When people still assert for Social Rights
(Or: "Social Justice: more than just doleouts")
Social Justice isn't just about promotion of welfare and ensuring economic stability to the community alone, but also the ensuring humanity the right to have a dignified living in order to serve its role in promoting a moral and just society.
Motivated by the desire to uphold human dignity, the concept of social justice aims to guarantee that life in society is just in the sense that it encourages freedom, reason, and honor; that the needy and impoverished have the right to receive assistance in a variety of ways, all in compliance with the law; and that these efforts will improve their well-being and enable them to become productive members of society.
It is unsurprising, however, that the concept will always be associated with the skewed interpretation of "welfare". Social justice, like welfare, is more than just "doleouts"; it also assigns rights and responsibilities in societal institutions, allowing people to receive basic benefits as well as duties, such as taxation, social insurance, public health, public education, labour law, and other examples whose driving force is wealth redistribution and equal opportunity. For as time goes by, words like freedom and justice is increasingly more than just "political", but also "social" in its content, knowing having bestowed rights and duties in society, humanity, being a "social animal" should provide a dignified means for its existence in order to contribute further for the society's well-being as that of its own self as persons.
Detractors may find social justice "idyllic" if not "delusional", but is it the obvious reason why people revolt against unjust societies because of its yearning for justice? Throughout the medieval and early modern eras, poverty was considered a legal condition and thus entitling the poor the right for immediate and substantial assistance. But the structural unjustness of society- from exorbitant taxes, forced labour, arbitrary detention from authorities, altogether justifies the reason to revolt as to assert the need for justice especially from the poor. And although true that the French Revolution was driven by the rights of Man, that Man is bestowed "natural, unalienable, and sacred" rights to justify such demands such as freedom of speech, press, abolishing arbitrary arrests, and popular sovereignty, the majority of those who revolt against the old order didn't uprise for reasons the bourgeoisie preached, but also social rights and the elimination of social and political inequalities.
However, the social rights yearned by the toiling masses were not included in the final draft of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen of 1789, and social aims had been limited to "charity" as what Alexis de Tocqueville said in his speech to the National Assembly during the Revolution of 1848. ‘There is nothing [in the 1789 revolution] that gives workers a right in respect of the state […] nothing that authorizes the state to intervene in industry, to impose restrictions upon it’ as he said, making that social provisioning measures only as a matter of government that can be discontinued and not as a matter of right that emanates from the people. But the spirit of the French Revolution doesn't limited to simply political rights alone as realised by the Declaration itself- as calls to include social rights came from all parts – from radical sans-culottes, who also clamoured for price controls, to the well-heeled moderates in the National Convention, who believed that economic freedom would remedy deprivation. Even some anti-revolutionary Catholic priests were espousing social rights at the time while radicals like Saint-Just proposed to confiscate the property of exiles and opponents of the Revolution, and redistribute it to the needy through the Ventôse Decrees of 1794, so was Babeuf who argued that society's individualistic economy failed to serve the common good and that France had to be restructured in a manner that fostered economic sharing.
The struggle for social justice doesn't stop by a mere government policy nor individual and institutional charity alone. Detractors may try their "bests" to downplay social justice claiming it is all about "wealth and power is distributed equally and fairly among all groups", but no! Social Justice also demands the folk to perform its duty and be compensated justly according to its performance the way Saint-Simon said "from each according to his ability, to each ability according to its work". Even St. Paul the Apostle bluntly said "He who does not work, neither shall he eat" (Second Epistle to the Thessalonians 3:10) that made Lenin call it a necessary principle. De Tocqueville may've dismissed the idea about the state intervening in industry and impose regulations in it, but, the state represents the folk, and the folk are by themselves bound by social responsibility from paying its due to that of obeisance to laws. And whereas these people, particularly the toiling masses seriously performed its duties to society, why deprive them the right to intervene in industry what more of society by depriving its right to be just compensated? Detractors cried Marx because of class struggle, that "a revolution is needed to settle the score, taking wealth and power away from those who have it and redistributing it to those oppressed groups" without understanding why oppressed groups have to seize the means of production away from the established order of things! Social justice isn't about "wokeness" or whatsoever detractors claimed about, otherwise, that is an exaggeration said by those who misunderstood what social justice is!
And to think that today's capitalist order faileth to ameliorate the existing social problem (what more to downplay and thus aggravating it) the failure to include social rights alongside political rights from the toiling masses makes "terror" against the existing order justifiable for them. Just like the French and Russian Revolutions that shook the established orders of the past, The have-nots who took arms and die for just causes were driven not just by freedom of speech, press, or expression alone- but also of land and bread, for they themselves worked hard, enduring everyday pain for the society to live, paying taxes and obeying laws for order to maintain, then why would they who have the duty be deprived of the right? True that there are lawmakers who tried to humanise laws and equalise social and economic forces by the State making justice in its rational and objectively secular conception may at least be approximated and yet its implementors who sworn to promote the welfare of the people rather fail to enact making themselves in the eyes of many appearing to be preserving the unjust status quo, hence making the have-nots resort to the "nightmare" the order is scared of. Critics may be right that the French or any other revolution driven by social change looms as a cautionary tale, but regardless of being dismissed as "dangerous" and thus trying to soften hearts by claiming to be "reforms" the folk still demand what's just and right for the society to thrive as that of humanity and its quest for survival.