Social Justice Usage
Source: Encyclopedia.com, “conflict theory” entry.
Conflict theory explains social structure and changes in it by arguing that actors pursue their interests in conflict with others and according to their resources for social organization. Conflict theory builds upon Marxist analysis of class conflicts, but it is detached from any ideological commitment to socialism.
New Discourses Commentary
“Conflict theory” refers to a way of thinking about society frequently attributed to Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, though it need not only apply to socialist or socialism-like thinking. Though it could apply to the individual context, as with Hobbes, the term usually refers to Marxian thought, which views various social groups as intrinsically in conflict with one another for access to resources and the fruits of society. It is this group-based application that is relevant to the Theory of Critical Social Justice.
Conflict theory sees society as stratified into groups in zero-sum conflict for the resources, opportunities, and rewards of that society. These groups are typically organized as “oppressor” and “oppressed” (see also, Marxian). That means that it sees society broken into different classes along some axis (usually of power) that fight against one another for control of society such that where one gains the other necessarily loses. For Marx and Engels, who believed that power was located in economic class, the conflict took place intrinsically at the group level with the relevant groups being the working-class proletariat masses against the capitalist bourgeoisie (itself a gross oversimplification of the upper and elite classes of society). Applying conflict theory across this stratification along this axis is one of the fundamental operating assumptions of Marxism. (Another, for what it’s worth, would be the evolution of History through six phases, ending with capitalism into socialism into communism.) Conflict theory is, in some sense, the engine of Marxian dialectical materialism.
As Marxism failed, giving way by the early 20th century to the brutalities of Bolshevism and Leninism, then later Stalinism (in the USSR) and Maoism (in China), conflict theory was rescued and repurposed by the emerging neo-Marxists, primarily following the efforts and analyses of Antonio Gramsci and György Lukács and the establishment of the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory. These frustrated communist thinkers sought to understand why Marxism failed without giving up on all of Marxian analysis or the communist vision. That is, they didn’t think that Marx was wrong in the big picture but that he must have got something in the details wrong. Their conclusion was that Marx was incorrect in assuming that it is economics that precedes politics. They concluded that it is culture that does (see also, Cultural Marxism), and Gramsci’s concept of cultural hegemony became the guiding concept that repurposed Marxian conflict theory into a new realm: the high culture against the low (and middle) culture.
Among the ideas of the early Frankfurt School of Critical Theory was a criticism of Marx that he erred by placing the conflict in his conflict theory on a single axis—economic class, rather simplified into two coarse camps. Marx believed that the proletariat could be united in a single class consciousness that transcended all other identity divisions (“workers of the world, unite!”), at which point it would become an effectively unstoppable political force. The Critical Theorists thought otherwise and believed (seemingly rightly) that consciousness raising is more effective along smaller fronts and multiple axes at a time (see also, multiple consciousness). They also believed, making far more of it than Marx did himself, that oppressed people are fundamentally trapped in false consciousness that leads them to act to maintain their own oppression. Critical Theory was meant to get inside their heads to awaken their political consciousness and, generally, to foment doubt in and resentment against the prevailing liberal order and Enlightenment rationalism (see also, ressentiment, science, and objectivity). Drawing upon the emerging “liberation” movements around the (mostly colonized) world, this was said to be a path toward liberation from systemic oppression—a kind of parallel replacement for the communism that Marx had envisioned regarding mere economic theory.
Eventually, following World War II, the neo-Marxist thinker Herbert Marcuse, by then in America (first at Columbia University in New York City, later in Southern California), proposed in his landmark 1964 book One-Dimensional Man that racial minorities should, in particular, be agitated for a kind of racial consciousness over systemic racism, which he likened to a kind of fascism and proposed was immanent, just beneath the surface of society. This, at the least, strongly encouraged the development, maturation, and radicalization of the black liberation movement (see also, black lives matter), which had other roots in the liberation movements and related liberation theology (which were also Marxian). Meanwhile, feminists who, in having adopted much Marxism by that point in their own ways, had taken up similar conflict theory-based analyses (one immediately thinks of Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, which has a similar tone regarding women in a patriarchal order). These approaches had laid the seeds for the identity-based conflict theory that developed from the 1960s through the 1990s in a second phase of neo-Marxist thought (see also, identity politics) and eventually came together in intersectionality, which emerged from this milieu in the late 1970s in the Combahee River Collective and was formalized by Kimberlé Crenshaw in 1989.
Today, intersectionality is the dominant application of Marxian conflict theory, and it operates in a far more complex way than Marx’s original conception (which was, itself, a Rousseauian perversion of Hegel’s master-slave dialectic). It has more or less completely replaced Marxist analysis except to pay lip-service to “classism” as one (minor) axis of stratification across which there is a zero-sum oppressor-versus-oppressed conflict for “liberation.” It proposes an identity-first approach to conflict theory and outlines an identity politics based upon the idea that one’s status as oppressed or oppressor is most saliently defined in terms of one’s group identity. Group identity is to be assessed “intersectionally” by intentionally engaging one’s “positionality,” which can be thought of how one’s various identity group memberships define one’s (potentially unique) relationship to the many interacting systems of power defining society. Liberation in this context is often referred to as “justice” or “Social Justice,” and the Theory that has developed in service to this approach to Marxian conflict theory is sometimes referred to as “Critical Social Justice” (which has adopted various tools from postmodern Theory to reach its present state, it should be noted—see also, applied postmodernism, deconstruction; Foucauldian, Derridean, and poststructuralism).
Related Terms
Applied postmodernism; Black liberationism; Capitalism; Classism; Communism; Consciousness raising; Critical; Critical Theory; Cultural Marxism; Deconstruction; Derridean; Domination; Engagement; Enlightenment; False consciousness; Fascism; Feminism; Foucauldian; Frankfurt School; Hegemony; Identity; Identity-first; Identity politics; Individualism; Intersectionality; Justice; Liberalism; Liberation; Liberation theology; Marxian; Marxism; Multiple consciousness; Neo-Marxism; Objectivity; Oppression; Patriarchy; Positionality; Postmodern; Poststructuralism; Power (systemic); Race; Racism (systemic); Radical; Ressentiment; Science; Social Justice; Socialism; Theory
Revision date: 12/9/20
5 comments
Conflict theory sounds just like dialectic materialism to me. Two things clash and something new emerges. This is taught as a “theory” but I consider it a “strategy”. They relentlessly attack institutions but the outcome is not important to them. They just take whatever emerges and attack again. Repeat as necessary until they exhaust and demoralize their opponent.
First and second wave feminists also adopted Marxian conflict theory. Second wave feminists are mostly TERFs today and are now fighting with intersectional feminists. I remember people made fun of second wave feminists in the 90’s, the “man-hating butch lesbian” meme and the Millie Tant comic. TERFs aren’t based, and it’s funny to see Lindsay go easy on them and retweet them because they also happen to be skeptical of the pronoun cult. They probably still secretly hate Lindsay for being a straight man sitting with his legs apart.
These entries have been such a help in deciphering what people “seem” to be saying. So many conversation assume certain definitions, which I was simply not raised with, and it is frustrating; these “new” definitions change the ontology. In ways which we, seem to, have already discovered to be destructive/nonproductive. Yet, when disagreeing, the new definitions become a source of conflict. The encyclopedia has confirmed my nesciencine. What tangled webs we weave.
The definition of conflict theory above from Encyclopedia.com is repeated twice. Just an FYI.
Thank you. Fixed.