Economic Justice

3 Credits · Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

The wealth gap in the contemporary United States, as in other developed nations, is vast, unprecedented, and growing, making it clear that economic inequality is a major social justice issue of our time. This class starts by examining some major recent grassroots responses to economic inequality, Occupy Wall Street and the broader Occupy Movement, the Solidarity Economy Movement, the Poor People’s Campaign, and the Movement for Black Lives—as windows onto discourses and practices of the multi-faceted economic justice movement in the contemporary US. We will then situate recent events in the long history of people’s movements for economic justice, looking back at important milestones in that history (e.g., Abolitionism, the beginnings of the labor movement and first wave feminism in the mid-nineteenth century; the Populist movement of the 1890s and Progressive-era labor reform; the fight to establish of the New Deal welfare state; the Civil Rights Movement and the War on Poverty of the 1960s; the second-wave feminist movement of the 1970s); we will also examine neoliberalism and globalization as the context for our current situation. Along the way we will address various ideologies and political and cultural traditions (the idea of the “commons” and a “moral economy”; humanitarianism and human rights; various theological traditions (e.g., Jewish ethical traditions, especially tikkun olam (healing the world) and Catholic liberation theology); communitarianism and principles of distributive justice; socialism and communism; Land Back and Reparations) that have inspired, anchored and legitimated the pursuit of economic justice. Finally, throughout the course, we will pay special attention to the role of cultural productions—specifically, literature, film, and music--in publicizing forms of economic inequality, class exploitation, and “economic violence,” in imagining more just worlds, and in mobilizing individuals and communities in pursuit of social change.