Formal legal equality masks substantive inequality between rich and poor

Evidence

It does not accord with the sense of the Weimar constitution for laws which are apparently a burden on an economically stronger class to be rejected in the name of justice as arbitrary. It is precisely this apparent injustice which fulfils the demand for justice that is contained within the social system of the Weimar constitution. It is precisely when equality is to be conceived of as a material value that it must be recognized that the principle of equality before the law will remain merely a right on paper until social equality creates conditions which will make it possible for the law genuinely to apply to all equally . — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 253 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

A few months after the end of World War I, moral philosopher Zino Zini gave a lecture titled “From Citizen to Producer.” He argued that the citizen as commonly viewed in a capitalist democracy is a passive individual, “theoretically sovereign, but in fact, only so on election day; the rest of the time, he is nothing but a subject subordinated to laws and regulations, drafted and promulgated without his actual participation.” The citizen lives a political servitude founded on economic servitude: How much do our votes really count when our options are circumscribed by market dependence and wage labor? The inequality of classes within the matrix of production effectively prevents any genuinely democratic relationship between free human beings. Instead, Zini argues, we must become active producers: participating on equal terrain in the construction and change of our social reality. — Clara E. Mattei, Escape from Capitalism, 406 (#expands, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Formal legal equality obscures real inequality because equivalence as a legal norm ignores difference — Dirk Braunstein, Adorno’s Critique of Political Economy, 786; Legal equality before the law requires negating actual individuality — Dirk Braunstein, Adorno’s Critique of Political Economy, 793; Formal legal equality leaves substantive social inequality untouched — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 959 (+18 more)

Broader Connections

• Formal legal equality remains paper rights until material social equality exists #corroborates (0.94) — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 253
• Formal political equality masks deep economic servitude that hollows out democracy #expands (0.92) — Clara E. Mattei, Escape from Capitalism, 406