Re: RE: Re: Keeping focus after the WTO

[Ken Hanly <khanly@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

How does equality drive progress? What is equality anyway? Equality of income?
Equality before the law?
Equal rights to vote and run for office, own property? Under capitalism and any
class society inequality
in power and income and actual rather than formal rights is a precondition of
progress rather than equality.
Even such successes of the democratic struggle as the welfare state were
possible only within basic relations of production that are unequal between
capital and labour. When the welfare state came into contradiction with further
devleopment of capitalism it was cut back, creating greater inequalities in the
name of progress. The latest round of increases in GDP, at least development if
not progress according to Brad, comes together with a vast increase in income
inequality and loss of such rights as access to
decent medical care etc.

     Cheers, Ken Hanly

Nathan Newman wrote:

> it is equality that drives progress -- economic,
> political and cultural -- and the debate is over how best to pursue that.
> This changes the map of debate quite a bit, since it focuses on the
> occasional successes of authoritarianism not as an end in itself but as
> merely a contingent means that happened on equality as a means.  But that
> also implies that equality without authoritarianism would do the job as
> well.
>
> -- Nathan Newman