Complaining About Reality is not a Solution for Social Problems

A lot of leftist social criticism amounts to simply complaining about reality and human nature.

I have noticed a pattern in leftist social criticism in which certain forms of cultural and political criticism are carried out by identifying certain persistent social problems, and then assigning responsibility for them to the various social arrangements and cultural paradigms that the political left doesn’t like. Leftist critics point out the existence of some persistent social malady which looks like it could be fixed through sufficient effort, and then assign responsibility for society's failure to address the problem to such things as modernity, neo-liberalism, capitalism, conservatism, patriarchy, and so on. All of the current problems in society are thus taken to be the result of the contingent social structures that have been put in place by humans, and the goal of the leftist social critic is to identify and enumerate all of the problems in society and go about attributing them to the various social arrangements, social structures, and cultural paradigms that are currently in place. It is then simply taken for granted as a conclusion that all of this is something like an iron-clad moral indictment of the current social and political situation which justifies a total transformation of the current social, cultural, and political order. The unstated premise of the whole endeavor seems to be that all social problems are the product of external social factors produced by the way that society is ordered and structured, and that those problems can be solved (or at least greatly ameliorated) by replacing the current social and political order with one favored by the leftist social critics.

What is interesting about this mode of analysis is that it is never quite clear what sort of social order the leftist critics would put in place if they were given the chance, and the entire enterprise thus seems to be driven by the urge to implement some sort of leftist emancipatory political end which remains conveniently ill-defined.¹ The result is that the critic is able to launch a number of criticisms against the current social order and its defenders, without ever having to put forth a workable alternative, or to subject his own preferences to the same criticism. And so leftist social critics launch criticism against the targets of their ire while adopting strategic ambiguity with respect to their own political goals as a way to inoculate their own positions and political goals from criticism.

Beyond that, there is something wrong with the entire leftist critical project, which in my view has the consequence of cutting the legs out from under much of the criticism that has proceeded under the banner of Critical Theory. Stated simply, leftist critics tend to reflexively place the blame for whatever social problems happen to be occurring at any given time on the current target of their ire in an attempt to create a justification for a social transformation that aligns with the leftist vision for society. The result of this is that they misdiagnose the causes of social problems because they are looking for a pretext to justify a vision of social transformation that they already find attractive. The result is that they generate an endless list of complaints about the current society in the form of a list of social problems which they lay at the feet of capitalism, liberalism, modernity, the profit motive, gender roles, patriarchy, and whatever else happens to be the target of their ire. They are in possession of a number of solutions that are in search of a problem, and so they go looking for problems which will allow them to suggest as solutions a set of policy prescriptions and social transformations that they have already decided on.

When one reads the enormous body of critical theory dedicated to attacking capitalism, one finds a seemingly endless list of social maladies that theorists claim are the fault of capitalism: poverty, exploitation, inequality, racism, slavery, climate change, sexism, alienation, the death of creativity, food insecurity, the Israel-Palestine conflict, failures of the education system, homelessness, food shortages, mental health problems, lack of public transit, and the list could go on indefinitely. In the service of attributing these problems to capitalism, the theorists posit a number of causal mechanisms which are thought to tie capitalism to these various problems. So we get a large jargon-laden literature on the cultural logic of advanced capitalism, the structural effects of capitalism, the ideological function of capitalism, and a host of other theories created in the service of attempting to identify how capitalism is responsible for an incredibly large number of social problems and maladies.

The sheer volume of problems that are attributed to capitalism, and the seemingly endless series of mechanisms posited for how this can be so, is a red flag that lets us know that the cart has been put before the horse. The villain has already been identified; the only thing left is to figure out all the things that he is guilty of. This by itself would be bad enough, but the real problem arises once one realizes that many of the problems attributed to capitalism are actually problems that are produced by features of reality, the necessity of tradeoffs, or by the human condition. The result of this is that many of the criticisms of capitalism turn out to be criticisms of things that would persist regardless of what sort of economic or social system was put in place. To make matters worse, the preferred solutions suggested by the critical theorists often turn out to do nothing to get rid of the underlying conditions which create the problem to be solved, with the added effect that the solutions put forth exacerbate the very problem the critical theorist is trying to solve.

Let's hold that idea in our minds as we walk through an example to illustrate the point.

According to various critical theorists, market capitalism is responsible for the alienation, exploitation, and impoverishment of the masses. The idea here is that the capitalist mode of production results in a distribution of resources that is both unfair and unjust, and for this reason markets need to be abolished. The idea is that markets create the poverty and inequality, and so a new system of resource distribution is needed which can allocate resources in a way which is more fair. What lies at the root of this entire discussion is the problem of scarcity; resources and wealth are limited and thus there needs to be a mechanism through which resources are distributed to people. The problem of scarcity does not magically disappear under communism,