From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!
These lines from Marx, as he writes in The Critique of the Gotha Program (1875), have a fundamental presupposition: human beings have unequal abilities and unequal needs. However, Marxism is often criticized by the likes of Dr. Jordan B. Peterson for its championing of equality of outcome. This abhorrent tag, arguably, gives Marxism a stigma that is intensified by a collective right-wing obsession on the web. I took the liberty of searching about equality of outcome on a popular video-sharing website. I was not disappointed. Hundreds of videos stared at me, screaming how pernicious the Marxist notion of equality of outcome is. Yet, almost no one from that camp seemed to quote extensively from real Marxist literature. Apart from a few monotonous, soulless readings of the Communist Manifesto, most of these videos did not seem to have any substance. But, does Dr. Peterson’s argument against Marxism hold any water? Did Marx and Engels really vouch for equality of outcome at all? Or, is it just sloppy research to conflate the duo with the so-called “social justice warriors”?
Well, basic Marxist literature reveals that an accusation cannot be more preposterous. Marx never saw equality of outcome as a goal. If anything, he detested this bourgeois notion. In The Critique of the Gotha Programme, Marx says:
…one worker is married, another is not; one has more children than another, and so on and so forth. Thus, with an equal performance of labor, and hence an equal in the social consumption fund, one will in fact receive more than another, one will be richer than another, and so on. To avoid all these defects, right, instead of being equal, would have to be unequal.
Indeed, it is all about the specifics. What kind of equality do we crave for? Equality in one category inevitably brings inequality in another. People belonging from different cultures will always be different. People with different skills cannot be made equal. Marx does not deny this. His notion of equality means the abolition of class. In the lower stage of communism, he opines, the society will still have remnants of capitalism. Only in the higher stage will the abolition of class happen.
The empty notion of equality can make us embrace absurd demands. If a religion forbids caricature of its leading figures, other religions which are relatively tolerant can also lay claim to the same right of being immune from ridicule and criticism. After all, everyone should have the right to be protected from freethinking, right? Equality! Regardless of how bizarre this scenario is, the implications do suggest this. Marx, however, rejects this sloppy idea of equality:
Instead of the indefinite concluding phrase of the paragraph, “the elimination of all social and political inequality”, it ought to have been said that with the abolition of class distinctions all social and political inequality arising from them would disappear of itself.
Clearly, Marx did not see equality as a goal. Rather, his version of equality would be the aftermath of the abolition of class. This idea resonates well with his view on religion, to “give up a condition that requires illusions.” His solution is not a call to fix inequality itself, but a proposal to give up the system that paves the way for certain kinds of inequality.
In his 1875 letter to August Bebel, Engels echoes the same concern:
The elimination of all social and political inequality,” rather than “the abolition of all class distinctions,” is similarly a most dubious expression. As between one country, one province and even one place and another, living conditions will always evince a certain inequality which may be reduced to a minimum but never wholly eliminated. The living conditions of Alpine dwellers will always be different from those of the plainsmen. The concept of a socialist society as a realm of equality is a one-sided French concept deriving from the old “liberty, equality, fraternity,” a concept which was justified in that, in its own time and place, it signified a phase of development, but which, like all the one-sided ideas of earlier socialist schools, ought now to be superseded, since they produce nothing but mental confusion, and more accurate ways of presenting the matter have been discovered.
The notion of political equality sounds beautiful and desirable. But, in reality, other factors come into play to prevent a certain section of people from enjoying its benefits. Lenin addressed this issue in his rebuttal of Tugan-Baranovsky’s remarks against socialism:
If we take socialism, not as an economic theory, but as a living ideal,” Mr. Tugan declared, “then, undoubtedly, it is associated with the ideal of equality, but equality is a concept … that cannot be deduced from experience and reason.
In a 1914 article, Lenin launched a scathing attack against Mr. Tugan’s views. Denying any sympathy for this fantasy of equality, Lenin clarified that the demand for political equality had first been advanced by the bourgeoisie.
The bourgeoisie put forward the demand for equal rights for all citizens in the struggle against medieval, feudal, serf-owner and caste privileges. In Russia, for example, unlike America, Switzerland and other countries, the privileges of the nobility are preserved to this day in all spheres of political life, in elections to the Council of State, in elections to the Duma, in municipal administration, in taxation, and many other things.
But, did this political equality guarantee basic rights to all sections of the society? No, opined Lenin.
Even the most dull-witted and ignorant person can grasp the fact that individual members of the nobility are not equal in physical and mental abilities any more than are people belonging to the “tax-paying”, “base”, ‘low-born” or “non-privileged” peasant class. But in rights all nobles are equal, just as all the peasants are equal in their lack of rights.
The other kind of equality, the economic one, remained unfulfilled in a similar way. This is where the article shows its Marxist nature. Lenin explains that the capitalist class owns the means of production and live on the unpaid labor of the workers. Despite having equal political rights, the proletariat is forced to sell their labor power. There is no economic equality. To Lenin, the socialist interpretation of equality suggests the equality of social status — not of the physical and mental abilities of individuals. Like Marx, he proposes the abolition of classes, “The abolition of classes means placing all citizens on an equal footing with regard to the means of production belonging to society as a whole.”
But, what kind of equality does he vouch for? It is certainly not equality of outcome. In his own words:
It means giving all citizens equal opportunities of working on the publicly-owned means of production, on the publicly-owned land, at the publicly-owned factories, and so forth.
Lenin’s said article, “A Liberal Professor on Equality”, took a dig at Tugan-Baranovsky. Had it been written in the 21st Century, it would have targeted the spurious claims of a Classical Liberal (arguably) professor.
By now, it is clear that Peterson’s critique of Marxism lacks nuance. As evident from the basic Marxist literature, Marxism does not call for equality of outcome. This is just an intellectually dishonest narrative. When this simplistic narrative departs from old, recycled Cold War propaganda, it falls only into error. A quick reading of Engel’s Anti-Duhring will reveal further clues.
In Anti-Duhring (1877), written in response to Eugen Duhring’s ideas, Engels mentions Duhring’s points of view and then proceeds to critically analyze it. Engels dismisses Duhring’s idea of “two human wills” being “entirely equal to each other”. He goes on to say:
That two people or two human wills are as such entirely equal to each other is not only not an axiom but is even a great exaggeration. In the first place, two people, even as such, may be unequal in sex…
…
One thing or the other: either the Dühringian social molecule, by the multiplication of which the whole of society is to be built up, is doomed beforehand to disaster, because two men can never by themselves bring a child into the world; or we must conceive them as two heads of families. And in that case the whole simple basic scheme is turned into its opposite: instead of the equality of people it proves at most the equality of heads of families, and as women are not considered, it further proves that they are subordinate.
To Engels, the demand for equality of the proletarians must reflect the demand for abolishing the classes. In his own words:
Any demand for equality which goes beyond that, of necessity passes into absurdity.
This version of Marx, Engels and Lenin does not resemble, in any way, the straw-man put forward by Dr. Peterson. Another accusation against the Marxists, at least against the spooky non-existent Postmodern Neo-Marxists, is that they want to eliminate hierarchies from the society. Peterson claims, and rightly so, that hierarchies exist everywhere in nature. Human society is not an exception. But, Engels himself do not deny it.
Hierarchies do exist in socialist states. However, Engels was not talking about mere tyrannical authority. He was talking about something the likes of Peterson would refer to as competence hierarchy. In his article “On Authority” (1872), Engels criticizes the so-called anti-authoritarians. He uses the example of a cotton spinning mill:
“Wanting to abolish authority in large-scale industry is tantamount to wanting to abolish industry itself, to destroy the power loom in order to return to the spinning wheel.”
He does not want to do away with the authorities in all the fields. Hierarchies had existed even before the classes came into being, as Engels himself explains in The Origin of the Family (1884). There, he vividly describes the sexual division of labor in families. Apart from the cotton-spinning mill, Engels puts forward the case of the railways. Would a railway function without a hierarchy of operations and operators? What about a ship on the high seas? Would it survive without a competent commander, or, relevant expertise?
We have thus seen that, on the one hand, a certain authority, no matter how delegated, and, on the other hand, a certain subordination, are things which, independently of all social organization, are imposed upon us together with the material conditions under which we produce and make products circulate.
Engels clearly states that it is absurd to consider authority to be absolutely evil. Neither is autonomy absolutely good. These are relative things depending on the phases our society goes through. Ending all hierarchies is not a Marxist motto. It is the class division that Marxists aim to end.
Times without number, scholars have tried to dismantle these misconceptions. Unfortunately, these querulous misrepresentations of Marxism paint Marx as an egalitarian. False, of course. Ironically, this recycled set of false claims positions its proponents eerily close to the so-called snowflakes the right-wingers passionately detest. Both deny facts.
However, I will not reiterate the harsh comments Lenin made about the liberal professor, in the last paragraph of the 1914 article. He had his own reasons to do that. 1914 is not 2020. The appeal of Dr. Peterson did not originate from his shallow critique of Marxism. His lectures and compassionate speeches do provide genuine comfort to a gargantuan number of young people throughout the world. This must be acknowledged. It would be foolish to ignore this important aspect of his work. The sleazy tendency to vilify him just because he opposes certain aspects of Marxism does not help the conversation, at all.
It is indeed necessary to engage with Dr. Peterson’s ideas. Let’s conclude with a familiar note: The left and the right have interpreted his ideas. The point, however, is to rebut the ones that deserve rebuttal.
