Inequality and the Capitalist Economy

(Quote of the Week)

A key premise of social-democratic reformism is that wealth inequality under capitalism is fundamentally a matter of unequal distribution of goods, to be remedied by “tax the rich” schemes and other such measures. As Karl Marx pointed out, the distribution of wealth is determined by the capitalist mode of production, in which the bourgeoisie owns the factories, land, etc., while the working class sells its labor power in order to survive. To eliminate scarcity requires a series of proletarian revolutions internationally, through which the working class will collectivize the means of production and create and develop a global planned economy.

Any distribution whatever of the means of consumption is only a consequence of the distribution of the conditions of production themselves. The latter distribution, however, is a feature of the mode of production itself. The capitalist mode of production, for example, rests on the fact that the material conditions of production are in the hands of non-workers in the form of capital and land ownership, while the masses are only owners of the personal condition of production, of labour power. If the elements of production are so distributed, then the present-day distribution of the means of consumption results automatically. If the material conditions of production are the collective property of the workers themselves, then there likewise results a distribution of the means of consumption different from the present one. The vulgar socialists (and from them in turn a section of the Democrats) have taken over from the bourgeois economists the consideration and treatment of distribution as independent of the mode of production and hence the presentation of socialism as turning principally on distribution. After the real relation has long been made clear, why retrogress again?

—Karl Marx, Critique of the Gotha Programme (1875)