Friday, November 18, 2011

Social Injustices

In sitting down to try and write this blog, I could not stop thinking about what Dr. J said in class about the evaluations of injustices. She made her comment just in passing as an introduction to Marx's theory, but it stuck with me. The comment was in reference to the fact that we, when of talking of injustices, we rarely look at the economic situations of individuals. The most popular maker for injustice conversation is race, ESPECIALLY here in Memphis. It is not until recently, in the past three years really (market crash of 2008) that the conversation began to significantly change. More people and more people (lay people that is) are now beginning to understand some of the connections between these injustices - educational, racial, environmental, and now economical (the most prevalent ones) - connections that people in the social work field have been alluding to for a very long time.

Capitalism, as Marx would argue, is the reason in delay of this awareness. Now understanding a bit more of what capitalism consist of, I am inclined to believe him. This then sullies my views of American's most prized concepts such as "The Pursuit of Happiness," "America, The Land of the Free," or"America, the land of opportunity." I am interested in how you guys now view these American values. Has your understanding of them changed?

Looking forward to your response.

3 comments:

  1. Those "American values" you mentioned (Pursuit of Happiness, Land of the Free/Opportunity, etc.) are, at least in my opinion, examples of the capitalist system preventing us from recognizing our class differences. We like to the think that in America anyone could become whatever he/she wanted as long as they worked hard. This is derivative of the “Protestant work ethic” that laid the foundation for the “American Dream,” but is also very applicable to capitalism. Our social system in American inherently distracts us from class differences because we refuse to believe that classes even exist.

    I think this may be why injustice is so often viewed within the case of race and racism – because we don’t acknowledge socio-economic differences as an identity against which injustice can be done. But I think we all realize that injustices occur to the poor, or even the 99%, every day. We live in a society that says if you work hard you can achieve anything. Put unless you want to do manual labor, you better go to college. Oh, can’t afford college? You have to take out student loans. What’s that? You just graduated and the economy is failing so you can’t get a job to pay off the massive amount of debt you’re drowning under? How ungrateful you are, Occupy protestor!

    This is the vicious cycle economic injustice through capitalism creates. I’m totally with you on this one, Nellie. Injustice stems from much more than race, and you were right to point to Memphis as an example of that.

    I’ve always been a bit skeptical about the “American Dream,” but under the current circumstances I’ve just become completely disillusioned with the whole thing.

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  2. I disagree with both of you. It may be because I’m also an economics student but Marx’s system doesn’t necessarily seem like it will actually make someone appreciate their craft much more or make someone experience less injustice. From what I have learned, in a perfect free market where there is no corruption everyone has the chance to make a dollar if their willing to risk a dollar or its equal in time.

    In communism there is no motivation to achieve; everyone gains the same amount no matter what. If a doctor found the cure to cancer he would still be paid the same amount as a doctor who failed to do the same but put in the same amount of work to do so. So why would someone love their craft if they didn’t think that they wouldn’t be rewarded for it, just like someone in a free market economy wouldn’t enjoy their work if they felt like they weren’t being compensated enough for it.

    However, we don’t live in a perfect country or world for that matter. We have to worry about market failure caused by the government or lack of government, in the free market economy. It’s not like communists don’t have to worry about that either though the wrong decisions in the government that controls their economy would cause injustice in the same ways. That injustice in both instances is that the workers don’t get equal compensation.

    I’m not arguing that Communism is lesser than a Free Market economy, but in no way is it better!

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  3. Nellie,

    You ask a very intriguing question at the end. I agree with Jane ( and you) and like how she explained that Marxism leads to a certain kind of “disillusion” of these values. If we were to apply Marx’s theory to these three values of happiness, freedom, and opportunity, we would get a pretty depressing view of the values we stand for. This would be so because these values would be lies in a sense that we are not really happy when we are working as we are alienated from each of ourselves when we work and are not truly ourselves at work .We are a society that works and revolves around work most of our time, thus work is where we are the least ourselves and the least happy because of capitalist logic. Similarly, freedom is not really freedom because we are stuck as one of two classes of people till we realize this through class consciousness and create a revolution to move out of our certain class. So the idea of “land of the freedom” sounds promising but the way freedom looks is depressing. Lastly, there is the claim of opportunity. This is a more complex one because you do get opportunities here and opportunities in a career context only. However, Marx would claim at what cost would people get opportunities here? They get opportunities t the cost of alienated themselves from themselves, other people as well as their products while only being in the worker class until a potential revolution, which may never occur without class consciousness. This, Marx would say is too high of a cost for opportunity. With Marx’s theory, these American values seem to be less appealing and in Jane’s words, “disillusioned”.

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