Equality. Where?

Watching the penultimate part of the ITV period drama Downton Abbey I was made aware of the emphasis of the show on the aspects of social change that were present at the turn of the 20th Century in particular women's rights and the injustice of the class system. Immediately sympathetic I then laughed at myself because of course nothing has changed!

At the turn of the century is was quite proper for people to be separated by class. Those of noble birth inherited the titles and ownership of estates; those of lower birth made a living working on those estates. This is the way it has always been.

But ideas percolated up from Protestantism that before God we were all equal and that the state of affairs where one man was master to another was wrong. We were all equally servants to God.

And so times changed and that way of thinking of class inequality seems quite unjust to us today. Today it seems quite just for one person to earn £6 an hour and another person to earn £100 an hour (and have off-shore tax exclusions and company car etc). It seems quite just for one person to own a company and another person to work their whole life with the machines and tools of that company and never own anything. It seems quite just for one person to get a golden hand-shake when they leave a company after only a few years (even after being responsible for collapsing the company), while another person is laid off for nothing after many years of service. It seems quite just for one person to inherit their parents wealth and have a house bought for them by their parents and have private education paid by their parents, while another can only get these things from the state (and made to feel ashamed for doing it). All this is deemed just in todays days of equality.

I laughed because the world is just as unequal as it was, indeed more so. As argued in this blog that inequality is not an unfortunatley feature of the world it is the foundation stone upon which the concept of wealth is built! If you had equality there would be no wealth! Capitalism is about creating wealth; it is about creating inequality. This is what the previous system did to ensure wealth. (See previous blogs on the relative nature of wealth and the contradiction in the concept of absolute wealth).

Apologists will argue that things have changed because everyone is free to make money. I refer to the previous argument on wealth being relative. By definition only a few people can make money; it by definition can't be the case that everyone makes money. We forget all the old stories of people marrying up the class system, or coming into inheritances. Everyone was free to change class, just only a few people did. People changed classes in the past, as they become rich today, it is just the rules were different and alien to our modern tradesman thinking.