeoff between mobility and equality, there is empirical evidence that they are positively correlated.
36: I've got my motherfucking can opener. When do we start cutting?
I was going to make a substantial point, but Alex went ahead and made it.
"Equality of opportunity" versus "equality of outcomes" is a completely bullshit frame. I mean, if we were choosing along the frontier of possible optimal societies, maybe there would be a trade-off. But in the here and now, we can improve both.
We are a rich society because of technological advance. The individual rich did not produce that advance other than in the most indirect way third-hand way.
50, 52: The tradeoff people purport to see isn't between economic equality and social mobility -- not only do statistics support that those two are correlated, it makes perfect sense. It's between social equality, that is racial, gender, sexual orientation, religious, and any other similar social status, and economic equality. There's no clear reason why there should be a tradeoff there, but in the US we've moved from a low-economic inequality high social-inequality society to a much more socially equal but less economically equal society over the last forty years or so.
I'm denying that there needs to be a tradeoff between those two types of inequality, but there's certainly some evidence to think there might be.
Christ, now my comments have to address the actual argument made in the original post? I can't function under these conditions!!!
49: I don't doubt that people in each of those categories exist but are you suggesting that these explain a significant part of the change in activism?
53
I'm denying that there needs to be a tradeoff between those two types of inequality, but there's certainly some evidence to think there might be.
There are a few factors. Worker solidarity is reduced with a diverse workforce. And there certainly is a tradeoff in terms of attention. Every debate question about social issues is a debate question which is not about economic issues. The same applies to front page newspaper stories or tv news segments. And how the electorate is divided into parties matters. If the division is based on social issues and campaigns are fought about social issues then economic issues will have less salience.
Worker solidarity is reduced with a diverse workforce.
The work force 1890-1940 was diverse too, with a lot of immigrants of many nationalities, languages, and religions. The dominant majority population, white Protestants, was among the least likely to unionize. Again, this is a problem to address, not a roadblack.
And there certainly is a tradeoff in terms of attention.
To the extent that the existing media and existing parties dominate people's consciousness, social issues will be dominant, since they're a cheap, convenient way to divide the electorate and often only involve symbolic acts like MLK Day, MLK Avenue, Black History Month, etc.
A measure of the seriousness of the problem is the adulation given the idle rich (Kardashians, Trump, Paris Hilton). Plenty of non-populists out there. But that might change when the economic downturn bites a little deeper.
I think it's undeniable that the existence of prominent social movements gives plutocrats a useful tool for reducing worker solidarity, but if they didn't exist, demagogues would just have to invent them.
Eggplant: No, not trying to suggest that at all. I just wanted to point out some of the many weird ways the personal becomes political, drawing on lives I know about myself. What you've got in my earlier post are dense webs of personal-scale constraints shaping personal choices. But then those constraints arise out of, among other things, the kind of inequalities we're talking about, both social and economic.
No life is really all that like any average. But precisely because the population of liminal zones is small, and because there's more tangle about sources of identity, individual experiences' ups and downs get magnified into greater significance more easily.
I'd like to note a disagreement here with John. He's talking about social movements largely in terms of glamour and commemorations. I'm talking about it in terms of people being able to get housing, get necessary medical treatment, not get killed by cops (half of all killings of trans people are committed by police), not have their children taken away by authorities who regard their sort of sinfulness as deservingly illegal, and so on - stuff that lets them live and work and raise families and take part in anything else.
I hope this next bit doesn't sound like me projecting onto John. I mean it to be "me free-associating from some of John's comments to stuff I hear elsewhere, and see told to friends from people who are nowhere near Unfogged". I'm really deeply distrustful when people who aren't affected by evil X tell the people who are, "But that doesn't matter nearly as much as Y" (where Y is something that probably does affect the speaker) and "it's just your responsibility to take that, and keep taking it, while we all work on my cause instead". Both of these seem to me to be true:
#1. We've all got to live, day by day, moment by moment. Present-day survivability and quality of life are part of what makes the ongoing struggle for better overall terms possible. The discrimination in hiring against people with black-sounding names, for instance, is a thing that needs addressing alongside opportunities to unionize.
#2. Economic justice doesn't have to produce social justice - focusing on economic justice and expecting social justice to come out of it, and telling others to all do the same, is a mug's game. The Dutch have Wilder; the Swedish government just this month freshly committed itself to some stupid transphobia in standards for medical care; and on and on. I agree that a society that allows the rich to have their way is one in which no marginalized group is ever truly safe, and that economic justice is a necessary facet in each and every push for social justice. (Which is to say that I'm right with MLK, a mere half-century later. This is not bold innovation on my part, to put it mildly.) But it's not a sufficient guarantee, and there will always be need to push on the frontiers of acceptance alongside the other perennial concerns - a society that really fully protected the rights of workers, that taxed the rich fairly and efficiently, that regulated pollution and punished externality dumping harshly, and so on could still be a society that made life bad or worse for a lot of people on margins of race, appearance, disability, gender identity, and more.
I agree that a society that allows the rich to have their way is one in which no marginalized group is ever truly safe, and that economic justice is a necessary facet in each and every push for social justice.
Huh. I basically agree with you (that both economic and social justice are fundamentally important), but I sort of hate this formulation. There are some kinds of social justice that can be improved without affecting economic inequality significantly at all -- they're just not strongly related to economic equality. If economic justice has to be a necessary facet in each and every push for social justice, then there are a whole bunch of social issues that no longer make any sense as something to fight for.
I'd agree that every decent person should be working for both economic and social justice, but I don't think you can insist that you can't or shouldn't work on one without working simultaneously on the other.
Bruce is mostly right. I've been banging away at the neglect of economic justice for long enough that I've probably come to neglect social justice, which I do support.
At the same time, the imbalance at the moment does favor social justice. The 40 year trend on economic issues, war and peace issues, and general civil liberties is very negative, the trend on women's rights and the environment is mixed, and only gay rights has shown progress. Probably this is only because gay rights started from zero at that time.
And I suppose that if my associations were different I'd run into homophobic misogynist economic liberals. But the people I do run into are upper middle class social liberals who are quite hostile to economic liberalism, and the Democratic Party seems to tend that way.
Finally, the economic issues do affect everyone (except the top 10-30%) regardless of race or gender identification. The situation now is that a poor black gay woman working in a minimum wage job might get representation as black and gay and female, but will be much less likely to get representation as poor and working in a minimum wage job.
I've been doing a lot of thinking about how fostering/adopting the way I've been trying to do it has economic and social justice implications. (I think the people who made me so mad at the foster support group and who think poor people are bad and lazy and don't deserve kids are not in this group despite being foster parents.)
There are only so many hours in the day, and I know that what I'm doing is more about "but it mattered to that little starfish!" than about systemic change, though maybe someday I can take a job that will make that less true. It's hard to know whether to feel comfortable about it, though. I am glad I've been talking about our experience online and particularly on facebook, because three couples have signed up for foster parent training because of us and I have other friends who are thinking about it.
LizardBreath, I'd be willing to go with "a really secure good life takes it all", and don't mean to suggest that this means that every part takes all the stuff in equal measure, or indeed at all. Also, and this is crucial, I don't think any one person or group should be trying to do too much - people should do what stirs them, while cultivating a good awareness of wrongs, needs, and opportunities that might stir them unexpectedly.
John: Much thanks. I do think that starting with the gaps each of us sees where we are is a darned good thing. I like the Quaker doctrine of the inner light, too.