Social Justice: Themes Transcending Time in Communist Manifesto
Many people are aware of how current political discourse is often inflammatory and dramatic, especially among youth who are determined to validate their victim mentality. However, what does not immediately make sense is that "social justice" can be understood through lens of its leftist relative – communist philosophy, specifically Marxist ideals stated in Communist Manifesto.
One similarity between social justice and communism is that they divide all people into groups and create identitarian "us versus them" divisions. You can see traces of this not just in our current social-political sphere, but in how certain political parties appeal to "minority" race/gender groups and even have control over majority of entire demographics.
The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.
Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guildmaster and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on a uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, fight that each time ended, either in revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes. [...] Our epoch, the epoch of the bourgeoisie, possesses, however, this distinct feature: it has simplified class antagonisms. Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each other — Bourgeoisie and Proletariat.
There is pervasive dichotomy between those who have worse circumstances and those who have managed to succeed, regardless of how either side arrived at their current position.
In addition, they resist idea that any form of class discrimination has been removed, instead believing that they have only been replaced or diluted: “modern bourgeois society that sprouted from ruins of feudal society has not done away with class antagonisms. It has but established new classes, new conditions of oppression, new forms of struggle in place of old ones.”
Manifesto portrays average workers as downtrodden and exploited, with no control over their lives or any life at all besides their endless labour. “[Proletariat is] a class of labourers, who live only so long as they find work, and who find work only so long as their labour increases capital. These labourers, who must sell themselves piecemeal, are a commodity, like every other article of commerce, and are consequently exposed to all the vicissitudes of competition, to all the fluctuations of the market.”
This relates to our current social-political state because large movements are committed to exaggerating their hardships and ignoring differences within groups. In addition, they neither pay enough mind to places where problem is most highly concentrated nor acknowledge central problems that cause disparities.
However, what is most concerning is that they believe that one’s connection to certain group makes them morally exempt and by default more virtuous. In their ideology, that group which has been previously disadvantaged will continue in their initial innocent spirit of equality, even when every member has been replaced by those with malicious intent.
“When, in the course of development, class distinctions have disappeared, and all production has been concentrated in the hands of a vast association of the whole nation, the public power will lose its political character. Political power, properly so called, is merely the organised power of one class for oppressing another. If the proletariat during its contest with the bourgeoisie is compelled, by the force of circumstances, to organise itself as a class, if, by means of a revolution, it makes itself the ruling class, and, as such, sweeps away by force the old conditions of production, then it will, along with these conditions, have swept away the conditions for the existence of class antagonisms and of classes generally, and will thereby have abolished its own supremacy as a class.”
In reality, any group can be guilty of injustice. By their own logic, ruling class will be oppressors – but since they have been wronged, they are not criticized for usurping power. When something gains enough power to free whole of society, what reason is there to not believe that they can take away all of their freedom and return to old ways of exploitation with new original organization?
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