7. From Hay Festival - What did Marx have to say about inequality?

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At Hay Festival today, was reminded by the excellent Terry Eagleton, a true scholar on Karl Marx, of one of the conditions that Marx set as critical for so called socialist systems to succeed. Wealth. A revision of Marx indeed confirms him stating that, and I paraphrase: ‘…instituting a socialist system in poverty would result in generalized scarcity…’. This, indeed, is what happened in all cases in which Socialism has been tried as a system so far (USSR, Cuba, Mao’s China,…), with the outcome anticipated by Marx. 
It should also be remembered that Marx did at no point propose the completely equal distribution of income and goods among the population, but, rather, he identified the tendency of capitalism to foster growing inequality. In this prediction he has also been vindicated. 
It is in some ways curious that Marx has been so maligned and his work so undermined by the capitalist system by misrepresenting both his predictions and his recommendations (of which he did not make many). 

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