Marxist Criticisms of Rawls’s Liberal-Egalitarian Justice

When John Rawls published A Theory of Justice in 1971, he set out to reconcile two values that liberal societies often struggle to hold together: individual liberty and social equality. His solution, built around the famous “difference principle,” argued that inequalities are acceptable only when they improve the position of the worst-off members of society. For many, this was a powerful moral framework. But for thinkers working in the Marxist tradition, Rawls had asked the wrong question entirely. Their argument is direct: you cannot make a fundamentally exploitative system fair simply by adjusting how its rewards are shared out.

What Rawls was trying to do 🔗

To understand the criticism, it helps to be clear about Rawls’s project. He imagined people choosing principles of justice from behind a “veil of ignorance,” not knowing whether they would be born rich or poor, talented or not. From this fair starting point, he argued, rational people would choose two principles. The first guarantees equal basic liberties. The second, the difference principle, permits social and economic inequalities only when they benefit the least advantaged.

This is what makes Rawls a liberal-egalitarian. He is egalitarian because he cares deeply about the worst-off. He is liberal because he accepts that markets, private property, and incentives can remain in place, as long as the resulting inequalities pass his test. The Marxist objection begins precisely here, with what Rawls is willing to leave untouched.

The core objection: distribution versus production 🔗

The central Marxist criticism is that Rawls focuses almost entirely on how the products of an economy are distributed, while ignoring how they are produced. For Marxists, this is the heart of the problem. Inequality does not appear out of nowhere at the point where wages and profits are handed out. It is generated earlier, in the relations of production, where one class owns the factories, land, and capital, and another class owns only its labour power.

From this angle, Rawls treats the sphere of production as unexplored territory, examining how income is shared while leaving unquestioned the structures that create unequal incomes in the first place. A Rawlsian society could have generous welfare, steep progressive taxation, and a robust difference principle, and yet the basic relationship would remain: workers produce value, and owners appropriate a large part of it.

Exploitation and surplus value 🔗

This brings us to the Marxist concept of exploitation. In Marx’s analysis, capitalism is exploitative not because some people are paid badly, but because the owners of capital extract surplus value from workers. Workers are paid for their labour power, but they produce more value than they are paid; the difference is captured by the capitalist as profit.

This is why Marxists describe Rawls’s theory as reformist rather than revolutionary. Higher minimum wages and stronger social programmes treat the symptoms of inequality, but they do not transform the economic structures that produce it. To use a comparison made by critics, attempting to achieve justice within capitalism can resemble trying to make an inherently unjust arrangement more comfortable rather than ending it.

Justice as ideology 🔗

Some Marxists push the argument further and claim that theories like Rawls’s actually perform an ideological function. By making capitalist inequality appear fair through modest redistribution, such theories can help legitimise a system that ought to be challenged. If citizens come to believe that their society is “just” because it satisfies the difference principle, they may be less inclined to question the deeper structure of ownership and class.

There is also a sharper philosophical worry. Marx himself, especially in the Critique of the Gotha Programme, was suspicious of the very language of “rights” and “fair distribution.” He criticised socialists who demanded a “fair” wage, treating such talk as a distraction. For Marx, the demand for fair shares accepted the framework of the existing system instead of abolishing it. Notions of justice, on this reading, are tied to particular modes of production and tend to reflect the interests of the ruling class of their era.

The Marxist alternative: need, not desert 🔗

If Rawlsian redistribution is not the answer, what is? The Marxist vision rests on transforming the foundations rather than fine-tuning the outcomes. This means the abolition of private ownership of the means of production and the end of class distinctions, replacing competition over scarce resources with collective ownership.

The guiding principle of this future society is captured in Marx’s well-known formula from the Critique of the Gotha Programme: from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs. Distribution would no longer be tied to what one contributes, owns, or can bargain for in a market. Instead, people would contribute according to their capacities and receive according to their needs.

Two phases of change 🔗

Marx did not imagine this happening overnight. In the same text, he outlines two phases of communist society. In the lower phase, which emerges immediately after capitalism, individuals are rewarded roughly in proportion to their labour contribution, still bearing the marks of “bourgeois right.” Only in a higher phase, once productive forces are highly developed and cooperative wealth flows abundantly, can society fully move to distribution according to need. The need-based principle is therefore a long-term goal, not an instant policy.

It is worth noting a serious challenge to this vision that Marxist scholars themselves have raised. The need-based principle is often assumed to depend on conditions of abundance. Critics ask whether such limitless abundance is realistic, particularly given ecological limits, prompting newer interpretations that ground communism in human self-realisation rather than sheer material plenty.

An internal critique: G.A. Cohen and the difference principle 🔗

Not all Marxist criticism rejects Rawls from the outside. The analytical Marxist philosopher G.A. Cohen took Rawls extremely seriously and produced one of the most influential socialist critiques, most fully developed in his 2008 book Rescuing Justice and Equality. Cohen’s approach is largely an internal one: he tries to show that Rawls is not egalitarian enough by his own standards.

Cohen’s main target is the way the difference principle handles incentives. Rawls accepts that paying talented people more can motivate them to be more productive, which can in turn raise the position of the worst-off. Cohen argues that offering financial reward is not the only way to motivate people to improve the lot of the worst off. When highly talented individuals demand extra pay simply to do work they would do anyway, Cohen contends, they are effectively holding the worst-off to ransom.

The egalitarian ethos 🔗

Cohen’s solution is what he calls an egalitarian ethos: a set of shared attitudes among citizens that would make extreme incentive payments unnecessary. He does, however, allow some flexibility. Cohen accepts that higher income for some can be justified where it compensates for especially unpleasant or dangerous work, since in those cases the extra pay actually has an equalising effect. His complaint is with rewarding talent that demands a premium for ordinary effort.

Cohen also challenges Rawls on the scope of justice. Rawls argues that principles of justice apply mainly to the “basic structure” of society, its major institutions. Cohen counters that justice cannot be confined to institutions alone and must also govern the personal choices individuals make within those institutions, echoing the feminist idea that the personal is political. If you genuinely care about equality, he argues, you cannot leave your own economic decisions outside the reach of justice.

Toward a synthesis 🔗

Despite the deep disagreements, the relationship between Marxism and Rawls is not purely hostile. A number of contemporary Marxist and socialist thinkers have tried to bring the two traditions into dialogue rather than treating them as enemies.

One line of scholarship argues that Rawls’s own ideals of equal liberty and equal self-respect could only be reasonably approximated in a socialist society. On this view, Rawls’s principles are admirable, but his assumption that they can be realised within capitalism is mistaken; his own commitments point beyond the system he is willing to accept. Indeed, Rawls himself was no uncritical defender of capitalism. He explicitly preferred what he called a property-owning democracy or even liberal socialism over welfare-state capitalism, because he wanted ownership of capital and skills widely dispersed rather than concentrated.

This is where the synthesis becomes interesting. The debate over property-owning democracy and socialism has become a productive meeting point, with scholars comparing how each ideal would distribute capital and confront class power. Many contemporary egalitarians take distributive justice seriously, as Rawls did, while also pursuing the broader structural change that Marxists demand. The questions of who owns productive assets and how value is created are treated as inseparable from the question of how income is shared.

Why this debate still matters 🔗

This is not merely an academic dispute between long-dead philosophers. In a country marked by rapid economic growth alongside persistent poverty, the choice between reform and transformation is a live one. A Rawlsian would ask how to design welfare schemes, tax policy, and labour protections so that growth lifts the worst-off. A Marxist would ask whether such measures, however generous, leave the underlying relations of ownership and exploitation intact.

The strength of the Marxist critique is that it forces us to look beneath the surface of distribution to the structures of production. The strength of the Rawlsian reply, and of synthesisers like Cohen, is that questions of fair distribution cannot simply be dismissed as “bourgeois right,” because real people live and suffer under real distributions here and now. The conversation between these traditions continues precisely because each sees something the other risks missing.

What do you think? Is it possible to build a genuinely just society while keeping private ownership of the means of production, or does real justice require transforming the economic structure itself? And when Marx dismissed the demand for “fair” distribution as a distraction, was he being clear-sighted about deeper causes, or was he overlooking the urgent needs of people living under unjust conditions today?

References

1. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/justice-distributive/
2. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10790-013-9366-0
3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critique_of_the_Gotha_Programme
4. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/From_each_according_to_his_ability,_to_each_according_to_his_needs
5. https://ideas.repec.org/a/sae/pophec/v23y2024i3p273-294.html
6. https://ivn.us/2016/03/10/justifying-egalitarianism-g-a-cohens-socialist-critique-of-rawlsian-liberalism
7. https://etheses.whiterose.ac.uk/id/eprint/31321/
8. https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-1-349-21763-2_13
9. https://dsps.ceu.edu/sites/pds.ceu.hu/files/attachment/basicpage/478/valentinstoian.pdf