In this can be seen just how far Marx was from the views of the moralists and the welfarists, who present the false idea that bourgeois society can provide such equal right.
“In a higher phase of communist society, after the enslaving subordination of the individual to the division of labour, and therewith also the antithesis between mental and physical labour, has vanished; after labour has become not only a means of life but life's prime want; after 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 – only then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be crossed in its entirety and society inscribe on its banners: From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!”
(ibid)
The moralists and welfarists say that, currently, not providing benefits for those with more than two children, for example, is to punish the children, but it is the parents that have those children without the means to provide for them that are actually the ones inflicting that punishment. There is a difference between equality of being, which forms the basis of bourgeois ideology of free and equal individuals meeting in the market on equal terms, and which, as Marx sets out above, continues even into the first stages of Socialism, as against the concept of equality of rights. The former is a lie, but the latter, the idea that we are all equally human, and so have equal human rights is one that has played a significant role in revolutionary struggles throughout history. As set out above, for the bourgeoisie, the idea of such equal human rights, in terms of political and legal rights, was central to its revolutionary struggle against the feudal aristocracy, “and which to this day still plays an important agitational role in the socialist movement of almost every country. The establishment of its scientific content will also determine its value for proletarian agitation.” (p 129)
Thousands of years elapsed before the idea that individuals, in society, should have equal political and legal rights.
“In the oldest, primitive communities, equality of rights could apply at most to members of the community; women, slaves and strangers were excluded from this equality as a matter of course. Among the Greeks and Romans the inequalities of men were of much greater importance than any equality. It would necessarily have seemed crazy to the ancients that Greeks and barbarians, freemen and slaves, citizens and denizens, Roman citizens and Roman subjects (to use a comprehensive term) should have a claim to equal political status.” (p 130)
Many of those distinctions disappeared, other than that between freemen and slave, which was fundamental to its mode of production. The equality of freemen, as property owners, became the basis of Roman Law, “the fullest elaboration we know of law based on private property. But so long as the antithesis between freemen and slaves existed, there could be no talk of drawing legal conclusions from a general human equality; we saw this again recently, in the slave states of the North American Union.” (p 130)
Indeed, as I have noted, elsewhere, as the US sociologist, Oliver Cromwell Cox, set out, it is the fact that the bourgeoisie espouses this concept of human equality, as the basis of its ideology and bourgeois society that means, in order to rationalise the enslavement of millions in the various colonial empires, established in the 17th century and after, by mercantilism, it must develop the ideology of racism, of the idea that those subjugated are less than human.
“Christianity knew only one equality on the part of all men, that of an equal possession of original sin, which corresponded perfectly to its character as the religion of the slaves and the oppressed. Apart from this it recognised, at most, the equality of the elect, which however was only stressed at the very beginning.” (p 131)
Indeed, in The New Testament, we find the story of how Jesus saw no reason to bestow his miracles on gentiles, when it came to healing a sick child. And, the Old Testament is replete with examples of the acceptance of inequality between men and women, who, like servants and slaves, were treated as chattels.
“The traces of common ownership which are also found in the early stages of the new religion can be ascribed to solidarity among the proscribed rather than to genuine equalitarian ideas. Within a very short time the establishment of the distinction between priests and laymen put an end to even this incipient Christian equality.” (p 131)
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