6 Ways to Subtly Distort the Meaning of the Socialist Drive for Equality

Everyone knows that socialists think ‘equality’ is quite a good thing (although some consider such talk too fluffy and just speak of ‘abolishing classes’, but whatever). And the ideal of equality has become a widely used motif in all sorts of areas of politics. But often the way that it gets expressed, especially by liberals and social-democrats, makes it appear quite different to how actual socialism would mean it. Which, since many people’s impressions of socialism are drawn largely from such things, can then cause confusion.

So! What are the Top 6 Ways to subtly distort the meaning of ‘equality’? Read on to find out!

1) Focusing primarily on personal consumption, and not on control of production. If people own the means of production together, and control them democratically, at least a rough equality of consumption flows naturally; if ownership of the means of production remains in minority hands (private business or the state), then inequality of consumption will be stark, regardless of how many new initiatives and reforms are introduced to reduce it. More to the point, even if it were possible, being handed an equal slice of wealth by a power over which you have no control (the state or the market) is still alienating and disempowering.

2) Presenting only claims of need, not of right. The people with 50 times someone else’s wealth are not 50 times as worthy – often they are less worthy. Everything around us has been produced by thousands of people’s efforts, living and dead, and splitting it into the rightful property of various individuals would be impossible, and even then would not look much like the actual distribution. People deserve equal shares not because they need them (though that’s not irrelevant) but because they have as much right to it as anyone else.

3) Implying, by accepting any comparability with private charity, that a rich person who lets some of their wealth go to others is displaying generosity beyond the call of duty, rather than returning some of what they have usurped.

4) Talking as if equality was primarily for the benefit of ‘the poor’, some fraction of the population who are worse off than ‘the average’. The majority of the population are dispossessed by capitalism and would benefit from equality.

5) Calling for ‘redistribution’: if you need to redistribute, your original distribution was badly off, and will probably override whatever efforts at re-distribution you tack on. If the distribution is broken, then change that primary distribution, so that the basic workings of the economy produce equality.

6) Implying that equality is something to be produced by a body standing outside the rest of society and independent of the ‘normal’ economy – a body thus separating itself from society being pretty close to a state already, whatever its other traits.

Obviously these aren’t entirely separate – each one connects with the others. But I thought it might be worthwhile separating them out.

What’s So Good About Equality?

An interesting part of Honderich’s attack on Conservatism is the discussion he includes of ‘the left’, in particular of the idea of ‘equality’. He rehearses a series of conservative arguments against ‘equality’, and rejects them, but then finishes with an argument often urged which he thinks it quite correct, what he calls the ‘mere relativities’ argument.

The complaint is that any principle along the lines of ‘people should have lives which are, as far as possible, equal in the satisfaction of their basic desires and needs’ fetishises a certain relative standard, fetishises people’s incomes being similar to other people’s incomes, independently of them being high or low. This seems a bit strange – why should this relative standard be so important?

What’s worse, it seems to generate absurdities. Firstly, it means that if everyone is equally well-off, and we have the option of making some people a bit better off, we have a good reason not to do so (to preserve equality), which seems perverse. Moreover, it means that if some people are badly off and others well off, but that the only way to make them equal would be to make them all even worse off than the badly off, then we should do so – we should make everybody worse off for the sake of equality.

As Honderich presents it, this is a formulation of ‘equality’ that has sometimes been put forward by socialists and liberals, and very often attacked by conservatives, but which is actually very clearly alien to the practice of the socialist and liberal traditions. As he says, nobody has ever seriously suggested taking measures to lower the life expectancy of the wealthy in order to bring it into equality with that of the poorest.

For Revolutionary Moderation: How to Make Socialism Appealing to the Public

A recent survey by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation has sparked comment on a few blogs. It investigated what a sample of the public felt about economic inequality in British society. There are various points that will both hearten and dishearten the left, and I won’t go through all of them. The Left Luggage, as is their wont, have expressed a feeling that socialists need to adjust their message to win broad appeal. I’d like to argue that the adjustments involved are actually to some extent prefigured in Marx’s Critique of the Gotha Programme.

Some of the key findings were

1) People strongly support the idea of earned or fair inequality – that those work harder or contribute more should receive more;

2) People tended to position themselves in ‘the middle’, even when they weren’t, and to feel most sympathy for those in ‘the middle’;

3) People tended to be quite hostile to any perceived wrongdoing by the very poor – in particular, to those seen as ‘parasites’, claiming benefits while refusing to take a job – showing a similar, though lesser, hostility to the very rich when they were perceived as benefiting unfairly.

4) People supported the general idea of progressive taxation and redistribution, and a large majority supported the recent increase in the top rate of tax.

5) People were generally quite worried that inequality in Britian was much too high, and that this was related to social cohesion and crime.

6) People didn’t seem to endorse the idea of ‘equality’ as a general principle as much as they endorsed ‘fairness’.

Now what this suggests to me is that the left-wing proposal that might get the most public support would be what in the Gotha text, Marx calls ‘the early stage of communism’, and what has at other times been called ‘socialism’ as opposed to ‘communism’.

“Equal Pay for Equal Work” – socialist or capitalist? Part 1

An interesting contrast between political debates of the last few decades and those before is the way that the idea of ‘receiving what you worked for’ has shifted sides.

That is, in the 19th century, the claim that the products of people’s labour were being taken from them unfairly for the benefit of those who hadn’t worked as hard was a typically socialist claim – the workers should throw off their ‘parasitic’ employers and establish the sort of just society in which people are given only as much as they produce. The value of work and effort was affirmed, the way that it justified and ennobled the worker.

Since the establishment in many Western countries of a substantial welfare state, though, that same idea has to some extent become a conservative and pro-capitalist talking point: that ‘the state’ is ‘robbing’ productive people of the wealth that they’ve earned and then unfairly lavishing it on the feckless and workshy. It’s more common now to see people on some sort of ‘left’ defending the idea, not of everyone receiving as much as they contribute, but of people receiving even if they haven’t contributed.

Now this presents an interesting spectacle for those who want to both maintain an ongoing connection with the 19th-century socialist tradition, and also deal fully with modern developments. In particular, it poses the question: what should socialists think about this principle, of receiving only what you put in?

Equality is Freedom

Often on this blog I either make or rely on the claim that freedom and equality are ultimately equivalent, and certainly not in conflict, so I thought it might be a good idea to explain it as clearly and concisely as possible. It goes like this:

Equality means relationships characterised by balanced (i.e. close to equal) power. In such relationships coercion becomes very difficult, because any threat by one party can be matched by the other. That is, coercion, to be practical (rather than senseless and suicidal) requires inequality of power.

Hence the promotion of equality (of power) amounts to the promotion of non-coercive relationships, and hence non-coercive action by individuals. If one is not coerced, then one acts from one’s own desires and judgement, i.e. freely, in at least the roughest and most obvious sense.

So equality means non-coercion, and non-coercion means freedom. Simple.

Some More Thoughts on Equality

So a few posts back I talked about the need to distinguish equality of consumption (people have the same access to drink, clothes, cars, movies, etc.) and equality of power, both political power traditionally conceived, and economic power, power to control production and distribution.

Reflections on Cohen and Equality

Like the previous post, this one is prompted by reading Jerry Cohen’s book “If you’re an egalitarian, how come you’re so rich?” The particular point that interests me is his discussion of equality.

Cohen talks a lot about what is probably the easiest and most common political defense of inequality (of wealth), which goes along the following lines:

1) Human nature is a certain, selfish, way;

2) Because human nature is thus, people (especially talented people) will be productive only if they are offered differential material rewards for their work, hence only if inequality is permitted;

3) This inequality is justified because by motivating people to produce, it improves the condition of the worst-off members of society – they would be even worse-off in a more egalitarian but less productive society.