Organic Marxism: An Alternative to Capitalism and Ecological Catastrophe by Philip Clayton & Justin Heinzekehr

Author:Philip Clayton & Justin Heinzekehr [Clayton, Philip & Heinzekehr, Justin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Philosophy, Politics, Marxism, Ecology, Environmental Science
ISBN: 9781940447025
Google: szcljwEACAAJ
Goodreads: 23437972
Publisher: Process Century Press
Published: 2014-09-18T23:00:00+00:00

Chapter 8

DEMOCRACY AND JUSTICE:

A POST-LIBERAL PERSPECTIVE

What holds for freedom holds even more clearly in discussions of democracy and justice. When American schoolchildren pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, I think they hear it as “[we are the only] nation… with liberty and justice for all.” Perhaps a few people know that Marx was striving to create a more just form of society and that he viewed socialism as the most consistent form of democracy. But few Americans have paused to do a comparative study of liberal and socialist approaches to these topics. (Few have an accurate understanding of what “socialist approaches” means.)

Justice means fairness. Since the ancient Greeks, justice has been pictured as a blindfolded woman holding a scale in her hands. Unswayed by personal gain, blind to fame or wealth of the disputing parties, she distributes the resources fairly between all parties.

Some years back Alisdair MacIntyre wrote a now-classic work, Whose Justice? Which Rationality?1 Of course, MacIntyre was not the first to recognize that the Western traditions include multiple notions of justice and that they are worlds apart. Has the liberal tradition launched by John Locke resulted in a fair (just) distribution of resources across the population? Or has it produced rules that favor the wealthiest and mete out disproportionate punishments on those who have the least? If the kind of wealth-based democracy that the U.S. and many Western nations have embraced is not just, what other options exist that might help to correct the injustices? How much have wealth-based notions of justice influenced the way we have constructed our particular form of democracy?

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