Am I misunderstanding or is Rawlsianism simply “yeah we should be nice” as an economic/political goal?
Like… HOW Rawls??? We can all agree that being nice is a good thing. But how do we get the capitalists to do that??? Why do they need to do that? Do you think nobody in the past several thousand years thought that the poor might need to be the target of social welfare? What are you even saying??? When did the poor simply become subjects to our economic policy??? A byproduct???
In my opinion, Rawlsianism is completely redundant to Marxism. Am I missing something?
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Rawlsianism is being aware that capitalism is inherently oppressive, but not being able to let go of liberalism.
Can you help me understand this more? I’d mainly heard of the veil of ignorance stuff and thought it was mainly about designing institutions to benefit the worst-off person, which seems reasonable to me.
I have often remarked on the fact that an “anti-Marxist” argument is only the apparent rejuvenation of a pre-Marxist idea. A so-called “going beyond” Marxism will be at worst only a return to pre-Marxism; at best, only the rediscovery of a thought already contained in the philosophy which one believes he has gone beyond.
- Sartre, who I broadly dislike but had it right here.
Why do you dislike Sartre?
His overall political analysis isn’t great (he’s not all that interested in democracy from what I’ve read) and obviously on a personal level he and Beauvoir had somewhat predatory relationships with young students and the like, and I think he was part of one of the infamous “let’s have all the French pedophiles sign their names here” petitions.
I don’t have some deep analysis on this subject (or whatever passes for that when I rant about things), I just think he was kind of a piece of shit who was nonetheless insightful part of the time.
That’s okay, I appreciate you sharing your thoughts. Even little nuggets like this are valuable to someone like me who knows very little about him.
It’s an appeal to abstract logic - so it has marginally more traction under the dictatorship of capital than Marxism (appeal to material logic).
It’s mostly just a thing that escorts a minority of liberals away from liberalism to marxism, but only those whom were liberal by cultural default.
I also think it’s pretty redundant to Marxism, but the gist of it is “before we talk about how to build a better world, we should think about what that even means, and found this position in reason somehow”. So you get the ‘original position’ which is just a convoluted way of tricking the bourgeois mind into considering everyone’s needs equally, because… imagine if you were poor, or black etc etc. It seems pretty silly, but presumably it works for some people, so whatever lol
Don’t worry about it
