One of the biggest en wide-spread misunderstandings about socialism is that under socialism everyone's supposed to be equal. Mentioning the ideology often conjures up visions of a dull and grey society where everyone lives in the same dull house, everyone has a dull job, and no one's allowed to pursue their potential to the full extent, no one's allowed to be as good as they can be.
source: Picpedia
This is wrong of course. On the other hand it's easy to come to this conclusion when we look at the real-world examples, at least the best known real-world examples we have of societies that attempted the socialist experiment. The problem with that is that these examples, The Soviet Union, Mao's and modern China and Venezuela, are not real socialist experiments. What we effectively have in all those examples is state capitalism:
Marxist literature defines state capitalism as a social system combining capitalism with ownership or control by a state—by this definition, a state capitalist country is one where the government controls the economy and essentially acts like a single huge corporation, extracting the surplus value from the workforce in order to invest it in further production. This designation applies regardless of the political aims of the state (even if the state is nominally socialist). Many scholars argue that the Soviet Union and the countries modeled after it, including Maoist China, were state capitalist systems. Many scholars also argue that the current People's Republic of China constitutes a form of state capitalism.
source: Wikipedia
This is not socialism, simply because the class divide that socialism aims to erase is still alive and well under these systems. The erasure of the class divide between one small group who owns the means of production (among which is labor), and the rest of us who are limited to sell our labor to those capitalists, is central to Marx's critique of capitalism. Since Marx wrote down his ideas, they spread like wildfire across the globe and most economies of the world have adopted and incorporated these ideas to an extent. But instead of erasing the class divide by abolishing the private ownership of the means of production, governments around the world opted for the redistribution of wealth through taxation, or tried to plan their economies by seizing ownership of all production facilities, keeping the divide intact.
This, in my opinion and that of many scholars, like Richard Wolff for example, is the reason why we've never been able to solve capitalism's intrinsic problems and contradictions. And like professor Wolff I believe that the best way to finally end the class divide is to simply do what Marx has proposed all along: give the means of production in the hands of those who do the producing, in the hands of the workers. Instead of corporations being ruled from the top down by a handful of top managers or a handful of share-holders, let them be ruled democratically by the workers. This has been done many times before, and these "workers coöps" have been fairly successful. If we can manage this on much larger scales is a question that can only be really answered in the real world, by trying it out, and there are tons of questions to be answered regarding the way this could be implemented; in a best case scenario we would democratically vote for such systemic change and somehow pay "reparations" to the private owners who will forfeit that private ownership at the end of a years long transition period. But we're not there yet.
Now imagine, if you will, we're already there; would we all be truly equal? The answer is obviously not; we'll never be equal because we're all unique, so inequality is just a fact of life. Some are stronger than others, some run faster than others, some are more creative than others and we all have our own personal interests, passions, hobbies and so on. These are natural inequalities and we should be grateful for them. Also getting rid of the class divide does not mean the end of management or leadership; every worker can't be expected to be an expert in all innumerous fields of expertise needed to run a factory let's say. It only means, and this is essential, that everyone working at the facility is truly part of its achievements, they seize to be just another cog in a machine run by some faceless shareholders who's only interest is the company's bottom-line. It would for the most part end the alienation so many of us experience right now in our jobs. And we would democratically vote in the amount of income disparity among the different functions; it's not as if all incomes would suddenly be on the same level, but neither would the workers vote for the planners getting an income hundreds of times higher than the lowest paid functions, which is what we have now and is responsible for the ever growing gap between rich and poor.
And finally, we would not vote for mass layoffs, not even as a consequence of automation, which is the dark cloud hanging on our collective horizon in capitalism as we know it. No, we would simply vote to... wait for it... work LESS. For this is the promise of scientific and technological progression, this is the future we painted for ourselves up until the 1950s and 1960s; back then we believed that human progression would lead to an era of working significantly less hours, and we proclaimed that the 4 day workweek and after that the 3 day workweek would become ours for the taking. But, if we work less, would that mean that we DO less? Not in my book; we'd use that free time to pursue all that makes us truly unique and we'd all have the time to participate in a truly democratic society where we have the time and the freedom to make informed decisions. Not our country or our state, but WE would become great again while taking full advantage of our new found freedom by pursuing our hobbies, art, science, sports or whatever talent or interest we now just lack the time and freedom to do; these are the things that make us great.
So, we're not equal, and Marx never advocated for the kind of equality so many envision when they hear the term "socialism". I'll leave you now with this nice little discussion on inequality, Rousseau and Marx, in a video titled "Are Socialists Against Greatness", and I apologize for already having answered that question ;-)
Are Socialists Against Greatness? Inequality, Rousseau, and Marx
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