Izvorni znanstveni članak
https://doi.org/10.20901/an.23.04
The Production of Equality: Towards a Theory and Empirical Grounding
Toni Prug
orcid.org/0000-0001-5845-373X
; Filozofski fakultet, Sveučilište u Rijeci, Rijeka, Hrvatska
Sažetak
This paper introduces the production of equality as a distinct object of inquiry. It demonstrates the limits of standard economic concepts of public goods and market failure, as well as the limits of established comparative approaches such as Esping-Andersen’s decommodification index, which measures monetary transfers exclusively. Drawing on social form analysis, the paper develops a theory of publicly financed state activities as specific forms of public production, systemic, egalitarian, and infrastructural. Systems in which products are allocated according to criteria — public health, education, care, sport, culture, housing, and infrastructure
— are conceptualised as egalitarian production, which introduces a certain degree of equality in the satisfaction of targeted needs. Applying the form-determination analysis through which Marx derived capital, commodity, and exploitation for the capitalist mode of production, this paper develops new categories: the monetary form egal, the social form of the product egality, and the real mechanism of egalitarisation — whereby egalitarian public production is, for the first time, approached as a distinct mode of production with its own determinate abstractions. Building on the literature that situates struggles for equality within the last two hundred and fifty years, the paper shows that selective egalitarian public production can be traced to considerably earlier periods, from ancient burial societies and Aztec cities to mediaeval friendly societies. Operationalisation through two novel aggregates of egal and statal, along with empirical illustrations using Eurostat COFOG data for thirty European countries (1995–2023), reveals high variability in national trajectories. The volume of egal, however, is insufficient for assessing the egalitarian character of a given system, as the implementation mechanisms, access across geographic and class lines, and the penetration of profit logic into public production chains determine the realisation of egalitarian capacities. Since these capacities are contingent on the performance of domestic economies and on structurally determined inequalities among capitalist states, egalitarian public production reflects the inequalities of global capitalism.
Ključne riječi
production of equality; public production; social form analysis; national accounts; public sector economics; public production chains
Hrčak ID:
347733
URI
Datum izdavanja:
11.6.2026.
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