How Marx's Class Analysis Could Solve Inequality Now
Mar 25, 2025
Discover how Marx's class analysis sheds light on today's inequality issues. The discussion delves into the evolution of societal structures, highlighting how systems like slavery and capitalism have perpetuated class divides. It emphasizes the need for a revolutionary approach through worker cooperatives to eliminate these inequalities. By revisiting Marx's insights, we can better understand the roots of economic disparity and strive towards a more equitable future.
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insights INSIGHT
Early Societies Were Egalitarian
Pre-modern human societies were roughly egalitarian in wealth, income, and power.
Modern systems like slavery, feudalism, and capitalism disrupted this equality with sharp class divisions.
insights INSIGHT
Production Breeds Inequality
Societal production creates class divisions by assigning some people to produce surplus and others to consume it.
This structural surplus production sustains inequality and an anti-democratic system, blocking true equality.
insights INSIGHT
Class Division Across Systems
Systems like slavery, feudalism, and capitalism vary but similarly depend on surplus produced by the many and appropriated by a few.
Those who control the surplus use it to maintain power and suppress the producers.
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In this week's episode of Economic Update, Professor Wolff discusses how Marx's class analysis presents a solution to today's inequality and the challenges to overcoming it we have faced throughout history. In short, since the early existence of human society, people lived in tribes, clans, and villages that exhibited equality of wealth, income, and political power among their members. As modern history began to unfold, slavery, feudalism, and capitalism evolved as society as we know it took shape. In each of those three systems, huge inequalities separated people into masters vs slaves, lords vs serfs, and employers vs employees. Exploited and oppressed slaves, serfs, and employees opposed the inequalities of those systems but were unable to overcome them despite repeated efforts (revolutions). Marx questioned why modern societies failed to install and sustain systems of egalitarian wealth and power distribution (democracy). His answer lay in the understanding that class differences within the organization of production produce inequalities and sustain them. Overcoming those inequalities thus requires ending the class divisions within the organization of production and instead organizing in favor of a worker-cooperative structured method of production.
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Economic Update with Richard D. Wolff 
