Socialism

5. Distributive justice

The final set of arguments for socialism to be considered here are distributive ones. Capitalism is criticized for the unequal and/or unjust distribution of material, social and cultural goods. But this criticism takes a number of different forms. For some socialists, the preferred distributive principle is strict equality, either contrasted with justice or regarded as its proper interpretation. Others espouse some not necessarily egalitarian principle of justice: distribution according to need is the most common, as in the well-known principle, ‘from each according to their ability, to each according to their needs’; but appeal may also or instead be made to a principle of desert, such as reward in proportion to contribution. While the last of these is rarely proposed as the sole distributive principle for a socialist society, it has often figured in socialist criticisms of capitalism, especially in the claim that capitalist profits are undeserved and hence unjust. But there is disagreement among socialists about whether the distribution of goods in a non-capitalist market economy would be unjust from this standpoint.

Defenders of capitalism have sometimes argued that it can be shown to be just by reference to a principle of desert: for example, by arguing that profits are a deserved reward for risk-taking. But more commonly they reject altogether the legitimacy of desert-based, need-based, egalitarian or any other so-called ‘patterned’ principles of justice in judging economic systems, on the grounds inter alia that any attempt to realize such patterns will involve unjustifiable and systematic coercion by the state. Instead, it is argued, justice should be understood as a purely ‘procedural’ concept: distributions are just if they are the outcome of fair or appropriate procedures, whatever the resulting pattern may be. An especially favoured procedure is voluntary exchange between free and equal parties. It is then claimed that since capitalist market transactions consist exclusively of such exchanges, capitalism is a just system (see Libertarianism; Nozick, R. §2).

For socialists, such procedural definitions illicitly reduce the concept of justice to that of (negative) liberty. But it may also be argued that even if adopted, they would fail to show that the outcomes of the transactions between capitalists and workers are just. For although the sale of labour power in return for wages is a transaction between formally or legally free and equal parties, there is an absence of substantive freedom on the part of workers, coupled with marked asymmetries of power. In addition, socialists may point to the historical origin of most current capitalist holdings of private property in past acts of theft, fraud, violence or state coercion.

While arguments for socialism couched in terms of distributive justice and equality have been widely employed, they have often been criticized by Marxists, partly for assuming that the crucial defect of capitalism lies in the improper distribution of goods in the sphere of exchange, rather than in the power relations in the sphere of production consequent upon capitalist property relations. Hence emphasis is placed instead on the concept of exploitation, understood as the extraction by capitalists of surplus value from workers which accrues to the capitalist in the form of profits – something that cannot be remedied by higher wages but only by the abolition of wage labour. Whether this concept of exploitation and its associated theory of value can be sustained is much disputed amongst socialist theorists, some of whom have argued instead for a purely distributional interpretation of the concept: for example, that someone is exploited if they would be better off than they now are had there been an initially egalitarian distribution of ownership rights over the means of production.