Is Socialism Really When People Are Paid The Same?

The notion of “absolute equality” is an anti-communist idea that genuine Marxist-Leninist-Maoists must not support. However, reactionaries strawman communists and try to say that communists want everyone to get the same incomes, outcomes, etc. This makes no sense to anyone who actually read communist texts; all Marxist leaders and theoreticians have condemned bourgeois notions of “complete equality”. For example, Friedrich Engels explained the communist, workers’ demand for equality in Part I, Chapter 10 of Anti-Dühring:

… the 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.

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Joseph Stalin agreed with this. In “An Interview with the German Author Emil Ludwig”, he said:

The kind of socialism under which everybody would receive the same pay, an equal quantity of meat, an equal quantity, of bread, would wear the same kind of clothes and would receive the same kind of goods and in equal quantities—such a kind of socialism is unknown to Marxism. All that Marxism declares is that until classes have been completely abolished, and until work has been transformed from being a means of maintaining existence, into a prime necessity of life, into voluntary labour performed for the benefit of society, people will continue to be paid for their labour in accordance with the amount of labour performed. “From each according to his capacity, to each according to the work he performs,” such is the Marxian formula of socialism, i.e., the first stage of communism, the first stage of a communist society. Only in the highest phase of communism will people, working in accordance with their capacity, receive recompense therefor in accordance with their needs: “From each according to his capacity, to each according to his needs.”

It is obvious that people’s needs vary and will vary under socialism. Socialism never denied that people differed in their tastes, and in the quantity and quality of their needs. Read Marx’s criticism of Stirner’s inclination toward equalitarianism; read Marx’s criticism of the Gotha Programme of 1875; read the subsequent works of Marx, Engels and Lenin, and you will see how severely they attacked equalitarianism. The roots of equalitarianism lie in the mentality of the peasant, in the psychology of share and share alike, the psychology of primitive peasant “communism.” Equalitarianism is entirely alien to Marxian socialism. It is those who know nothing about Marxism who have the primitive idea that the Russian Bolsheviks want to pool all wealth and then share it out equally. It is the idea of those who have never had anything in common with Marxism. It was the idea of communism entertained by such people as the primitive “communists” of the time of Cromwell and the French Revolution. But Marxism and Russian Bolshevism have nothing in common with the equalitarian “communists.”

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As Stalin described here, the principle determining distribution in a socialist society is that the amount of labor one puts in is proportional to the goods that they can take from society. We describe this as, “From each according to their abilities, to each according to their work/contributions.” Socialism, as we have said in other articles, is the transition from capitalism to communism, and it is the dictatorship of the proletariat; therefore, other distribution systems may temporarily exist in the socialist period, but distribution by work lasts the longest in socialism. We explained socialism’s relations of production in this article.

Now that we have shown that socialism does not imply equal income or outcome, what about communism? Does communism support absolute equality? No, it does not. In fact, equal distribution of goods would be anti-communist because of people’s needs. Some people have larger families; others have chronic health problems; still others live in regions with certain requirements for living. Therefore, in communism, society follows this principle: “From each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs.” People work as they can or wish to, and they take as they need or want.

This can only occur once there is an abundance of goods for all people, when little labor is required for production, when labor becomes more generalized, and when people’s consciousness and culture encourage labor (reducing or ending the distinction between labor and leisure). As Engels said in Principles of Communism:

[With the development of socialism and communism,] an abundance of goods will be able to satisfy the needs of all its members.

The division of society into different, mutually hostile classes will then become unnecessary. Indeed, it will be not only unnecessary but intolerable in the new social order. The existence of classes originated in the division of labor, and the division of labor, as it has been known up to the present, will completely disappear. For mechanical and chemical processes are not enough to bring industrial and agricultural production up to the level we have described; the capacities of the men who make use of these processes must undergo a corresponding development.

Just as the peasants and manufacturing workers of the last century changed their whole way of life and became quite different people when they were drawn into big industry, in the same way, communal control over production by society as a whole, and the resulting new development, will both require an entirely different kind of human material. …

The form of the division of labor which makes one a peasant, another a cobbler, a third a factory worker, a fourth a stock-market operator, has already been undermined by machinery and will completely disappear. Education will enable young people quickly to familiarize themselves with the whole system of production and to pass from one branch of production to another in response to the needs of society or their own inclinations. It will, therefore, free them from the one-sided character which the present-day division of labor impresses upon every individual. Communist society will, in this way, make it possible for its members to put their comprehensively developed faculties to full use. But, when this happens, classes will necessarily disappear. It follows that society organized on a communist basis is incompatible with the existence of classes on the one hand, and that the very building of such a society provides the means of abolishing class differences on the other.

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Socialism, being the transition to communism, allows these changes to occur. As socialism develops and advances, the division of labor is reversed, education improves, technology gets better, culture and people’s consciousness allows for a desire to work and help others, etc. None of this implies absolute equality.

To conclude this article, socialism distributes by work contributions, communism distributes by needs and wants, and communism will only develop with better productive forces, relations of production, and superstructure. None of this is in favor of complete equality.