Rev Left Radio - Red Hot Shot: Equality of Opportunity Vs. Equality of Outcome

Episode Date: October 2, 2022

Liberals of all stripes will argue that they support equality of opportunity, NOT equality of outcome... unlike those damn commies. What are we to make of this argument? Support Rev Left Radio: https://www.patreon.com/RevLeftRadio

Liberals will argue against socialists and socialism that they support equality of opportunity, not equality of outcome. Now, I've always found this argument amusing and quite ironic for a few reasons. One, nothing about socialism requires a perfect equality of outcome. In fact, even the idea of a perfect equality of outcome is incoherent. What would it even mean in practice? Where, in all of socialist theory and history, is this idea of equality of outcome promoted? Well, it's not. It's simply made up by anti-communists who've never bothered reading up on the thing they are so fervently against.

Two, liberalism has never, in all of its history, been able to produce anything even approaching equality of opportunity anywhere in the world ever. In fact, if anyone were to lay out a set of policies that actually brought about equality of opportunity, that person would be labeled a communist extremist by the very liberals who claim to support equality of opportunity. Three, ironically, it is not liberalism, but only socialism that could ever actually attempt to provide real equality of opportunity. And it would be precisely in their rejection of liberalism and capital. that socialists could open up a path to make this much flaunted liberal platitude a really existing social reality. And it is only communism, the final destination of socialism, that could solidify such equality and perpetuity. In conclusion, liberal support neither equality of opportunity nor equality of outcome, while communist and socialists the world over are the ones

who actually believe in and fight for genuine equality of opportunity and actually approach it in the real world. As for equality of outcome, our only response can be, what does that even mean? Every human life, even in a state of perfect equality of opportunity, will have different outcomes. The contingencies and vicissitudes of earthly existence guarantee the impossibility of equality of outcomes. However, those unequal outcomes need not take the form of an inequality of wealth and privilege, as they do under the dictatorship of capital, but rather the more mundane human inequalities of nature and nurture, of biology and luck, of motivation and talent. Instead of those inevitable inequalities resulting in social and class

stratification, however, they can take the form of varied contributions to the whole, of individual gifts to the collective. All talents and all skill sets put ultimately to the task of building and defending a better, more just society for all of its citizens, regardless of underlying differences in ability.