Karl Marx and Inequalities of Social Class

Karl Marx was not an apologist for equality. Even though he repeatedly welcomed the strategic demand of the workers’ movement for various inequality-reducing measures, a post-capitalist society cannot be boiled down to the redistribution of income for the sake of “equality”. Rather, Marx’s political goal is the abolition of class society through the liberation of the working class. For him, this classless society is not characterised by absolute equality, but by a specific form of “equality” that is essentially different from the bourgeois form: that is of all (diverse) individuals with different talents and capabilities to be free from domination. Marx began to question equality as a desirable political goal against the background of the promotion of this value by some socialists of his time. Moreover, in his economic theory, Marx was also less concerned with income distribution. Nevertheless, his general theory of the production and distribution of social wealth under capitalism, especially his analysis of exploitation, capital accumulation and the distribution of surplus value, offers an explanation for fundamental forms of inequality in modern society. Although bourgeois society propagates equality, it systematically produces actual inequality, of which Marx described manifold forms. In addition, his theory of modern society does not deal exclusively with class, for he conceptualised global inequality with the term “international division of labour” as a necessary moment of capitalist totality. With his problematisation of equality as a bourgeois value, his reflections on the meaning of “equality” in a post-capitalist society, his critique of the capitalist mode of production as a generator of inequality, Marx’s legacy is also able to connect to current debates in which inequality shows itself anew, such as natural catastrophe or globalisation.