Socialists and Equality

Gar Lipow lipowg at sprintmail.com
Tue Apr 23 19:16:25 PDT 2002


On Tue, 23 Apr 2002 19:02:27 -0400 kelley at pulpculture.org said:

Kelley

>At 01:44 PM 4/23/02 -0700, Gar Lipow wrote:

Gar

>>Secondly, almost all socialist believe in some degree of equality.

Kelley

>might be better to talk about equity, not equality, and the differences there.

>equity refers to fairness, whereas equality refers to sameness.

I think my actual error was leaving the phrase incomplete. I was talking about equality of income. I should have also made explicit that the hidden assumption that there is some equivalent of money, some unit that lets us compare apples to orange to steel to paperback books to theatre tickets.

I think most socialist agree that - under socialism at least - you cannot get rid of moeny. And I think the most socialists will agree that

under socialism there is some degree of inequality in money income that is not tolerable.

I think where you will find quite significant disagreement is where to draw the line. I think that market socialist proposals, for example, require much larger disparities in income and work condition than planned socialist proposals.



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