Alright, this is my bread and butter. Originally written for my Fall 2012 Social and Political Philosophy course, the prompt was “Which philosopher provides the best conception of ‘Justice?’” So, of course I answered it by negating it. What follows is crap, but it got me an A and the professor thought it was a unique (if funny) way to get my point across.
As the current world continues to wade through untenable and unsustainable social organizations, the impulse to question the underlying institutions that provide organization grows, in kind. There is one organizational method—in particular—that may have proven to have run its course.
Throughout the history of human development, humans have interacted with and acted upon each other—that’s sort of “our condition,” according to thinkers diverse and chronologically unique all the way back to Aristotle. The two self-evidently vacuous facts that there are other humans on Earth, and that humans (for the most part) possess autonomy creates a need for some sort of governing mechanism in guiding action and allocating resources. In our collective history, laws, God, war, nature, and other larger-than-man physical forces have all attempted to govern or control human action—and with a certain degree of success.
There is, however, one governing mechanism that does not have any physical antecedent—one that has no true tangible form in the material universe. Justice is—save for conjured deities—the most important and legitimate invisible force that acts on all of our lives. It is commonly accepted that justice intrinsically exists; justice is an immutable platonic form that has always existed and will always exist.
So, suppose that justice isn’t real—or that justice is unnecessary. Karl Marx, in his economic, social, and political theories has, through careful dialectic logic and historical analysis, deconstructed much of what western society takes as a given. Included in the pantheon of unassailable concepts that Marx assails is justice. It can be argued that, in a Marxist society, the concept of justice is an inaccurate and inefficient way of promoting its own intrinsic, positive qualities. One might even be so bold as to say that, in accepting Marx’s descriptive position on society, the existence of justice is impossible, and further, that a justice-less world is preferable. Marx, in a seemingly paradoxical way, provides the best descriptive account of justice by denying its necessity and intrinsic nature.
Normally, in beginning a Marxist account of justice, the clear first step would be defining justice, itself. Because Marx never fully defines his conception of justice (at least, on his own), it would normally be instructive to create a “justice-amalgam” that could be used in comparison with Marx’s conception of communist societies. This is difficult because Marx, himself, takes careful pains to make few claims about the intrinsic nature of justice or morality of capitalism or communism. Though analysis of Marx’s position vis-à-vis the abuses of capitalism could produce a proto-justice straw man for the purpose of argument, this is an untenable and intellectually dishonest argument at its core.
Instead, a Marxist critique of justice should begin with Marx’s conception of material factors. In Marx’s The German Ideology, a clear and stringent historical epistemology is established, replacing the idealism in Hegel’s Theory of the Dialectic with strict materialism. This matters in considering Marx because this base belief, that the course of history is propelled by a thesis-antithesis-synthesis dialectical materialism, informs the entirety of his thought.
Dialectical materialism provides the assertion that change is always the result of a change in the material factors in a given society. In the material factors, there are five categories, but the five can be divided in to two main groups. The first category, the substructure, contains the modes and means of production. The second category, the superstructure, contains social organization, the law and its related aspects, and ideology and its related aspects.
By this classification system, justice belongs in the superstructure category. This is where a Marxist critique of justice must deviate from a traditional argument. In dialectical materialism, history is seen to be a record of change in the superstructure depending on change in the substructure. According to Marx, the content of the superstructure is determined by who controls the means of production. In a capitalist society, this control comes in the command of capital—ownership. Justice, in being a concept of the superstructure, can only ever be, in Marx’s eyes, a historically determined concept unique to one particular society at one particular time. An accounting of justice, for Marx, becomes a logical exercise of tracking the interests of the owner class.
The owners, in the act of setting the rules of their own society, render the concept of justice, itself a bourgeois concept, as untenable in Marx’s eyes. After all, justice itself was an invention of the landed and powerful to maintain their land and power.
Marx’s account of justice, then, becomes much like the rest of his philosophy, descriptive instead of proscriptive. It is this fact that determines Marx to have the best account of what justice is. He cannot be wrong because he denies the necessity of the concept of justice to his own theories while at the same time charting the logical cogency or judicial intent of historical conceptions of justice. In simplest terms, Marx provides the best account of justice because he makes no claims of inherency or nature when discussing it—he only gives his descriptive, historical classification.
Any theorist outside of the Marxist designation, now, would have to be inherently opposed to Marx’s justice-skepticism. Because Marx was willing to sacrifice the previously universal importance of justice, any thinker—before or after—who makes claims to the existence of justice could be seen as an opposing force or critique of Marx’s conception.
For the purpose of argument, it would be instructive to compare Marx’s account with an existing theory on justice. Being that Marx’s implicit critique of justice-through-capitalism comes from the perspective of fostering equality, perhaps it is fitting that an equally equality-obsessed theory can provide a compelling counter-argument. In John Rawls’ A Theory of Justice, the famed social contract theorist lays out a definition of justice that, while maintaining the rabid commitment to equality that Marx displays, does not shut the door on the possibility of the existence of justice.
Rawls’ groundbreaking theory holds that justice should come to be defined as fairness. His conception of this begins with the original position thought experiment, wherein the members of a society who decide upon the attributes of justice do so without having any idea what their own personal skill sets are. This lack of self-knowledge, the veil of ignorance to Rawls, would force the rule-makers to create a society that protects and fosters liberty and equality while protecting the weakest and least well off in society.
The attraction of comparing Rawls’ fairness-based account of justice with Marx’s denial-based or nihilistic account is that there is somewhat of an equivalency in their focus on equality. Rawls thought it incredibly important to structure society so that the average human behind the veil of ignorance would have access to the same primary goods that their peers did. This does sound almost utopian Marxist, in a vacuous way. But, Rawls would assuredly criticize Marx on the basis that, within Marx’s writing, dialectical materialism takes a too reductivistic view on justice. Rawls would instead see justice as the positive application of just pre-defined principles, ones designed to foster the liberty and equality. To Rawls, this conception of justice should be universal instead of historical, because distributing the goods of a society fairly requires a working definition of justice instead of a critique of it’s existence.
In this regard, Rawls’ affable, palatable liberalism provides the most compelling counterargument to Marx’s lack of belief in justice. To a moderate leftist like Rawls, Marx can only be a social scientist—describing what he sees and tracking the historical development of society—until the proletariat makes the final step in creating a classless society. For Marx, as long as capitalism reigns, pragmatically, a working definition of justice must be in use. Because justice is definitionally dependent on the attributes of the society, even things that would be objectionable to Marx could be considered just. This does not mean, however, that the objectionable components of a capitalist conception of justice would necessarily be just. It simply means that the owner/rule-setters of the superstructure will inexorably define the very concept of justice to better fit their needs and ends—thus sometimes creating unjust laws.
For Rawls, laws and social structure, instead of being conservative forces for maintaining the power of the upper classes, become a vehicle for social mobility and equality. It can be established for the purposes of this argument that Rawls’ justice is a base distributive concept—one that attempts to right the ills of society in its own womb.
Earlier on, the assertion was made that in Marx’s non-existent definition of justice, it is difficult to objectively determine Marx’s theory on justice. Frankly speaking, this is because a Marxist critique of the concept of justice being compared to a concept of justice would be like comparing apples to a bushel of handwritten notes that deny the need for apples in the first place. However, after looking at the basic driving force behind Rawls’ justice, a common comparative element can be ascertained in order to determine who gives the best account of justice. Recalling distributive qualities of justice, Rawls is largely lauded for providing the most modern and ill-curing conception of justice. If the goal of a Rawlsian system—fostering equality, primarily—is better held up by a Marxist anti-justice perspective, then the Marxist critique still provides the best accounting of justice. This distributive nature of Rawls’ conception of justice leads directly back in to why Marx still has it right, in the end.
The criterion of comparison between Marx and Rawls, now, becomes distribution. In comparing the theoretical merits of the two systems, the point of commonality that exists in fostering equality or redistributing the goods in a more fair way allows for a fairly straightforward comparison. Recall, in Rawls’ just society, the rules of the society exist for the purpose of creating a fair distribution of primary goods. In a Marxist society, the proletariat has established the classless society to create a definitionally vacuous fair system of primary good distribution. At this point, the two conceptions of justice look to be a wash—both provide a normative accounting of what the best possible distribution would look like. However, it is in the extraneous effects of analyzing what kind of society would participate in each, and how the society would be changed, that a true determination as to the superiority of one theory over the other can be made.
Paradoxically, the best—and most theoretically “just” on a distributive metric—system can be found in the absence of justice. In a communist society, one removed from the struggle between the rule-setting bourgeoisie and the proletariat, the concept of justice as being a distributive element (of life, property, and the like) is rendered unnecessary. Justice, without the looming influence of the bourgeoisie attempting to use the system to protect and enrich their own power, would be an amorphous thing, if existing at all. The Marxist position on justice is preferable to Rawls’ because, simply, Marx solves for Rawls’ biggest problem—the fair distribution of goods—without having to resort to a bourgeois concept like justice.
In a near-Nozick-style sense, Marxism becomes a preferable account of justice primarily because it renders the necessity of justice moot. Recall that Nozick asks, in the beginning of Anarchy, State, and Utopia, how much a government is actually allowed to do, ethically. The conclusion that he reaches is that the most ethical government is that which governs as little as possible. Though Nozick’s entire argument takes a sharp veer to the right after this initial question, in applying it to the Marx and Rawls comparison, Nozick’s principle can be instructive.
That system that exists in its smallest possible iteration, that impedes the autonomy of its subjects in the smallest possible way, is the best system (and by many non-Marxist metrics, the most “just”). Marxist accounts of justice become preferable to Rawlsian conceptions because, at the point where equality has been mandated and legislated, in a Rawlsian system there still exists the potential for capitalist oppression or exploitation. In the Marxist society that has prioritized equality by moving ownership of the substructure to the members within it, justice is actually unnecessary.
Justice, itself, exists within the confines of capitalism to protect life and property, and within a more specific Rawlsian sense to increase the personal benefits of property and life to the average citizen. A Marxist would reply to Rawlsian critiques with charges of being counter-revolutionary or reformist with their ideals. One of the primary components of the Marxist conception of perfect equality is that it is unattainable within the substructure-superstructure paradigm of capitalism. Any attempts to foster a more lenient, equality-oriented, or benevolent form of justice would be seen by a Marxist as a simple reshuffling of the deck—where a Marxist wants to play a different game, entirely. The fact that “justice” is a creation within the superstructure by the owner class makes it a meaningless propositional phrase when removed from its historical context. In this sense, the clearest distinction between the justice-oriented distributive equality of Rawls and the societally defined quality of Marx can be found. Rawls requires an inherently corrupt system to implement his vision of the proper distribution, whereas the proper distribution is a necessary quality to a post-revolutionary Marxist society.
Though Marx does not seem to want to play within the same rules that Rawls does, the one point that Rawls seems to hold over Marx is the applicability and pragmatism of their systems. Marx can easily be interpreted as a generally utopian figure while Rawls provides a normative restructuring of existing concepts within our current justice system. Rawls designed his soft, reformist-liberalist concept in order to be implemented, whereas Marx requires that the very superstructure of implementation—where justice lives—be torn asunder in the restructuring of the post-proletarian revolution society. Though this critique of Marx in favor of Rawls holds some ground, the semi-utopian ideas of the veil of ignorance and the original position allow for the same critique to be leveled against Rawls.
It is fair then, to refer back to the original thesis: that Marx, in denying the concept of justice and its intrinsic necessity, provides the best account of it. Charges of utopian thought can only be leveled against normative or proscriptive philosophies, not descriptive social science. Marx’s account of justice is, in the end, circularly the best because it is a categorical, material, historical classification—it is the best account because it accounts for the prior and future definitions of justice. And, to wit, on a certain level, Marxism achieves the desired “just” outcome of a Rawlsian justice as fairness metric without using the vehicle of justice. The paradoxical statement that Marx’s denial of justice is the best accounting of it is, in the end, proven to be a compelling argument.