John Roemer's Egalitarian: Logical Deduction To A Social Construct

"Analytical Marxism" is one of important schools for studying on Contemporary Western Marxist, which rose in the late of1970s, and the object of this theory research is to think definite and clarify clearly the questions under the thought dense fog. The majority of Analytical Marxism researchers come from English-speaking countries as university professors, who are not necessarily Marxists, but in the Marxist theory of the common research field work. Under the guise of the analysis spiritual in Analytic Philosophy, which is the mainstream of modern and contemporary Western philosophy, they "analyze" and "launch" some of the important conceptions, propositions and important principles, by using modern scientific tools of mathematics and logic, for trying to establish "Micro-foundation" of Marxism and remolding Marxism to precise and scientific. The research paradigm which draws support from the "analysis" tool is called "analysis paradigm" or "scientific paradigm". It is considered a paradigm shift of the modern and contemporary Western philosophy, which produces significant and profound influence.John E. Roemer is one of the "Analytical Marxism" leaders. Since1978, under the banner of "egalitarianism", he embarked on research in many fields, such as "Marxian Economic Theory, Distributive Justice and Political Philosophy, Pure Game and Social Choice Theory, Public Ownership and Market Socialism, Political Economy, Climate change", and achieved fruitful achievement.In this study, the "equality" as a starting point, John E. Roemer's "General Theory of Exploitation","Equal Opportunity Theory","Market Socialism Theory" and other fields are unified thinking, that in order to maximize the comb and integration of Roemer's research findings, and explore its main theoretical perspectives and theoretical approaches. Studies suggest that the large research fields of Roemer always make "equal" as starting point and ultimate goal of research, in addition to "International Economics" which is the earliest study. Roemer's study experienced a longer time, even appeared the turn of the "equality" understood, however, the goal remains unchanged.Roemer's research focused on the Theory of Exploitation of Marxism in the late1970s to the throughout the1980s, as this point, without the key theoretical perspectives and methods that the Marxism advocated for labor theory of value and dialectics. On the basis of new theory of the property relations, Roemer's articles presented an in depth analysis on the reasons and inherent logic of unequal community, and came to the conclusion that unequal distribution of initial properties leads to the basic reasons of exploitation, and then establish the new theory of equality characterized by equality of result(equality of welfare),through including new conceptions, such as "a general theory of exploitation","social necessary exploitation", and "socialist theory of exploitation". Thought pure technical analysis, Roemer draw the conclusion that this theory of Exploitation is more scientific than based on Marx's labor value theory because of that theory was wrong. As compared with the labor, this new scale of property relations betterly explained and measured all types of exploitation in the real society, including socialist theory of exploitation. By aspirating the exploitation from Marx's moral values perspective, Roemer re-recognize the exploitation, and proved that the origin of exploitation is unrelated with the labor, but related with a particular distribution of property. Exploitation of whether justice is not determined by the labor, but by the fairness of the distribution of the social means of production. And then Roemer presented an in depth analysis on a variety of property relations, including private ownership, public ownership, personal self-ownership and so on. He advocated that the public could be achieve the welfare of its citizens equal with the Pareto optimal basic requirements, external public ownership, moderating restrictions on personal self-ownership, maximizing the elimination of inequality, and taking into account the efficiency. In1993, due to the double impact of reality of the prevailing theory (Western political philosophy) in that time and (the Western public dissatisfaction with the national welfare policy), Roemer recognized to limitations of his equality of welfare, and instead advocated equality of opportunity taking into account the personal responsibility to the citizens.In1994, Roemer constructed the first vision of equal society:market socialism. In this vision, Roemer creatively put forward the coupon concept to ensure initial equal distribution of means of production, and advocated to establish the coupon stock market to resolve the agency relationship contradictions that the Soviet Union and Eastern European countries unresolved and leading to them the failure through building a Japanese consortium of businesses. This is the theory ensuring social equality and taking into account the efficiency, and mainly designed for the former Soviet Union and Eastern European transition countries, socialist countries and the development of capitalist countries. Although this theory was mixed by the academia, it undoubtedly open new window to look at socialism with basis on the above unique design logic of the theory of equality.In2008, Roemer put forward another theory constructed specifically for the developed capitalist countries:social democracy. The design of this theory modeled on the current system of the Nordic high welfare state, was advocated to achieve social equality by appropriate redistribution of income and democratic institutional arrangements.These two theories all had the pertinence of specific society, and met the requirements of different development types and different nature of the countries transition to the equality goals, and were a complementary relationship each other. At this point, Roemer's equality theory was basically constructed, and had a uniform internal logic, complete the contents of the system and rigorous process of argumentation.In strict terms, Roemer's equality theory was not belong to Marxism, Roemer himself was not a Marxist, just only a Western scholar standing on the dominant view in the West and using mainstream Western social science methods to study the theory of Marxism. Nevertheless, Roemer's academic achievement of high level had unique reference meaning to research Marxism and socialist construction.