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 out their eyes. 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 already 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 passers-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.
Whereas the term should be used to describe rapists and murderers provided they are raping decent, hardworking, Christian folk. Clearly, if you have a job and are raising a God-fearing family you are oppressing the fuck out of Satanists who should be permitted to sodomize and kill your little children.
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.
