One gestalt impression I'm getting from the parts about "burn the place down" is that the economic precaritization of the professions has produced a mass cohort of young professionals who seriously don't care about the institutions they staff and the social purpose of those institutions. They see themselves as something of a generational social movement instead, taking over and coopting institutions they view as offering them a mostly adversarial social contract to begin with.
> They see themselves as something of a generational social movement instead, taking over and coopting institutions they view as offering them a mostly adversarial social contract to begin with.
Thanks for pointing this out. Don’t really care for the OP or most of the discussion, but I think this observation is really something to think on.
I’m not part of law so I can’t relate to that topic, but I can apply this pattern to most institutions (or markets) I’ve interacted with:
* healthcare market (movement to socialize)
* big tech institutions (lots of younger techies support unions, blatantly hate on their big tech employers, etc)
* housing market (upzone or socialize housing are popular topics)
* university (everyone wants the student loan status quo to change, the elite school status quo is garbage too)
>* big tech institutions (lots of younger techies support unions, blatantly hate on their big tech employers, etc)
The mindfuck for me is (we have these types in academia too) how they rack up a thousand and one political aspirations other than better wages and working conditions, before ever actually achieving a legally recognized union that can bargain a contract.
Our current "unionization effort" at my job has stances on dormitory construction, affordable housing, at least two theaters of foreign policy, COVID policy, racial justice, gender justice, and other issues. Also it gave up trying to obtain a formal union election and a contract from 2017-2021 because Trump was staffing the NLRB with the wrong people. Now under Biden we're "trying" to unionize again, but it seems to be the second year of the effort and everyone's still taking "solidarity stances" while conducting "trainings" for how to go and get people to actually sign union cards.
I signed my freaking card in 2018 and de facto they've done everything except fight for our interests as workers. I think that terms like "social justice" are often far too vague for useful discussion, but I've started thinking the vagueness is the point. "Social justice" seems to provide a useful way of melting down many different causes and different constituencies into a nondescript stew from which activists can spoon themselves "campaigns" to work on, without any accountability for having to win something concrete.
