This article originally appeared in City Press on 19 February 2023.
Tomorrow, South Africa will join the world in commemorating World Day of Social Justice. February 20 was designated by the UN through a General Assembly resolution in 2007 as the international day to recognise the need to promote social justice.
During the inaugural social justice commemorative event, former human rights commissioner and member of The Elders, Mary Robinson, highlighted the need for countries to embrace World Day of Social Justice.
She said:
Of course, a central aim of this day for social justice is to help refocus the attention of governments and people everywhere on important commitments which remain unfulfilled. Looking back, we know the commitments agreed to in Copenhagen in 1995 have been sidetracked in the years since. We should thus use this day in part to highlight the alternatives to the neoliberal economic approach that has been dominant in many of our institutions of global governance.
Robinson’s sense of urgency regarding governments’ action to make a difference for social justice was echoed by the International Labour Organisation (ILO), whose very existence, as envisaged in the Treaty of Versailles that established it, is to facilitate the adoption and guardrailing of measures to advance social justice at work and in the broader economy.
Interestingly, the renewed urgency regarding the advancement of social justice happened in the aftermath of the 2008 economic meltdown that flowed from integrity lapses in the American banking sector and devastated economies across the world, hitting working-class people more than any other social group.
The impact of globalisation, which partly accounted for the devastation caused by the 2008 financial crisis, has also been a factor, while the Covid-19 pandemic has spurred a new wave of urgency.
What is social justice?
The concept of social justice was coined by Italian Jesuit philosopher Luigi Taparelli in 1843 out of concern over unconscionable social and economic disparities emanating from the inequitable sharing of the fruits of social and economic collaboration entailed in the Industrial Revolution, and the social conflict that was triggered by such injustice.
Social justice as understood at this stage was about fair distribution of the benefits and burdens of social coexistence and economic cooperation.
Social justice as economic justice, and the link between peace and social justice, is apparent in the Treaty of Versailles. That peace agreement signed in Versailles, France, on June 28 1919 to officially end World War 1 established the League of Nations, the precursor to the UN. It embraced social justice as a guarantor of sustainable peace and incorporated a provision for the establishment of the ILO to work towards social justice.
However, the contents of the peace treaty and its impact on subsequent poverty in Germany have been criticised by some as too draconian, overly skewed in favour of the Allied forces and have been identified as a major contributor to the rise of fascism and Adolf Hitler, and a trigger for World War 2.
But in its conceptual evolution, social justice has showed enormous plasticity.
Constitutional commitment to social justice
When South Africa adopted its pioneering Constitution in 1996, social justice was intentionally incorporated as one of the three core aspirations of the society the republic sought to provide a blueprint for.
This made South Africa’s one of the modern constitutions that unambiguously declare social justice as one the core goals of the transformative agenda, together with advancing human rights and democratic values.
The conception of equality, primarily as reflected in Constitutional Court jurisprudence, equates social justice with the substantive notion of equality, combined with the values of ubuntu.
If the constitutional commitment to social justice were adhered to, there would be a gradual gap in the unequal enjoyment of all rights and freedoms that existed 30 years ago, when the interim Constitution was adopted in 1993. There would be visible progress regarding the just and equitable distribution of all opportunities, resources, benefits, privileges and burdens in all dimensions of South African society.
Is the constitution a Potemkin Charade?
The stubborn persistence of the racial and gender disparities manufactured by colonial and apartheid policies, and social schemes that keep Africans, coloureds, Asians and Indians along the contours of such unjust distributive schemes, is evident to all.
Through the principle of exponentiality, disparities such as poverty, which was estimated at 55.5% beforeCovid-19, and the Gini coefficient, which hovers near 0.7, have widened beyond pre-Constitution levels.
Racialised and gendered social prestige, and related discrimination and polarisation, have not abated significantly. The racially divisive Bell Pottinger campaign to distract the state capture investigation and subsequent similar campaigns have had a field day as they feed on grievances regarding poverty, opportunity barriers and the disrespect experienced by many of the historically oppressed. Xenophobia and related intolerances have also increased, as has gender-based violence and femicide.
There is a growing intellectual cohort that disavows the Constitution as anathema to the aspirations of those who were racially disposed of property, dignity and opportunities, and oppressed under colonial and apartheid powers. Some reject the Constitution as a neoliberal blueprint that solidifies the ill-gotten gains of the beneficiaries of racially unjust colonial and apartheid laws, policies and related measures.
Others ask whether the Constitution is nothing more than a Potemkin village, named for the story of Russian statesperson Grigory Potemkin, who built a fake portable village in an attempt to impress Catherine II during her journey to Crimea in 1787.
Others such as Palesa Musa have argued that poverty creates barriers and limits opportunities in the same way that pass laws did under apartheid. A 12-year-old Musa was arrested on June 16 1976 for protesting against apartheid and its Bantu education system.
The Thuma Foundation therefore came up with the Musa Plan for Social Justice (Social Justice M-Plan) to mobilise academic and broader civil society input to catalyse progress on social justice to significantly reduce structural inequality and end poverty by 2030.
We believe that the achievement of social justice, through the advancement of equality and fighting poverty, would benefit immensely if World Day of Social Justice got the same kind of attention as International Women’s Day, World Aids Day, World Disability Day and World Antiracism Day.
But why should you and I care? Just as business and allied leaders saw justice as an antidote to conflict and war, injustice poses a threat to peace and social cohesion. The harsher the injustice, the more resentment there is.
A Rubicon opportunity
Just as the UN saw the crisis in 2008 as an opportunity to turn things around regarding society as a public good and global imperative, this World Day of Social Justice takes place in a world dealing with the aftermath of Covid-19 and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, coupled with economic and socioeconomic displacements, as well as digitisation and globalisation.
To commemorate World Day of Social Justice, Stellenbosch University and its Centre for Social Justice will host their fourth social justice lecture, presented by retired Constitutional Court Justice Albie Sachs, who is one of the architects of the South African Constitution and author of various Constitutional Court judgments that moved the needle on social justice through transformative constitutionalism.
Sachs is a struggle stalwart who, having joined the struggle at the age of 17, lost his arm and sight in one eye due to a bomb planted by apartheid agents in his car in Mozambique. He will deliver a lecture titled Social Justice and the Constitution: Is this the country we were fighting for?
Sachs understood then and still does that no peace can endure where freedom and prosperity for one group are based on oppression and extraction of the same from another.
In the past, this was achieved through unjustly weaponising the law and social power for asymmetrical distribution of the benefits and burdens of social coexistence and cooperation.
The question is: What has been, and what should be, the role of the law and society regarding social justice from here on? Can we – and will we – cross the Rubicon of hope presented by this crisis moment? If not, are we ready for the strife that lies ahead?
Madonsela is the director of the Centre for Social Justice at Stellenbosch University and founder of the Thuma Foundation