Analysis of information sources in references of the Wikipedia article "Economic inequality" in English language version.
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Finally, changes in household structures (assortative mating and increases in single-headed households) increased household earnings inequality, albeit to a lesser extent than often suggested (Figure 7). These patterns hold true for all countries
{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: DOI inactive as of August 2026 (link){{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: periodical has ISBN (link)Capital accumulation requires cheap labor, however, and these concessions would have brought capitalism in the core to its knees were it not for the fact that capitalists were able to obtain cheap labor instead in the periphery, through colonial and neocolonial forms of appropriation, which continue to this day.
The collapse of communism, then, opened the entire world to capitalist penetration, shrank the imaginative and ideological space in which opposition to capitalist thought and practices might incubate, and impelled those who remained leftists to redefine their radicalism in alternative terms, which turned out to be those that capitalist systems could more, rather than less, easily manage. This was the moment when neoliberalism in the United States went from being a political movement to a political order.
Marx's view appears to be that we must, somehow or other, acknowledge our communal existence in our institutions. At first it is "deviously acknowledged" by religion, which creates a false idea of a community in which we are all equal in the eyes of God. After the post-Reformation fragmentation of religion, where religion is no longer able to play the role even of a fake community of equals, the modern state fills this need by offering us the illusion of a community of citizens, all equal in the eyes of the law. But the political state and religion will both be transcended when a genuine community of social and economic equals is created.
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