Rejecting Res Judicata turns Courts into perpetual motion machines

 In Property Owners Association v State of Maharashtra 2024, CJI Chandrachud wrote the judgment of a nine member bench on an appeal on this matter dating to 2002. The case had previously been heard by a three member bench in 1996 who thought a five member bench (i.e. a 'constitution bench' was needed. This was done in 2001. The five judges decided that a seven member bench was needed. The next year, such a bench decided that a nine member bench was needed. 22 years later such a bench directed the Registry to obtain administrative instructions from the Chief Justice for placing the matters before an appropriate bench for further proceedings! Forget about 'Res Judicata'! The Supreme Court is a perpetual motion machine creating more and more work for itself such that no decisions are ever made! 

 Meanwhile the underlying problem- viz. that the pre-1992 Repair Board which had been doing a fairly good job of  maintaining 'cessed' buildings had been replaced by the much less productive  MHADA- worsened as more and more buildings collapsed during the monsoons. Even if the CJI, who isn't an architect and doesn't know anything about repairing old buildings, gives lots of lovely instructions such that lots of cases can be brought before 'appropriate benches' and even if all those benches decide that what is needed is bigger and bigger benches to decide the case, still, the underlying problem will either worsen or disappear by itself. 

 Still, this judgment of Chandrachud's did attract adverse comment. The evil bastard was rejecting Socialist ideology! But this wasn't really the case.  The Bench merely affirmed that the Government could take away any private property if they thought it truly essential for the community's well-being. But this was already the settled view of the Courts! The time judges spent on this matter was time wasted. 

In another case involving Waqf property, Chandrachud found that Res Judicata can be challenged by anything at all! But what was the outcome? The matter was sent back to the District Court. What is to prevent another thirty or forty years of appeals which will culminate with the Supreme Court sending the matter back to the District Court? Meanwhile all sorts of people are being harassed by claims that their ancestral property is actually Waqf land. Since none of the cases are ever resolved, this uncertainty will persist unless violent action is taken such that the nuisance ends. But that is the law of the Jungle!  

Chandrachooth on Intersectionality

Rights are only effective if linked to incentive compatible remedies under a bond of law. In other words, it must be in the interest of the obligation holder to supply the remedy otherwise the obligation holder will find some way to evade or avoid that responsibility. Human rights guaranteed by the Government are only effective if the Government has the necessary resources to supply the remedy. If it doesn't have the resources, the remedy will be rationed or its provision will be purely cosmetic.

Former CJI Chandrachud, speaking at King's College, never once mentions the question of the resources available for the provision of remedies. What he does talk about is modish Left-Liberal ideas like 'intersectionality'-

f intersectional discrimination, where many factors including gender, caste and disability play a role in the commission of heinous offence on say, a visually challenged woman belonging to the Scheduled Caste. In Patan Jamal Vali v. State of Andhra Pradesh , the Court stressed that the factors causing intersectional discrimination must be assessed while determining the sentence of a convict.

There was no need. The victim belonged to a Scheduled Caste and thus the Prevention of Atrocities Act of 1989 applied. This just meant that he got more concurrent life sentences. The victim was also blind and so an additional concurrent sentence could be imposed. There was no need to drag in 'intersectionality' because Indian law had already differentiated between crimes against Scheduled Castes and Tribes. The rapist was a poor coolie and nobody cared what happened to him. The question before the court was whether PoA was applicable even if the offender neither knew nor cared about the caste of the victim. It was decided that it was applicable though the Court left open the question of whether prosecution under the Act 'can be sustained as long as caste identity is one of the grounds for the occurrence of the offence'. If the Court had said that Dalit on Dalit crime (for offenses carrying a jail term of ten years or more) came under the Act by reason of difference in gender or disability, then 'intersectionality' would arise. But such was not the case. 

These factors do not operate in isolation and are deeply imbedded in our society.

What is embedded in Indian society is poverty. The 1989 Act made provision for Special Courts. Only one third of Districts have any such thing. Moreover, pendency has been rising and convictions have been falling. Instead the PoA act is used as a tool of harassment.  

The only possible way of creating a more inclusive society is to

grow the economy by raising general purpose productivity such that people have more opportunities to earn.  

recognize these causes of discrimination through our judicial work and even in our every day lives.

There is no need for any such recognition because those causes are blindingly obvious. What is needed is better functioning courts. But this means more resources must be made available. That means tax revenue has to rise which in turn entails raising Total factor productivity. If Courts are used to harass people and criminalize employers and entrepreneurs, then productivity will stagnate. Courts will become ineffective. They will be disintermediated as people turn to local gangsters to deal out rough justice.  

The struggles of the LGBTQ community have found a voice in the courts.

The court enjoys virtue signalling. But nobody had been prosecuted under anti-sodomy laws since 1920. Just as it makes no difference to a prisoner if he is serving one or two or even one hundred concurrent life sentences, so too, homosexuals gained nothing by the Bench's grandstanding on this issue.  

The members of the LGBTQ community have lived, thrived, endured and loved through the beginning of time. In the face of stigma and prejudice, many have been forced to live their lives closeted from the “straight” society.

This remains the case if the local people will apply Sharia law to them if they come out of the closet.  

In turn, they have created their own communities, found liberation in solidarity as they together resisted the heteronormative order and have crafted their own language of “being” when the labels that the society gave them fell short of the diversity that they had to offer to the world.

Mere verbiage. The fact is, the Hindus don't seem to have greatly cared about this issue and even Muslims tended to be tolerant of Homosexuality. This is an artificial problem. It pretends that draconian punishments and persecution of a sort which existed in some Protestant countries also prevailed in India.  

LGBTQ liberation movements are gaining momentum today in India and have achieved certain legal milestones that I will be discussing today. 14. The first significant case that advanced the rights of the LGBTQ community was National Legal Services Authority v. Union of India & Others .

The 'hijras' are politically important and have gained legal recognition even in Pakistan and Bangladesh. 

The judgment of the Court detailed the deep cultural, societal and religious recognition given to transgender persons in India. It recognised the different kinds of communities of transgender persons in India and the suffering they had witnessed. In recounting the discrimination faced by transgender persons, the  Court held that non-recognition of the true identity of transgender persons led to exacerbation of the social stigma they faced.

Hijras are a nuisance but nobody wants to get on the wrong side of them. Their true identity is well known which is why there is a social stigma against them. Still, you have to pay them off if they turn up at your doorstep because a son has been born to you. It is vitally important that the Bench recognizes the intersectionality of the cultural imperialism of the Neo-Liberalism of the Patriarchy by usurping more and more power so as to create yet more ways of harassing wealth creators and employment generators. On the other hand, kidnapping and castrating boys and giving them female hormones so they can money as prostitutes is a very noble and enlightened practice. If only Chandrachooth's daddy had permitted this to happen to his son, we would all be very happy. 

This made them vulnerable to exploitation, and hindered their access to public places, employment opportunities and placed a bar on their freedom of expression.

Very true. Most hijras want to get jobs with INFOSYS.  As kids they actively sought out kidnappers who would cut their dicks off and turn them into prostitutes.

Such a life without dignity struck at the heart of the fundamental rights guaranteed under the Indian Constitution. 

Getting kidnapped and having your dick cut off is a fundamental right.  

In my opinion in Navtej Johar, I invoked the principle of indirect discrimination to argue that although Section 377 is neutrally worded,

you aren't allowed to sodomize either males or females 

its effect and operation infringes the fundamental rights of the members of the LGBTQ community.

especially those who were kidnapped and who had their dicks cut off.  

The Bench's zeal to appear politically correct has led to absurd outcomes

In recent years, the Indian Supreme Court’s jurisprudence has also advanced in the field of disability law. At the legislative level, efforts had already been made to ensure that persons with disability are not subjected to discrimination with the introduction of the Rights of Persons with Disabilities Act. In Vikas Kumar v. UPSC , the Indian Supreme Court held that an individual suffering from writer’s cramp is entitled to the provision of a scribe for appearing in Civil Services Examination. The court held that denial of the scribe on the basis that the petitioner did not have a benchmark disability of 40 per cent or more violated the provisions of the Rights of Persons with Disabilities Act since every person with a disability is entitled to reasonable accommodation.

Vikas Kumar did not have a disability. A guy with 'writer's cramp' is not going to be a good civil servant. It is a different matter that a Nation may want blind people or those with cerebral palsy to become civil servants. They may have lived experience of disability and thus may be able to contribute to discussion of how productivity for disabled people can be raised. What the Bench has done is make it easier for people like Puja Khedkar- the daughter of an IAS officer- to unfairly claim various concessions meant for the genuinely disabled so as to get into the Civil Service. It was her high handed behaviour as an IAS officer which got her into trouble. Now the top Court is having its time wasted on this case as the prosecution seeks to deny her appeal for anticipatory bail. This is typical of the Indian Bench. They make a crazy decision as a result of which there will be more and more appeals coming before them.  

The Court recognized that the principle of reasonable accommodation

for the disabled, not for people who have 'writer's cramp' or 'exam nerves' or something of that sort.  

is at the heart of the values of substantive equality and human dignity recognized by the Constitution. Writing the judgement, I emphasized that, “[w]hen competent persons with disabilities are unable to realize their full potential due to the barriers posed in their path, our society suffers, as much, if not more, as do the disabled people involved. In their blooming and blossoming, we all bloom and blossom.”

But this dude was no more disabled than Puja Khedkar.  Still, it is undeniable that everybody is so fucking disabled that there is a fundamental duty to ensure they get Government jobs. 

In Ravindra Kumar Dhariwal v. Union of India

a crazy drug-addict who kept threatening to shoot people 

, the Indian Supreme Court addressed workplace discrimination against persons with mental health conditions. In that case, a central reserve police force officer was diagnosed with OCD and secondary major depression and was found to be having 40-70% mental disability.

He sometimes said he was mentally ill and sometimes said he wasn't. Different Psychiatrists may have come to different conclusion

In a judgement authored by me, the Supreme Court held that initiation of disciplinary proceedings against him was indirectly discriminatory because persons with mental disability are at a disproportionate disadvantage of being subjected to such proceedings in comparison to their able-bodied counterparts.

Actually, Chandrachud's reasoning was more subtle- '  The respondent (i.e. the Government agency) holds a privilege under the 2002 notification to not comply with the principles of non-discrimination and reasonable accommodation provided under Section 47 of the PwD Act. 

In other words, you can fire a guy who beats up a fellow officer and threatens to start shooting. 

However, for a privilege to accrue in terms of Section 6 of the GCA, mere expectation or hope is not sufficient. Rather, the privilege-holder must have done an act to avail of the right. The privilege provided by the 2002 notification would accrue only when one of the punishments provided under Section 47 has been imposed. However, in the instant case, the disciplinary proceedings were challenged even before the punishment stage could be reached. Therefore, the privilege available to the respondent under the 2002 notification was not accrued in terms of Section 6 of the GCA.

In other words, Chandrachooth is saying the Government Agency was dilatory. It had slept on its rights. Was this actually the case? Arguably disciplinary proceedings are themselves a punishment and have always been regarded as such. True, complete exoneration would have the effect of completely cancelling out the punitive aspect of such proceedings. But such was not the case in this instance. 

We held that while all para military personnel may be subject to disciplinary proceedings on charges of misconduct, the appellant was more vulnerable to engage in behavior that could be classified as misconduct because of his mental disability.

This is typical of Chandrachooth's reasoning. Whether a person is or is not disabled is a matter of fact not law. Moreover, a person receiving treatment for a mental disorder is either not fit to work- in which case he must not come to work- or else is not more liable to misconduct himself than other officers, though his efficiency may be impaired. In this case, there was grave misconduct even after the officer started receiving medical care. 

Chandrachooth lays aside the facts of the case and assumes what has not been proved- in this case that people receiving medical treatment for mental illness are more likely to misconduct themselves if they come to work. In other words, he chooses his own facts and interprets the law just as he pleases. But such judgments are unsafe. The effect of this judgment would be to create a defence for any Government employee accused of any type of crime. They could say 'had I been disabled, I'd have committed the crime because of my disability- e.g. I'd have stolen that money because I had a delusion that it was actually my money. The Court must follow Chandrachooth in deeming me to have been disabled at that time and thus acquit me of misconduct because crazy peeps are bound to misconduct themselves.'  

As a relief, we directed that the officer to be reasonably accommodated and be given a suitable post.

I suppose this would have happened anyway. There was a feeling that he had gone crazy while on active service in the insurgency infected North East.  

Conclusion . All of these instances and more show the path that the Indian Supreme Court has taken to protect human rights and civil liberties for different sections of the society in a democracy.

It has done nothing save 'virtue signal' and, in Chandrachooth's case, make modish reference to 'intersectionality' and 'cultural imperialism'.  

The role of courts in a democracy is informed by the civil and political structure, the social fabric, and the customs and traditions of society.

Either Courts promote total factor productivity or they get disintermediated. In India, the higher Courts are clogged up with suits pertaining to Government departments or employees of the Government. But, if the Government goes off a fiscal cliff, there will be no money to provide Court mandated remedies.  

Very often however, the Supreme Court, is thought of as the first line of defence or the one stop solution to resolve complicated issues of policy and society.

Governments like kicking the can down the road into the Courts so as to delay matters. But delay is not defence. It is merely delay.  

The use of the court as the first line of defence to solve complicated social issues is a reflection of the waning power of discourse and consensus building.

Neither had any power whatsoever. Fine words butter no parsnips. There may be  a consensus that rich people should give us lots of money and also come and wipe our bums for us. But rich people will do no such thing. Most have acquired foreign passports and have offshored their assets.  

If we allow our local laws, institutions and practices to be co-opted by the forces of racism, casteism and discrimination,

e.g. persecuting Hindus for their religious and social practices but not interfering with Muslims in any way 

all our social problems will have to be taken out of deliberative fora and placed before the court.

The Court is a deliberative fora. But its deliberations are meaningless if there is no incentive to provide the remedies they mandate.  

Our ever-expanding list of rights risks trivialising the essential core of rights without really advancing the important social issues that we have reconceptualised as rights.

The thing is a nuisance. Curb it by all means. 

The growing litigious trend in the country is indicative of the lack of patience in the political discourse.

No. It is a way to get cheap publicity.  

This results in a slippery slope where courts are regarded as the only organ of the State for realization of rights-

No. It is the only organ where self-important nutters can pose and posture.  

obviating the need for continuous engagement with the legislature and the executive.

Ambanis and Adanis know how to do that type of engagement. Self-important nutters go to Court.  

It is true that the Supreme Court of India must protect the fundamental rights of persons and perform its constitutional duty.

It has never been able to do so. In Pakistan and Bangladesh, the Bench has been cut down to size. It may not happen in India because everybody already ignores the Bench.  

However, it cannot and must not transcend its role by deciding issues requiring  the involvement of elected representatives.

In other words, Judges mustn't get too big for their boots. In Bangladesh, the Chief Justice was threatened by the students and so he resigned.  

That would not only be a deviation from its constitutional role but would not serve a democratic society, which at its core, must resolve issues through public deliberation, discourse and the engagement of citizens with their representatives and the Constitution.

No. Public deliberation does not matter. What matters is imitating what successful countries have done. This means making a bonfire of all sorts of paternalistic labour and land and other such laws.  

Refining our rights rhetoric to include participative processes and as well as substantive outcomes is one step towards recognising the complementary roles the political and legal spheres of the Constitution play in protecting our human rights.

No. Looking at substantive outcomes causes us to despair of both the Bench and the Legislature.  

The fulfillment of the ideals of our Constitution and the protections guaranteed under it cannot only be achieved by exercising our role as citizens once every five years. There must be a continuous engagement with all the pillars of democracy.

No. There must be an increase in general purpose productivity. The compliance and regulatory burden on enterprises must be reduced so total factor productivity can go up. Talking and engaging and building consensus does no good whatsoever.

The Law is a service industry just like the software or BPO industry. But productivity has risen a great deal in the latter two industries. It has fallen or stagnated in the Legal profession. The total Indian legal market is about 1.3 billion dollars a year- about 0.1 percent of the global market. Tiny Singapore has a legal market of about 2.4 billion. Indeed it exports about 0.9 billion! By contrast the software industry is about 255 billion dollars. There was a time when smart kids wanted to be lawyers. By the time Chandrachooth got to Harvard, this was no longer the case. Smart kids wanted to be software engineers. Technology has made Indian lives better. The Law has made Indian lives worse. That is why its footprint is shrinking and it is increasingly being disintermediated. 

Chandrachooth may be an aberration. He returned to India from Harvard with a head stuffed full of nonsense. He forgets that India generates about 8 dollars per man-hour of work. America generates over 80.  Bridging that gap is what turns notional 'rights' into realities. 

Chandrachud's kut-niti vs. Nyaya as Artha

St. Columba's School, in Delhi, does an excellent job of teaching English and Mathematics and Physics. Sanskrit, however, is not emphasized. I believe you are supposed to pass an exam in it in the Eighth standard but the rule wasn't strictly enforced when former CJI Chandrachud and I were studying there. However, even the most deracinated St. Columban knows that the word for law in Sanskrit is not, as Chandrachud now says, 'niti'- which means policy and is something decided by a 'neta' or leader. Rather it is vidhi- a mandatory injunction. An observance is a niyam and 'Nyaya' is the word for Justice. In Hindi, we speak of kanoon which derives from the Greek 'canon' via Arabic and Persian. It is notable that in the Hindi version of the Indian Constitution, 'vidhi' is used for 'law' or 'kanoon'. Chandrachud does not appear to know this. 

I should mention 'Nyaya' is linked to 'Artha' because the proper hermeneutic to apply is pragmatic or instrumental. In other words, 'meaning' is 'cash value'. It is economia, not akreibia- i.e. discretionary and defeasible rather than rigid or narrow. In other words, it already contains its own equitable principle such that where the law falls short by reason of too great generality, there is an equitable remedy. But the same is true when there is 'akreibia'- i.e. the fault of seeking greater precision than the subject matter affords. In this Indian 'dharmashastras' are at one with Greek and Latin jurisprudence. Dharma was translated by Indo-Greeks as 'eusebia' (Latin- pietas) and economia rather akreibia is recommended in the pursuit of this great, eusocial, goal. 

The law is a defeasible 'samskar' whose aim is to improve economic outcomes. In this sense, everything is 'res integra' till Authority decides policy in consonance with due process of Law. Justiciability is narrow and can only be concerned with that purely formal, not substantive, consonance. Otherwise, Authority has been usurped from what is Sovereign to a merely adjudicative body. Well and good, if it can raise taxes and pay for its own Armies. Otherwise, this is merely imbecility or hubris of a type which invites its own swift Nemesis. 

A crooked-policy (kutniti) may worsen economic outcomes so that some particular clique can extract a rent or maintain their higher status. But the thing is repugnant. Don't do it. Improve Society by raising productivity. Don't be a Social Justice Warrior who kills off the golden goose of industry. Learn how to draw up a contract or a will which stands up in court. Get together with a good Accountant and a guy who is good at Marketing or Social Media or whatever and see whether you can add value to existing businesses in your area. Start now. Don't wait till you get your credentials. 

In a recent speech given to law graduates, Chandrachud equated 'niti' with law and 'nyay' with Justice. Why? The silly man has been reading Amartya Sen who propounded a 'nyaya-niti' distinction. This corresponded to getting rid of 'doctrine of political question' (i.e. policy matters are not justiciable per se) so as to concentrate all power in the Bench. But that has never worked. The Legislature passes Budgets and raises Taxes and pays for Armies. Judges can't usurp that function. 

Indians who study law in India have few illusions about the Indian judicial system. It is a mark of Chandrachooth's deracination that he tells them-

At many points in your career, you will realise that what is legal is probably unjust whereas what is just may not be always legal.

 The task of the lawyer is to find legal remedies for injustices suffered by his client. The problem is that there may be no injustice. 

This is where your law school training of learning to critique the law will come in handy....

Law schools train you in understanding and applying the law, not in critiquing it. Economists or Political Scientists or Philosophers or polemicists may be better at critique. Chandrachud, it appears, may have had his brains destroyed at Harvard Law School.  

You must remember the importance of differentiating between law and justice and critiquing the law as a step to advance justice.

Legislators are authorized not just to critique but to change the law. Lawyers are officers of the court. They are expected to show deference to judges and to uphold the laws as they are written. Critique may be done in specific forums- e.g. journals of jurisprudence- but it is out of place in the ordinary course of a lawyer's business. 

Niti, in other words, does not always result in Nyay,"

Niti means policy. The Executive is the 'Neta' which decides and implements policy. This may be subject to judicial review. But what Judges can't do is decide policy. Where this occurs, we say the Executive & Legislature implicitly delegated that function to the Court. But they do not lose that right or that function just because they slept upon it. The moment the Bench is defied by the Executive, its authority collapses. The animals of the jungle may flee before a jackal which strides in front of a lion. But the jackal has no inherent power. 

Chandrachud said-

"Stepping into the world as fresh graduates amidst the increasing noise and confusion of political, social and moral clashes of ideologies, you must be guided by the path of your own conscience and equitable reason.

No. Lawyers must be guided by the science of law. Everybody has a conscience. Everybody has a feeling for what they think is required by an equitable rule of reason. But lawyers must tell their clients what the 'per se' rule is. True, they might be able to persuade the Court to apply an equitable remedy. But what are the relevant costs and benefits? That is what lawyers must inform their clients about. 

What Chandrachud is doing is encouraging ignorant youngsters to bring all sorts of nonsensical PILs while telling their paying clients fairy tales.  There are old and rich advocates or failed politicians who can take this path. But they create a nuisance. Chandrachud was a Peter Pan type of figure who did nothing to curb this nuisance.  

Speak truth to power,

Don't reveal confidential information about your client to powerful people. Chandrachud doesn't think before he opens his mouth.  

maintain your composure in the face of unspeakable social injustices

No. You are welcome to lose your composure under those circumstances. It is in Court that you need to maintain decorum.  

and utilise your good fortune and privileged positions to remedy them,"

The bad luck of your clients is the source of your fortune unless you stick to boring commercial work. 

Being accepting and tolerant of the opinions of others

is irrelevant.  

by no means translates into blind conformity and it does not mean not standing up against hate speech

It doesn't mean anything at all. Chandrachud hasn't put his brain in gear.  

You may encounter people who will tell you the situation is much better than before or better than situation in other places.

You may encounter this shithead talking bollocks.  

However, the journey to justice does not stop midpoint or where we feel that we are less unjust than the others

There is no journey to justice. The thing is a service industry just like Banking or Insurance. If it is shit, it will be disintermediated or ignored.  

Not content with channeling Sen, Chandrachud mentions the cretin Iris Young. 

"As Iris Young discusses, cultural imperialism

e.g. deracinated cunts like Chandrachud interfering in the ancient religious practices of Hindus 

is one of the faces of oppression faced by marginalised groups

This stupid cunt does not know that India was ruled by the British. Indians weren't 'marginalized'. They weren't a minority. But they were subject to imperialism- including linguistic and cultural imperialism. Chandrachud may be Brown, but he is the face of cultural imperialism in India. Call him a cunt and tell him to go fuck himself. That's a type of parrhesia we can all get behind.  

and she knows how the dominant culture will always define such groups as deviant...

Chandrachud is now pretending to be 'Sanatani'. But he also thinks 'niti' means law. Thankfully, his own 'culture'- viz. that of Harvard Law School back in the Eighties- had stopped being dominant in America. Vance says the Executive can defy the Bench with impunity.  

in other words respectability politics may sometimes even lead to further marginalisation of sub-groups," he said.

Being ignored or actively derided will marginalize the tiny sub-group which is the 'Collegium'.  

He then proceeded to differentiate between law and justice

The law is only concerned with justiciability. If the Bench says everything is justiciable, very soon nothing will be. Either the Bench replaces the Executive,  and raises taxes and fields Armies on its own authority, or it is ignored or disintermediated.  

and the importance of social justice lawyering.

The thing is a nuisance. If you raise compliance costs or the regulatory burden in a field, there is less output and employment. Those who beat and kill officers of the Court monopolize the industry.  

In this regard, he quoted from William Quigley's 'Letter to a Law Student interested in Social Justice'

India's productivity per hour is $8 per hour. It is $82 per hour in the US. America can afford Social Justice. India can't. What this stupid cunt should be talking about is how lawyers can raise total factor productivity. If they don't contribute to this, they will be disintermediated.  

"A lot of work which leads to achieving justice within law also happens outside the law in terms of social movements, faith in politics and cultural understanding.

Actual work is productive work- i.e. stuff which results in more goods and services being produced. India needs to raise general purpose productivity. It doesn't need virtue signaling shitheads like Chandrachooth.  

In our own context we don't have to look too far to decipher the difference between law and justice.

Justice, David Hume said, has utility. It raises total factor productivity. It has nothing to do with stupid prejudices or what is or isn't politically correct.  

It was only in 2005 that

only Hindu but not Muslim or Christian 

women were granted interest in coparcenary property and were given equality in terms of succession to property.

in other words, there will be increased fragmentation of agricultural land and SMEs will break up more often. Also, there will be more cousin marriage, lower female participation, and 'out of caste' marriages will lead to murder. Still, so long as the Lutyens' elite gets to pat itself on the back, who gives an actual fuck? 

Until the longest time in our history, there was no legislation regulating child labour.

In my, and Chandrachud's, lifetime, there has been plenty of such legislation. It doesn't work. It is useless. At one time maybe political parties could squeeze a bit of money out of bigger employers of child or bonded labor. But they found it cheaper to kidnap and kill politicians till they got paid off.  

Minimum wages across the world are a result of recent labour movements.

They are useless. This silly man doesn't get that productivity has to rise otherwise there are no jobs. This doesn't mean people don't work in the unorganized sector. It just means what they are doing isn't a job. There is no employer per se.  

'During your own time at law school, Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code which criminalised sexual relations even between consenting adults of the same gender was the law of the land.

Only 5 people were ever prosecuted under it up to 1920. After that it wasn't used at all. This was pure gesture politics. It changed absolutely nothing. 

It was only in Navtej Singh Jauhar v. Union of India, a bench of which I was part of that the Supreme Court held that Section 377 was unconstitutional," 

Sadly, that judgment was itself unconstitutional. As a previous Bench had observed, it was up to the Legislature to provide the remedy. My point is what the Bench gives, the Bench can take away. It if usurps the right to say what is or isn't constitutional, it can itself be reconstituted to make the constitution mean anything at all.  

He also added that pursuing a career in social justice lawyering may not be for everyone as graduates from impoverished backgrounds might have education loans to pay off and might, therefore, have to take up high-paying jobs.

They won't get them. 90 per cent of lawyers make their money from 'bureaucratic facilitation'- i.e. filling out forms and standing in a queue at Government offices. The total legal market in India is only about 1.3 billion dollars. That's about 0.5 percent (ppp) of the global market. There are probably about 1.7 million lawyers in India. There are over twelve hundred law schools churning out 100,000 lawyers every year. Chandrachud should stop gassing on about 'Social Justice' and tell these kids to concentrate on getting their clients to do business with each other so as to make a money drafting contracts and arranging loans etc. 

"But one can promote Constitutional values and social justice if you imbibe Constitutional morality in the way you conduct your professional life regardless of the career you pursue," 

Very true. Beggars can promote constitutional values by begging outside the courts where they hoped to practice.  

The Supreme Court judge also stressed on the importance of reinterpreting law.

in other words, increase uncertainty so that investment falls and, at the margin, firms exit the jurisdiction.  

"Along with critiquing law, it is important to simultaneously look for ways in which laws can be reimagined and redefined to make them better and more just.

These cunts are too stupid to do any such thing.  

The reinterpretation of law takes place as much through the lawyer's vision as through the judges craft," he stated.

But Indian lawyers and Indian judges are shit. There's a good reason why the Indian legal market is so small. It is merely a tool of harassment & delay. 

Consider Singapore. It's legal market is twice the size of India and it exports 0.9 billion of legal services. I don't know what proportion of that is Indian in origin but I believe that if Indian courts weren't so utterly shit and there were better tax-breaks for start-ups there would be 2 billion of Indian origin (i.e. contracting parties are Indian) business coming to Indian lawyers in India. This would have a multiplier effect for other service industries.

Importantly, he said that lawyers should not be afraid of failures.

They should be afraid of being as poor as fuck because their industry is focused on 'social justice' rather than raising total factor productivity. Look at the Indian software industry. It earns the country money, some of which can be given to the poor.  

"Always remember to not be afraid of failure. As a matter of fact, if you are not trying to achieve things when you are falling, you are probably not even trying to meet you potential because it is only at that edge that you will receive equal amounts of success and lawyer.

I suppose he means job-satisfaction as a lawyer. The problem is that these cunts have been getting a lot of satisfaction out of fucking up the country, destroying their own profession, and creating the conditions for a backlash of the sort Trump's America is witnessing.  

And if you are in the space of social lawyering, always remember that

you are a virtue signaling cunt. Anyway, a criminalized Trade Union leader (who may have a law degree) can do a better job extorting money from local employers, till they go bankrupt or run away. But that's what Social Justice means.  

never has justice been achieved in any movement without encountering failure, criticism or chaos," 

The Indian legal system is chaotic. Chandrachooth was the Master-bator or the Roster of Disaster.

He also cautioned against being swayed by social media distractions.

Chandrachooth has an 'only fans' page- right? Don't get distracted by it.  

"It also helps to remember especially the world of social media with a limited attention spans, that a lot of work you do will have only long term impact

of a wholly mischievous type 

and you should not worry too much about the everyday distractions that will become a given in your path," he opined.

The everyday distraction will be to earn enough to put food on the table.  

Before winding up he added that "as young wide eyed graduates, you must aspire to attain utopia, for the harbingers of change are often hopeless dreamers."

The Indian judiciary needs to change. Court administration must be separated and streamlined. Justice is a knowledge based service industry just like the software or BPO industry. To restore the prestige of the legal profession, productivity has to rise. The word Utopia means 'nowhere'. Hopeless dreamers and senile shitheads are welcome to fuck off to Utopia. But young Indian law graduates need to understand Coase Posner style Law & Econ. They can add value and contribute to Total factor productivity by telling Social Justice to go fuck itself. Grow the Economy if you want a better Society.  

Jason Stanley vs Christopher Rufo

Last month, the Guardian carried the following article by Jason Stanley.

We are witnessing the rise of a new Republican ‘Southern Strategy’

The Republicans have been poaching white votes in the South since the time of Goldwater and Nixon. What matters now is whether they can hang on to Male Hispanics and make greater inroads amongst women. 

How to make sense of the Trump administration’s attacks on Diversity, Equity and Inclusion

Surely Vivek Ramaswamy deserves some credit? His book claimed that DEI was damaging the competitiveness of American industry. China didn't bother with 'Woke' virtue-signalling. America needed to refocus on STEM subjects or risk Chinese dominance in crucial new knowledge industries.

On his first day in office, President Trump signed an Executive Order targeting “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” programs in the federal government. A day later, the President signed an executive order entitled “Ending Illegal Discrimination and Restoring Merit Based Opportunity.” Together, these executive orders have been used to justify an across the board targeting of all federal programs, grants, and contracts, essentially a targeting of the entire federal bureaucracy. For example, very quickly, thousands of federal web pages have been taken down, with vast amounts of data from Alzheimer’s research to clinical trials being removed.

No doubt, some babies were thrown out with the bathwater. However, tech companies seem to have been backing away from DEI because it caused a nuisance and lowered productivity. 

The Trump administration has taken as its chief target DEI - Diversity Equity and Inclusion. The Executive Orders Trump signed on his first two days in office have been used to justify targeting federal agencies and other institutions, and to threaten the jobs of those suspected to be less than completely loyal to the new regime, on the grounds that they embody the ideology of DEI.

One may equally say that DEI was a stick to beat those considered to be politically incorrect in their views. What is sauce for the goose &c.  

In the vocabulary of America’s new regime, meritocracy is meant to replace diversity in hiring.

Hire the guy with better grades even if he is white and heterosexual.  

But what the administration means by “meritocracy” is distant from its original meaning.

No. That was the original meaning.  

The original meaning of “meritocracy” is a system based on competence and excellence.

On merit. The clue is in the word.  

Based on its actions, we can see that the sole metric of this regime’s judgements of merit is loyalty to the regime.

Jason can also see that everybody he doesn't like is actually Adolf Hitler.  

The attack on DEI is thus Orwellian double-speak.

Orwell was guilty of double-speak. So is Jason. Their own ideology is some sort of crazy leftist shite and they say everybody who disagrees with them is Adolf fucking Hitler.  

But, if anything, the true danger of the attack on DEI has been overlooked and underestimated.

There is no 'true danger'. DEI was a way of wasting money. America is waking up to the fact that, if it falls behind China, it won't have any fucking money to waste. 

In the Republican “Southern Strategy”, enacted most clearly and powerfully under

Goldwater and Nixon.  

Reagan,

who did use the term 'state's rights' but who then pivoted to talk of God. This 'God Strategy' worked. But what worked even better was 'oppo research'- Lee Atwater's trademark. Al Gore had mentioned Dukakis's giving convicts weekend passes. Atwater investigated this and found Willie Horton who robbed and raped wile on such a pass. That enabled Bush Snr. to win. I don't suppose Horton's being black was wholly irrelevant.  

federal programs that wealthy individuals supported eliminating in order to make way for tax cuts were described as “welfare.”

They were described as 'social welfare' by the people who created those schemes. Reagan's genius was to bring up 'Welfare Queens'.  

By describing such programs as “welfare”,

because that is what they were called 

Republicans intended to communicate that these programs were there to take money away from “hard working” white Americans and directed to benefit Black Americans,

it is true that African Americans were twice as likely to be on Welfare 

who, according to longstanding US anti-Black racist ideology, were associating with criminality,

in which case they were incarcerated. I suppose their families may have got welfare.  

laziness, and corruption (there are of course far more white Americans on programs aimed to help the poor

not relative to the size of their population 

than there are Black Americans on such programs).

Actually, African-American intellectuals- like the writer who coined the term 'woke'- saw with their own eyes that 'Welfare' was destroying African-American families. Thomas Sowell and Clarence Thomas are the foremost exponents of this view. Clinton got the message and thus came up with 'work-fare'.  

Scientists have repeatedly found, at least as recently as 2018, that this strategy was successful. Research has shown that almost half of white Americans regard Black Americans as lazier than whites, and almost as large a percentage regard Black Americans as less intelligent.

because us darkies have ginormous dongs. 

By describing certain government programs as “welfare”, politicians can easily decrease their popularity among this group of Americans.

Why not decrease the popularity of masturbation by describing it as 'welfare'? Did you know that if everybody stopped jerking off, productivity and hence Corporate profits would rise by 2.3 percent?  

The original version of the Republican Southern Strategy was necessarily limited –

it was about getting White votes in the South. It worked well enough once Carter was out of the picture.  

it was, after all, hard to describe all federal grant-making as welfare, or all federal bureaucracy as welfare.

So, the stuck to calling stuff which was already called 'welfare', welfare. How very devious! This shows Republicans are all 'boys from Brazil'- i.e. clones of Hitler.  

We are now witnessing a radical broadening of the Republican Southern Strategy, drawing on the same underlying racist attitudes towards Black Americans.

No. We are witnessing crazy shit. Hopefully, Trump will do a U turn before he tanks the market completely. As things are, he expects a recession by the end of the year.  

The idea behind the mechanism of extending the Republican Southern Strategy to all public institutions was due to Christopher Rufo, who realized that, in the expression “Critical Race Theory”, lay a potent weapon:“Strung together, the phrase ‘critical race theory’ connotes hostile, academic, divisive, race-obsessed, poisonous, elitist, anti-American.” Most perfect of all, Rufo continued, critical race theory is not “an externally applied pejorative.” Instead, “it’s the label the critical race theorists chose themselves.”

In other words, if darkies get to weaponize race, whites can do the same thing. There's no need for 'doublespeak'. What's important is to get the Hispanic vote. Just redefine them as White already. Same with East Asians. As for African-Americans, they are smart and keep their eye on the prize. What's so wrong with letting them rise in productivity and wealth?  Anyway, the second half of this century is going to be all about Africa's economic rise. Surely, African-Americans can play a great role in this? 

By connecting all of federal bureaucracy to “Critical Race Theory”, Rufo could create negative attitudes towards the entire federal system.

Which is why Left-Liberals should have kept their distance from it. It's one thing for me to bang on about how us Darkies invented everything. I am clearly stupid and ignorant and have a chip on my shoulder. If a well educated white person does it, we know they are lying. There's probably tax dollars that Whitey wants to get her greedy little mitts on.

There is, however, an obvious problem with radically extending the Southern Strategy by replacing “welfare” with “Critical Race Theory.”

This is the obvious problem with Jason's article. The 'Southern Strategy' is irrelevant. It was obvious that if the Dems backed Civil Rights, they would lose white votes in the South. CRT was a poison which parents wanted kept out of schools. That's it. That's the whole story. There is no secret program to take an axe to the Federal Government in the belief that this hurts African Americans. There is an open program to cut Federal spending so as to lower taxes and keep the Government's nose out of our business.  

The argument that the ideology of the federal government was Critical Race Theory was impossible to make.

Like Jason's argument that those who oppose it are rich bastards who want the poor to starve.  

Critical Race Theory is a small academic subdiscipline,

it is nonsense. 

and the expression “Critical Race Theory” occurs almost nowhere in federal documents. To argue that Critical Race Theory was somehow guiding the funding of (for example) Alzheimer’s research at Harvard and Yale would always sound like a conspiracy theory on the level of QAnon.

Rufo's tweet on the subject reads ' Columbia professor Jennifer Manly, who participated in the pro-Hamas demonstrations, has received $100 million in public funds for her "research" arguing that Alzheimer's is caused by "racism," not genetics or "lifestyle choices." He links to a video of her saying this. Incidentally, she is African American. 

Still, the fact is Black people think Alzheimer is something which can be cured by Scientists working in laboratories. At the very least, the guys researching this should be Medical Doctors. A psychologist focusing on 'mechanisms of inequalities in cognitive aging and Alzheimer’s Disease' can't add much value even if her research team has partnered with the Black and Latinx communities in New York City to design and carry out investigations of structural and social forces across the lifecourse, such as educational opportunities, discrimination, and socioeconomic inequality, and how these factors relate to cognition and brain health later in life.' We get that poor people of colour have horrible lives. Maybe they also suffer disproportionately from all sorts of cruel diseases. But the solution is better medicine not saying 'it sucks to be a darkie.' Even if this lady is black, there is no point spending money on her research. 

Even when Rufo argued that Critical Race Theory was guiding public schools, for example, his opponents could simply challenge him by asking for evidence that this academic theory had so much power.

He did produce such evidence. It is a different matter that kids don't give a shit about anything taught in public schools. They are too busy knifing each other or selling drugs to teechur.  

And it was evidence that, even in the much narrower range of education, was difficult to provide.

Jason never provides any evidence for his claims. The fact is CRT or some such shite motivated Manly's research which most of us darkies think was a complete waste of time. We know granny had a hard life. The question is whether Doctor Manly could cure her so she becomes well enough to cook our dinner. Sadly, Manly wasn't a Medical Doctor. She was a psychologist- i.e. useless.  

In short, “Critical Race Theory” could be deployed as an effective political weapon, for the reasons Rufo so clearly explains. But it was impossible to argue with any force that it was an ideology that governed the entire federal government.

People think the government spends a lot of money for political or cosmetic reasons. The funding for Dr. Manly is a case in point. You don't increase 'diversity' by hiring useless people. You merely waste public money. 

Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion programs are there to

piss money against a wall 

help ensure that workplaces are free from discrimination,

they become free of workers if the enterprise goes bankrupt. Still, we can always buy stuff cheaper from China- right? 

and accessible (for example to the disabled).

What about the dead? It is unfair to stop paying a dude just because he is pushing up daisies. Have you never heard of 'work from home'? The grave is the home of the dead person. Many dead people continue to be highly productive while working from their coffins.  

These programs are ubiquitous across federal agencies. Unlike Critical Race Theory, then, it is trivial to show that DEI is present across all federal agencies as well as institutions that the Trump administration deems hostile, such as universities.

So what? If CRT is part of the ideology of DEI then it shares the blame for the money being wasted in this way. 

The term “Welfare” was such a potent political weapon in the Republican Southern Strategy,

'Welfare Queen' was a weapon. Anyway, Clinton came up with 'work-fare' thirty years ago. It was popular with African Americans.  

as it was a useful shorthand for the deeply embedded racist attitude that Black Americans were lazier and less competent than whites. Rufo and others quickly realized that “DEI” could also be used to evoke the same racist attitudes, that Black Americans needed special help to compete with white Americans, positions that they could only obtain through cheating because of their supposed lesser competence and intelligence.

Did you know Vivek Ramaswamy is secretly white? That's how come he is so smart.  

We know that calling programs “welfare” made many Americans think less of them.

We know that working people didn't want their taxes to go to lazy drug-addicts.  

The anti-DEI campaign is the Republican Southern Strategy on steroids, as “DEI” marshals racist attitudes as effectively as “welfare”, but against a vastly broader target.

No. DOGE is about increasing efficiency by making a bonfire of regulations of various kinds. It is also about cutting government spending so more resources are available for household consumption and investment.  

The Republican Southern Strategy was a devastatingly effective weapon against America’s social safety net.

No. What was effective was running out of money. It turned out printing the stuff caused 'stagflation'. Who knew?  

By arguing that social programs were “welfare”, and benefitted supposedly undeserving Black Americans,

Black American tax payers were not keen on subsidizing 'Welfare Queens'.  

Republican politicians could argue that funding to these programs should be slashed, and the savings handed over to the wealthy in new tax cuts. The new version of the Southern Strategy is directed not just against the social safety net,

I suppose the retirement age will have to go up. This has nothing to do with any political strategy. It's just Accountancy is all.  

but against the entire federal government, and all the programs it supports, from health research to foreign aid to basic science.

If there are genuinely worthwhile scientific programs which have been axed, mention them by all means. Dr. Manly, sadly, does not qualify.  

Right now, America’s legacy of racism is being now directed as a weapon against America itself.

Jason is a weapon directed against the subject he teaches. The problem with telling stupid lies is that people think you are a stupid liar.  

Iris Marion Young & the five faces of Imbecility

Strangely, this blog has never commented on Iris Marion Young. She sought to turn the traditional American notion that justice must focus, not on individual desert- such as even a 'Red Indian' or 'Negro' might possess- but, rather, on Social Groups- e.g. WASP dudes whom God, in his infinite justice, had placed above all others. Indeed, in the Bibble, it is clearly stated that Moses told the Jews to go fuck themselves. God had promised all land to the White Anglo Saxon Protestant who will never be parted from his foreskin, selah! 

In her essay

Five Faces of Oppression

she quoted the nutter Simone Weil- 

Someone who does not see a pane of glass does not know that he does not see it.

No. He sees it but does not realize it is a pane of glass. What the silly bint meant was that a person who does not notice something, does not notice that thing.  

Someone who, being placed differently does see it, does not know the other does not see it.

Sure they do. They see the distracted dude striding towards the pane of glass and warn him to stop. He could hurt himself very badly if he walks through the pane of glass.  

When our will finds expression outside ourselves in actions performed by others we do not waste our time and our power of attention in examining whether they have consented to this.

Only if we are as stupid as shit. Weil lived at a time when dudes like Hitler and Stalin spent a lot of time and attention checking if their lackeys were obedient because of fear or because they were true believers. The former could be trusted because they were already shitting themselves with fear. The latter might have to be purged. Churchill and Roosevelt faced the opposite problem. They paid a lot of time and attention to getting consent and commitment from those who worked their will. 

This is true for all of us.

No. There may be some stupid sociopaths of the type this crazy lady described. For most of us, to get others to do what we want involves constantly monitoring their morale and seeking to reinforce their motivation to do what we consider to be right.  

Our attention, given entirely to the success of the undertaking, is not claimed by them as long as they are docile. . . .

 If we are shitty managers. 

Rape is a terrible caricature of love from which consent is absent.

It has nothing to do with love- even in France.  

After rape, oppression is the second horror of human existence.

but torture is cool. Good to know.  

It is a terrible caricature of obedience. 

Simone Weil was a terrible caricature of an obedient but, alas!, utterly useless idiot.  

I have proposed an enabling conception of justice.

the lynch mob had such a conception.  Iris Young shared it with the Grand Wizard of the KKK

Justice should refer not only to distribution, but also to the institutional conditions necessary for the development and exercise of individual capacities and collective communication and cooperation.

a good example is Jim Crow. It would be terribly unjust for a White man to get paid less than an African American woman just because the woman is far smarter and more productive. 

Under this conception of justice, injustice refers primarily to two forms of disabling constraints, oppression and domination.

Iris and her ilk wanted to oppress and dominate Society's institutions. Sadly, women hate women and pull their hair out and try to scratch their eyes out. Women rose through their own hard work, enterprise, and ability to tell Third Wave Feminists to go stick their heads up their own fannies. 

While these constraints include distributive patterns, they also involve matters

e.g. slut shaming or peeps suggesting you shower more often.

that cannot easily be assimilated to the logic of distribution: decision-making procedures, division of labor, and culture.

e.g. feeling miffed coz some peeps don't have to sit down to pee. How is that fair?  

Many people in the United States would not choose the term oppression to name injustice in our society.

We don't say muggers who shoot us and run off with our wallet are oppressing us unless the only remedy available to us is hiring seven Samurai to come and slice and dice those muggers. 

For contemporary emancipatory social movements, on the other hand—socialists,

crazy ranters only useful for splitting the Dem vote.

radical feminists,

lesbian TERFs 

American Indian activists,

who are cool. It is Indian American activists that we want to seen deported.  

Black activists,

Samuel L Jackson was one such. He's totes cool.  

gay and lesbian activists—oppression is a central category of political discourse.

this is also true of masturbation and coprophagy activists. Why is there still a taboo on Kamala Harris fisting herself  or eating her own shit while presiding over the deliberations of the Senate? Is it coz she iz bleck? No! It is coz she don't got a dick. Fuck you Biden! Fuck you very much!

 My starting point is reflection on the conditions of the groups said by these movements to be oppressed: among others women,

men, who previously were expected to marry girls they got pregnant.  

Blacks,

Whites, who previously were expected to get slaughtered in foreign wars. Let darkies do it. We want to take drugs. Come to think of it, darkies can probably supply them to us faster and cheaper than anybody else.  

Chicanos, Puerto Ricans and other Spanish speaking Americans,

who wanted to rise by their own thrift, industry, enterprise and sound religious and family values.  

American Indians, Jews, lesbians, gay men, Arabs, Asians, old people, working-class people, and the physically and mentally disabled.

and rich white dudes who weren't allowed to own gold because of a stupid law passed by FDR. Also, how come my taxes are so high? That's fucking oppression, mate!  

The fact is the very rich feel terribly oppressed. Look at Trump. As he will soon point out USAID sent ten trillion dollars to South Sudan to help them with their problem of obesity. Now that many of them are fashionably emaciated, there is the suggestion that America should send food! Trump is a generous man and may send them a cheeseburger or two but South Sudan must first hand over ten trillion dollars worth of 'raw earth' and other valuable minerals. America has been oppressed by all sorts of 'poor' countries for far too long! 

I aim to systematize the meaning of the concept of oppression as used by these diverse political movements,

That is easily done. People who claim to be oppressed or exploited or metaphorically ass-raped, want more money and power even if they have more than their fair share of both. However, it is those who hand over money and power who are truly oppressed. 

and to provide normative argument to clarify the wrongs the term names.

Normative arguments are stupid lies. Anyone can tell them.  

Obviously the above-named groups are not oppressed to the same extent or in the same ways.

They aren't oppressed. The fact that nobody likes me does not mean I am oppressed. It just means that I am not very likable.  

In the most general sense, all oppressed people suffer some inhibition of their ability to develop and exercise their capacities and express their needs, thoughts, and feelings.

Nonsense! A great poet may have this capacity to a greater degree than anyone else. Yet he may be being beaten and ass-raped in a prison cell because he is suspected of wanting the tyrant to stop robbing and killing his people. 

The tyrant may not have the capacity to express himself in any way other than killing and raping and robbing. But he is the oppressor. 

In that abstract sense all oppressed people face a common condition.

In that wholly mendacious and false sense- sure.  

Beyond that, in any more specific sense, it is not possible to define a single set of criteria that describe the condition of oppression of the above groups.

If a group is oppressed then resources are being expended on inflicting harm on it. It is being exploited if the reward for its economic activity is much less than would arise by the free working of the market. If neither of these conditions are met, it is not oppressed; it is not exploited. It may be disadvantaged by reason of bigotry or the operation of an unfair law or social practice.  

Consequently, attempts by theorists and activists to discover a common description or the essential causes of the oppression of all these groups have frequently led to fruitless disputes about whose oppression is more fundamental or more grave.

Only if those 'theorists and activists' are utterly shit. If there is genuine oppression or exploitation, it is easy to identify a law or social practice which gives rise to the thing. Neither 'theorists' nor 'activists' are needed because those adversely affected have a compelling motivation for collective action.  

The contexts in which members of these groups use the term oppression to describe the injustices of their situation suggest that oppression names, in fact, a family of concepts and conditions, which I divide into five categories: 

exploitation. You can't exploit those who have nothing and who produce nothing. It is the rich and the productive who feel exploited. They can take active steps to reduce transfers from themselves to the less productive. 

marginalization.  The exceptionally able, like the exceptionally useless, are 'at the margin'. If the burden on the top increases, they may exit the jurisdiction by emigrating. If the lot of poorest worsens they may exit the jurisdiction by dying. 

powerlessness, The rich and highly productive may feel they have little power relative to their ability and may exit the jurisdiction. But the possibility that they will do so may endow them with more and more power. A 'Capital strike' can be more effective than a strike of unskilled workers. 

Are you oppressed if somebody else gains something you don't have. Yes. If you get a degree in mathematics, which I can't do because I am stupid as shit, they you are oppressing me and exploiting me and ass-raping me and shitting on my tits. 

Speaking generally, if a person is given power to do something which is socially beneficial then no oppression or injustice arises. I may think it unfair that I can't sentence the Judge to death but there's a good reason he has that power and I don't.  

cultural imperialism, Any country can be accused of this. Why do people expect me to speak English in England? Why does nobody take the trouble to decipher my miaow miaow noises? 

and violence. Why is it that in every country under the Sun, there is an Army which shoots invaders and a police force which uses violence to prevent oppressed people like me from knifing passer-by?

In the old days, ass-rape was defined as people beating you and forcibly shoving their dicks, or other objects, up your ass. New social movements of a liberative type, have a more nuanced concept of ass-rape such that if you are ass-raping a person, you are in fact the one being ass-raped by Cultural Imperialism and Christian Morality and the fact that people think that ass-raping your pillow isn't just as macho a thing to do as ass-raping Putin. Clearly we need a new Structural Concept of ass-raping which draws on the works of Merleau-Ponty, Simone Boudoir, and that pillow of mine which I have ass-raped the fuck out of. 

Oppression as a Structural Concept One reason that many people would not use the term oppression to describe injustice in our society is

because they know English. In Law, an  oppressive clause in a contract is one that is deemed unfairly restrictive, one-sided, or unconscionable, potentially leading to a significant imbalance in the parties' rights and obligations. It may not be enforceable for this reason. Oppression is a Legal concept. The Law can deem a particular social group as having lower immunities and entitlements. But if it does so, the Law is oppressive. Those oppressed by it may exit the jurisdiction or find ways to disintermediate the Law Courts.  

In any given society, there are actual structures- e.g. Law Courts and Police Stations. There may also be fairy tales told by stupid pedagogues. But those fairy tales have no 'Structural component' because they do not correspond to any actual 'Structure'. They correspond to madness.  

that they do not understand the term in the same way as do new social movements. In its traditional usage, oppression means the exercise of tyranny by a ruling group.

Not necessarily. Courts might find a clause in a contract to be onerous, unconscionable or oppressive.  

Thus many Americans would agree with radicals in applying the term oppression to the situation of Black South Africans under apartheid.

What about White South Africans under majority rule? Elon Musk seems very exercised about this. The US has just declared the South African Ambassador persona non grata.  

Oppression also traditionally carries a strong connotation of conquest and colonial domination.

It may carry the reverse connotation. The 'White Man's burden' was to remove the oppression previously exercised by local tyrants and witch-doctors. Those bastards even put an end to the slave trade. The argument for self-determination did not depend on establishing that colonial rule was oppressive. It was based on the notion that people should learn the arts of responsible self-government.  

The Hebrews were oppressed in Egypt,

they were slaves 

and many uses of the term oppression in the West invoke this paradigm. Dominant political discourse may use the term oppression to describe societies other than our own, usually Communist or purportedly Communist societies. Within this anti-Communist rhetoric both tyrannical and colonialist implications of the term appear. For the anti-Communist, Communism denotes precisely the exercise of brutal tyranny over a whole people by a few rulers and the will to conquer the world, bringing hitherto independent peoples under that tyranny. In dominant political discourse it is not legitimate to use the term oppression to describe our society, because oppression is the evil perpetrated by the Others.

Nonsense! Anybody at all can go to court to challenge a law or a clause in a contract they feel is oppressive. Suppose a firm insists that all female workers have a hysterectomy as a condition of employment. This is oppressive. The Courts will force the firm to change its policies and to compensate women who were affected by this oppressive condition of employment.  

New left social movements of the 1960s and 1970s, however, shifted the meaning of the concept of oppression.

They told stupid lies similar to the equal and opposite lies told by the KKK. These 'theorists' were no better, or worse, than the Grand Wizards. However, their activities led a greater back-lash as voters turned against these crazy liars.  

In its new usage oppression designates the disadvantage and injustice some people suffer not because a tyrannical power coerces them, but because of the everyday practices of a well-intentioned liberal society.

A well-intentioned clause in a contract may still be oppressive.  

In this new left usage, the tyranny of a ruling group over another as in South Africa, must certainly be called oppressive.

In which case, majority rule in Africa is oppressive. 

But oppression also refers to systemic constraints on groups that are not necessarily the result of the intentions of a tyrant. Oppression in this sense is structural,

e.g rich people having to pay more in tax.  

rather than the result of a few people’s choices or policies. Its causes are embedded in unquestioned norms, habits, and symbols, in the assumptions underlying institutional rules and the collective consequences of following those rules. It names, as Marilyn Frye puts it, “an enclosing structure of forces and barriers which tends to the immobilization and reduction of a group or category of people” (Frye, 1983a, p. 11).

The IRS is oppressing the fuck out of the rich. How come hobos aren't subject to tax audits? When was the last time you heard of a beggar ending up in jail for tax evasion?  

In this extended structural sense oppression refers to

anything at all. I am oppressed because I told the Sun to shine. It refused. Fuck you Sun! Fuck you very much! I bet, if I was a blonde eighteen year old with big tits you would have happily shone on me even at midnight!  

the vast and deep injustices some groups suffer as a consequence of often unconscious assumptions and reactions of well-meaning people in ordinary interactions, media and cultural stereotypes, and structural features of bureaucratic hierarchies and market mechanisms— in short the normal processes of everyday life.

Very true. My University oppressed the fuck out of me by refusing to give me a PhD in Mathematics even though I submitted a thesis which consisted entirely of doodles of cats fighting crime in costumes of my own devising.  

We cannot eliminate this structural oppression by getting rid of the rulers or making some new laws, because oppressions are systematically reproduced in major economic, political, and cultural institutions.

A good example is Society's refusal to pay unemployment benefit to dead people. It is totes oppressive that death has not been abolished.  

The systemic character of oppression implies that an oppressed group need not have a correlate oppressing group.

Paranoia can easily supply that deficiency. Did you know that the Nicaraguan horcrux of my neighbour's cat is emitting 'mind rays' which prevent Governments from abolishing death? That's truly fucked up, dude!  

While structural oppression involves relations among groups, these relations do not always fit the paradigm of conscious and intentional oppression of one group by another. Foucault (1977) suggests that to understand the meaning and operation of power in modern society we must look beyond the model of power as “sovereignty,” a dyadic relation of ruler and subject, and instead analyze the exercise of power as the effect of often liberal and “humane” practices of education, bureaucratic administration, production, and distribution of consumer goods, medicine, and so on.

Foucault could not understand why those with power were not using it to inflict torture on all and sundry. What's the point of being President of France if you aren't shoving pineapples up the rectums of Notaries while the Pope, dressed in a gimp suit, stands by laughing maniacally?  What he didn't understand was that this was because of 'mind rays' emitted by my neighbour's cat's Nicaraguan horcrux.  

The conscious actions of many individuals daily contribute to maintaining and reproducing oppression, but those people are usually simply doing their jobs or living their lives, and do not understand themselves as agents of oppression.

Because of evil mind rays emitting from a feline horcrux in Nicaragua. Wake up sheeple! Ensure that the leaders you put in office spend all their time shoving pineapples up rectums. If you don't like the Pope, get in an Ayatollah to wear the gimp suit and laugh maniacally. 

I do not mean to suggest that within a system of oppression individual persons do not intentionally harm others in oppressed groups. The raped woman, the beaten Black youth,

who raped the woman while she was sleeping. Sadly, she woke up and beat the fuck out of him.  

the locked-out worker, 

not to mention the rapist locked out of other people's houses.  

the gay man harassed on the street are victims of intentional actions by identifiable agents.

Plenty of decent people get harassed by 'Social Justice warriors' on Campus. It seems Trump is deporting some foreign students who do this at places like Columbia University.  

I also do not mean to deny that specific groups are beneficiaries of the oppression of other groups,

the clique of 'Woke' nutters benefit by creating a climate of fear on Campus- till there is a back-lash.  

and thus have an interest in their continued oppression. Indeed, for every oppressed group there is a group that is privileged in relation to that group. The concept of oppression has been current among radicals since the 1960s, partly

because they took a lot of drugs and became completely paranoid.  

in reaction to Marxist attempts to reduce the injustices of racism and sexism,

by sending everybody who looked 'intellectual' to a fucking Gulag 

for example, to the effects of class domination or bourgeois ideology.

Stuff like not raping your daughter every time you get drunk. That totes bougie.  

Racism, sexism, ageism, homophobia,

Wokeism 

some social movements asserted, are distinct forms of oppression with their own dynamics apart from the dynamics of class, even though they may interact with class oppression.

DOGE will fuck up the dynamics of that class of woke academo-bureaucrats who use DEI to bully corporations.  

From often heated discussions among socialists, feminists, and antiracism activists in the last ten years, a consensus is emerging that many different groups must be said to be oppressed in our society, and that no single form of oppression can be assigned causal or moral primacy (see Gottlieb, 1987).

This is the rainbow coalition which includes both Hamas and the Homosexuals  

The Law has a notion of a 'class' which can bring a 'class action suit'. Here anybody and everybody adversely affected by an oppressive or unconscionable practice is a member of the class and may receive damages if the action is successful. This is useful because the class is well defined. 'Social Group' is not well defined. If it is used as a proxy for a class, there will be injustice- e.g. the benefits of affirmative action, for a Group which is disadvantaged, may be monopolized by people who are highly privileged and who suffer no handicap relative to the rest of the population. 

The Concept of a Social Group Oppression refers to structural phenomena that immobilize or diminish a group.

It may do. But one member of a group may oppress another member of that group.  

But what is a group? Our ordinary discourse differentiates people according to social groups such as women and men,

this gender. Women do not form a Social Group. Many live with a Man and their children may all be male.  

age groups,

this is a class, not a group. However, we may say the residents of an old age home or the pupils in a kindergarten form a Social Group.  

racial and ethnic groups,

if they self-segregate- sure.  

religious groups,

if they turn up for congregational worship, they are a group at least one day of the week.  

and so on. Social groups of this sort are not simply collections of people, for they are more fundamentally intertwined with the identities of the people described as belonging to them.

No. A class is constituted by possession of a particular trait. But no 'fundamental intertwining' is involved. Traits may change over time or else they may cease to have salience.  

They are a specific kind of collectivity, with specific consequences for how people understand one another and themselves. Yet neither social theory nor philosophy has a clear and developed concept of the social group (see Turner et al., 1987).

So what? Both are shit.  

A social group is a collective of persons differentiated from at least one other group by cultural forms, practices, or way of life.

No. Members of one social group may also be members of another. Moreover, there may be no trait which picks out all and only members of the group. A class is a different matter. This is why the Law and Public policy are concerned with Classes not Groups. Politically, however, the latter notion may have salience precisely because group membership is associated with something like 'kin-selective' altruism or Dawkins' 'extended phenotype' principle.  

Members of a group have a specific affinity with one another because of their similar experience or way of life, which prompts them to associate with one another more than with those not identified with the group, or in a different way.

They may do. They may not. But so long as there is something like group selective altruism, groups have salience. Consider the person who by birth is Irish Catholic but who keeps away from Irish people and who dislikes Catholicism. Such a person may still feel a sort of tribal loyalty to both groups and politicians have to take that into consideration.  

Groups are an expression of social relations; a group exists only in relation to at least one other group.

There is no such requirement. You can be a Humanist or a Mystical Theist while also retaining fondness for plants, animals, rocks and distant stars.  

Group identification arises,

through social or moral entrepreneurialism. A particular person or set of people may seek 'interessement' and 'obligatory passage point status' and, towards that end, may 'enrol' people thus creating a group.  

that is, in the encounter and interaction between social collectivities that experience some differences in their way of life and forms of association, even if they also regard themselves as belonging to the same society.

Nonsense! Political parties and other Social groups- e.g. the Masons- recruit from the same families. Of a pair of identical twins, one may be enrolled in one party or social group, while the other has been enrolled by a different party or group. Some years back, I went into a pub in a small town in Haryana. I was astonished to see that half of the hefty yokels there were cheering for Manchester United, while the other half were equally fanatical in their devotion to Chelsea.  

As long as they associated solely among themselves, for example, an American Indian group thought of themselves only as “the people.”

No. They retained an awareness that they had split off from other tribes with whom, nevertheless, they shared common ancestors.  

The encounter with other American Indians created an awareness of difference: the others were named as a group and the first group came to see themselves as a group.

Quite false. The American Indians, like the Indian Indians and the ancient Greeks and so forth, had legends of origin which emphasized how and why they split off from other groups. But, we see that in the Bible. The Jews were descended from Sarah, the Arabs from Hagar. But Abraham was their common ancestor.  

But social groups do not arise only from an encounter between different societies.

They arise by a form of social entrepreneurialism. America's founding fathers had relatives who were loyalists or who still resided in England. They had economic and political grievances and mobilized their fellow Americans to fight for Independence. After that was achieved, loyalists were expelled.  

Social processes also differentiate groups within a single society. The sexual division of labor,

occurred hundreds of millions of years ago 

for example, has created social groups of women and men in all known societies.

No. Men and women have created all known societies. But before there were men or women there were male and female apes who had baby apes. 

Members of each gender have a certain affinity with

those of the opposite gender- though a minority may be asexual or homosexual.  

others in their group because of what they do or experience, and differentiate themselves from the other gender, even when members of each gender consider that they have much in common with members of the other, and consider that they belong to the same society.

Women philosophers felt that they must differentiate themselves from male philosophers by telling stupid lies. Sadly, male philosophers were already doing so. Only stupid liars go in for useless subjects.  

Political philosophy typically has no place for a specific concept of the social group.

It has always done so. What it didn't say was that Society created gender.  

When philosophers and political theorists discuss groups they tend to conceive them either on the model of aggregates or on the model of associations, both of which are methodologically individualist concepts.

Science is very naughty and bougie because it is methodologically individualist. So is Econ and the Law and Medicine and even Theology. Female philosophers must tell all such subjects to fuck the fuck off. 

To arrive at a specific concept of the social group it is thus useful to contrast social groups with both aggregates and associations. An aggregate is any classification of persons according to some attribute.

No. A classification creates a class on the basis of which data can be aggregated.  

Persons can be aggregated according to any to number of attributes—eye color, the make of car they drive, the street they live on.

No. They can be classified in this manner. Aggregation requires the deployment of resources to gather data.  

Some people interpret the groups that have emotional and social salience in our society as aggregates, as arbitrary classifications of persons according to such attributes as skin color, genitals, or age.

Nonsense! We may feel loyalty to our kin even if nobody has bothered to trace out our family tree.  

George Sher, for example, treats social groups as aggregates, and uses the arbitrariness of aggregate classification as a reason not to give special attention to groups. “There are really as many groups as there are combinations of people and if we are going to ascribe claims to equal treatment to racial, sexual, and other groups with high visibility, it will be mere favoritism not to ascribe similar claims to these other groups as well” (Sher, 1987a, p. 256).

Classification is arbitrary. The Wanatabe 'ugly duckling theorem' shows that classification is not really possible without some sort of bias (i.e. arbitrariness). 'Essentialism' thought there may be non-arbitrary classes. But 'Essentialism' shat the bed. Spivak proposed 'strategic essentialism' as a way to keep lying in a bed which has already been thoroughly shat in. 

But “highly visible” social groups such as Blacks or women are different from aggregates, or mere “combinations of people” (see French, 1975; Friedman and May, 1985; May, 1987, chap. 1).

Where there is a difficult to disguise trait, there is a danger of price, wage or service provision discrimination. The Law has developed tools to deal with this. Political philosophy has merely shat the bed more and more profusely. 'Methodological individualism' is a good thing. It means legal remedies become available. Talking paranoid bollocks is a bad thing. If you do it, the other side will retaliate in like terms.  

A social group is defined not primarily by a set of shared attributes, but by a sense of identity. What defines Black Americans as a social group is not primarily their skin color; some persons whose skin color is fairly light, for example, identify themselves as Black.

As do some Professors who are completely white. Then, they are found out and have to resign.  

Though sometimes objective attributes are a necessary condition for classifying oneself or others as belonging to a certain social group, it is identification with a certain social status, the common history that social status produces, and self-identification that define the group as a group.

No. It is social or moral or political entrepreneurialism. Members of the 'Aryan Nation' aren't exactly expert philologists with a sound knowledge of Proto Indo-European.  

Social groups are not entities that exist apart from individuals

they may do. A Church or a University may have legal personality as a corporation.  

but neither are they merely arbitrary classifications of individuals according to attributes that are external to or accidental to their identities.

They may start out that way. Social entrepreneurialism, or even the workings of the market (as Thomas Schelling showed for 'self-segregation'), may bring it about.  

Admitting the reality of social groups does not commit one to reifying collectivities,

unless you are a Judge or a legislator. Suppose I get sacked for wearing a teapot on my head. If I can persuade a Judge that this is a requirement of my religion then my employer may be forced to take me back or else pay heavy damages. Here, the religion I claim to belong to has been 'reified'. It is treated as an object with in rem entitlements and immunities. 

as some might argue. Group meanings partially constitute people’s identities in terms of cultural forms, social situation, and history that group members know as theirs because these meanings have been either forced on them or forged by them or both (cf. Fiss, 1976). Groups are real not as substances, but as forms of social relations (cf. May, 1987, pp. 22–23).

We don't know if there are any substances. Everything may be purely relational.  

Moral theorists and political philosophers

do stupid shit 

tend to elide social groups more often with associations than with aggregates (e.g., French, 1975; May, 1987, chap. 1). By an association I mean a formally organized institution, such as a club, corporation, political party, church, college, or union.

If they have legal personality, it does not matter if they have no human members. They exist in law even if they don't exist in Society.  

Unlike the aggregate model of groups, the association model recognizes that groups are defined by specific practices and forms of association.

So, the association model recognizes associations. What's next? A disassociation model which recognizes dissociation? How about a model which recognizes models? Political Philosophy can keep making more and more such wonderful discoveries.  

Nevertheless it shares a problem with the aggregate model.

It is stupid and useless. The Law is useful.  

The aggregate model conceives the individual as prior to the collective

which came first? The chicken or the egg? The answer is cocks come first. That's why my wife left me.  

because it reduces the social group to a mere set of attributes attached to individuals.

No. It says the members of a class have a particular trait. It may be wrong.  

The association model also implicitly conceives the individual as ontologically prior to the collective,

Anyone can say everybody else conceives of their own shit as ontologically prior to food. You can then go on, as I did, while at the LSE, to using Kakutani's fixed point theorem to prove that Amartya Sen eats only dog turds.  

as making up, or constituting groups. A contract model of social relations is appropriate for conceiving associations,

Nope. At best, the thing is an 'incomplete contract', but anything and everything could be called an incomplete contract.  

but not groups. Individuals constitute associations; they come to together as already formed persons and set them up, establishing rules, positions, and offices.

They may do. They may not. The Institution may pre-exist but may be taken over and repurposed.  

The relationship of persons to associations is usually voluntary,

unless there is a 'closed shop' or the Professional Association has a monopoly established by law on granting and revoking work-credentials.  

and even when it is not, the person has nevertheless usually entered the association.

Or has been born into it- e.g. 'the Firm' as the late Duke of Edinburgh called the British Royal Family.  

The person is prior to the association also in that the person’s identity and sense of self are usually regarded as prior to and relatively independent of association membership. Groups, on the other hand, constitute individuals.

Nope. Mummy and Daddy did so. But they are not a 'group'. Indeed, Mummy may not know Daddy's name because she was drunk off her head when she jumped his bones.  

A person’s particular sense of history, affinity, and separateness, even the person’s mode of reasoning, evaluating, and expressing feeling, are constituted partly by her or his group affinities.

Philosophers, as a group, are stupid and useless. Don't associate with them even if you have an affinity for being stupid and useless.  

This neither means that persons have no individual styles, nor are unable to transcend or reject a group identity. Nor does it preclude persons from having many aspects that are independent of these group identities.

In other words, this shite doesn't mean anything at all.  

The social ontology underlying many contemporary theories of justice is methodologically individualist or atomist.

There is no 'social ontology' in such theories. If there were, then there would be an account of the aetiology of beings of various types. The Bible has this. John Rawls does not.  

It presumes that the individual is ontologically prior to the social.

No. This is a methodological, not an ontological, assumption. Where does it come from? The theory of contracts.  

This individualistic social ontology usually goes together with a normative conception of the self as independent.

No. It is an empirical conception. Either there is coercion or people act of their own volition.  

The authentic self is autonomous, unified, free, and self-made,

There is no assumption of 'authenticity' in Social Contract theory. Indeed, 'representative agents' are 'cloned' in such models. 

standing apart from history and affiliations, choosing its life plan entirely for itself.

There is no such assumption. The Social Contract is a contract of adhesion.  

One of the main contributions of poststructuralist philosophy has been to

shit the bed already shat in by structuralist philosophy 

expose as illusory this metaphysics of a unified self-making subjectivity,

there is no such metaphysics. Social Contract theory is empirical and falsifiable. Harsanyi pointed out that Rawls had made an error in his mathematics. However, the bigger problem was that the silly man had neglected Knightian Uncertainty as had Arrow-Debreu. Getting insurance is 'regret minimizing'. Agreeing to cut the cake so the least well off are prioritized will destroy the economy. 

which posits the subject as an autonomous origin or an underlying substance to which attributes of gender, nationality, family role, intellectual disposition, and so on might attach.

No. The 'subject' has mutable, or defeasible, traits of an empirically verifiable kind. But these can change. A son may be disinherited. He may change his nationality or even his gender. He may move from the far Left to the far Right as he grows older. He may become rich and then lose all his money. Finally, he goes from being alive to being dead.  

Conceiving the subject in this fashion implies conceiving consciousness as outside of and prior to language and the context of social interaction, which the subject enters.

No it doesn't. A computer program could do the job. Any way, the Young Hegelian, or Chomskian, notion that man is super-duper special because dudes can talk has been well and truly exploded.  

Several currents of recent philosophy challenge this deeply held Cartesian assumption.

So do several currents of schizophrenia.  

Lacanian psychoanalysis,

was stupid and fraudulent 

for example, stood by the social and philosophical theory influenced by Cartesian assumptions, which conceived the self as an achievement of linguistic positioning that is always contextualized in concrete relations with other persons, with mixed identities (Coward and Ellis, 1977).

Language speaks us. But what La-con spoke was shit. This wasn't the fault of the French language. Foucault's psychiatrist was good at his job. Apparently he was a pioneer in the use of lithium salts. The Maoists drove him out of the profession.  

The self is a product of social processes, not their origin.

Some 'selves' initiate 'social processes' and change history. But they don't study or teach useless shit.  

From a rather different perspective,

that of a stupid Kraut 

Habermas indicates that a theory of communicative action

which is what guys who make billions out of speech-recognition and generative AI have 

also must challenge the “philosophy of consciousness,” which locates intentional egos as the ontological origins of social relations.

Why challenge shit by shitting? Do something useful and you will get rich and pay lots in taxes.  

A theory of communicative action conceives individual identity not as an origin but as a product of linguistic and practical interaction (Habermas, 1987, pp. 3–10).

But linguistic interaction probably only started a few hundred thousand years ago. It can't be the origin of anything because it is itself the product of a much longer evolutionary process. Apparently, some mice have now been given the language gene. This has changed the way they squeak.  

As Stephen Epstein describes it, identity is “a socialized sense of individuality,

Nonsense! A guy in a coma still has the same identity.  

an internal organization of self-perception concerning one’s relationship to social categories that also incorporates views of the self perceived to be held by others. Identity is constituted relationally, through involvement with—and incorporation of—significant others and integration into communities” (Epstein, 1987, p. 29).

Nope. Identity remains the same even though interactions change. I suppose what this cretin means is 'self-image' is affected by how others see you. Fortunately, I continue to see myself as a younger version of Beyonce even though everybody treats me like a fat, bald, smelly, old man.  

Group categorization and norms are major constituents of individual identity (see Turner et al., 1987). A person joins an association, and even if membership in it fundamentally affects one’s life, one does not take that membership to define one’s very identity, in the way, for example, being Navaho might.

If you are Navaho you will feel a compulsion to hunt buffalo with your tomahawk.  

Group affinity, on the other hand, has the character of what Martin Heidegger (1962) calls “thrownness”: one finds oneself as a member of a group, which one experiences as always already having been.

Nonsense! We may feel 'thrownness' with respect to having to live on a really shitty planet instead of being a flying unicorn grazing upon the rings of Uranus. Group affinity however is volitional and feels 'elective'. That's why it makes us feel special and appreciated for our own sake. True, we may join a very ancient group- e.g. the Catholic church- but, for us, everything about it seems novel and 'made new'.  

For our identities are defined in relation to how others identify us,

If only other people didn't identity philosophers as useless shitheads, they wouldn't be useless shitheads. They would invent time-travel.  

and they do so in terms of groups that are always already associated with specific attributes, stereotypes, and norms. From the thrownness of group affinity it does not follow that one cannot leave groups and enter new ones.

In which case there is no fucking 'thrownness'. By contrast, it is difficult to turn into a flying unicorn and say goodbye to this planet.  

Many women become lesbians after first identifying as heterosexual.

So do many men. Sadly, the local dykes give me a wide berth. Sad.  

Anyone who lives long enough becomes old.

and dies.  Geworfenheit isn't so bad compared to the alternative which is pushing up daisies. I like to think I was a ball thrown for a nice puppy dog to pick up and bring back to God. 

These cases exemplify thrownness precisely because such changes in group affinity are experienced as transformations in one’s identity.

You identity doesn't change. Your ethos may do so.  

Nor does it follow from the thrownness of group affinity that one cannot define the meaning of group identity for oneself; those who identify with a group can redefine the meaning and norms of groups’ identity. Indeed, oppressed groups have sought to confront their oppression by engaging in just such redefinition.

So have oppressing groups who, however, complain bitterly of being oppressed and exploited. The problem with taking over the paranoid arguments of the KKK to push a woke agenda is that Trumpistas can steal your clothes and use the same paranoid arguments to pursue a purge of Professors and students of useless subjects. 

Groups, I have said, exist only in relation to other groups.

No. They come into existence if there is a collective action problem even if no other groups exist. 

A group may be identified by outsiders without those so identified having any specific consciousness of themselves as at group.

Paranoid people can identify all sorts of non-existent groups just as well as Professors of useless shit.  

Sometimes a group comes to exist only because one group excludes and labels a category of persons, and those labeled come to understand themselves as group members only slowly, on the basis of their shared oppression. In Vichy France, for example, Jews who had been so assimilated that they had no specifically Jewish identity were marked as Jews by others and given a specific social status by them.

There was a long history of French anti-Semitism. Still, some Jews claimed to have felt great surprise when the Vichy government showed great vim and vigour in implementing Hitler's policy. 

These people “discovered” themselves as Jews and then formed a group identity and affinity with one another (see Sartre, 1948).

No. They already had this. Edmond de Rothschild was a great Zionist. The anti-Dreufus agitation had been a wake-up call. 

Turning to 'exploitation', Iris writes-

Thus, the mystery of capitalism arises: When everyone is formally free, how can there be class domination?

Domination may be informal or even illegal.  

Why do class distinctions persist between the wealthy, who own the means of production, and the mass of people, who work for them?

This is a distinction of wealth, not of class.  

The theory of exploitation answers this question.

No. The theory of capital accumulation answers it. Exploitation has been defined by Morishima's fundamental theorem of Marxist Economics. If even one firm makes a profit, there is exploitation. The Feminist version is, if even one dick enters a vagina, all women are exploited coz dicks really really like vaginas. Vaginas. on the other hand, hate dicks. They are icky and leave you sticky. Ban dicks immediately. 

Profit, the basis of capitalist power and wealth, is a mystery if we assume that in the market goods exchange at their values.

Only if we deny that the role played by the entrepreneur and the arbitrager has any economic value.  

The labor theory of value dispels this mystery.

It is nonsense.  

Every commodity’s value is a function of the labor time necessary for its production.

Entrepreneurs and arbitragers spend a lot of time taking risks and making markets.  

Labor power is the one commodity that in the process of being consumed produces new value.

So does Land and Capital and Entrepreneurship and the Government.  

Profit comes from the difference between the value of the labor performed and the value of the capacity to labor which the capitalist purchases.

Because the capitalist doesn't have to pay rent, interest,  or taxes. He gets raw materials and electricity for free. 

Profit is possible only because the owner of capital appropriates any realized surplus value.

Why don't the workers start up a producer's cooperative? That way they can keep the 'surplus value' for themselves. Don't forget, there is no rent, or interest or taxes and all raw materials are free.  

In recent years, Marxist scholars have engaged in considerable controversy about the viability of the labor theory of value this account of exploitation relies on (see Wolff, 1984, chap. 4). John Roemer (1982), for example, developed a theory of exploitation that claims to preserve the theoretical and practical purposes of Marx’s theory, but without assuming a distinction between values and prices and without being restricted to a concept of abstract, homogeneous labor. My purpose here is not to engage in technical economic disputes, but to indicate the place of a concept of exploitation in a conception of oppression.

Roemer says that if you take home less than the value of what you produce, you are exploited. The silly man didn't get that every net contributor to the Treasury is in this boat. The rich are being exploited by 'Welfare Queens'! End this oppression now! Abolish the IRS! 

Roemer's Class Exploitation Correspondence Principle (CECP), states that individuals who optimize by hiring labor are necessarily exploiters, and those who optimize by selling labor are exploited. Thus if your frail and elderly grandmother pays a cleaning-service out of her exiguous pension, she is an exploiter. Fuck you Granny! Fuck you very much! Old people are oppressing and exploiting the young! Kill all of them! As for Elon Musk- who is selling his labour for the low low price of 56 billion dollars to Tesla- he truly is one of the most oppressed and exploited creatures on the planet. 

There is one person whom we have all oppressed and exploited. Her name is Mummy. 

Christine Delphy (1984) describes marriage as a class relation in which women’s labor benefits men without comparable remuneration.

 Women should not marry. Indeed, many don't. But the real problem is babies. They will exploit you mercilessly. Get your tubes tied. Do it now. 

She makes it clear that the exploitation consists not in the sort of work that women do in the home, for this might include various kinds of tasks, but in the fact that they perform tasks for someone on whom they are dependent.

Those are the lucky ones. Many women have to support a lazy good-for-nothing husband because at least he can play with the kids. Men have very low IQs and thus enjoy the intellectual companionship only a baby can provide.  

Interestingly, high female participation in the economy correlates with much lower fertility and even marriage. Affluent countries are now being forced to give mothers a better deal. The alternative is to import workers from developing countries. But this raises the bogeyman of 'demographic replacement'. 

More than two centuries ago, Condorcet described a liberal utopia. Malthus pointed out that such a paradise would be vulnerable to invasion or immigration and thus population growth would erode such affluence as had been attained. A country may decide that everybody is oppressed and thus should get more from the State than they put in. It may be able to run a deficit because of 'capital flight' from more unstable parts of the world. But more and more of the unpleasant jobs will be done by immigrants. In order to take advantage of more abundant social capital and natural resources, they are likely to have high fertility. But as they grown in numbers, their political power may increase. They may consider the bien pensant intellectual as a hypocrite with her head in the clouds. They may prefer Old Testament morality and fiscal conservatism. I suppose, this is the reality of Trump's America which, sadly, Iris did not live to see. I may deplore the fact that the Donald wields power which I wanted Kamala to wield. But there was a free and fair contest between them and the better candidate, in the opinion of the majority, won the prize. 

Powerlessness As I have indicated, the Marxist idea of class is important because it helps reveal the structure of exploitation: that some people have their power and wealth because they profit from the labors of others.

Pensioners are exploiting working people. Kill the elderly! 

For this reason I reject the claim some make that a traditional class exploitation model fails to capture the structure of contemporary society.

Most pensioners wear silk top-hats and monocles. Their names tend to be Rockefeller or Rothschild.  

It remains the case that the labor of most people in the society augments the power of relatively few.

Power isn't wealth. Biden's net worth is about 10 million. Still, it is a fact that he was very old and thus must have been draining power, vampire fashion, from those of working age.   

Despite their differences from nonprofessional workers, most professional workers are still not members of the capitalist class.

Everyone with a private pension is a capitalist. In America that covers 136 million people. Professionals are likely to have a private pension. Incidentally, many public sector pension funds are heavily invested in the Stock Market. The retired cop or teacher is a Capitalist because she is the beneficial owner of stocks and shares.  

Professional labor either involves exploitative transfers to capitalists or supplies important conditions for such transfers.

Which is why people with pensions don't starve once they become too old to work.  

Professional workers are in an ambiguous class position, it is true, because they also benefit from the exploitation of nonprofessional workers.

People claiming unemployment benefit are exploiting their working brethren. Institutional investors (pension funds, insurance companies, etc.) own about 80 percent of all US equities. Charitable foundations own about 10 percent. There may be as much as 4 percent of the population with sufficient inherited wealth not to have to work. But most do because three million in the bank will only get you a basic middle class lifestyle- till you fall victim to a Madoff or a gold-digger.  

 Professionals are privileged in relation to nonprofessionals, by virtue of

specialist skill and credentials enabling them to do higher value adding work.  

their position in the division of labor and the status it carries. Nonprofessionals suffer a form of oppression in addition to exploitation, which I call powerlessness.

In which case, the Trustafarian with a PhD in useless shite is exploited by reason of powerlessness.  

In the United States, as in other advanced capitalist countries, most workplaces are not organized democratically,

this is also the case in backward shitholes.  

direct participation in public policy decisions is rare, and policy implementation is, for the most part, hierarchical, imposing rules on bureaucrats and citizens.

If you are only allowed to do what the rules say, then you don't have any power of your own. You are merely doing a job.  

Thus, most people in these societies do not regularly participate in making decisions that affect the conditions of their lives and actions, and in this sense, most people lack significant power.

This would still be the case if they participated in making decisions with the result that the enterprise goes bankrupt.  

At the same time, domination in modern society is enacted through the widely dispersed powers of many agents mediating the decisions of others.

In which case, there is no domination. One may as well say that Capitalism is sodomizing everybody with an invisible cock. That is why Hamas is so angry. 

The powerless have little or no work autonomy,

just like the powerful. Suppose President Trump decides to run around the White House naked and with a radish up his bum. He would lose office under the Twenty-Fifth amendment. The more power you have, the less 'autonomy' you have.  

exercise little creativity or judgment in their work, have no technical expertise or authority, express themselves awkwardly, especially in public or bureaucratic settings, and do not command respect.

This is certainly true of Professors of Philosophy.  Woke pedagogues may want power but their stupidity creates a backlash. Still, since they do a shitty job, they may be left to get on with it. It may be a good thing, for young people to be inoculated against Wokeism in adolescence.