Similarities Between Karl Marx And John Rawls

John Rawls and Karl Marx both see equality as an important value in human society; indeed, they both see it as something people are entitled to and as the foundation upon which the ideal society is built. However, they diverge drastically in how they conceptualize the way an egalitarian society would operate and how they believe such a society could be achieved. Concerning the former, Marx envisioned a communist utopia, whereas Rawls was a strong believer in liberal democracy. In terms of the latter, Marx was a staunch believer in proletarian revolution, while Rawls believed in perfecting the existing system through democratic reforms. Their contrasting visions stem partly from the different periods in which they wrote. Karl Marx formulated …show more content…
Marx explicitly denies the idea that a truly egalitarian society can be achieved through a system of equal right to anything. As Marx says, “This equal right is an unequal right to unequal labor” (Marx, 232). Because some people may be willing and able to do more labor than others, those people would be entitled to more than others; in other words, the system still produces inequality. Marx posits that true communism can only be achieved when “labor is no longer just a means of keeping alive but has itself become a vital need; when the all-around development of individuals has also increased their productive powers and all the springs of cooperative wealth flow more abundantly” (Marx, 233) Once this happy state of things is achieved, people will simply contribute all the labor that they can (because it’s a “vital need”) and the society will duly distribute to them according to their needs. Moreover for Marx the only way of achieving this sort of egalitarianism is by the workers seizing the means of production. A just society cannot be actually achieved purely by fiddling with how goods are distributed. As Marx sees it, the distribution is “a feature of the mode of production itself” (Marx,