Valhelm said: there's nothing wrong with a class system if social mobility is possible. Click to expand...

Besides its lack of success in the past, I dislike communism's insistence on complete economic equality. Click to expand...

Since you started talking about Marx, I will just try to correct some common misunderstandings related to him:This doesnt really understand what Marx talked about when he talked about classes, and is based on the "common sensical"-way of thinking about classes today, very much inspired by people like Weber and Bourdieu. In the marxiam understanding of class, income inequality is irrelevant and so is social mobility, it is the interest of various groups that is the important part. Basically, he states that there is really only two classes in capitalistic society, people who live by selling their labour-power and people who live by buying others labour powers. His critique, is that it is this first groupd of people - the workers - who produce everything, while it is the second group who reaps the benefits, get to control what gets produced etc, and that the workers only get what they can obtain through organized struggle - creating an eternal conflict between the two groups that can never really be resolved within a capitalistic framework (and the fact that this conflict is institutionalized in most european countries, shows how right he was on that part)..So that means that in the marxian understanding, the people at Wall Street who earn millions a year are in the same class as the people staging the Occupy-movement as long as they are employed by somebody - and that the income differentials between the two groups is nowhere near as important as the difference between all workers and capitalists. So what is my point? My point is that Marx critique of the class system has nothing to do with how much or little social mobility there is, and that thus your statement in marxian terms makes no sense. His critique is about alienation, democracy, interest and conflict - and not really distribution of wealth.There are many ways of understanding the word "communism", but again, this is not the kind of communism you can read out of Marx. He doesnt want complete economic equality (at least nowhere I have observed), but he does write about a future with a "class-free" society, and also uses the phrase "for each according to his needs" etc. The point of the notion of the class-free society, is to maketake part in the ownership, and eliminate the border between people who live by selling and buying labour power by making everybody take part in both groups, thus effectually both removing the fundamental conflict of capitalism, and at the same time including everybody in the decision-making process in regards to production and economy, which it can be argued, are today outside of the realm of "democratic capitalism".This democratization of working life will be done by public ownership over the means of production by having the actual workers themselves, not the capitalists (who will themselves become workers), own their own working place. This is also the true meaning of the "dictatorship of the proletariat" - which indeed has nothing to with dictatorship at all and as such is a terrible phrase by Marx, but simply gives proletarians (which means those who do not live by buying labour power, and thus basically everybody) democratic control over the economy.Of course such a system would guarantee a much more equal distribution of wealth than today (since their would be none of the people Piketty writes about for instance), but there would still be differences, since organization would have to imply voting for leadership at the firm-level in the same way as at a societal level, and taking up the more responsible positions could easily,depending on what the majority would have wanted out of them, also give more money.