A very common characterization of Marxism and communism is that capitalism is about “equality of opportunity” while communism is about “equality of outcome,” that communists want to “pay everyone the same,” or “force everyone to be equal,” so on and so forth. This also leads into the “human nature” argument, where people argue that Marxism does not understand human nature because humans are naturally greedy and competitive.
The reality is, communism, as understood by Marx, had absolutely nothing to do with equality at all. For clarity sake, I will be using “communism” and “socialism” here interchangeably as a catch-all term for the kind of societies China or the USSR were trying to achieve, since I know many people levying this criticism often mean “socialism” when criticizing the “communism” of countries like the Soviet Union or China.
Friedrich Engels, the co-author of the Communist Manifesto, criticized the notion of “equality” for being unspecific and impossible to achieve, since people’s living conditions will always be unequal. The concept of communism as being about “equality” goes back to French utopian socialists which Marxists reject.
As between one country, one province and even one place and another, living conditions will always evince a certain inequality which may be reduced to a minimum but never wholly eliminated. The living conditions of Alpine dwellers will always be different from those of the plainsmen. The concept of a socialist society as a realm of equality is a one-sided French concept deriving from the old “liberty, equality, fraternity,” a concept which was justified in that, in its own time and place, it signified a phase of development, but which, like all the one-sided ideas of earlier socialist schools, ought now to be superseded, since they produce nothing but mental confusion, and more accurate ways of presenting the matter have been discovered.
— Engels, Engels to August Bebel In Zwickau
If “equality” is a “dubious expression,” then what expression should we use? Engels argued in favor of “abolition of class distinctions,” which is a technical Marxist phrase that I will not get into great detail here, but in practice means the transition away from private to public property. Any call for “equality” that goes beyond this is utopian.
“[T]he real content of the proletarian demand for equality is the demand for the abolition of classes. Any demand for equality which goes beyond that, of necessity passes into absurdity.”
— Engels, Anti-Durhing
A criticism I often hear is that Marxists don’t understand humans because humans are all inherently different and Marxists apparently want to treat everyone equally independent of their circumstances. want to “force everyone to be the same.” I have often seen this graphic posted around social media, which supposedly demonstrates that communism is bad because it wants “equality” while the good liberals want “equity” instead which recognizes differences between individuals.
However, Marxists have never denied differences between individuals nor have they ever insisted all individuals should be treated equally.
When we say that experience and reason prove that men are not equal, we mean by equality, equality in abilities or similarity in physical strength and mental ability. It goes without saying that in this respect men are not equal. No sensible person and no socialist forgets this. But this kind of equality has nothing whatever to do with socialism. If Mr. Tugan is quite unable to think, he is at least able to read; were lie to Lake the well-known work of one of the founders of scientific socialism, Frederick Engels, directed against Dühring, he would find there a special section explaining the absurdity of imagining that economic equality means anything else than the abolition of classes. But when professors set out to refute socialism, one never knows what to wonder at most — their stupidity, their ignorance, or their unscrupulousness.
Since we have Mr. Tugan to deal with, we shall have to start with the rudiments. By political equality Social-Democrats mean equal rights, and by economic equality, as we have already said, they mean the abolition of classes. As for establishing human equality in the sense of equality of strength and abilities (physical and mental), socialists do not even think of such things.
— Lenin, A Liberal Professor on Equality
Another form of this criticism I often hear is that Marxists “want to pay everyone the same” and want to “force everyone to be equal.”
The insistence that communists want to “pay everyone the same” or that they “expect everyone to be the same” has been something Marxists have denied since Marx himself.
The kind of socialism under which everybody would get the same pay, an equal quantity of meat and an equal quantity of bread, would wear the same clothes and receive the same goods in the same quantities — such a socialism is unknown to Marxism.
— Stalin, Talk With the German Author Emil Ludwig
Marxists have always argued for the exact opposite: payment should be according to labor performed. Often, Marx is falsely believed to have advocated for a society where people distribute “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need.” In reality, Marx did not advocate for this.
This phrase was common among socialists and communists of the era, but Marx wrote a letter to a German political party criticizing its party platform for adopting such a slogan. For Marx, distribution according to need was utopian unless you lived in a post-scarcity society where “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.” If you have scarcity, you have to ration, and Marx, argued that this rationing should be based on labor performed.
In other words, Marx argued in favor of distribution according to work, not according to need. People should be paid according to their labor performed and should take from society in proportion to what they put into it.
This inherently means a rejection of equality because humans have inherently different circumstances and abilities, and thus any equal standard will recognize unequal individual endowment. Hence, Marx concluded that communists have to reject equality and that people would not be treated equally, have equal incomes, nor will they have equality of outcome.
“[O]ne 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.”
— Marx, Critique of the Gotha Programme
A lot of critics of communism seem to imagine that what Marxists want is equivalent to a small scale hippy commune where people pool all their wealth equally and share everything in common, but to scale this up to the size of a whole country. This is by no means what Marxists are advocating for nor have we ever advocated for this.
Equalitarianism owes its origin to the individual peasant type of mentality, the psychology of share and share alike, the psychology of primitive peasant “communism.” Equalitarianism has nothing in common with Marxist socialism. Only people who are unacquainted with Marxism can have the primitive notion that the Russian Bolsheviks want to pool all wealth and then share it out equally. That is the notion of people who have nothing in common with Marxism. That is how such people as the primitive “Communists” of the time of Cromwell and the French Revolution pictured communism to themselves. But Marxism and the Russian Bolsheviks have nothing in common with such equalitarian “Communists.”
— Stalin, Talk With the German Author Emil Ludwig
Finally, we have to deal with the misconception that Marxists “don’t understand human nature” because humans are naturally “greedy” and therefore we cannot expect them to happily “share everything in common.” They accuse us of being “utopian” and “idealist” for attacking greed and individualism.
First, Marxists do not deny humans have a tendency towards egotism, greed, and individualism. Marxists are not interested in preaching morality or condemning greed. Whether or not greed and egoism are moral or immoral is irrelevant to Marxism, and we have no desire to try and make people less greedy or less individualistic. Marxism does not make any statements on morality.
Communists do not oppose egoism to selflessness or selflessness to egoism[…]The Communists do not preach morality at all. They do not put to people the moral demand: love one another, do not be egoists, etc.; on the contrary, they are very well aware that egoism, just as much selflessness, is in definite circumstances a necessary form of the self-assertion of individuals. Hence, the Communists by no means want to do away with the “private individual” for the sake of the “general”, selfless man. That is a statement of the imagination.
— Marx, The German Ideology
The Socialism of earlier days certainly criticized the existing capitalistic mode of production and its consequences. But it could not explain them, and, therefore, could not get the mastery of them. It could only simply reject them as bad.
— Engels, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific
Second, the Marxian understanding of socialism and communism are based on socialized production — centralized production and economic planning as opposed to decentralized production and market competition — — and socialized production is not some ideal Marxists want to go out and enforce upon the world, and to force humans to fit into some idealized utopian system.
In other words, Marxists are not prescribing socialized production as if it is inherently superior to isolated production on a competitive market. Marxists instead are describing the objective state of things. Markets themselves develop naturally towards socialized production on their own independent of whether or not any communists are involved. Our viewpoint that human society will inevitably move away from markets and more and more towards rational, socialized production and planning, is a description of the objective nature of capitalism’s development derived from rigorous research into the behavior and development of the capitalist system.
Communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality [will] have to adjust itself.
— Marx, The German Ideology
That is quite a large topic which I have covered an introduction to in my other article below.
The point is that Marxists are not arguing for the movement away from free markets towards a rationally planned and centralized system out of morality or any sort of “inherent superiority” of centralization and planning over markets. Any argument against socialism or communism that focuses on the supposed “immorality” or even the “inefficiencies” of the system misses the point entirely. The system is inevitable unless you can debunk the arguments going back to Marx’s Capital and the Manifesto that the development of industry naturally has a tendency to gradually socialize production.
The essential conditions for the existence and for the sway of the bourgeois class is the formation and augmentation of capital; the condition for capital is wage-labour. Wage-labour rests exclusively on competition between the labourers. The advance of industry, whose involuntary promoter is the bourgeoisie, replaces the isolation of the labourers, due to competition, by the revolutionary combination, due to association. The development of Modern Industry, therefore, cuts from under its feet the very foundation on which the bourgeoisie produces and appropriates products. What the bourgeoisie therefore produces, above all, are its own grave-diggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable.
— Marx & Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party
Marxism describes the objective nature of the development of the capitalist system through rigorous research and evidence, and describes where it is developing therefore where it is developing towards. It does not inherently prescribe any policies.
Like any science, a field of study does not inherently advocate for any policies, but may inform policy decisions. The study of biology may inform what treatment a doctor should prescribe a patient, but biology itself is merely descriptive and prescribes nothing. The prescription requires a desired goal. Marxism describes objective socioeconomic laws which are outside of and apart from policy prescriptions. They inform policy prescriptions as policies should be inline with the study, they should be inline with objective economic laws, but they cannot override or change them.
It is said that some of the economic laws operating in our country under socialism, including the law of value, have been “transformed,” or even “radically transformed,” on the basis of planned economy. That is likewise untrue. Laws cannot be “transformed,” still less “radically” transformed. If they can be transformed, then they can be abolished and replaced by other laws. The thesis that laws can be “transformed” is a relic of the incorrect formula that laws can be “abolished” or “formed.” Although the formula that economic laws can be transformed has already been current in our country for a long time, it must be abandoned for the sake of accuracy. The sphere of action of this or that economic law may be restricted, its destructive action — that is, of course, if it is liable to be destructive — may be averted, but it cannot be “transformed” or “abolished.”
Consequently, when we speak of “subjugating” natural forces or economic forces, of “dominating” them, etc., this does not mean that man can “abolish” or “form” scientific laws. On the contrary, it only means that man can discover laws, get to know them and master them, learn to apply them with full understanding, utilize them in the interests of society, and thus subjugate them, secure mastery over them.
Hence, the laws of political economy under socialism are objective laws, which reflect the fact that the processes of economic life are law-governed and operate independently of our will. People who deny this postulate are in point of fact denying science, and, by denying science, they are denying all possibility of prognostication — and, consequently, are denying the possibility of directing economic activity.
— Stalin, Economic Problems of Socialism in the USSR
The fact that these economic laws within the study of Marxism are objective is of real consequence. This means the advocacy for socialism within a Marxist context is not based on simply a moral desire for socialism, and hence, the advocacy for socialism or communism thus cannot be universalized.
Liberals, who tend to operate with an idealist understanding of political economy, insist that their system is “the most moral” and therefore “the most universal.” They see their economic system as merely a reflection of this “most moral” ideology implemented into law, and the result of this is free market capitalism.
Marxists, on the other hand, see capitalist society as something that has arisen due to a given stage of economic development independent of anyone’s intentional design, and that liberalism arose as a post-hoc justification for an already-existing system.
In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of production. The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness.
— Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy
Marxists, too, see the development of the foundations of socialism as not something that is simply imposed by law from an outside party, but as something that arises unintentionally and inevitably from the development of industry itself.
Capitalism[…]leads directly to the most comprehensive socialisation of production; it, so to speak, drags the capitalists, against their will and consciousness, into some sort of a new social order, a transitional one from complete free competition to complete socialisation.
— Lenin, Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism
Hence, Marxists, unlike for all other political and economic worldviews in the modern world, are the only ones to not prescribe universal validity to any economic system. The advocacy for socialism is only done on the basis of particular material conditions which may not exist in all countries, nor may exist universally throughout a single country.
We can see this in practice, for example, with Mao Zedong, who originally had supported Sun Yat-sen’s vision of bringing capitalism and liberal democracy to China and insisted communists should side with the Kuomintang, and indeed most communists in China were originally members of the Kuomintang.
Why would Mao advocate for bringing capitalism to China? Simply put, China was just coming out of the feudal Qing Dynasty, and Marxists see feudalism as based on small production agriculture, while socialism is instead based on large-scale industry. This large-scale industry is developed through capitalism. Hence, socialism was not applicable to China as China the material basis for it.
If any Communist or Communist sympathizer talks about socialism and communism but fails to fight for this objective, if he belittles this bourgeois-democratic revolution, relaxes or slows down ever so slightly and shows the least disloyalty and coolness or is reluctant to shed his blood or give his life for it, then wittingly or unwittingly, such a person is betraying socialism and communism to a greater or lesser extent and is certainly not a politically conscious and staunch fighter for communism. It is a law of Marxism that socialism can be attained only via the stage of democracy. And in China the fight for democracy is a protracted one. It would be a sheer illusion to try to build a socialist society on the ruins of the colonial, semi-colonial and semi-feudal order without a united new-democtatic state, without the development of the state sector of the new-democratic economy, of the private capitalist and the co-operative sectors, and of a national, scientific and mass culture, i.e., a new-democratic culture, and without the liberation and the development of the individuality of hundreds of millions of people — in short, without a thoroughgoing bourgeois-democratic revolution of a new type led by the Communist Party.
Some people fail to understand why, so far from fearing capitalism, Communists should advocate its development in certain given conditions. Our answer is simple. The substitution of a certain degree of capitalist development for the oppression of foreign imperialism and domestic feudalism is not only an advance but an unavoidable process. It benefits the proletariat as well as the bourgeoisie, and the former perhaps more. It is not domestic capitalism but foreign imperialism and domestic feudalism which are superfluous in China today; indeed, we have too little of capitalism. Strangely enough, some spokesmen of the Chinese bourgeoisie fight shy of openly advocating the development of capitalism, but refer to it obliquely. There are other people who flatly deny that China should permit a necessary degree of capitalist development and who talk about reaching socialism in one stride and “accomplishing at one stroke” the tasks of the Three People’s Principles and socialism. Obviously, these opinions either reflect the weakness of the Chinese national bourgeoisie or are a demagogic trick on the part of the big landlords and the big bourgeoisie. From our knowledge of the Marxist laws of social development, we Communists clearly understand that under the state system of New Democracy in China it will be necessary in the interests of social progress to facilitate the development of the private capitalist sector of the economy (provided it does not dominate the livelihood of the people) besides the development of the state sector and of the individual and co-operative sectors run by the labouring people. We Communists will not let empty talk or deceitful tricks befuddle us.
— Mao, On Coalition Government
Of course, Mao would later change his mind, but not entirely. Mao came to believe the Kuomintang could not develop China due to Chiang Kai-shek’s siding with imperialists and fascists like Nazi Germany and the USA, as well trying to appease the Japanese. Mao came to believe that imperialism would prevent capitalism from being able to rapidly develop China as it has failed to develop much of the global south, and thus eventually the Party broke away from the Kuomintang.
However, Mao did not immediately try to implement socialism, because he still believed that such a thing was impossible in China. He instead implemented a system of “state capitalism” which he believed would ultimately be a capitalist system and thus be able to develop China’s economy away from feudalism, but also would have a strong state to safeguard its development, to avoid imperialist influence, and to make sure capitalism was being put to use for the people as a whole, and that this state capitalist economy could eventually develop into a socialist one.
The present-day capitalist economy in China is a capitalist economy which for the most part is under the control of the People’s Government and which is linked with the state-owned socialist economy in various forms and supervised by the workers. It is not an ordinary but a particular kind of capitalist economy, namely, a state-capitalist economy of a new type. It exists not chiefly to make profits for the capitalists but to meet the needs of the people and the state. True, a share of the profits produced by the workers goes to the capitalists, but that is only a small part, about one quarter, of the total. The remaining three quarters are produced for the workers (in the form of the welfare fund), for the state (in the form of income tax) and for expanding productive capacity (a small part of which produces profits for the capitalists). Therefore, this state-capitalist economy of a new type takes on a socialist character to a very great extent and benefits the workers and the state.
— Mao, On State Capitalism
You can see, then, that Mao did not believe that capitalism was merely “bad” and needed to be “destroyed.” This is not how Marxists think. Economic systems are based on a particular set of material circumstances, and you must implement policies in accordance with the objective laws of history and not according to your personal idealistic and utopian desires. Marxists may advocate for capitalism, socialism, markets and private ownership, or planning and social ownership. It depends on not just the country, but different sectors within a single country may require different policies.
Hence, if you argue with a Marxist, it is a waste of time to drone on about how you think socialism or communism are “immoral” systems, or how they “violate human nature,” and depending on context, even arguments about efficiency miss the point. Just because you do not want a particular system, just because you do not like it or think it is good, these are irrelevant questions to whether or not historical progress is objectively pushing humanity towards such a system independent of their will.
If you want to argue with a Marxist, you can either tackle it from a scientific perspective, showing that the development of industry does not lead to the socialization of production (either through theoretical arguments or evidence-based arguments), or you can attack Marxism from a philosophical angle, criticizing historical materialism itself.
Rarely do any arguments against Marxism discuss it at this sort of fundamental level, because most critics of Marx are too lazy to read a single word from any Marxist. Rather, they are, most of the time, more interested in straw man arguments about “equality” and petty moralizing.
