Equality

As the subject of social relations, men (including natural and legal persons) are treated equally in terms of human dignity and legal status in socio-political, economic and cultural aspects, and enjoy rights and assume obligations on an equal footing, including gender equality, racial equality, intergenerational equality, equality of beliefs and religions, moral equality and equality of access to education.

As an idea, equality is a product of development of society to a certain historical stage, its content constantly develops and changes along with the development of history, and different epochs and different classes gave different contents to equality. “The idea of equality, both in its bourgeois and in its proletarian form, is therefore itself a historical product, the creation of which required definite historical conditions that in turn themselves presuppose a long previous history. It is therefore anything but an eternal truth.” The idea of “equality” did not arise, as a matter of course, from the low level of productive forces of society during the vast majority of the primitive society. With the emergence of classes, men’s social status and enjoyment of rights evolved from primitive equality to inequality, thus constantly raising the demand for equality and forming the idea of equality. For example, in Chinese feudal society the idea of “equalizing the wealth between the rich and the poor, putting the noble and the lowly on an equal footing” was put forth, and Christianity emphasized “the equality of original sin” etc. The modern bourgeois idea of equality is a product of the struggle against feudal absolutism and privileges of estate. The slogan of “equality” was put forth in the French bourgeois revolution of the 18th century, and The Declaration of the Rights of Man declared: “All men are equal in the eyes of the law.” In A Discourse Upon the Origin and the Foundation of the Inequality Among Mankind, Rousseau, a bourgeois Enlightenment thinker, held that men were equal in the “state of nature” and savage state, and as a result of inequality arising from the emergence and development of private property, equality was declared an inalienable “natural rights of man”. The petty-bourgeois egalitarians advocated the application of equality of property and person on the basis of private property, and egalitarianism (levelling) in distribution and life. Against the inequalities of the capitalist society, utopian communists put forth the establishment of a communist commune in which “all are equal”. In criticizing the idea of “entire equality”, Engels pointed out that men in reality are always affected by national, economic, political and religious relations, and have sexual and personal peculiarities, and cannot be “entirely equal”. On the basis of this, he put forth the idea of equality in the modern sense: “The idea that all men, as men, have something in common, and that to that extent they are equal, is of course primeval. But the modern demand for equality is something entirely different from that; this consists rather in deducing from that common quality of being human, from that equality of men as men, a claim to equal political and social status for all human beings, or at least for all citizens of a state or all members of a society. Before that original conception of relative equality could lead to the conclusion that men should have equal rights in the state and in society, before that conclusion could even appear to be something natural and self-evident, thousands of years had to pass and did pass.” Private property in the means of production is the root cause of inequality. As long as private property exists, equality among men is an impracticable fantasy.

In class society, the idea of equality has a class nature. The bourgeois conception of equality is the reflection in thought of the capitalist relations of commodity production. This conception of equality requires the abolition of feudal privileges and requires the exchange of equal values of commodities, and is an equality under conditions that the relations of exploitation and inequality in politics and property are retained. Between the worker and the capitalist, there is in fact a relation between the exploiter and the exploited. In Capital, Marx put forth that the capitalists cry for equality in the conditions of competition, i.e., for equal restraint on all exploitation of labor. In capitalist society, the people formally enjoy equal rights to vote and to stand for election in politics; in practice, the bourgeoisie owns the means of production and holds the state machinery, and the working people are always in a position of being exploited and oppressed. Because of the inequality in economic status, there can be no substantive political and social equality between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie.

The demand for equality raised by the proletariat has a double meaning: one is the strong dissatisfaction with the extreme social inequality, the cruel exploitation and oppression of the exploiting classes, as a manifestation of revolutionary instincts; the other is the adoption and further development of the bourgeois slogan of “equality” as a means of agitation for mobilizing the workers to rise in rebellion against the capitalists, i.e., “the proletarians took the bourgeoisie at its word: equality must not be merely apparent, must not apply merely to the sphere of the state, but must also be real, must also be extended to the social, economic sphere. And especially since the French bourgeoisie, from the great revolution on, brought civil equality to the forefront, the French proletariat has answered blow for blow with the demand for social, economic equality, and equality has become the battle-cry particularly of the French proletariat.”

In socialist society, owing to the establishment of socialist public property in the means of production and the overthrow of the political rule of the exploiting classes, the working people have become the masters of the country and are politically on an equal footing; economically, they gained equal duties “from each according to his abilities” and equal rights to remuneration “to each according to his labor”; and culturally, they enjoy equal opportunities for education, hence there is a social basis for true equality among the people. However, in the socialist society, due to the differences in the mental and physical faculties of each individual, the quantity and quality of labor provided, and the different burdens of each family, there are bound to be differences in the people’s standard of living, and there is also actual inequality. Bourgeois equality still exists. This defect is inevitable in a socialist society. Substantive equality can only be truly realized in a communist society, where classes and class distinctions have been completely liquidated, where man himself has realized full and free development, and where the rule “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs” has been implemented. Marx and Engels pointed out: “In both cases 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.” “Democracy means equality. The great significance of the proletariat’s struggle for equality and of equality as a slogan will be clear if we correctly interpret it as meaning the abolition of classes. But democracy means only formal equality. And as soon as equality is achieved for all members of society in relation to property in the means of production, that is, equality of labor and wages, humanity will inevitably be confronted with the question of advancing further from formal equality to actual equality, i.e., to the operation of the rule ‘from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs’”.

Equality is a moral and juridical claim, assertion and principle upon the society, the State or other social subjects, which may be either a claim and an aspiration for an ideal social system or an arrangement or demand for a concrete social system, activity or measure. The establishment of the scientific content of the idea of equality has a great agitational value for the proletariat, as Engels said in Anti-Dühring, “the idea of equality, which especially thanks to Rousseau played a theoretical, and during and since the great revolution a practical political role, and even today still plays an important agitational role in the socialist movement of almost every country”. In contemporary China, as one of the socialist core value outlook, equality is of great value and significance for the socialist modernization with Chinese characteristics.