Gar Lipow:
> The question is a red herring. Taken literally, almost no socialists
> would be in favor of COMPLETE material equality. Needs differ. Wants
> differ. In socialism, if we take the Marxist definition of from each
> according to her work, people preferred labor/leisure tradeoffs will
> differs. Some people may prefer to work very little, have very few toys
> a lot's of spare time. Others may prefer to work very hard, and have
> lots of toys - and enjoy their work enough not to care about spare time.
>
> Secondly, almost all socialist believe in some degree of equality. That
> is almost no socialist believes that income and wealth should differ by
> factors of thousands, let alone tens of thousands or millions.
>
> Within this broad difference there a significant differences. Some
> people believe that very great differentials in income, and conditions
> of work are acceptable - cenrtainly by factors of ten, possibly by
> factors of hundreds. Others believe that socialism requires a pretty
> damn egalitarian distribution of income - with conditions of work and
> payment per hour being very close, and only minor variations acceptable.
>
> I think a good case that Marx was on the side of allowing pretty
> significant inequality. I think this was an issue on which Marx was wrong.
I used to think (before I read this list) that the definition of socialism was "the means of production owned or controlled by the workers, or by the people generally." I will tentatively recover this definition, and say that that seems like a bourgeois formulation which could easily provide for a great deal of inequality. Marx, it seems to me, thought so too, at least while writing _Critique_of_the_ _Gotha_Program_. But the question was not what socialism required, but what socialists were _in_favor_of_, which might be something very different, like the aforesaid Marx's vision of socialism transforming itself into communism. The question can't be answered by grinding the definition of socialism in the mills of logic -- one must go ask the socialists. And a great many of those who "have ever been" are beyond hearing our query. A general assessment of the totality of socialists' favors being impossible, I have to wonder why such an assertion was made, and on what basis.
-- Gordon