(In-)equality in Socialism and Communism

Equality in socialist and communist thought refers not only to equal rights and duties or equal respect but strongly also to economic equality. At its core, this is the idea of a “classless society” in which all people recognise each other as socially equals and work as free social individuals together to meet the needs of all. However, equality had an ambivalent status. On the one hand, radical equality was demanded; on the other hand, it was about finding forms beyond the bourgeois-capitalist understanding of equality. Throughout, the critique has revolved around the dialectic of why the same bourgeois-capitalist society that proclaims certain promises of equality and is mediated by certain political, juridical, and economic forms also produces inequality through those same forms. While traditional socialist theories focus on economic equality, arguments have developed within feminist, antiracist and anticolonial theoretical concepts, and ecology and climate justice that dispute this. In addition to this theoretical history of socialist and communist thoughts of (in-)equality, we look in a second step at how it has been expressed in concrete terms in the socialist state world.