Social Justice and Political Stability

Mark Thoma comments on Social Justice and Political Stability (the original paper is Social justice and democratic stability, by Dan Little).

One thing I find interesting about the sustained demonstrations and protests in Madison, Wisconsin is the fact that people on the streets do not seem to be chiefly motivated by personal material interests. Rather, the passion and the sustainability of the protests against Governor Walker's plans seem to derive from an outrage felt by many people in Wisconsin and throughout the country, that the Governor's effort is really an attempt to reduce people's rights…

The same thing is seen in the current Arab Revolt.

This is an insight that James Scott expressed a generation ago in The Moral Economy of the Peasant: Rebellion and Subsistence in Southeast Asia, and E. P. Thompson a generation before that in Customs in Common, in the theory of the moral economy. In its essence, the theory holds that the fact of sustained violation of a person's moral expectations of the society around him or her is a decisive factor in collective mobilization in many historical circumstances. Later theorists of political activism have downplayed the idea of moral outrage, preferring more material motivations based on self-interest. But the current round of activism and protest around the globe seems to point back in the direction of these more normative motivations -- combined, of course, with material interests. So it is worth reexamining the idea that a society that badly offends the sense of justice of segments of its population is likely to stimulate resistance.

Emphasis in original.

What the Capitalists forget is that humans are a social species. This has been proven time after time in scientific experiments. And all social species have moral norms—the primary one being justice.

Despite Capitalism's relentless assault upon our collective sense of justice through the propaganda of the educational system and the mass media, humans still retain this natural sense of justice. We could not survive as a species otherwise—we are too weak physically to compete with other predators.

The atomisation of human society into competing individuals is a doomed project of Capitalism. Either it will succeed and the species dies out; or Capitalism is replaced by a more equitable system. I am aiming for Communisim.

Thoma's conclusion is that:

I would add the powerlessness and frustration that workers feel due to stagnating incomes and high rates of unemployment as motivating factors, and also add the additional frustration that comes from the growing feeling — intensified in Wisconsin — that the political process does not represent workers' interests.

Emphasis mine.

The ideologues of the Capitalist system are openly expressing the forbidden thought that the workers are politically oppressed. Whatever happened to the mystique of the representational Democract?