Economic organization, distribution, and the equality issue: The marx-engels perspective

My first concern is the treatment of distribution by Marx and Engels within the general framework of "historical materialism." After a brief review of their rejection of egalitarian schemes based on "justice" or "morality," I proceed to their objections on grounds of the impossibility of divorcing distribution from conditions of production and the related exchange system. I demonstrate first that growing inequality is accorded a strategic and essential role in the evolution of a capitalist-exchange economy. (In any event, Marx and Engels seem to have downplayed the quantitative significance for labor even of major transfers.) That the pattern of distribution could not be altered unilaterally without damaging consequences for production is then shown to govern their hostility to schemes of communist organization entailing wages paid according to "equal right" and "the undiminished proceeds of labour." In brief, Marx's communism in its first phase (sometimes referred to as the socialist phase), when there remains a residual influence exerted by the preceding institution,1 would recognize the essential inequality of labor on grounds of efficiency and growth; the celebrated dictum "from each according to his abilities to each according to his needs" applied only in a utopian phase. Engels's rendition of these themes is approached in terms of his critique of Dühring. A high degree of respect for the allocative role of markets is then brought into the picture to explain Marx's rejection of contemporary rent-confiscation and price-control schemes. I seek in this context to understand the championship of a full-fledged control system-social ownership of the means of production, central planning, abolition of markets for labor and goods, consumer rationing-notwithstanding such respect, and notwithstanding Engels's severe condemnation of Rodbertus and Dühring for neglecting the role of competition in their socialist schemes. Essentially, the system would ideally be simplified to the point that a sophisticated allocation mechanism would not be required. I draw some unexpected parallels entailing common ground on the approach to distribution and market process between Marx and Engels and the modern "conservative" or "classical liberal" writers Mises and Hayek. An overview focuses on the cautious evolutionary nature of the Marx-Engels perspective: The development within capitalism of forces preparing the ground for a political takeover by the proletariat, preeminently nationalization of industry; the period of transition to full communism with continued though diminishing reliance on a capitalist sector, to which period the Communist Manifesto applied; and the two phases of communism, the first of which would entail a measure of inequality reflected in differential wage rates.