[It’s not enough for socialists to point out capitalism’s many
faults — we need to explain our positive vision of the future and
how it lives up to our ideals of justice. ]
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WHY SOCIALISTS NEED TO TALK ABOUT JUSTICE  
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Lillian Cicerchia
December 28, 2022
Jacobin
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_ It’s not enough for socialists to point out capitalism’s many
faults — we need to explain our positive vision of the future and
how it lives up to our ideals of justice. _

,

 

After decades on the margins of political life, the last few years
have seen socialism make a comeback as a topic for serious
deliberation. Among contemporary political theorists, there is now a
maturing debate about whether market socialism, universal basic
income, property-owning democracy, council communism, or a post-work
utopia should be our vision of the postcapitalist future. But this
debate is too rarely grounded in a political philosophy.

What I mean by “political philosophy” is a theory of justice, a
systematic ethics, or a widely shared conception of human freedom.
What political philosophers do is develop concepts that help us to
distinguish the right from the wrong, the good from the bad, the just
from the unjust. Socialists have historically had a complicated
relationship to this project. We suspect that it is bourgeois,
reifying of the status quo, or simply reformist.

It’s time to turn the page on this set of suspicions. We need not
only diagnoses of systematic injustice but prescriptions for justice,
freedom, and the good life. We need these prescriptions to be
universalist, unsectarian, compelling to the unconverted, and hopeful
about the future. We also need to restore our own conviction that
socialism is possible, desirable, and just.

Socialism vs. Justice?

Let me begin by clarifying the traditional socialist objections to
theorizing about justice. The first worry that justice is a bourgeois
ideal is well founded. Claims about justice take place on a social
terrain on which there are deep social divisions that liberal ideals
like liberty and equality do a great deal to obscure. It is not easy
to use the same ideals that obscure social divisions to argue for
society’s fundamental transformation.

Second, as a result, claims about justice can tend to reify the status
quo. It is too easy to take people’s intuitions about justice at
face value. The market shapes our values, sentiments, and moral
intuitions in a way that reinforces the status quo, which mystifies a
whole variety of social problems. In this context, it is not credible
to appeal to existing norms or people’s actual desires and
preferences relative to those norms to legitimize socialist ideals.

The third objection is that the bourgeois nature of the ideal and its
many ideological distortions lead to a hopelessly reformist political
strategy. The idea of “justice” in capitalism legitimizes
capitalist dominance through the law, the courts, and the
parliamentary system; so committing oneself to maintaining a political
structure that reinforces support for such institutions makes it
nearly impossible to challenge their social basis in a fundamental
way. Radical change requires questioning some fundamental values that
people now have.

But socialists today should consider how our political opponents pose
the problem of socialism’s relationship to justice. Liberals also
argue that socialism and justice are incompatible — but for
different reasons.

First, liberals argue that socialism presupposes one idea of the good
life
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which is illiberal
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Socialism forces each individual to share in the life project of
building a classless society that seeks to harmonize individual
interests into an ideal of the common good. Critics say that the
socialist position effectively denies the pluralism about ideals of
the good life that democracy requires. In demanding that individuals
identify completely with a social mission that is greater than
themselves, the socialist rejects from the outset the fact of
unreconcilable diversity in human life. In a classless world,
socialists imagine away the realm of human contestation,
communication, and diversity. This imaginary world erases social
differences by denying the fact of pluralism that liberalism
preserves.

The second liberal objection is what I call the “Don’t be an
American rube!” objection. It goes like this: “You lot have got a
bad case of the capitalism over there (seems pretty brutal!), but
there are varieties of capitalism, don’t you see, and your
objections to it only apply to the unrestrained sort of capitalism
that is so inhospitable to human life that you are used to.” Karl
Popper famously argued that there are not only two possibilities —
capitalism or socialism — but many possibilities within capitalism.
(There are, for instance, the more humane versions of capitalism found
in the Nordic countries.) Socialism, by contrast, has very few
varieties. It is the ultimate rationalization of society, which takes
value pluralism and ideological diversity off the political table.

The third liberal objection is that abuses of political power are
easier to prevent in a capitalist system than in a socialist one. If
one understands socialism as public ownership over the means of
production and central planning, then socialism builds corruption
right into state institutions. A state structure that allows no
independence to competing centers of power, like the market, puts
individuals at the mercy of a ruling clique that can use that
structure to enrich itself without oversight.

Voters in a capitalist democracy, on the other hand, can choose
between better or worse responses to economic problems, which makes
state officials more responsive to the public. What undergirds this
political freedom is more choice when it comes to goods, services, and
job opportunities. If one is not forced to take whatever the state
provides, then the state depends more on public approval, which makes
corruption less likely to persist or become pervasive. By contrast,
socialism simply creates a large, opaque, and unaccountable
bureaucracy hostile to external criticism.

What a Democratic Socialism Might Mean

The common thread running through these objections is that socialist
politics are intrinsically illiberal, because socialists don’t
acknowledge the desirability of having a conception of justice that
allows for dissent, democratic deliberation, and civil liberties.

Socialists need to abandon their reluctance to talk about justice and
explain forthrightly why socialism is compatible with liberal values,
for two reasons.

First, it’s not clear how hope for the future can be built through a
purely negative mode of social criticism. By “negative,” I mean
the critical stance that diagnoses but refuses to develop positive
prescriptions. Karl Marx famously refused to write “recipes for the
cookshops of the future”: he rejected the idea that we should
attempt to say in detail what a future socialist society will look
like. This attitude is supposed to generate political realism and
democratic deliberation as a revolutionary movement progresses, so
that we figure out what socialism looks like in the process of
building it.

But is it not odd for the Left in 2022 to hold fast to this position?
Many of us have become nearly apocalyptic about the multiplying crises
of climate change, global stagnation, and migration, and yet an
immediate, clear idea of a socialist alternative to the global
capitalist economy that is causing these crises remains out of reach.

If the political situation is as bad as many think it is, then can the
Left really afford to employ no cooks in the kitchen? If we have lost
even the capacity to be forward-thinking, I don’t see what this
historic ban on our cooks adds to the discussion except
demoralization, political disengagement, and, as a result, fatalism.

Second, socialists have always sought political and not just economic
hegemony, which involves convincing the majority of society that
labor’s political leadership benefits everyone. Even if one isn’t
a worker, one ought to be able to find socialism desirable. Without a
compelling idea of justice, there isn’t much hope for making that
majoritarian goal a reality.

This isn’t to say that the individual is more important than the
collective (i.e., “individualism”). But socialists need to show
that individuals can flourish equally well in a different sort of
social structure. The burden is on us to say that they can and should
expect something richer and warmer from a conception of human freedom
than the one capitalism offers.

Many of the liberal arguments against socialism turn on the assumption
that socialism must be a centrally planned economy from top to bottom.
The argument that socialism is homogenizing, undermining of social
difference, and thereby denies politics should be less convincing once
one takes the politics of socialism more seriously. As Aaron Benanav
recently asked, why can’t the socialism of the future “be composed
of overlapping partial plans, which interrelate necessary and free
activities, rather than a single central plan?” _Planning _might
be qualitatively different than in the past, leaving a more limited
scope to market mechanisms but incorporating other values into the
mainstream of economic life. One might make plans for technological
developments that raise labor productivity, save time, and create a
surplus, but if investment were democratized, one could mix this plan
with other plans. For instance, citizens might propose competitions
for public investment of the surplus into the arts or into care of
children and the elderly. Socialism will require a democratic
political structure that facilitates this massive social change, which
will have to assume that pluralism is a basic fact of political life.

There may be varieties of socialism after all, which depend on how
people transform already-existing institutional structures. It may
very well be that North American socialism will look different from
European socialism, which will in turn look different from South
American socialism, because their state institutions and developmental
needs are quite diverse. For instance, I can envision a large and
illustrious project of building electric rail across the Great Plains
of North America, where farmers there have a council that coordinates
the price of grain with the rancher council in the Southwest that is
sending livestock to Chicago. I can imagine the codetermination system
in Germany turning managerial control entirely over to the workers
while the trade unions become responsible for active labor market
policies that they coordinate with an investment council.

There are many ways to have a socialism that doesn’t rely on one
central authority that is particularly vulnerable to corruption.
Checks and balances can still exist under socialism. A socialist
political theory that makes good on this potential would seek to endow
individuals with the capacity to negotiate differences in what we
value or in emphasis in how we distribute and invest the surplus of
our collective labor.

Projecting Our Hopes

Asocialist conception of justice should offer good reasons for a great
existential gamble: Why should people throw their lot in with a
transition beyond capitalism? People must believe that such a
transition will remove incentives for us to change for the worse and
instead help us to adapt for the better. They need to feel confident
that civil liberties, for instance, won’t go away.

Is “justice” necessarily reformist, as some socialists say? Maybe,
but not hopelessly so. A socialist transition will likely require many
reforms that expand capacities for people to act freely in the
present, to give us more people to work with, creating more of the
buy-in and expertise that a future free society certainly needs. That
much is required to orchestrate a rupture with something so serious as
the dominant imperatives of an economic global system. There is no way
from reform to revolution that does not expand such capacities, making
the individuals who now exist “fit to govern” themselves.

What reforms lead in the direction of rupture is not easy to
determine. But people need to be able to see the seeds of socialism
growing in the process, to trust that they are fertile grounds for
justice, so that they can shift their horizons toward freedom. To deny
the importance of justice in this historical process means denying
that socialism should try to make itself morally legitimate in the
eyes of the majority. It is self-undermining, turning socialism into
an empty placeholder onto which people project fear and uncertainty
rather than, as Otto Neurath once wrote, their hopes for a place where
the kind person can feel at home.

_Lillian Cicerchia is a postdoctoral researcher in philosophy at the
Free University of Berlin, with a focus on political economy,
feminism, and critical theory._

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* socialism
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