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Rethinking Marxism

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Beyond Equality
David M. Bholat

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To cite this Article Bholat, David M.(2010) 'Beyond Equality', Rethinking Marxism, 22: 2, 272 284 To link to this Article: DOI: 10.1080/08935691003625588 URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/08935691003625588

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RETHINKING MARXISM

VOLUME 22

NUMBER 2

(APRIL 2010)

Beyond Equality
David M. Bholat
My paper explores the character of Marxs critique of equality as an ideal and the salience this critique has for progressives today. I suggest a reading of Marx different from the standard Marxist critique of liberalism as an emancipatory but unrealized set of ideals whose primary function in capitalist society is to conceal its conditions of inequality and unfreedom. Rather, I argue that Marx gestures at the limitations of liberal ideals, and shows why they are logically compatible with capital. This means that progressives are tasked with transcending, rather than merely appropriating, ideals such as freedom and equality. Key Words: Karl Marx, Liberalism, Equality, Capital

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First and foremost, socialism means a new cultural world . . . But second*/what cultural world? Some socialists are ready enough with folded hands and the smile of the blessed on their lips, to chant the canticle of justice, equality, freedom in general and freedom from the exploitation of man by man in particular, of peace and love, of fetters broken and cultural energies unchained, of new horizons opened, of new dignities revealed. But that is Rousseau adulterated with some Bentham. */Joseph Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy This paper argues that equality in particular and the ideals of liberalism more generally are insufficient ultimate ends for progressives. This insight comes from Marx in a passage at the end of chapter 6 of volume 1 of Capital. The sphere of circulation or commodity exchange, within whose boundaries the sale and purchase of labor-power goes on, is in fact a very Eden of the innate rights of man. It is the exclusive realm of Freedom, Equality, Property and Bentham. Freedom, because both buyer and seller of a commodity, let us say of labor-power, are determined only by their own free will. They contract as free persons, who are equal before the law. Their contract is the final result in which their joint will finds a common legal expression. Equality, because each enters into relation with the other, as with a simple owner of commodities, and they exchange equivalent for equivalent. Property, because each dispenses only of what is his own. And Bentham, because each looks only to his advantage. The only force bringing them together, and putting them into relation with each other, is the selfishness, the gain and the private interest of each.
ISSN 0893-5696 print/1475-8059 online/10/020272-13 2010 Association for Economic and Social Analysis DOI: 10.1080/08935691003625588

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Each pays heed to himself only, and no one worries about the others. And precisely for that reason, either in accordance with the pre-established harmony of things, or under the auspices of an omniscient providence, they all work together to their mutual advantage, for the common weal, and in the common interest. (1976, 280) The significance of this passage is its grounding the ideals of liberalism*/freedom, equality, property rights, Bentham (self-interestedness)*/in capital, which Marx elsewhere defines as a social relation in which workers are free from forms of servitude like slavery, but also free of means of meaningful and material survival such that they are compelled to sell themselves to capitalists.1 What Marx thus effects in this passage is an ideological distancing from our everyday political vocabulary. His provocation is that what are often identified as natural rights are actually historical conventions that achieve their apotheosis with the ascendance of capital; the ideals of the Enlightenment and contract theory are linked to the emergence of commodity labor relations. For Marx, capital thus shapes social relations and subjectivity, meaning and material life (Postone 1998). Consequently, the significant contradiction of capital is not between liberal ideals and the capital relation (as in standard Marxist interpretations) because these realms are in fact intertwined. Rather, the relevant contradiction is between capitals discourse and social relation on the one hand, opposing postcapital possibilities latent and unrealized in the present on the other. According to Marx, capital generates a dynamic totality that brings into existence the conditions of possibility for its own overcoming, while also constraining this achievement. In this first of a proposed two-part essay, I focus on Marxs critique of equality as an abstraction grounded in capital.2 I argue that the task Marx sets forth is not merely to actualize equity, but to go beyond it. A move toward a postliberal, democratic, postcapital society is one to which this paper seeks to make a contribution.

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Left Victory or Defeat?

The connections between, on the one hand, private property and self-interestedness, and, on the other hand, capital as a social relation (labor as a commodity) are relatively
1. Marxs object of critique was capital. Capitalism is a term of art foreign to his corpus. Marxs investigation is therefore both more parsimonious and more precise than most theories of capitalism today, without being any less robust. I therefore use the term capital where capitalism is more frequently used, at the risk of awkwardness in syntax. I view Marxs analysis therefore as quite at odds with versions of antiessentialist Marxism which refuses to acknowledge the (ontological) dominance of any particular class process (DeMartino 2003, 7). While I agree that other social relations need to be analyzed to adequately grasp capitalist society today, I think Marx would still prioritize the capital relation over all others. 2. In the second part of this essay, I propose to examine Marxs critique of freedom as an ideal and more fully elaborate on Marxs claim that the discourse and social relation of capital are at odds with postcapital possibilities that capital brings into existence.

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well documented and will not receive much attention here. It is widely recognized, even among conservatives, that private property is the historical achievement of capital (see Rajan and Zingales 2003). The tragedy of the commons in the past, and what conservatives see as the present tragedy of poor governance in the Third World (i.e., lack of private property rights), are well-worn arguments. Widely acknowledged as well, at least among progressives, is that self-interestedness as a norm is a sociohistorical construction, where the term construction means neither a false stereotype nor gross simplification but an accurate description of the historically specific mode of reasoning required to flourish within capitalist society. However, it must be stressed that this insight is unique to neither Marx nor critical theory. There is therefore little serious debate that private property and self-interestedness become hegemonic ideals with the historical triumph of capital. But freedom and equality? Arent these the ideals of leftists? At a moment when the Left, defined as an organized global movement against capital, is for practical purposes dead, there is an understandable and factually correct sentiment on the part of some leftists to remind those who will listen that the legal and social rights we generally associate with liberal democracy were very often secured through leftist struggle (see Eley 2002). At present inconsequential, the Left can at least be consoled in the knowledge that, to quote Dirk Maxeiner and Michael Miersch: The Left has won. Admittedly, its economic and political concepts have failed wherever they were applied. It has nevertheless conquered peoples minds. Everybody nowadays shares values that once were decidedly on the Left. Everybody is for democracy and liberty; for progress, enlightenment, and science; and for equal rights, whether woman or man, black or white. Against poverty, oppression, economic exploitation, and religious obscurantism. These attitudes are now commonplace. But, a hundred years ago . . . all these aspirations were decidedly on the Left. (2006) At a certain level of historical abstraction, I agree with the argument made by Maxeiner and Miersch. The ideals of freedom and equality are the official norm today even in places like Burma and Syria, no matter how far practice deviates from rhetoric. My only addition to their observations is that we consider the possibility that the dissemination of the ideals of freedom and equality and the decay of an anticapital Left are mutually conditioned. To clarify, I am not claiming that, with the ostensible triumph of left ideals of freedom and equality, the Left as a movement was rendered anachronistic. According to such a possible argument, the continued existence of the Left after its establishment as doxa would be as ridiculous as the continued mobilization of nonpropertied men for suffrage after its achievement. Instead I propose that we investigate (1) in what ways the ideals of freedom and equality express the capital social relation, and (2) how unequivocal fidelity to these ideals by leftists inhibits the articulation of a distinctively progressive discourse. In pursuing this trajectory inspired by my reading of Marx, I want to question the idea that what the Left needs to do is reappropriate the idiom of liberalism that various Rights employ to legitimize their agendas. This means rethinking the character of the Marxian critique of liberalism of which the following is representative.

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[T]he ruse of power peculiar to liberal constitutionalism centers upon granting freedom, equality, and representation to abstract rather than concrete subjects. The substitution of abstract political subjects for actual ones not only forfeits the project of emancipation but resubjugates us precisely by emancipating substitutes for us*/by emancipating our abstracted representatives in the state and naming this process freedom. The subject is thus ideally emancipated through its anointing as an abstract person, a formally free and equal human being, and is practically resubordinated through this idealist disavowal of the material constituents of personhood, which constrain and contain our freedom. (Brown 1995, 106; emphasis in original text) This critique is of the failure of capitalist society to realize the ideals of liberalism empirically, but not a philosophical critique of liberalism per se. According to this standard Marxian critique, liberalism generates schizophrenic subjects who, conflating legal rights with actual ones, think they live in a democracy when, all the while, they live most of their lives in hierarchically organized workplaces and find their freedom hindered by all sorts of material and ideological constraints. The idealist emancipation of liberalism then functions to preclude further struggle to make these lofty pretensions real. The conclusion drawn from this observation is that the task today is to extend liberal ideals from the purely legal realm into all domains of the social world: democracy in the workplace, equal access to healthcare, and so forth. However, if we take seriously Marxs claim that capital is an epoch-defining totality, then we ought to consider a more fundamental critique. The ideals of freedom and equality must be viewed as by themselves inadequate for an anticapital movement to the extent that they discursively express the ideals of capital. The evolving contradiction of capital then is not primarily a widening lacuna between its liberal democratic discourse and illiberal, nondemocratic social relations, though this may be an aspect of it. Rather, both the discourse and social relations are in increasing contradiction with the postcapital possibilities capital itself brings into existence. Of course, to call into question freedom and equality in the name of Marx is to necessarily court misunderstanding, playing all too easily into anti-Marxist representations of Marxism: You see the Reds really are fascists! Indeed, for reasons that are understandable, the project of many Marxist commentators post-1989 has been to resituate Marx as another, but more radical, Enlightenment philosopher. Marx is depicted as a radical Kantian who extended the moral maxim to treat others as ends, not means to a critique of the political economy of capital, where, after all, humans are reified as labor inputs for a process with no ultimate end other than money, or what Georg Simmel termed the purest reification of means (1991). However, instead of emphasizing continuity between Enlightenment thinkers and Marx, I want to highlight their differences, and suggest that Marxs writings provide a point of departure for a post-Enlightenment, postliberal democratic politics.3 Here I want to caution against reading the connection Marx makes between liberalism and capital as a purely historical link without consequence for the present.
3. Marxs opinion that a better society entailed freedom from religion, not to religion (liberal tolerance), is further evidence for reading Marx along the lines I will pursue here (1978b, 52).

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According to one possible line of argument, liberal democratic ideals may have been advanced originally to secure capitalist rule, but this fact alone cannot guide normative or empirical judgment about their connection to contemporary society. Such an argument was made recently by, among others, Slavoj Zizek, who claims: It is not enough to make the well-worn Marxist point about the gap between the ideological appearance of the universal legal form and the particular interests that effectively sustain it. It was bourgeois formal freedom that set in motion the very material political demands and practices of feminism and trade unionism. Rancieres basic emphasis is on the radical ` ambiguity of the Marxist notion of the gap between formal democracy */the Rights of Man, political freedoms*/and the economic reality of exploitation and domination. This gap can be read in the standard symptomatic way: formal democracy is a necessary but illusory expression of a concrete social reality of exploitation and class domination. But it can also be read in the more subversive sense of a tension in which the appearance of e galiberte is not a mere appearance but contains an efficacy of its own, which allows it to set in motion the rearticulation of actual socio-economic relations by way of their progressive politicization. We might perhaps apply here the old Levi-Straussian term of symbolic efficiency: the appearance of e galiberte is a symbolic fiction which, as such, possesses actual efficiency of its own: the properly cynical temptation of reducing it to a mere illusion that conceals a different actuality should be resisted. Much more interesting is the opposite process, in which something that was originally an ideological edifice imposed by colonizers is all of a sudden taken over by their subjects as a means to articulate their authentic grievances. (2005, 130; emphasis added)

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Two critical remarks are in order. First, Marx does not treat the relation between liberalism and capital as a tension a la Zizek but as a totality which represents an ambivalent moment in history. From Marxs standpoint this means cultivating, rather than resisting, a skeptical attitude towards liberalism. Second, Zizek fails to adequately address the limitations of articulating political grievances through a hegemonic discourse, e galiberte or otherwise.4 DeMartino made this point well. He has argued that the problem with the Left strategy of criticizing neoliberalism to make good on its own promises is that it implicitly adopts the normative standards embraced by the advocates of neoliberalism as the appropriate terrain on which to conduct the battle (DeMartino 2003, 1). Instead he proposes that we question the worth of neoliberal goals such as unlimited economic growth themselves.5
4. There are, however, resources in Zizeks larger corpus which, to echo one of his frequent phrases, allow us to articulate a position that is more faithful to Zizek than Zizek himself. As he has elsewhere noted, the lure today is the belief that one can undermine capitalism without problematizing the liberal-democratic legacy*/ but this would be a mistake (Zizek 2002, 554). 5. To illustrate the point further, an analogy can be drawn to critiques leveled against identity politics by feminist and queer theory. It may be that political mobilization based on established gender and sexual identities can sometimes be effective because these are the categories through which people understand themselves. However, the problem with such movements is

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In the spirit of his critique, I want to treat liberalism as a similarly ambiguous discourse, as both creating the possibility for progressive social life and constraining its further imagination. To justify this reading of Marx requires brief attention to the location of our opening passage within the overall structure of volume 1 of Capital. This in turn requires explanation of how that texts structure is a critical appropriation of Hegelian narrative form, although the debt Marx owes to Hegelian logic has been discussed excellently by others and can only briefly be touched upon here (see Levine 2002; Meaney 2003). Following Hegel, Marx chose a starting point whose subsequent unfolding, from abstract concept to more readily empirical manifestations, is designed to retrospectively validate the strength of the point of departure. For Hegel, looking retrospectively, there exists at the beginning the abstract idea Spirit, and the subsequent process of History is directed toward the phenomenological realization of Spirit in the empirical world (2004, 25). While the substance cum subject is different with Marx, the dialectical unfolding of volume 1 of Capital is formally similar. Marx begins with abstract labor as the implicit principle behind commodity exchange (see below) which, as it develops into the archetypal form of production, brings into existence an empirical class labor with the antagonistic potential to supersede the very dialectical dynamic that created them.6 Marxs critical appropriation of Hegelian logic is particularly evident in the early chapters of volume 1 of Capital. Marx, following Hegel, orders the presentation of categories in his text not in their historical sequence of appearance, but according to their present significance in conceptualizing the logical core of capital. This tight dialectical presentation continues until at least chapter 10 of the first volume, when the logical and historical intermix in his discussion of the fight for working-day legislation.7 This means chapter 6, the basis of the passage that animates this essay, should still be read as a chapter in which the mode of presentation is conceptual rather than purely historical. Consequently, although the ideals of freedom and equality may historically predate capital, it is only with the development of this society that they gain widespread currency. These ideals therefore possess an elective affinity to capital. The theoretical task, as indicated in these pages by Noonan, is to demonstrate that these grounds of social morality are not theoretical constructs but emergent properties of capitalist
that they reproduce, rather than challenge, the patriarchal and heterosexual ideologies that produced these distinct identities in the first place (Foucault 1990; Butler 1999). Whatever gains identity politics achieve come at the foreclosure of more radical possibilities for challenging these ideologies. Reform movements that speak through hegemonic discourses therefore are double-edged in character. 6. The significant difference between Marx and Hegel is that Marx treated this dialectical method as appropriate to the history of capital and not, as with Hegel, a method valid for investigating history en toto. Hence Marxs inversion of the Hegelian dialectic is more than a materialist appropriation of an Idealist method, a simple reversal of the relative weight given to economics and culture, base and superstructure. Instead, when Marx speaks about the mystical shell of Hegel, he is referring to not only the Idealist content of the dialectic, but its pretension to philosophical form outside Hegels context (Althusser 1969). 7. I would suggest that the mode of presentation switches at that point because Marx is no longer dealing with historical material but with his present, and has already logically reconstructed the cognitive conditions of possibility for his own perspective.

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society itself (2004, 313).8 The remainder of this essay focuses specifically on the ideal of equality, and how Marx views it as a problematic abstraction we need to move beyond.

Equality Is So Bourgeois
Recall what Marx writes about the connection between the ideals of equality and the labor-as-commodity relation that defines capital. According to Marx, equality accurately describes the transaction between capitalists and the proletariat in the sphere of circulation since the owners of money (capitalists) and the owners of labor power (proletariat) exchange equivalent for equivalent, or one kind of commodity for another. Later, of course, as Marx ventures into the sphere of production, he will indicate that what is obscured by this equal exchange at the level of circulation is that the proletariat is forced to enter labor contracts because they have been dispossessed of alternative means of livelihood. As already noted, a standard Marxist move is to then read his critique of equality as a kind of demystification of liberal ideology. In this reading, liberal contract theory abstracts from actual social inequities presupposed and deepened by wage labor. While my purpose is not to contradict the validity of this observation, such a reading does not seize hold of the profounder critique of liberalism that I want to suggest is available in the text. Such a critique is not only about the inadequacy of equality as an empirical description of the capital relation. It is also a normative critique about the inadequacy of equality as an unqualified ideal for postcapital society. To develop this argument, a brief biography of the ideal of equality is helpful. In most human societies that have existed, inequity and hierarchy have been viewed as unobjectionable and appropriate (see Davis 1992). Indeed, when we glance across history, it is not hard to find societies with inequities like slavery, but rarer are those that deemed it unacceptable. For ancients like Aristotle, the slave was merely a productive instrument (1984). This conception of the slave wasnt a ruse; it accurately corresponded to and ideologically expressed the reality of ancient Greece, where classes of people called helots remained in servitude from generation to generation ad infinitum (Finley 1985). According to Marx, this social fact presented an insuperable obstacle even for the genius of Aristotle. In the first place, (Aristotle) states quite clearly that the money-form of the commodity is only a more developed aspect of the simple form of value i.e. of the expression of a commodity chosen at random, for he says: 5 beds01 house is indistinguishable from 5 beds0a certain amount of money
8. That said, although Noonan seems to be pushing in the same direction I am, most of his article criticizes capitalist society along standard Marxian lines, as a failure to concretize the formal universalization of rights.

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He further sees that the value-relation which provides the framework for this expression of value itself requires that the house should be qualitatively equated with the bed, and that these things, being distinct to the senses, could not be compared with essential identity. There can be no exchange, he says, without equality, and no equality without commensurability. Here, however, he falters, and abandons the further analysis of the form of value. It is, however, in reality, impossible. Marx continues: But why not? Towards the bed, the house represents something equal, in so far as it represents what is really equal, both in the bed and the house. And that is*/human labor. However, Aristotle was himself unable to extract this fact, that in the form of commodity-values, all labor is expressed as equal human labor and therefore as labor of equal quality . . . because Greek society was founded on the labor of slaves, hence had as its natural basis the inequality of men and of their labor-powers. The secret of the expression of value, namely the equality and equivalence of all kinds of labor because and in so far as they are human labor in general, could not be deciphered until the concept of human equality had already acquired the permanence of popular opinion. This however becomes possible only in a society where the commodity-form is the universal form of the product of labor, hence the dominant social relation is the relation between men as possessors of commodities. Aristotles genius is displayed precisely by his discovery of a relation of equality in the valueexpression of commodities. Only the historical limitation inherent in the society in which he lived prevented him from finding out what in reality this relation of equality consisted of. (1976, 151/2) This passage makes a number of salient points. In the first place, Marx draws our attention to the fact that to refer to a bed or a house as things or to classify the labors involved in their production as work involves abstraction from their concrete realities, which is not necessarily apparent. Indeed, for Aristotle, such an abstraction is a mistake. According to Marx, Aristotle was right to conclude this given the society in which he lived, and appears incorrect to us only because we live in a society in which such abstractions are commonplace practice. We regularly compare apples and oranges according to a universal equivalent (money) and reward various concrete labors with it. Thus, within capital, it is accurate to label the various activities a plumber, a professor, and a janitor engage in as labor only because each treats their labor time as commodities, and their labor is treated as a commodity*/they sell their services to others and must find a buyer to continue practicing their trade. However distinct their actual activity may be, the plumber, the professor, and the janitor share in common their status as commodity laborers, and produce surplus value when those concretely different labors occur within structurally homogenous capital relations. This commonality provides the practical grounds for the concept of labor in the abstract as well as norms of egalitarianism and social equality. The plumber, the professor, and the janitor are all equally laborers to the extent that they use and receive the universal equivalent money for their efforts.

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The form of equality which consequently emerges with capital is simultaneously a progressive and regressive development. A historical anecdote helps illustrate. As far back as Athenian democracy, property had been a prerequisite for citizenship because ownership of land was materially valuable and socially esteemed. But the emergence of capital brought with it a shift in the regime of value as commodity labor replaced land as the implicit qualification for citizenship. As wage work became more common, new notions arose of property as residing in ownership of ones labor (Nakano-Glenn 2004). Consequently, nonpropertied men made arguments for enfranchisement on the basis of their shared participation in the so-called public sphere of commodity exchange in ways that quite explicitly differentiated their free labor from the private domestic servitude of women and slaves. Again, according to Marx, equity within capital has its genesis in the social reality of various concrete labors becoming abstract labor*/commodity labor paid in and done for money. As this historical example indicates, such a definition of labor and citizenship can be both racist and gendered, excluding slave and female productive activity from the definition of real labor.9 This reveals something of the inadequacy of egalitarianism in capitalist society. On the one hand, generalized commodity exchange provides the conditions of possibility for equity to be realized both ideologically and in practice. On the other hand, this equation is made by the reduction of diverse human activity to the common standard of the universal equivalent. Generalized commodity exchange thus involves the simultaneous equalization of people and products and their subordination to a transcendent third term, money.10 Marxs critique of capitalist equality at heart rests on a critique of what it presupposes: the homogeneity and commensurability of diverse human activities and ways of life. Marx set as his task the transcendence of the foundations on which egalitarianism and equality in our historical epoch has been grounded. The response to my provocation might be to reconstitute the grounding of equity in something other than abstract labor and money. For example, we could adopt the humanist position that we are all humans, therefore all equal. But such an essentialist ethic contravenes Marxs non-ontological approach and smacks of natural law arguments characteristic of the Right. According to Marx, what potentially
9. This qualification remains with us today, as evidenced in the ways in which the homeless, felons, welfare recipients, youth (not full-employment age), and other noncontributing members of society are treated as less than full citizens. For example, according to Dahl, polyarchy (liberal democracy) requires full inclusion, which he then defines as all persons . . . except transients and persons proved to be incapable of caring for themselves (1998, 78). 10. Money in capital provides the basis on which all can be considered equivalent, yet itself has no equivalent. It is for this reason properly termed a fetish*/ privileged symbol for expressing a value and for this reason irrationally overvalued (Goux 1990). In clear contrast with freemarket depictions of capitalist society, our society is thus essentially centralized. By this I mean more than the standard Marxist observation that within capital there is a tendency toward political-economic monopolies. More acutely, capital as a culture is logically fixated with money and thus subsumes, either directly or indirectly, ever more spheres of social life under this principle.

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distinguishes humans from other animals is our non-nature: that is, that we are not fully or largely determined at birth by an essence or instinct. Instead our character is shaped through our practices. Here again it is the nonliberal, nonhumanist dimensions of Marxs thought that deserve rethinking. Human lives are shaped by different practices, cultures, and historical epochs. They are irreducibly different, incomparable, and unequal. This means that the argument for human equality, rather than simply needing a new foundation, itself needs to be critically examined. In this regard Marx might be read as a precursor to contemporary arguments that stress the importance about thinking through the irreducibility of diversity, plurality, and difference. However, contemporary arguments in the name of pluralism and diversity tend to be prefigurative in the sense of identifying the diversity and plurality to be defended with that which already exists. On the Left this argument takes the form of essentialist apologies for subaltern and cultural rights to difference, while the Right version identifies diversity with the marketplace and the consumptive individuality it makes possible. Here Marx differs from both left and right defenses of actually existing difference by seeing them as equally unsatisfactory. For Marx, both capitalist and actually existing noncapitalist cultural difference spring from prehistorical epochs in which our character is formed and constrained by successive modes of problematic production. This holds especially true for practices and discourse formed under the yoke of the worst forms of oppression; as Marx proclaimed, after capitalist society, the proletariat rids itself of everything that still clings to it from its previous position in society (Marx and Engels 1978, 144; emphasis added). Similarly Terry Eagleton has pointed out: The point for Marx is not to move us toward the telos of History, but to get out from under all that so that we may make a beginning*/so that history proper, in all their wealth of difference, might get off the ground. This, in the end, would be the only historic achievement. And here universality and plurality go hand in hand. (1996, 65/6) I do not doubt that Marx envisaged postcapital society as partly the extension of a certain type of equity across society: namely, equal access to basic material means of survival and equal opportunities. The claim here is that Marx rejected capitalist homogenization advanced by the commodification and monetization of social life, and that this in turn meant an appreciation of the limits of the ideal of equality that rose to prominence as part of that process. This aspect of Marxs thought is most clearly expressed in Critique of the Gotha Program, and has been extensively commented on in recent issues of Rethinking Marxism (DeMartino 2003; Tabak 2003; Screpanti 2004; Madra 2006). Here he is scathing in his assessment of the rhetoric of Germanys emerging social democratic movement and the proposal that laborers receive certificates redeemable for consumption in equal proportion to their labor time. Marx writes, The same principle prevails as in the exchange of commodity equivalents: a given amount of labor in one form is exchanged for an equal amount of labor in another form. Hence equal right is still in principle bourgeois right . . . the equality consists in the fact that measurement is made with an equal standard, labor (1978a, 530).

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Marx then dialectically deconstructs this proposal by showing its logical incoherence on its own terms and its transmutation into its opposite. The equal right ostensibly served by this proposal turns out, according to Marx, to be in fact unequal right once we account for physical and mental differences, administration costs, welfare for those unable to work, 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 (531). In light of the world-historical failure of Marxism, it is Marxs tolerance of the defects of first-phase communism that might be reevaluated today. In retrospect, the one-sided emphasis of historical left movements on equity made them vulnerable to fascist elements motivated by ressentiment and revenge; since it was unclear how to impose the demand for equal enjoyment, what one could impose was the demand for shared sacrifice (Zizek 2007, 55). It might even be argued that such a one-sided demand for equality represented a reactionary desire on the part of leftists to return to a romanticized, precapitalist moment where equity was viewed by classical anthropology as the norm among so-called primitives. The task today is insisting on aspects of Marx that point beyond capital and its ideals. In certain instances it is important tactically to insist on inequity, on the necessity for disproportional intervention and attention to subaltern populations, especially in a historical moment where such affirmative action is attacked by the Right in the name of equal rights.11 More philosophically, we might think of how Marxs critique of equality converges with postmodern theories that argue that equality before the law is ethically insufficient since the particularity of cases is paramount and cannot be given in advance by prefabricated procedures or guidelines for judgment (Derrida 2002), as a kind of casuistry in which each receives their due. Hence Marxs famous, unrealized dictum for communism: From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs! (1978a, 531). So much for equality!12

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Acknowledgments
This paper has beneted from the reading of Moishe Postone, Chris Cutrone, Matthias Staisch, Sharif Youssef, and Kylie Smith. Earlier drafts of this paper were
11. Lest this example mislead: the progressive antithesis to capitalist equality is not its inversion (e.g., inequity). Rather, the point is moving beyond the equality/inequality framing of politics. 12. What Marx is gesturing toward is premodern as much as it is postcapital. Marx, echoing Aristotle, identifies justice with proportionality rather than strict equality. Consider the field of education. An adequate education system is not one that simply provides the same resources to each student. Rather, adequate pedagogy responds to the individual needs of each student and cultivates their unique capacities.

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presented at the Midwest Political Science Association Conference and, with the assistance of the Marion R. and Adolph J. Lichstern Fund, at the Strategies of Critique Conference held at York University.

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