Marxists maintained that economic inequality was caused by markets. But communist efforts to suppress markets, which required strongly repressing individual liberty, produced terrible economic results.
The inequality criticized by Marxists is not caused by markets, but by the legal framework within which markets operate. To reduce economic inequality, we therefore need to change that legal framework.
To understand the necessary changes in the legal framework, we must begin by explaining where Marxism went wrong.
Marxism's ugliest feature was its endorsement of "revolution." Violent revolutions and wars attempting to improve the world have generally impeded progress and brought unattractive people to leadership. "When the pot boils, the scum rises."
Despite its colossal failure, Marxism had one appealing feature: its vision of a classless society without unjust distinctions between people.
Marx proposed to eliminate the "bourgeoisie," the city-dwelling capitalists, leaving only the "proletariat" (property-less workers). Since he maintained, not unreasonably, that to have classes, there had be more than one, the resulting society would be classless, not one-class.
This has been tried, as I said, with disastrous results. But what about creating a classless society by eliminating the proletariat, instead? Although Marx himself scorned this idea, by his own logic it would clearly be classless.
This society could be reached by peaceful reform, since proletarians wouldn't object to being pulled up into the bourgeoisie. The bourgeoisie, by contrast, would certainly object to being pulled down into the proletariat and, thanks to their power, could be displaced only by violence.
My periodic table of human associations helped me identify the reforms needed to produce a bourgeois classless society, one that would implement capitalist values to the greatest degree imaginable.
Individual liberty would be maximized, limited only by government conducted in accordance with the requirements of democracy and the rule of law. Prices of all goods and services, except for regulated utilities, would be determined by the interaction of supply and demand ("the market") rather than by central decree, and property rights would be fully respected.
The resulting society would be classless in two senses.
First, it would make all of its members owners-in-common of "nature," or what Henry George called "land."
By "land" George did not mean just mean the Earth's surface. He used the term to refer to "all natural materials, forces, and opportunities ... everything that is freely supplied by nature." In today's world, George's "land" would include things like the immensely valuable electromagnetic spectrum through which TV and cellphone signals travel.
Like manna from heaven, the value "land" contributes to production would be distributed equally. Government-as-trustee for the public would capture this value and distribute it as an equal social dividend to every man, woman, or child subject to its jurisdiction, like the oil dividend for Alaskans.
Voila: since Marx's proletarians have no property, no more proletarians!
Second, society would also be classless in the sense that government would have no power to enact pseudolaws, rules enforceable by sanctions that do not apply to all actors.
Marx defined the "state" as merely a tool by which one class exploits another. It would therefore "wither away" when there were no more classes.
In the bourgeois classless society, it is merely government-as-bandit — which enacts pseudolaws applying different rules for different classes of people — that must be discarded.
Government-as-legislator could continue to classify actions as legal or legal and the circumstances of those actions, but it could not preclassify people.
No more nonsense like "Blacks must ride in the back of the bus."
Society would thus be classless in two different ways: in equal ownership of nature and in genuine equality before the law.
The world would still be capitalist, but we would have gone beyond today's capitalism by changing the legal framework within which its markets operate. And we would have done so peacefully.
For more details see my book, "Beyond Capitalism: A Classless Society With (Mostly) Free Markets."
Paul F. deLespinasse is Professor Emeritus of Political Science and Computer Science at Adrian College. He received his Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University in 1966 and has been a National Merit Scholar, an NDEA Fellow, a Woodrow Wilson Fellow and a Fellow in Law and Political Science at the Harvard Law School. His college textbook, "Thinking About Politics: American Government in Associational Perspective," was published in 1981. His most recent book is "The Case of the Racist Choir Conductor: Struggling With America's Original Sin." His columns have appeared in newspapers in Michigan, Oregon and other states. Read more of his reports — Click Here Now.
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