>> I think socialists have to return to Marx's perspective on this and give up
>> on the bourgeois idea that equality of incomes is important. Marx didn't
>> think so. He was right, too.
>>
>> jks
>
> I'm of the mind that a little inequality is like a little pregnancy.
> Inequality feeds on itself -- that's certainly been the experience of the
> United States over the last two decades and more.
Marx's ultimate principle of "justice" embodies the the ideas to which I've been pointing.
"In spite of this advance, this equal right [embodied in the distributive principle of 'a co-operative society based on common ownership of the means of production'] is still constantly stigmatized by a bourgeois limitation. The right of the producers is proportional to the labor they supply; the equality consists in the fact that measurement is made with an equal standard, labor.
"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. Right, by its very nature, can consist only in the application of an equal standard; but unequal individuals (and they would not be different individuals if they were not unequal) are measurable only by an equal standard insofar 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. Further, 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 these defects are inevitable in the first phase of communist society as it is when it has just emerged after prolonged birth pangs from capitalist society. Right can never be higher than the economic structure of society and its cultural development conditioned thereby.
"In a higher phase of communist society, after the enslaving subordination of the individual to the division of labor, and therewith also the antithesis between mental and physical labor, has vanished; after labor has become not only a means of life but life's prime want; after the productive forces have also increased with the all-around development of the individual, and all the springs of co-operative wealth flow more abundantly - only then then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be crossed in its entirety and society inscribe on its banners: From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!" (Marx, "Critique of the Gotha Programme" on the web at <http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1870/gotha/ch01.htm>)
Each individual receives what they "need" for "all-around development" and for life as the "universally developed individual" this development enables them to become. The principle recognizes individual differences in the sense that individual differences mean individual "needs," understood in this way, differ. "Labor" as "life's prime want" sublates, among other things, Kant's aesthetics.
Kant makes "art" in its fully realized form an aspect of mutual recognition, a form requiring for its production and appreciation the full development of the "sensus communis" (Critique of Judgment, §40 "On Taste as a Kind of Sensus Communis"). Art of this kind is ""production through freedom, i.e. through a will that places reason at the basis of its actions". (§43 "On Art in General")" Such production is also an end-in-itself ("an occupation that is agreeable on its own account").
These ideas are embodied in Marx's account of production in the "realm of freedom" - a realm which "really begins only where labour determined by necessity and external expediency ends" and "lies by its very nature beyond the sphere of material production proper." (Capital, vol. 3, [Penguin ed.], p. 959)"
"Let us suppose that we had carried out production as human beings. Each of us would have in two ways affirmed himself and the other person. 1) In my production I would have objectified my individuality, its specific character, and therefore enjoyed not only an individual manifestation of my life during the activity, but also when looking at the object I would have the individual pleasure of knowing my personality to be objective, visible to the senses and hence a power beyond all doubt. 2) In your enjoyment or use of my product I would have the direct enjoyment both of being conscious of having satisfied a human need by my work, that is, of having objectified man's essential nature, and of having thus created an object corresponding to the need of another man's essential nature. 3) I would have been for you the mediator between you and the species, and therefore would become recognized and felt by you yourself as a completion of your own essential nature and as a necessary part of yourself, and consequently would know myself to be confirmed both in your thought and your love. 4) In the individual expression of my life I would have directly created your expression of your life, and therefore in my individual activity I would have directly confirmed and realized my true nature, my human nature, my communal nature.
"Our products would be so many mirrors in which we saw reflected our essential nature.
"This relationship would moreover be reciprocal; what occurs on my side has also to occur on yours." ("Comments on James Mill") http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/james-mill/
Ted