same old same, really

I've been thinking about all this, and more and more I think that the problem is the same old one. I just don't think that the market economy can deliver results that are compatible with what we see as justice.

Someone I respect a lot asked me whether I really thought that a lack of character or fortitude was the reason a lot of social liberals to focus on emoting about injustice rather than addressing injustice structurally. And it's a fair point. Problems this big and this pronounced don't stem from failures of personality but from structural issues. This particular issue is the big issue with American liberalism: not so much a failure of analysis but a refusal to take that analysis to its logical endpoints. This will drive some of my readers crazy, but I think that a lot of liberals actually have a fairly sophisticated critique of current American society, and one that gets pretty radical in its understanding of class warfare, and in its identification of the way that money has undermined democracy. Read liberal media after the financial crisis; they aren't afraid to say that the antagonism that matters is an antagonism between social classes and that the good of the moneyed is directly at odds with the good of the poor. The trouble is that they never make the next step and advocate for equally radical change to match that radicalism in analysis.

So look at issues of race, like we've been talking about. I think the reason that there's so much focus on people saying shitty things is that the material change is essentially impossible under our current system. Wealth and income disparities are self-replicating. Changing the massive black-white wealth gap, for example, would take an enormous redistributive effort, one that will never happen under our current political system. What's more, it is not an accident that conditions like the Drug War exist. The Drug War is essentially a way to derive profit from racism. The money that flows from anti-drug programs to corporate entities like private prison companies, and to police departments, is staggering. Now I happen to believe that there are reforms that are possible within the system that could help alleviate the effects of this situation, and that the human benefits are substantial. But there's nothing to stop corporate power from simply finding a new way to immiserate the lower classes in order to find profit.

The reality is that our economy will be in a permanent, ever-more-violent cycle of booms and busts as long as finance remains beyond societal control. And as long as currency holds as much power as it does, no political entity will discipline finance. It's not going to happen. Within this system, social justice cannot be achieved. There is too much power in the hands of money, and money's interests and society's interests are not the same.

I will continue to dismay my radical friends in seeing much to praise in the critiques and analysis of liberalism. (I will also continue to dismay my liberal friends in calling them part of the problem, leaving me, as per usual, without a large bloc.) But ultimately I can't be someone who can be put in the liberal camp, because I simply do not believe that a market economy can or will deliver results compatible with minimal human justice. Revolution or evolution, only structural change in ownership of the means of production and a dramatic leveling of economic and political power can get us the world liberals say they want.