Highlighting inequalities was something 2017 was very good at: from #MeToo’s exposure of systematic sexism stretching way beyond Hollywood, to the president of the IMF warning against rising levels of economic inequality, to the incendiary visuals of Black Lives Matter.

But this year, how should such outrage be extended into imagining, and creating, true equality? It’s often harder to answer this question than to point out specific examples of inequality.

Over the past few decades, the most influential stories about what equality is have been created by the political right. Equality, we have been endlessly told, means maximum social mobility and “meritocracy”: a society where we work hard to unleash our potential and climb the ladder of success.

This idea of equality of opportunity has saturated most of our popular culture since the 1980s: from novels in which servant girls work upwards to own department stores, to thrusting entrepreneurs on reality TV scornfully teaching the rules of business, to the spangled glitter of the talent show selling us the dream that anyone can make it. The formats may have changed, but the basic stories have stayed the same.

In the world of lived experience, however, things look somewhat different. Donald Trump has overseen a tax plan which hands $200bn from families to corporations. The World Inequality Report produced by Thomas Piketty and colleagues has just revealed that the world’s richest 0.1% has captured as much of the wealth created globally since the 1980s as half the world’s adult population.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Black Lives Matter protesters gather in Seattle. Photograph: David Ryder/Reuters

In the UK, the government’s entire social mobility commission has resigned. “There is currently no overall strategy to tackle the social, economic and geographical divide that the country faces,” declared the UK’s State of the Nation 2017 Social Mobility Report, published just as the MPs left office. The report drew attention to vastly uneven geographies of privilege, and to a stark intergenerational decline in social mobility; to the seaside towns left underfunded, with their transport links decimated, and the lack of possibilities for children growing up in “social mobility coldspots”.

In political philosophy, equality of opportunity is a right-wing formulation, one opposed to equality of outcome on the left. Its mantra of meritocracy is used to convince us that upward social mobility is down to us as individuals; that as long as we start on a level playing field, massive inequalities of wealth are acceptable – that they might, in fact, even be a spur to growth.



The problem, of course, is that this formulation is a tautology. How can we all start on a level playing field if we have a society featuring massive discrepancies of wealth? It is not only impossible, it is ludicrous.

But the idea that it is possible has been so amply resourced and promoted that it has considerable traction. A select few examples of social mobility are highlighted to make it look like a social norm, while the majority of people’s economic life chances go into freefall. Even the Guardian is not immune to promoting these combined ideals, recently publishing an article arguing that university vice-chancellors “deserve” their stratospheric pay.

Equality of opportunity is potent because it appeals to our sense of hope, opportunity and possibility - while creating the conditions for it to worsen: what the cultural theorist Lauren Berlant calls “cruel optimism”. In recent years, an entire social mobility industry has been built up to foster these hopes while working against them at a material level. Foxtons – estate agent to the Islington and Kensington elites – has now become a proud sponsor of the UK Social Mobility Awards.

Equality of opportunity sounds like equality but isn’t. Equality of outcome, on the other hand, is. Concerned with what economic and material resources people actually end up with, the concept has lost the battle of public opinion over the past few decades. It is time to revive it: to contrast the abstract, conjuring-up of “possible opportunities” with the stark realities of what people actually get and where they end up.

A more equal society would mean everyone has shelter, healthcare, education, food and time to rest and play as well as work. It would mean not discriminating on grounds of identity, sex or skin colour. It would mean a system of “public luxury and private sufficiency”: of facilities such as libraries and galleries and parks which could be participated in by everyone. It would involve foregrounding egalitarian goals and dramatically curbing corporate power and high pay. It would mean heeding the call for universal public services. It would mean prioritising climate change as an issue that affects everyone.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A more equal society means having facilities such as libraries and parks that can be used by everyone. Photograph: James D Morgan/Getty

There is something in the accusation that equality of outcome can sound final and authoritarian, whereas equality of opportunity gives the impression, at least, of being able to grow and flourish. Grappling with this problem takes us to the heart of what equality should really look like: to make equality both enticing and truly democratic, you need to democratise all the way down.

This demands, for example, the existence of political parties where the local level counts rather than the hollow shells left by Blairism and Clintonism (what Peter Mair called “partyless democracy”). It means involving workers in plans to move away from fossil fuels and towards green energy - just as manual workers created proposals for “socially useful” types of manufacturing in the 1970s when the company Lucas Aerospace was being closed down. It means stopping our rail, health and education services being used as spaces to make profit for corporations.

It also means taking on board the lessons of co-production: of genuinely involving users in public institutions such as schools and hospitals – rather than the empty-gesture forms of astroturf consultation that are symptomatic of corporate customer service.

The Inequality Project: the Guardian's in-depth look at our unequal world Read more

There are also many innovative examples of participatory democracy which can be built on - including the “new municipalism” wave of revitalisation of local governments, such as citizen platform Barcelona en Comú (Barcelona in Common). In the UK, the democratisation of Labour Party membership and the energising of the grassroots has been hugely influential in engaging a new youth vote (the last general election saw the highest youth turnout for 25 years). The hashtag feminism of #MeToo began as a grassroots movement in the US to aid sexual assault survivors in underprivileged communities with no rape crisis centres. In Mississippi, Co-operation Jackson is building on the Black Lives Matter movement through its “solidarity economy”, a local network of co-operative sites including stores, an education centre and a bank.

Equality is in many ways a complex subject, because people’s lives and identities are infinitely varied. But in another way it is simple: inequality, discrimination and authoritarianism are repulsive.

In 2018, we need to move away from the tired lies of “equality of opportunity”, “meritocracy” and “social mobility”. Instead, we need to work for equality in terms of actual results and outcomes, whilst opening up our political imaginations to new and diverse forms of democratic participation.

Dr Jo Littler is a Reader in the Sociology Department at City, University of London. Her new book, Against Meritocracy: Culture, Power and Myths of Mobility, is out now