Rather than aiming to replace free-market relations with coercive price control, as their opponents claimed, defenders of the NIEO challenged the order of 'freedom' and 'equality' that benefited colonial powers and their corporations at the expense of former colonies, and they called for ' "substantive equality" to compensate for inequality'. Here, they followed Marx, who argued in his Critique of the Gotha Program that 'equal right', which measures unequal individuals by a single standard, ignores their different abilities and needs, and can only result in inequality. 'To avoid all these defects', Marx wrote, 'right, instead of being equal, would have to be unequal.'

Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, loc. 416