Unequal Rights

A couple of weeks ago, in “Marxism and Difference”, I addressed a question that came up at my FIP keynote, “do you believe that the principal ‘all individuals are created equal and should be allowed an equal opportunity under the law to pursue happiness and prosper based on individual merit” is congruent with the motto Marx espoused in the “Critique of the Gotha Programme”, “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need”.

It had been a long time since I’d read Marx’s critique of a program laid out by the Eisenach Faction of the German Social Democratic Party in 1875. Following the “Marxism and Difference” blog post, I decided to reread it. I was struck by Marx’s insistence on individual difference as needing to be taken seriously in a post-capitalist future. Far from the erasure of individuality and difference at the heart of the Cold War communist caricature, Marx here recognizes not only that people have different needs and abilities, but that these must be taken into consideration in any system of justice (especially just distribution). Not only that, but he explicitly recognizes that while a communist revolution would overcome all conflicts and struggles created by social class, other problems of social hierarchy - racism, sexism, ableism, for example - would remain to be solved. The Critique provides a serious challenge to the “class only” brand of Marxists who continue to adhere to the technological (or productive-force) determinism of German Social Democracy.

Marx challenges the Gotha programme’s point that in a communist society, every worker will get back from the social stock of goods in proportion to the amount of labour they put in. In particular, Marx takes issue with the following statements: “the proceeds of labour belong undiminished with equal right to all members of society” and “the emancipation of labour demands… the co-operative regulation of the total labour with a fair distribution of the proceeds of labour”.

For Marx, the concepts “equal right” and “fair distribution” are stamped with bourgeois (capitalist) conceptions of equality. In order for there to be a standard, “fair”, way to measure the labour contribution of each individual worker, their productivity must be abstracted from their concrete existence. In this way, the “fair distribution” of the Gotha programme simply mirrors the already-existing capitalist way of measuring labour contribution, by labour-time alone. To receive commodities from the common social stock in exchange for labour performed means nothing more than trading a common measure of labour-time for commodities with the same exchange value. “Hence,” Marx writes, “equal right is still in principle - bourgeois right… the right of the producers is proportional to the labour they supply; the equality consists in the fact that measurement is made with an equal standard, labour”.

However, different workers have different abilities, and it would be unfair to allot less of the social product to those who are less productive either through natural endowments and capacities or through social situation. It is here that we can see Marx attempting to resist the presumptions of, for example, ableism in the capitalist image of the productive worker.

This equal right is an unequal right for unequal labour. It recognizes no class differences, because everyone is only a worker like everyone else; but it tacitly recognizes unequal individual endowment and thus productive capacity as natural privileges. It is, therefore, a right of inequality, in its content, like every right. Right by its very nature can consist only in the application of an equal standard; but unequal individuals (and they would not be individuals if they were not unequal) are measurable only by an equal standard in so far as they are brought under an equal point of view, are taken from one definite side only, for instance, in the present case, are regarded only as workers and nothing more is seen in them, everything else being ignored.

We know from disabled people that the imposition of an “objective” category of productivity simply imposes an unequal burden; equality, precisely because it is partial and selective, simply obscures an existing inequality. So when, as in the question posed above, we consider the standard American formulation that “all individuals [originally all men] are created equal”, we have to ask ourselves how equality is being measured? What characteristics are adopted to make the judgement of equality and what characteristics are left out. It is clear from the history of North American politics that equality included whiteness and property-ownership and masculinity, for example, gradually expanding to include (some) white women and (some) people of colour but never overcoming the exclusion of the non-propertied or disabled.

This critique of equality provides much of the ammunition used against Marx as a denier of equal rights. It’s true that Marx opposed “equal” rights when the term “equal” is used to hide inequality and obscure existing relations of power and privilege.

We can see this same mystification in questions of the “equal right” to free speech or free expression. There is a long-standing criticism of Intellectual Freedom in libraries that it concerns itself solely with government interference, but not in the interference of capital. A clear example of this argument can be found in Sandy Berman’s introduction to Toni Samek’s Intellectual Freedom and Social Responsibility in American Librarianship. Berman writes that

Becoming increasingly dominant within librarianship - albeit never recognized by the Intellectual Freedom junta - is what might be termed the Techno-Blockbuster philosophy, which views digital technology as the overriding fact of the future, making traditional formats like books, magazines, CDs, and videos ultimately superfluous, yet which emphasizes - for the time being - conglomerate-published, Madison Avenue-hyped bestsellers, which may be bought in massive quantities to satisfy artificially created demand. And they aren’t just acquired. They’re prominently displayed and publicized by libraries as though there were some special, intrinsic, compelling worth to them. They are consciously pushed in ways that most midlist or small and alternative press materials are not, reflecting a bias in favour [of] bigness and big money.

The spurious equality Marx identified applies here to library material (or put more broadly, information). According to the neutral perspective of intellectual freedom, all information is “equal”, but only by excluding the very characteristics that libraries use to collect and display material: popularity, publisher, prestige, power. Similarly, individuals are equals only under the aspect of consumption. As consumers with “information seeking behaviour” they are the bearers of the “equal” right to individual freedom, but this equal right obscures an inequality, of what is collected or displayed, for example, but also of education and access.

Obviously this kind of mystifying equality plays into the language-games of the “Intellectual Dark Web”, for whom “wokeness” attacks precisely the kind of spurious equality Marx also challenged. The “equality” - primarily intellectual and political, in terms of equal freedom - espoused by the IDW crowd serves to maintain their own hierarchies of inequality - hence the “objective”, scientific inequality pushed by venues like Quillette under the guise of empirical fact to which we are ostensibly all equally subject.

Whenever the concept of social equality arises, we have to be very careful to interrogate the basis on which that equality is founded. What is excluded to make two different things “equal”, and what inequalities do those differences signal?