Formal equal right applied to unequal individuals necessarily produces inequality.

Evidence

Rather than aiming to replace free-market relations with coercive price control, as their opponents claimed, defenders of the NIEO challenged the order of ‘freedom’ and ‘equality’ that benefited colonial powers and their corporations at the expense of former colonies, and they called for ’ “substantive equality” to compensate for inequality’. Here, they followed Marx, who argued in his Critique of the Gotha Program that ‘equal right’, which measures unequal individuals by a single standard, ignores their different abilities and needs, and can only result in inequality. ‘To avoid all these defects’, Marx wrote, ‘right, instead of being equal, would have to be unequal.’ — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 416

Categorization

• XREF: The Marx ‘equal right produces inequality’ argument directly feeds the reader’s human-rights discourse work — formal rights regimes entrench rather than remedy material inequality. — connects to: Formal legal equality leaves substantive social inequality untouched — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 959; Formal legal equality cannot deliver justice without social equality — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 958; Formal equality doctrine becomes a weapon against material equality — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 959 (+10 more)
• DEFINE: Clarifies ‘substantive equality’ vs formal equality, a key conceptual distinction for human-rights and market-ethics debate.

Broader Connections

• Formal legal equality masks substantive inequality between rich and poor #exemplifies (0.95)
• Formal legal equality obscures real inequality because equivalence as a legal norm ignores difference #corroborates (0.92) — Dirk Braunstein, Adorno’s Critique of Political Economy, 786
• Capitalist-worker exchange is formally equal but substantively unequal #exemplifies (0.90) — Dirk Braunstein, Adorno’s Critique of Political Economy, 1365
• Law converts difference into sameness to enable formal equal treatment #expands (0.88) — David Theo Goldberg, The Racial State, 82
• Separate-but-equal was invented to sell inequality as equality. #exemplifies (0.85) — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 702
• Legal equality before the law requires negating actual individuality #corroborates (0.85) — Dirk Braunstein, Adorno’s Critique of Political Economy, 793