13 - Economic Organization and the Equality Issue

Summary

Introduction

My first concern in this chapter is Marx's treatment of distribution within the general framework of “Historical Materialism.” After a brief review of his rejection of egalitarian schemes based on “justice” or “morality” (Section B.1), I proceed to his objections on grounds of the impossibility of divorcing distribution from conditions of production and the related exchange system. I demonstrate first that growing inequality is accorded a strategic and essential role in the evolution of a capitalist-exchange economy (B.2). That the pattern of distribution could not be altered unilaterally without damaging consequences for production, is then shown to govern his hostility to schemes of Communist organization entailing wages paid according to “equal right” and “the undiminished proceeds of labour” (B.3). In brief, Marx's Communism in its first phase (sometimes referred to as the Socialist phase), when there remains a residual influence exerted by the preceding institution, would recognize the essential inequality of labor on grounds of efficiency and growth; the celebrated dictum “from each according to his abilities to each according to his needs” applied only in a utopian phase.

A high degree of respect for the allocative role of markets is then brought into the picture to explain Marx's rejection of contemporary rent-confiscation and price-control schemes (C). I seek in this context to understand the championship of a full-fledged Control system – social ownership of the means of production, central planning, abolition of markets for labor and goods, and consumer rationing – notwithstanding such respect.