> I grew up in the Soviet Union, where people had to affirm their fealty to ideals
Well, a scary % of the DEI professionals I've come across also self-identify as communists, so not sure if they view that as a bad association.
Well, a scary % of the DEI professionals I've come across also self-identify as communists, so not sure if they view that as a bad association.
For example he is famous for saying "from each according to their ability, to each according to their need" i.e. everyone works as hard as they can yet gets the same pay, because everyone's "need" is the same. Maybe adjusted by a few exceptions like family size and medical conditions, but the point of this is to separate how hard you work from what you get.
"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."
"But one man is superior to another physically, or mentally, and supplies more labor in the same time, or can labor for a longer time; and labor, to serve as a measure, must be defined by its duration or intensity, otherwise it ceases to be a standard of measurement. This equal right is an unequal right for unequal labor. 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 a natural privilege. It is, therefore, a right of inequality, in its content, like every right."
"The elimination of all social and political inequality,” rather than “the abolition of all class distinctions,” is similarly a most dubious expression."
Lenin also says:
"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."
"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."
Marx absolutely was opposed to equality of outcome, and had a lot of conflict against other leftists on this point. He was against class as a source of inequality, but he recognized that people have unequal capabilities and unequal needs.
I'm not a Marxist, but I actually read a bit of what he wrote - the difference between the words people typically put in his mouth and what he says is gigantic. This is an example. Marxism was a successful ideology over other leftist ideologies is in a huge part because it did recognize that people aren't equal, and that it based it's critique on capitalism on far more than that.
> because everyone's "need" is the same. Maybe adjusted by a few exceptions like family size
And the parts of Marx you quote say literally that exact thing: that people's needs vary only depending on whether they are married, how many children they have "and so on and so forth".
In other words Marx didn't recognize any connection between quantity or quality of work and what you get back. In a Marxist system your income is a function of family size. Indeed Marx didn't even recognize the concept of "work smarter not harder" because he believed everyone's work was exactly the same and the only difference was that big strong men could deliver more units of abstract "labor" per hour than a small weedy sick man.
Why do you think your quotes dispute what I said? Is it not perfect support for it?
The next quote literally says that some are better or work more and therefore the right to one's work is a right to unequality.
If you want the full context, read the full text. It's not so long. Otherwise, you have to trust me for the context and not imagine one.
In reality there's already a standardized unit which sums up the worth of a person's labor (money) and a standardized way to compute it (the market). Marx didn't like what that system computed and argued strongly that it all be swept away and replaced with some notion of "need" (family size) and "ability" (simple hours worked or intensity of those hours) which is drastically too simple to reflect reality. That's why his ideas led to collapse everywhere they were tried.