Wage Labour and Capital has been recommended to me (by people actually interested in Marx) as a suitable broad primer to the Marxist viewpoint.
“Equity is a Marxist concept”?
Specifically this chapter is illustrative: “The General Law that Determines the Rise and Fall of Wages and Profits”.
After you’ve read the text, ask yourself: if what Marx has said is true, and the relationship of profit (understood as the extractable part of capital growth) to wages is an inverse relationship, how could a Marxist be satisfied with equity as a political goal?
The part of capital reserved to establish “Equity” in the sense you’re using it would simply be the whatever proportion of capital labor were able to wrestle away for itself.
Or even if (somehow) a real mathematical equity could be achieved (through union organization, or a truly benevolent capitalist), it would still be only the proportion of capital which union leaders (or stoic capitalists) saw as expendable. And that’s the fantasy world.
An equitable dispersal of the fruits of capital would be (if managed by the state) simply welfare-state capitalism. Ownership of the means of production would still rest in the hands of the capitalists.
If managed by the capitalists, it would be something like private welfare - or charity. In the Marxist viewpoint, charity is no substitute for revolution.
Furthermore, economic equity (in the sense of the word you’re using here) is an economic concept independent of Marx. It can be easily defined in the terms preferred by subscribers to free market ideology. There’s nothing revolutionary socialist about welfare state capitalism on the one hand, or about charity on the other.
To the Marxist, you’re under the table arguing with me over crumbs while the people in real power dine above.
Marx considered his audience to be the industrial workers of advanced industrial capitalist societies, at what he considered the peak of the “bourgeois revolution” (the period when the class of capitalists had begun to seize power from the old pre-industrial aristocracy)
he considered that the policies of advanced industrial capitalist states reflected the political interests of the bourgeois political class, just as the customs and cultures of those societies reflected those of the bourgeois social class. He reasoned that since a specific class (he called the petty bourgeois) of minor merchants and subordinate gentry would fare well under bourgeois governance - and by nature, had a lot of free time on their hands - they would volunteer to play a role in the political discourse affecting bourgeois government policies. Since the petty bourgeois would be closer and more familiar with the suffering of the proletarian class, they would propose state efforts to redistribute money, to reform bourgeois government, to mitigate the inequities which were the natural consequence of bourgeois government. However, he demonstrated to/persuaded readers how these “reformist” (a word he contrasted with “revolutionary”) policies could only ever be palliatives at best, being designed by petty bourgeois political representatives (so-called “democrats,” - note the small d) whose interests aligned ultimately with those of the bourgeois class they fed off.
These democrats would design these reform measures, perhaps deliberately or not, to placate the proletarian (working) classes by making our circumstances of life temporarily more tolerable. He thought that revolution would be accelerated by inequality, so that the petty bourgeois reformists (perceiving this) would naturally take steps to limit the worst of the brutality of their system and forestall revolution - or in any case, to perform their intent as such through legislation, literature and propaganda. He considered these “democrat” reformists to be something like wolves in sheep’s clothing.
Marx considered the Bourgeoisie to be a revolutionary class, and argued that the proletariat needed to push for a state of permanent revolution, embarking immediately in the period of bourgeois revolution.
So (for examples of the types of political maneuvering the proletariat should pursue leading to permanent revolution), when “democrats” argued for a codified system of taxation, the proletariat should demand a more progressive tax structure; when the petty bourgeois democrats proposed to purchase infrastructure (such as railways or factories), the proletariat should demand the state nationalize that infrastructure, appropriate/confiscate its capital (materials) without compensating its owners. The purpose of each of these steps, of this adversarial dialectic, should be to demonstrate and exacerbate the conflicts of interest between the proletariat and the bourgeois, or the proletariat and the petty bourgeois.
He did argue for the proletariat to form *temporary* alliances with (for example) labor unions and reformist political parties, in order to achieve decisive victories over powerful adversaries. But his emphasis was on “temporary”; in his view, an independent and permanent revolutionary party was the only path forward after advanced capitalism, and such alliances would be dispensed with as soon as their functions served.
In other words, Marx said a bourgeois government (by which he meant *all* governments we’ve witnessed in our lifetimes) was constitutionally incapable of achieving any meaningfully just model of distribution, and thought the closest thing which would ever arise would be the temporary injustice of the proletarian dictatorship which would follow the overthrow of the bourgeois government. He considered the capitalist system to be exploitative by definition, incompatible to anything like an “equitable distribution” of capital/goods/resources. He rendered (repeatedly, in letters and pamphlets) the question of an equitable redistribution under existing governments as an absurdity or a contradiction.
Sorry for the wall of text. Im trying to give you an idea of why the concept of “equity” existed long before Marx, and why calling equality and equity (and other values from the enlightenment) “Marxist” concepts is both anachronistic and confusing. I hoped to show how the language you use looks out of place, by contrasting it with something more like the language found in *actual* Marxist thinking.
What would you suggest?
Wage Labour and Capital has been recommended to me (by people actually interested in Marx) as a suitable broad primer to the Marxist viewpoint.
“Equity is a Marxist concept”?
Specifically this chapter is illustrative: “The General Law that Determines the Rise and Fall of Wages and Profits”.
After you’ve read the text, ask yourself: if what Marx has said is true, and the relationship of profit (understood as the extractable part of capital growth) to wages is an inverse relationship, how could a Marxist be satisfied with equity as a political goal?
The part of capital reserved to establish “Equity” in the sense you’re using it would simply be the whatever proportion of capital labor were able to wrestle away for itself.
Or even if (somehow) a real mathematical equity could be achieved (through union organization, or a truly benevolent capitalist), it would still be only the proportion of capital which union leaders (or stoic capitalists) saw as expendable. And that’s the fantasy world.
An equitable dispersal of the fruits of capital would be (if managed by the state) simply welfare-state capitalism. Ownership of the means of production would still rest in the hands of the capitalists.
If managed by the capitalists, it would be something like private welfare - or charity. In the Marxist viewpoint, charity is no substitute for revolution.
Furthermore, economic equity (in the sense of the word you’re using here) is an economic concept independent of Marx. It can be easily defined in the terms preferred by subscribers to free market ideology. There’s nothing revolutionary socialist about welfare state capitalism on the one hand, or about charity on the other.
To the Marxist, you’re under the table arguing with me over crumbs while the people in real power dine above.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1847/wage-labour/ch07.htm
Also
No one here is arguing. This is civil discourse.
Two people taking in an e-bar.
Ok well let’s have an e-beer
Does Marx opt for a redistribution model in his writings?
Marx considered his audience to be the industrial workers of advanced industrial capitalist societies, at what he considered the peak of the “bourgeois revolution” (the period when the class of capitalists had begun to seize power from the old pre-industrial aristocracy)
he considered that the policies of advanced industrial capitalist states reflected the political interests of the bourgeois political class, just as the customs and cultures of those societies reflected those of the bourgeois social class. He reasoned that since a specific class (he called the petty bourgeois) of minor merchants and subordinate gentry would fare well under bourgeois governance - and by nature, had a lot of free time on their hands - they would volunteer to play a role in the political discourse affecting bourgeois government policies. Since the petty bourgeois would be closer and more familiar with the suffering of the proletarian class, they would propose state efforts to redistribute money, to reform bourgeois government, to mitigate the inequities which were the natural consequence of bourgeois government. However, he demonstrated to/persuaded readers how these “reformist” (a word he contrasted with “revolutionary”) policies could only ever be palliatives at best, being designed by petty bourgeois political representatives (so-called “democrats,” - note the small d) whose interests aligned ultimately with those of the bourgeois class they fed off.
These democrats would design these reform measures, perhaps deliberately or not, to placate the proletarian (working) classes by making our circumstances of life temporarily more tolerable. He thought that revolution would be accelerated by inequality, so that the petty bourgeois reformists (perceiving this) would naturally take steps to limit the worst of the brutality of their system and forestall revolution - or in any case, to perform their intent as such through legislation, literature and propaganda. He considered these “democrat” reformists to be something like wolves in sheep’s clothing.
Marx considered the Bourgeoisie to be a revolutionary class, and argued that the proletariat needed to push for a state of permanent revolution, embarking immediately in the period of bourgeois revolution.
So (for examples of the types of political maneuvering the proletariat should pursue leading to permanent revolution), when “democrats” argued for a codified system of taxation, the proletariat should demand a more progressive tax structure; when the petty bourgeois democrats proposed to purchase infrastructure (such as railways or factories), the proletariat should demand the state nationalize that infrastructure, appropriate/confiscate its capital (materials) without compensating its owners. The purpose of each of these steps, of this adversarial dialectic, should be to demonstrate and exacerbate the conflicts of interest between the proletariat and the bourgeois, or the proletariat and the petty bourgeois.
He did argue for the proletariat to form *temporary* alliances with (for example) labor unions and reformist political parties, in order to achieve decisive victories over powerful adversaries. But his emphasis was on “temporary”; in his view, an independent and permanent revolutionary party was the only path forward after advanced capitalism, and such alliances would be dispensed with as soon as their functions served.
In other words, Marx said a bourgeois government (by which he meant *all* governments we’ve witnessed in our lifetimes) was constitutionally incapable of achieving any meaningfully just model of distribution, and thought the closest thing which would ever arise would be the temporary injustice of the proletarian dictatorship which would follow the overthrow of the bourgeois government. He considered the capitalist system to be exploitative by definition, incompatible to anything like an “equitable distribution” of capital/goods/resources. He rendered (repeatedly, in letters and pamphlets) the question of an equitable redistribution under existing governments as an absurdity or a contradiction.
Sorry for the wall of text. Im trying to give you an idea of why the concept of “equity” existed long before Marx, and why calling equality and equity (and other values from the enlightenment) “Marxist” concepts is both anachronistic and confusing. I hoped to show how the language you use looks out of place, by contrasting it with something more like the language found in *actual* Marxist thinking.
Thanks for your indulgence.