You are right only if socialism is equated with (Soviet-style) communism.Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Sat Mar 23, 2024 6:54 pmIn every real-world case in history, Socialism has turned to a devastated economy and piles of corpses. No exceptions. So only when Socialism is not the dominant economic or political strategy in a place is any measure of it even tolerable. And there's a serious doubt that it's ever functional, let alone ideal, even then.
The social (welfare) state with its institutions of social security such as health insurance and unemployment insurance (as we have it in Germany) does have a record of success! It's a very good humanitarian thing!Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Sat Mar 23, 2024 6:54 pmFor example, socialized medicine, even in a basically democratic polity like the UK or Canada, bankrupts the medical system.
Public schooling turns into a propaganda factory. Social welfare turns out to be beset by freeloaders. And so on. Every socialized program turns out to be more expensive and less efficient than it ought to be, and ultimately unsustainable. That's a serious problem for any Socialist. But I never hear them talk about their own 100% record of failure.
(I'm not denying that an excessively, inflationarily generous welfare state creates new problems, such as attracting too many immigrants.)
If public schooling is (mis)used for ideological indoctrination by the (Far-)Left or the (Far-)Right, then the problem is not public schooling as such, especially as private schooling as such doesn't guarantee freedom from propaganda either.
Do you mean equity (qua justness/fairness) or equality (qua sameness in some respect or other)? As for the latter, if egalitarianism were the view that all people ought to become or be made equal in all respects, it would be quite silly indeed—but it is not that view! Trying to realize absolute egalitarianism means trying to do the in-principle impossible, but trying to realize relative egalitarianism doesn't. People will never be equal in all mental or physical respects, but equality (or almost-equality at least) in other respects is not a natural impossibility.Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Sat Mar 23, 2024 6:54 pmTwo problems, though. One is that in real life, equity is completely impossible. It never exists, anywhere.
A moral conception and justification of equality or equity (qua justice/fairness) doesn't require any non-secular underpinnings. Generally, ethics is independent of theism and theology.Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Sat Mar 23, 2024 6:54 pmThe other is that given secularism, there's no rational explanation of why we owe it to each other even to regard each other as theoretically equal, even if we admit that, in practice, it remains impossible to actualize.
"A female, black, youthful, able-bodied homosexual" and "a fat, male, Chinese, elderly, disabled heterosexual" certainly cannot become physical/corporeal equals, but they can become ones in other respects (moral, legal, social, political, economic ones).Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Sat Mar 23, 2024 6:54 pmIn what way can a female, black, youthful, able-bodied homosexual be made the equal of a fat, male, Chinese, elderly, disabled heterosexual? What's the recipe for getting that done? And then, what's the rationale that explains why it is incumbent upon our society to try to make the Chinese man the "equal" of the black girl?
Or if we mean that they are, in some value sense, each other's "equals in value," to whom or what is that value delivered, and why should we assume that they have the same value to that?
Of course, can doesn't imply ought; and there is an ongoing debate over how much moral, legal, social, political, or economic inequality is justifiable.
You've erected a straw man against egalitarianism here!Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Sat Mar 23, 2024 6:54 pmThere is no way to explain what's "equitable" in forcing the black girl to suffer some sort of "equivalent" inhibitions to the Chinese man. What's "just" about crippling or limiting her potential in some way, in order to make sure he doesn't feel bad?
I don't believe in objective moral facts, so I agree that there is no objective moral "metric for determining" equity or "justice as fairness" (John Rawls).Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Sat Mar 23, 2024 6:54 pm Right. Which means force of some kind. The black girl must be excluded, denied access, inhibited, discriminated against in some way, so that some standard of "equity" we can't even agree on is "satisfied" that we have hammered her enough, or bestowed so many unearned privileges on him that our personal estimation of "equity" has been met. But we have absolutely no metric for determining what that point is, or what is just another form of inequity.
From the socialist perspective, equity and equality are intimately connected. Here, the moral default position is that (except for certain natural inequalities) inequality is unjust/unfair.
I do see the big problem that there is a clash of equality and liberty: The more the state is turned into an equity-through-equality machine, the more coercive its instruments will have to become in order for it to succeed. – The Woke Left will reply that they are legitimately using the power of the state and the law for the sake of their good cause.
Is it a socialist principle that "people are all essentially good in the first place"? I don't think so.Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Sat Mar 23, 2024 6:54 pm Wait. That doesn't answer the fundamental question. The real question is how any faults or "evils," if we can use that word, ever come to exist when people are all essentially good in the first place. They say "society": but society is composed of nothing by good and meliorable human beings, allegedly: so whence this social maladjustment that is alleged to be producing all the problems? Why is a group of supposedly sociable, morally-well-arranged not either properly sociable or morally well-arranged when they combine into a society? And why do they need any amelioration, when they're already good people?
"Essentially social" doesn't mean "essentially good", and I don't read this description of the socialist view of human nature as meaning that everybody is, will, or can become a good person, or that nobody has an anti-social or anti-rational habitus."Socialists regard humans as essentially social creatures, their capacities and behaviour being shaped more by nurture than by nature, and particularly by creative labour. Their propensity for cooperation, sociability and rationality means that the prospects for personal growth and social development are considerable."
(Heywood, Andrew. Political Ideologies: An Introduction. 7th ed. London: Red Globe/Macmillan, 2021. p. 56)
However, even mafiosi are sociable in the sense of being "naturally inclined or disposed to be in company with others of the same species" (OED). They are not sociable in the sense of being "characterized by, pertaining to, contact, intercourse, or companionship with [all] others in a friendly or pleasant manner". (OED)
I already mentioned the welfare state (which doesn't exist in all countries). It is an empirical fact that it has reduced a lot of human suffering (through poverty or illness).Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Sat Mar 23, 2024 6:54 pm What is our evidence that it's not a delusion? That we don't want it to be a delusion? That it sounds nice, optimistic and humane if we say such a thing? Or that history gives us some evidence that would give us some reason to think that's true?
Where has this "progressive belief that the conditio humana can be improved" been realized, so that we may marvel?
Following Rorty's logic, one would have to say that many people freely decide to become evil and to do bad things.Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Sat Mar 23, 2024 6:54 pmThen why did they "make themselves up" so badly? How did we get gulags, re-education camps and Auschwitz from good and ameliorable human beings "making themselves up"? Where did that evil come from?
I'm convinced that a person's habitus (in the sense of a dispositional matrix of ways of feeling, thinking, and behaving) is at least partially determined by nurture, by their non-innate, non-nature-given conditions of socialization and enculturation (including education), which needn't stay the same from one generation to the next. However, I don't agree with Rorty's extreme opinion that "there is no such thing as human nature." I was not born as a complete tabula rasa. Human self-creation or self-determination in his absolute sense is a fiction.
How about Proudhon's anarcho-socialism?Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Sat Mar 23, 2024 6:54 pm Well, you could answer the question before posing the counterquestion, of course.
"To the extent that society becomes enlightened, royal authority diminishes; this is a fact to which all history bears witness. At the birth of nations men reflect and reason in vain. Without methods, without principles, not knowing how to use their reason, they do not know what is justice and what deception; then the authority of kings is immense, since no knowledge has been acquired to contradict it. But little by little, experience brings habits, which become customs; then the customs are formulated in maxims, set down as principles, and in short transformed into laws, to which the king, the living law, is forced to render homage. There comes a time when customs and laws have so multiplied that the will of the prince is as it were entangled with the general will, and that, on taking the crown, he is obliged to swear that he will govern in conformity with customs and usages, and that he is only the executive power of a society whose laws are made independently of him.
Up to this point, all is done instinctively, and as it were unconsciously, but let us see the end point of this movement.
By means of self-instruction and the acquisition of ideas man finally acquires the idea of science, that is, of a system of knowledge conforming to the reality of things and deduced from observation. He searches for the science, or the system, of inanimate bodies, the system of organic bodies, or the system of the human mind, and the system of the world: why should he not also search for the system of society? But having reached this point, he understands that political truth or science exists quite independently of the will of sovereigns, the opinion of majorities, and popular beliefs; that kings, ministers, magistrates, and peoples, as wills, have no connection with science and are worthy of no consideration. At the same time he understands that if man is born a sociable being, the authority of his father over him ceases on the day when, his mind being formed and his education finished, he becomes the associate of his father; that his true chief and his king is demonstrated truth, that politics is a science and not a matter of stratagem, and that the function of the legislator is reduced, in the final analysis to the methodical search for truth.
Thus, in a given society the authority of man over man is universally proportional to the intellectual development which that society has reached, and the probable duration of that authority can be calculated from the more or less general desire for a true government, that is, for a government based on science. And just as the right of force and the right of strategem retreat before the growing awareness of justice and must finally be extinguished in equality, so the sovereignty of the will gives way to the sovereignty of the reason and ends up being replaced by a scientific socialism. Property and royalty have been crumbling ever since the beginning of the world. As man seeks justice in equality, so society seeks order in anarchy."
(Proudhon, Pierre-Joseph. What is Property? [1840.] Edited and translated by Donald R. Kelley & Bonnie G. Smith. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994 pp. 207-9)
Marxists don't have to accept postmodern relativism (or epistemic antifoundationalism, or semantic antirepresentationalism, or metaphysical antirealism), do they?Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Sat Mar 23, 2024 6:54 pmBut the truth is that the fact that they have to ditch science, logic and reason has come recently to the Left: but it's because the hopes of what they call "crude Marxism" turned out to be dusty if science, logic, history and rationality were regarded as reliable at all. Hence, the Postmodern critiques that emphasize this are testament from the Marxists themselves to the rational, historical and scientific failure of original Marxism.
No, Marx was not a fraud, but a serious and able analyst of capitalist society. Scruton calls him a social scientist, but he can as well be called a social philosopher; and his "scientific socialism" is actually not as scientific as Marx believed it to be.Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Sat Mar 23, 2024 6:54 pmMarx was a fraud. Not only did he not "enlighten" anyone, his thinking has proved to be a Stygian mess. He was no economist, and none of the theories he tried to sell as "scientific" were in any way scientific in actuality. He was an ideologue and a secular prophet, a self-professed genius, whose chief personal project seems to have been to obtain a free ride. But for some inexplicable reason, the Left loves the guy.
"Marx, Karl (1818–83)
A Young Hegelian turned social scientist, who lived for much of his life in exile, having lent support to the revolutionary activity of 1848. Together with Engels he wrote the Communist Manifesto, and developed a philosophy of man, history and politics that would give hitherto unprecedented authority to the communist cause. This philosophy has undergone many changes (see dialectical materialism, Marxism-Leninism, neo-Marxism). The form in which it is found in Marx has three distinct, but interdependent, parts.
(i) Human nature. This theory shows the influence of Hegel and finds fullest expression in Marx’s early writings (e.g. The 1844 Manuscripts). The nature of man is not immutable but historical, changing in accordance with social and economic conditions. But the prime mover of history is man himself who, through labour, remakes the world in his own image and changes his image in accordance with his powers. The nature of man therefore depends upon the conditions in which he labours. Private property creates the division between the classes, and also the condition of alienation which is overcome only by overthrowing the institution which creates it. With the abolition of private property man ceases to be a mere object or means; he is restored to his dignity as subject, or end in himself. He then becomes free, and his social relations become classless.
(ii) History. The philosophical idea of the ‘historical essence of man’ is recast in the later writings (notably Capital, vol. I, 1867) as a scientific claim concerning the evolution of human societies. All social forms have a function, and this function explains their existence, their survival and their destruction. Marx’s theory is a form of materialism: history is propelled by material forces – the productive forces – whereby nature is transformed into use-values and exchange-values. These productive forces compel the creation and destruction of successive systems of production relations between people. These systems, or economic structures, form the material base of society upon which the many-tiered superstructure of institutions is erected. Among the possible production relations are those of feudalism, capitalism, socialism and communism. The superstructure consists of the legal and other institutions which consolidate these arrangements, together with the ideology that pertains to them. Productive forces have an intrinsic tendency to develop, as human knowledge of and mastery over nature increase. As they develop successive economic structures arise and give way, and the social superstructure changes along with them. At a particular point of development the productive forces and the production relations enter into conflict: the latter being unable to contain the former. Society then enters a period of revolution. People become conscious of this by recognizing the existence of class struggle, between those whose activity fits them for the new economic structure, and those who are guardians of the old. This consciousness is not the cause, but the effect, of the material conflict which generates revolution.
(iii) Economics. Marx put forward a version of the labour theory of value. Since exchange-value enters the world only through labour, attribution to it of autonomous power is a form of fetishism (see commodity fetishism). Exchange-value is in reality ‘congealed human labour’. The accumulation of surplus value is explained as the extortion of hours of unpaid labour; exchange-value therefore accumulates in the hands of the capitalist, and never in the hands of the worker. This is the only explanation of regular capital accumulation that is compatible with the truth of the labour theory (but cf. primitive accumulation); it follows that capitalism is of necessity a form of exploitation.
The combination of these views leads to a prediction. At a certain point of development the economic structure of capitalism will no longer be able to contain and facilitate the everdeveloping productive forces. Hence there will be a crisis of capitalism to be resolved by revolution. This revolution will transfer power to the proletariat, and there will follow a development towards an economic arrangement that will be communist (since that is the only arrangement suited to the final mastery of nature), and also classless. Marx is famous for his attacks on ‘utopian’ socialism,
describing his own form of socialism as ‘scientific’. In retrospect, however, the motive of his thinking in all its forms appears decidedly utopian, and its brilliance no longer disguises the fact that Marx’s scientific pretensions are illusory."
(Scruton, Roger. The Palgrave Macmillan Dictionary of Political Thought. 3rd ed. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. pp. 424-5)
Yes, there is such a non-nonsensical version of socialism as social democracy.Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Sat Mar 23, 2024 6:54 pmThere's no such thing. For the Left, "social" means "the people," and the only "people" who count are the Socialists. Thus, there's no "democracy," because people have no power not to be Socialists or to choose anything that is not Socialism. So that's just a nonsense term, like "new antique."
"Social democracy is an ideological stance that supports a broad balance between market capitalism, on the one hand, and state intervention on the other. Being based on a compromise between the market and the state, social democracy lacks a systematic underlying theory and is, arguably, inherently vague. It is nevertheless associated with the following views: (1) capitalism is the only reliable means of generating wealth, but it is a morally defective means of distributing wealth because of its tendency towards poverty and inequality; (2) the defects of the capitalist system can be rectified through economic and social intervention, the state being the custodian of the public interest; (3) social change can and should be brought about peacefully and constitutionally."
(Heywood, Andrew. Political Ideologies. 7th ed. London: Palgrave, 2021. p. 95)
"Tensions Within Socialism:
Communism <–> Social democracy
scientific socialism <–> ethical socialism
fundamentalism <–> revisionism
utopianism <–> reformism
revolution <–> evolution/gradualism
abolish capitalism <–> ‘humanize’ capitalism
common ownership <–> redistribution
classless society <–> ameliorate class conflict
absolute equality <–> relative equality
state collectivization <–> mixed economy
central planning <–> economic management
vanguard party <–> parliamentary party
dictatorship of proletariat <–> political pluralism
proletarian/people’s state <–> liberal-democratic state"
(Heywood, Andrew. Political Ideologies. 7th ed. London: Palgrave, 2021. p. 97)
No, it's rubbish to count fascism and national socialism among the left-wing ideologies.Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Sat Mar 23, 2024 6:54 pmNo, Fascism is Left. It's Socialism. Libertarianism, individualism, genuine democracy, conservatism, classical liberalism...these are on the right.
No, Heywood is right!Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Sat Mar 23, 2024 6:54 pmAt odds with, yes: repelled by, no."[N]eo-Marxists were usually at odds with, and sometimes profoundly repelled by, the Bolshevik model of orthodox communism." – A. Heywood
(I have a copy and read it.)Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Sat Mar 23, 2024 6:54 pmOrthodox Communism is a universal failure. Even the Neo-Marxists had to accept that. But they tried to save the theory by their bait-and-switch move. See James Lindsay, "Race Marxism."
Of course, there is still something Marxist about Neo-Marxism; but it remains true that it is relevantly different from orthodox communism.
The Frankfurters are famous for their critical studies of fascist/nazist authoritarianism (totalitarianism). There is a book titled The Authoritarian Personality (1950) by Adorno et al.; and Marcuse wrote a whole book on orthodox communism: Soviet Marxism: A Critical Analysis (1958)
Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Sat Mar 23, 2024 6:54 pm
No. It's a fight for group pre-eminence. The individual is of no interest to Socialism, except as a token of the group. That's why they define every individual by his/her race, class, sexuality, disability, fatness, etc., and treat those as socially-determinative of what every individual is.
…They stereotype and lock in everyone according to the Socialist ideologues' own conception of class/race/sex/sexuality essentialism. If you're outside of that essentialist conception they impose, if you are a rejector of their Socialist group, if you're an individual, if you're not like the others they expect, then you just don't count. Nothing could be more evident from their rhetoric. You are not "the People," as Mao said; you're "against the People."
The >80s Woke Left (aka identitarian/minoritarian Left) is the successor of the 60s/70s New Left; and I don't see that they are ultracollectivists, who have completely abandoned the values of individual liberty and authenticity."The New Left was born in the early nineteen-sixties as a revolt against the modern university, and it died less than ten years later, in the auto-da-fé of Vietnam. Although it helped mobilize opinion on issues like civil rights, urban poverty, the arms race, and the war, the New Left never had its hands on the levers of political power. But it changed left-wing politics. It made individual freedom and authenticity the goals of political action, and it inspired people who cared about injustice and inequality to reject the existing system of power relations, and to begin anew."
Source: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021 ... e-new-left
Lindsay & Pluckrose speak of…
However, according to the following description of postmodern politics, the individual is not lost: "…the right to individual and collective forms of…""The Loss of the Individual and the Universal
Consequently, to postmodern Theorists, the notion of the autonomous individual is largely a myth. The individual, like everything else, is a product of powerful discourses and culturally constructed knowledge. Equally, the concept of the universal—whether a biological universal about human nature; or an ethical universal, such as equal rights, freedoms, and opportunities for all individuals regardless of class, race, gender, or sexuality—is, at best, naive. At worst, it is merely another exercise in power-knowledge, an attempt to enforce dominant discourses on everybody. The postmodern view largely rejects both the smallest unit of society—the individual—and the largest—humanity—and instead focuses on small, local groups as the producers of knowledge, values, and discourses. Therefore, postmodernism focuses on sets of people who are understood to be positioned in the same way—by race, sex, or class, for example—and have the same experiences and perceptions due to this positioning."
(Pluckrose, Helen, and James Lindsay. Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity; and Why This Harms Everybody. Durham, NC: Pitchstone, 2020. p. 42)
"Postmodern politics, then, can be described – at the same time – as a ‘politics of identity’, as a ‘politics of difference’, and as a ‘politics of recognition’:
A. As a politics of identity, it defends the right to individual and collective forms of performative expressivity as long as this does not involve the discrimination of other members of society.
B. As a politics of difference, it advocates the right to individual and collective forms of sociocultural idiosyncrasy, irrespective of whether people belong, or think they belong, to group-specific minorities or majorities.
C. As a politics of recognition, it endorses the right to individual and collective forms of public visibility, sustained through both the quotidian and the institutional acknowledgement of relationally constituted identities constructed, and constantly reconstructed, within spatiotemporally situated communities.
Arguably, ‘[t]he “struggle for recognition” is fast becoming the paradigmatic form of political conflict in the late twentieth century’ and, most likely, will continue to be of great significance throughout the twenty-first century. The ‘recognition of “different voices”’, different identities, different belief systems, different social practices, and different life forms is central to demonstrating that – to recall an influential aphorism of second-wave feminism – ‘the personal is political’. In other words, the seemingly most private aspects of human existence are profoundly public, in the sense that the struggle for recognition of one’s identity cannot be reduced to the realm of subjectivity but takes place within the wider context of society, which is pervaded by – relatively arbitrary – symbolic and material hierarchies of legitimacy.
‘Postmodernist thought, in attacking the idea of a notional centre or dominant ideology, facilitated the promotion of a politics of difference’, thereby drawing attention to the dangers arising from marginalizing processes by means of which members of discriminated or disempowered groups are ‘defined or “othered” as inferior with respect to’ members of dominant and empowered sections of society. To be sure, both legitimization and delegitimization mechanisms can be realized on multiple levels – in particular, on economic, political, ideological, cultural, ethnic, sexual, gender-specific, generational, and physical grounds. It is open to question whether or not power is – or, at least, can be – ‘used in all societies to marginalize subordinate groups’. Yet, regardless of whether one considers social marginalization processes to be a historical contingency or an anthropological invariant, the detrimental – and, possibly, pathological – consequences of power dynamics can be sought to be minimized by virtue of an inclusive ‘politics of identity, difference, and recognition’.
What much of anti-classist, anti-elitist, anti-racist, anti-sexist, anti-ageist, and anti-ableist projects have in common with postmodernism is that they condemn ‘the legitimating metadiscourse’ put in place to ensure that those who, in a particular realm of social life, have the upper hand in the present continue to do so in the future. The ambition to seek both individual and collective forms of empowerment able to oppose this is vital to the idea of a postmodern politics. Rather than conceiving of the self as ‘autonomous, rational, and centred, and somehow free of any particular cultural, ethnic, or gendered characteristics’, we need to acknowledge that an actor’s numerous dispositions internalized in relation to other members of society, as well as an actor’s manifold positions occupied within different spheres of an asymmetrically structured reality, need to be taken into account in order to generate an empowering ‘politics of difference’. Hence, we are confronted with ‘a new kind of emancipation, one of a liberation of difference’:
—
Emancipation, here, consists in disorientation, which is at the same time also the liberation of differences, of local elements, of what could generally be called dialect. With the demise of the idea of a central rationality of history, the world of generalized communication explodes like a multiplicity of ‘local’ rationalities – ethnic, sexual, religious, cultural or aesthetic minorities – that finally speak up for themselves.
—
In other words, the struggle for the recognition of differences, expressed in the multiplicity of spatiotemporally constituted particularities, lies at the heart of postmodern politics. Accordingly, postmodern politics can be characterized by reference to various significant normative features:
a. its ‘deliberate open-endedness’ (anti-dogmatism);
b. its ‘infinitely skeptical and subversive attitude toward normative claims, institutional justice and political struggles’ (anti-conventionalism);
c. its advocacy of ‘trans-social networks of mutual recognition and arrangement’ (anti-parochialism);
d. its preparedness not only to appreciate but also to ‘celebrate diversity’, along with its conviction that ‘plurality is preferable to singularity, difference to identity, otherness to sameness’ (anti-universalism);
e. its critical engagement with the emergence of ‘a multi-cultural and fragmented civil society’ (anti-monoculturalism);
f. its willingness to challenge traditional ‘ideas of national commonality’ insensitive to ‘the multiple parts of the marginalized’ and voiceless (anti-nationalism);
g. its ability to destabilize ‘the configuration and perceived transmission’ of dominant cultural identities reproduced on the basis of ‘hegemonic memory politics’ (anti-hegemonism);
h. its attack on mechanisms of ‘social exclusion, domination and subjugation’ (anti-exclusionism);
i. its insistence upon the fact that complex societies require post-traditional models of citizenship capable of ‘incorporating a sensitivity to “difference”’ (anti-monism); and
j. its open-minded readiness to experiment with ‘multiple projects’ embedded in constantly shifting structures of ‘intersectionality’ (anti-traditionalism).
In short, postmodern approaches to politics are committed to acknowledging the distinctive normative weight, and power-laden implications, of social differences."
(Susen, Simon. The ‘Postmodern Turn’ in the Social Sciences. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. pp. 182-4)
——————
"Somewhat schematically, it is possible to distinguish two main types of justice claims, both of which have had, and continue to have, a significant influence on contemporary conceptions of social struggle.
A. There are ‘redistributive claims, which seek a more just distribution of resources and wealth’ – for instance, a fairer ‘redistribution from the North to the South, from the rich to the poor, and (not so long ago) from the owners to the workers’. Owing to the rise of neoliberalism and the corresponding revival of free-market policies in large parts of the world, advocates of redistributive models of justice have been ‘on the defensive’, finding themselves in an increasingly weak position in recent decades.
B. There are recognitive claims, which aim for a more just recognition of identities and differences, especially of those of relatively marginalized and disempowered members of society, who may suffer the consequences of domination based on class, ‘race’, ethnicity, culture, ideology, religion, gender, age, or ability – or on other sociologically relevant variables. Given the growing impact of multiculturalism and the parallel resurgence of inclusivist policies in numerous societies around the world, proponents of recognitive models of justice have been on the offensive, benefiting from a gradually more influential position in the contemporary era.
In short, whereas the former model endorses social-democratic politics oriented towards the redistribution of income and wealth, the latter model advocates multicultural politics oriented towards the recognition of group-specific identities and differences. Surely, it may be legitimately objected that this twofold categorization is founded on a false opposition and that, more importantly, ‘justice today requires both redistribution and recognition’. In other words, if it is the case that ‘neither redistribution alone nor recognition alone can suffice to overcome injustice today’, then it is also true that ‘they need somehow to be reconciled and combined’, rather than being considered and treated as mutually exclusive. The shift from modern to postmodern conceptions of politics is reflected in the transition from the ‘paradigm of redistribution’ to the ‘paradigm of recognition’ and, hence, from the universalist concern with ‘equality’ to the particularist engagement with ‘difference’."
(Susen, Simon. The ‘Postmodern Turn’ in the Social Sciences. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. pp. 185-6)