[claudiawerner]

"Inequality" here clearly does not refer to the idea that diversity of skills or circumstance (circumstance considered above a certain baseline) should be eradicated[0] - of course, they cannot be, as you point out. However, both warlordism and human sacrifice also had their uses within the societies that used them (or they would not have emerged as cultural phenomena). The fact of a positive (such as literature or art) obviously does not outweigh whatever negatives there may be - after all, it is possible to create an artistic threatening letter, or artistic child pornography. But we are justified in prohibiting both of these regardless of their artistic merit.

People having different qualities and experiences is a positive. That inequality is generally agreed upon to be good. People living in poverty in first world nations which hosts billionaires is generally agreed upon to be bad.

[0] If you don't believe me, here is a quote from a famous Russian who advocated against inequality, dated 1914. Your objection was replied to more than one hundred years ago: "It goes without saying that in this respect men are not equal. No sensible person and no socialist forgets this. But this kind of equality has nothing whatever to do with socialism. [...] he would find there a special section explaining the absurdity of imagining that economic equality means anything else than the abolition of classes."

[AmericanChopper]

That quote doesn’t stand up to basic scrutiny. Perfectly normal differences from one person to another will result in perfectly normal differences in economic outcomes from one person to another. To eradicate classes, you must eradicate differences in economic outcomes, or at least make the differences so small that they cannot possibly be classifiable. The first half of the quote contradicts the second half.

[claudiawerner]

"Classes" to the person writing means ownership and control of major productive capacity in society - i.e. the Marxist concept. It does not refer to people with different wage levels, different skills, or people with physical differences. Considered as that, the quote is not contradictory at all.

[AmericanChopper]

Even within the Marxist two-class world view, it is still contradictory. “We recognise people are unequal, but we will ensure that their economic outcomes are”. If the first part doesn’t contradict the second, then it certainly isn’t a relevant part of the message.

But even then, the strict two class world view doesn’t describe Marx’ entire philosophy regarding class, which was founded on ideas of social isolation. Something any level of class inequality will create.

Though in any case, the two class world view doesn’t fit into reality at all. According to that theory, anybody with capital is in the upper class. That’s a huge majority of people today. The moment you let people use capital, you have a Marxist theory class system. How could you possibly eliminate that? There’s no way? Well this was actually a problem Marx solved, and the quote makes much more sense when you account for that:

> The theory of Communism may be summed up in one sentence: Abolish all private property.

[claudiawerner]

>“We recognise people are unequal, but we will ensure that their economic outcomes are”.

That's not the message at all. Marx makes no mention of equality of outcomes, and in fact, he is known to be one of the first socialists to speak against the abstract idea of "equality". The class system, determined by ownership and control of large scale productive capacity in society, is founded on (but, supports in turn) the notion of private property. For Marx, alienation was not a by-product of class inequality, or even the class system, at least not directly - it was a result of the nature of the capitalist production process in which people do not see themselves in the goods they make at another's direction.

>According to that theory, anybody with capital is in the upper class.

This is the problem with strict definitions of "capital" and "upper class". You end up saying that most people in our society are capitalists, which while it may be terminologically true, it misses the point of the critique, which appears to apply whether people are termed capitalists or proletarians. Most people are wage labourers - the fact that they may also own some mostly immobile capital, stocks and shares in public companies does not make them capitalists, any more than fur makes a wolf. This is because capital is about the production process: its appropriation of the product of labour at the end of the day, its extraction of surplus-value (or, if you don't care for Marx's value theory, UE-exploitation and domination) and its totalization in society.

The majority of people may have some kind of capital (do they?), yet given they can't live from it, it still rings strikingly true to say that a proletarian is defined by being only the possessor of his capacity to labour.

[AmericanChopper]

> Marx makes no mention of equality of outcomes

This is an absurdly revisionist view, that can be falsified simply by reading his work. The only way to dismantle class structure is to institute equality of outcomes.

His view of equality of outcomes is perhaps the most extreme view of equality possible. His view was to abolish private property all together. Something he passionately and repeatedly promoted.

> In this sense, the theory of the Communists may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property.

> But if selling and buying disappears, free selling and buying disappears also. This talk about free selling and buying, and all the other “brave words” of our bourgeois about freedom in general, have a meaning, if any, only in contrast with restricted selling and buying, with the fettered traders of the Middle Ages, but have no meaning when opposed to the Communistic abolition of buying and selling, of the bourgeois conditions of production, and of the bourgeoisie itself.

> You are horrified at our intending to do away with private property. But in your existing society, private property is already done away with for nine-tenths of the population

> In one word, you reproach us with intending to do away with your property. Precisely so; that is just what we intend.

The nice sounding quotes about dismantling class structure don’t stand up to even passing scrutiny. These ideas are not compatible with a free society, and by presenting them in that way, you are concealing the oppressive nature of the system they are promoting.

[claudiawerner]

>This is an absurdly revisionist view, that can be falsified simply by reading his work.

Cite some, then. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy actually makes quite a point about Marx on this[0]. There is no "equality of outcomes" in Marx, or as I cited earlier, Lenin. Marx repeatedly and ferociously argued against these abstract notions such as "fairness", the equality of wages, and other things you associate with him.

>The nice sounding quotes about dismantling class structure don’t stand up to even passing scrutiny.

Why not?

>These ideas are not compatible with a free society

It's ironic that before approximately the middle of the 20th century, there was hardly a single philosopher who argued that "free society" or "freedom" should be understood as private property (state-protected large scale means of production). Seriously - look at almost any major modernist or pre-modern philosopher concerned with political philosophy, from Rawls and Sen today, to Nietzche, Marx, Proudhon, Rousseau, Stirner and perhaps even Hegel in the past.

These figures were arguing for free society, and precisely from the same premises of self-actualization that Marx was.

[0] "Hence with the possible exception of Barbeuf (1796), no prominent author or movement has demanded strict equality. Since egalitarianism has come to be widely associated with the demand for economic equality, and this in turn with communistic or socialistic ideas, it is important to stress that neither communism nor socialism — despite their protest against poverty and exploitation and their demand for social security for all citizens — calls for absolute economic equality. The orthodox Marxist view of economic equality was expounded in the Critique of the Gotha Program (1875). Marx here rejects the idea of legal equality, on three grounds. In the first place, he indicates, equality draws on a merely limited number of morally relevant vantages and neglects others, thus having unequal effects; right can never be higher than the economic structure and cultural development of the society it conditions. In the second place, theories of justice have concentrated excessively on distribution instead of the basic questions of production. In the third place, a future communist society needs no law and no justice, since social conflicts will have vanished."