The Crisis of Inequality and the Crisis of Equality

It’s wonderful to have someone of Steve Dovers’ calibre provoke us to think about both the big picture of inequality in Australia, and the measures and movements that might be powerful in addressing it. The picture of growing wealth inequality that Steve paints for us in his Patrick Troy lecture is certainly grim. And as he notes, more could have been said about other inequalities that intersect with wealth inequalities – not the least gendered inequalities (so stark in the impacts of COVID on lost income and employment, for instance) and racialised inequality (certainly a feature of the housing market and public space policing during COVID here in Sydney, where I live and work). In responding to his provocation, I want to say something about the relationship between this crisis of inequality and what we might call a crisis of equality, and suggest that our work has to attend to both of those related but distinct crises. Steve’s indignation about inequality – an indignation that was also characteristic of Patrick Troy – is accompanied by a sense of frustration. He points out that inequality seems to persist in the face of widespread knowledge about its extent, and in the face of oft-repeated proposals for reform that struggle to get traction despite mountains of evidence that supports them. This disconnect is itself worthy of interrogation, as both Steve and Kate do in their contributions. Rosanvallon (2013) made a similar point a few years ago in his book The Society of Equals. That book tried to grapple with that fact that “inequalities have never before been so widely discussed while so little was being done to reduce them” (2013, p. 2). Pointing out inequality, he says, loses its power in part because there is now a widespread acceptance of inequalities as natural or inevitable. It’s not so much that we deny the existence of inequality, it’s that we deny any injustice in that inequality. Instead, inequality is explained as a result of just deserts and moral failure of the poor, or of the incapacity for the autonomy of the colonised and the racialised and the differently abled, or of the inexorable logic of some process (globalisation, neoliberalisation, etc.) over which we have no power, and which it’s just not realistic to challenge. So for Rosanvallon, the problem is not just that we’ve got a crisis of inequality, it’s that “we face a crisis of equality”. What’s at the heart of that crisis? “The word has somehow become detached from experience, so that it no longer clearly indicates battles that must be fought or goals that need to be achieved” (2013, pp. 7–8, emphasis added). Hence, our job is not only to catalogue inequalities. He argues that “there is no more urgent task than that of restoring the idea of equality to its former glory” (2013, p. 8). Importantly, the “restoring” the idea equality is not just a “looking back” to the meanings of equality that were established in history. No, “we must also go further and rethink the whole idea of equality itself” (2013, p. 10). How do we do that? We have for inspiration and guidance the incredible work of feminist, queer, anti-racist and anticapitalist scholars who have been rethinking the very meaning of equality, paying particular attention to how equality has to change in the context of diversity as well as inequalities of wealth. What’s attractive to me about the way folks like Iris Marion Young, Nancy Fraser, Paul Gilroy, Stuart Hall