There's a really interesting materialist dialogue going on around the relationship between capitalism and social justice. Some folks are arguing the prima facie inconsistent positions that social justice poses an existential threat to capitalism but is also easily co-opted. 1/6
At first we might think this is just anti-social justice folks using any argument at hand to play to different audiences. Some individuals need to see social justice as an all powerful looming collapse and some need to see it as the soul draining dystopian diversity training. 2/6
Here's how earnest anti-social justice folks square this, and I don't think it's totally absurd. Social justice, like other theories of justice, does threatens Capitalism because Capitalism has (so far) run on profiting (amongst other things) on currently legal injustices. 3/6
Knowing that social justice poses this risk, capitalists are even more invested in co-opting social justice into safe modes (just as it does with co-opting class justice). Pretty standard survival technique and fair of the anti-social justice folks to highlight the danger. 4/6
Where the dialogue then seems to go astray is the unjustified inference that we should abandon social justice in favor of a purely class based liberalism, as if that model hasn't been effectively co-opted as well through right wing corporatism masquerading as populism. 5/6
The synthesis of this critique is that we must remain vigilant about the co-opting of ethics by unethical institutions, and we must acknowledge the high risk of slipping into the safe narrative that we've avoided this problem. And keep doing social and class justice. 6/6
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