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PHIL3395: Marx Novy SP09 “From each
according to his ability, to each according to his needs” Background Marx’s Critique of
the Gotha Program is a critique of a draft of a founding document of the
United Workers' Party of Germany. Lenin later wrote: The great significance of Marx's explanation is, that here too,
he consistently applies materialist dialectics, the theory of development,
and regards communism as something which develops out of capitalism. Instead of
scholastically invented, 'concocted' definitions and fruitless disputes over
words (What is socialism? What is communism?), Marx gives analysis of what
might be called the stages of the economic maturity of communism. (Collected
Works, V.25, p. 471) From Part I of Critique of the Gotha
Program (1875) In a higher phase of communist society, after the
enslaving subordination of the individual to the division of labor – and
therewith also the antithesis between mental and physical labor – has
vanished; after labor has become not only a means of life but life's prime
want; after the productive forces have also increased with the all-around
development of the individual, and all the springs of co-operative wealth
flow more abundantly -- only then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right
be crossed in its entirety and society inscribe on its banners: From each
according to his ability, to each according to his needs! … Any
distribution whatever of the means of consumption is only a consequence of
the distribution of the conditions of production themselves. The latter
distribution, however, is a feature of the mode of production itself. The
capitalist mode of production, for example, rests on the fact that the
material conditions of production are in the hands of nonworkers
in the form of property in capital and land, while the masses are only owners
of the personal condition of production, of labor power. If the elements of
production are so distributed, then the present-day distribution of the means
of consumption results automatically. If the material conditions of
production are the co-operative property of the workers themselves, then
there likewise results a distribution of the means of consumption different
from the present one. Vulgar socialism (and from it in turn a section of the
democrats) has taken over from the bourgeois economists the consideration and
treatment of distribution as independent of the mode of production and hence
the presentation of socialism as turning principally on distribution. After
the real relation has long been made clear, why retrogress again? |