Aside from (in descending order) Kierkegaard, Mill, Kant, Plato, Aristotle, and Camus, John Rawls is my favourite philosopher. I'm by no means Marxist or Rawlsian or even a political philosopher, but I've always thought that Marxist/Communist thought can learn some thing from Rawls [and Kierkegaard]. I think the problem with Marxism was that there was no incentive to progress and to work harder (and smarter). If the State provides housing, food, clothing, and funding in equal proportion to every citizen of the State what's the incentive to work hard? The capitalist solution was that people work hard in order to earn more money and use that money to invest in other hard working people and companies which, if they work hard and smart, earns the investors even more money. Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, Ted Rogers, Jim Pattison...these people worked for their billions and no government can take that away from them.

But my question is, would a Marxist-Rawlsian society work? Rawls introduces the ideas of the Maximin and original position. According to Rawls, the Maximin principle means that "social and economic inequalities are to be arranged so that they are to be of the greatest benefit to the least advantaged members of society". In other words, when a designing a society from scratch from the original position; if you don't know your place in society, you'd want to make sure that if you were the least well off member of society, you won't suffer greatly for it. But Rawls also adds an incentive as well; if you were one that worked hard in this society, you would also gain incentive and benefits as well.

My old poli sci teacher explained it like this:
if there were 20 units of resources, in a capitalist society, something like this might end up
11 - richest/well off
7 - middle class/average
2 - the destitute and the poor

In Rawls' original society applying maximin, it might be distributed this way:
8 - incentive hard workers
6 - citizens
6 - citizens

In this setup, the worst off citizens are not as made worst off in Rawls (-2 pt difference), than in capitalism (-5/-9 pt difference), BUT the hard workers get incentive to work hard (+2 pt difference). Could applying Rawls Maximin correct the "Incentive" problem in Marxism or is there something irreconcilable I'm missing?