Author: Sam Badger
Categories: Social and Political Philosophy, Historical Philosophy, Ethics
Word Count: 1000
The slogan “From each according to their ability, to each according to their needs” is one of German philosopher Karl Marx’s (1818-1883) few explicit descriptions of communism.
Marx imagines communism as an economic system where workers themselves freely manage the production and distribution of goods and services.[1]
This essay describes the origins of the slogan and its meaning.
1. Distribution under Capitalism
In a capitalist society, goods and services are distributed through individuals and businesses trading in a competitive marketplace.[2] In theory, competition ensures that nobody has too much unfair bargaining power, and economic freedom allows both parties to get what they need out of exchange.[3]
Socialists argue that there is only an illusion of equal bargaining power, as this system actually privileges those who own the means of production, or capital: factories, land, and other things labor uses to create commodities. In practice, it justifies the exploitation of workers who are increasingly reduced to “cogs” in the profit-making machine of capitalism.[4]
2. Critics of Capitalism
The French utopian socialist Henri de Saint-Simon (1760-1825) laid out an alternative to capitalism centered on the leadership of experts to plan the economy to meet everyone’s needs.[5] The followers of Saint-Simon advocated for a principle of distributive justice—or a distribution of goods and services[6]—which would inspire Marx’s:
“From each according to their ability, to each according to their work.”[7]
That is to say, everyone should provide for society to the best of their abilities, working no more than is mentally, physically, and socially healthy. However, the compensation for that work should be based on effort, not market rates.
The later French socialist Louis Blanc (1811-1882) revised the slogan to read:
“From each according to their ability, to each according to their need.”[8]
Like Saint-Simon’s slogan, all are free to pursue their own talents and enrichment. But the phrase “to each according to his needs” means that distribution will reflect individual needs, not how hard one works.
3. The Influence on Marx
Marx would cite both Blanc’s and the Saint-Simonian slogans in his “Critique of the Gotha Program,” his critique of the German Social Democratic Party (SPD) platform in 1875.[9]
Though the platform was influenced by Marx’s ideas, it diverged from his thinking in important ways: it mistakenly focused only on a fair distribution of goods and services, and not how those goods and services were produced.[10] Workers shouldn’t merely be compensated better, they ought to own and control the means of production themselves, for the benefit of humanity.
In emphasizing the production of goods, Marx took seriously the part of the slogan shared by Saint-Simon and Blanc, which emphasized production. Marx believed that each slogan would find its place in his vision for a socialist society.
4. Marx’s Lower Stage of Communism
Marx proposes two stages of communism.[11] He argued these would inevitably arise due to the economic crises within capitalism and the growing class consciousness of the working class.[12]
The first stage is organized like in the Saint-Simonian slogan where workers are paid proportionately to the length and difficulty of labor. This stage appears superficially egalitarian as there is equal pay for equal effort.[13] But Marx points out the flaw in Saint-Simon’s formulation, since people have different needs:
This equal right is an unequal right for unequal labor. It recognizes no class differences, because everyone is only a worker like everyone else; but it tacitly recognizes unequal individual endowment, and thus productive capacity, as a natural privilege. It is, therefore, a right of inequality, in its content…[14]
Marx argues, this apparent “equality” conceals our individuality in a way that is fundamentally inegalitarian.[15] A mother has two mouths to feed, a disabled person may not be able to work for as long, and so on, so equal pay for equal effort will still be unequal.
5. The Higher Stage of Communism
In the second stage of communism, society is organized according to Blanc’s principle: “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!” This stage realizes full equality as everyone has their needs met and can develop their talents freely.[16]
People work according to their ability: work is not only necessary to sustain society, but is part of what makes us human.[17] Due to gains in productivity and organizing work in accordance with the ends of the workers, needs can be met without grueling working days.[18] This also allows the leisure time to develop themselves and their needs beyond survival—to want music, art, philosophy, science and so on.[19]
People are compensated according to their needs: compensation is not based on effort, but rather what is required for them to flourish. This requires overcoming biases about which occupations are most valuable; society must overcome the hierarchy of mental labor over physical labor and all other similar hierarchies within the division of labor.[20]
Some might worry whether people would be willing to work only for the fruits of their labor to be redistributed to those who did not work as hard. Marx states that people will voluntarily shoulder some of the social responsibility, the way we share chores, gardening, and childcare. This may seem naive, and Marx does not specify whether or how this would be enforced or encouraged.[21]
But eventually people will labor willingly because work is its own source of fulfillment. Marx thought human nature found its greatest realization in social labor, but capitalism had turned work into a burden.[22] This is because work within capitalism is organized around the ends of profit, not the needs of the workers or humanity more generally.[23] As we take pride in using our abilities to meet people’s needs, work becomes one of our desires instead of a mere means to survival.
6. Conclusion
Marx’s slogan “From each according to their ability, to each according to their need” is a principle of social organization whereby work is both edifying and desirable, and where we see the needs of others as our own. Consequently, Marx saw this as a society freed from exploitation, dehumanization, and domination.
Notes
[1] The definitions of “capitalism,” “communism” and “socialism” are themselves a matter of controversy: see Defining Capitalism and Socialism by Thomas Metcalf
Alongside other early socialists, Marx coined the term “capitalism,” which he defined as an economy where the means of producing goods and services are privately owned, and distribution and price of goods, services and labor is determined by market competition. As capital grows, Marx argued, it had a tendency towards monopolization, alienation and worsening exploitation of the workers.
He understood communism socialism to be systems where the producers directly control production and distribution, be it through the state or some other mechanism. Notably, Marx and Engels did not distinguish between socialism and communism, though later Marxists such as Lenin would identify socialism as the transitional phase between capitalism and communism. See Manifesto of the Communist Party by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, and Socialism: Utopian and Scientific by Friedrich Engels.
[2] Notably, Marx still argued that this notion of distributive justice, though problematic, was superior to that which existed under feudalism. In feudal relations, lords, peasants and townspeople alike were constrained in their economic choices because distributive justice was understood through the lens of feudal privileges which structured values in terms of arcane and largely unquestioned traditions.
One of the important achievements of Adam Smith was identifying why the liberal capitalist notion of distributive justice was preferable to the feudal one in freeing individuals in the marketplace. For instance, Adam Smith identified how guild privileges under feudalism constrained the labor market in a way which exploited apprentices and consumers (Smith, 131).
[3] Marx’s Capital delves into these dynamics in detail, describing how the capitalist principle of distributive justice endorses the exploitation of workers to create surplus value. Surplus value is the difference between the value which workers produce for their employers and what they receive for their work, minus the value required for maintenance and material. Surplus value is divided between rent for landowners, returns for investors and interest for creditors. As Marx argues, profit can only come from this surplus value, as it is impossible for capitalists as a class to profit by exploiting one another.
[4] Marx’s theory of alienation is famously outlined in his 1844 Manuscripts, which describe the four kinds of alienation which emerge in capitalist production. These four forms of alienation contribute to the dehumanizing dimension of work. Though Marx uses the term “alienation” less frequently in his later writing, the description of society given in “The Critique of the Gotha Program” echoes some of the same themes about eliminating the dehumanizing aspects of work. See Karl Marx’s Conception of Alienation by Dan Lowe. Marx’s theory of exploitation is laid out in Capital, and argues that profit comes from the surplus value or unpaid labor extracted from workers.
[5] The early French and English Utopians such as Saint-Simon, Robert Owen and Charles Fourier all had a significant influence on Marx and his colleague, collaborator, and friend Friedrich Engels (1820-1895). The method of the utopians largely consisted in theorizing a blueprint for an ideal society then convincing both workers and elites that this ideal was superior to the current system. For instance, in his essay “The Rule of Scientists,” Saint-Simon (1966, 261-268) argues that industrialists (which, it should be noted, were capitalists) should pursue his utopia.
Marx and Engels would come to reject “utopianism” in favor of a “scientific” approach to socialism (see Socialism, Utopian and Scientific by Engels). The key difference for Marx and Engels is that a scientific approach is grounded on an explanation of concrete social conditions instead of abstract theory. This is why Marx generally avoided explicit descriptions of the socialist society, and instead focused on more immediate struggles. Where Marx and Engels did describe it, it was usually through these sorts of general principles.
Despite Marx and Engels’s rejection of utopianism as a political movement, Ernst Bloch argues that the idea of utopia remains important in Marx’s thought as a constructive utopia, or a normative ideal. “From each according to their ability, to each according to their need” is one such ideal.
[6] For a description of the concept of distributive justice, see Distributive Justice: How Should Resources be Allocated? by Dick Timmer and Tim Meijers.
[7] Luc Bovens and Adrien Lutz (2019) provide a brief history of the slogan and how it developed between Saint-Simon and Marx. They track the development from the Saint-Simonian idea through to Marx’s “Critique of the Gotha Program.”
[8] Blanc used the phrase “de chacun selon ses facultes, a chacun selon ses besoins” to describe his notion of communism in his Plus de Girondins (92). Blanc advocated for an economy of worker’s cooperatives instead of private capital so that workers could democratically determine working conditions and hours of employment. The fate of Blanc is an interesting story in its own right, as he was involved with the Paris Commune uprising specifically and French politics more broadly.
[9] The German Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands or SPD would become an important socialist party in Germany under the leadership of the Marxist Karl Kautsky and is today one of the two largest parties in the German Bundestag (or parliament) though it is politically more moderate today than it was in the times of Marx and Kautsky. The SPD was formed by the merger of two political parties, one organized by allies of Marx and Engels (though Marx and Engels lived in political exile in London, they remained engaged in German politics), and one influenced by Ferdinand Lassalle (1825-1864). Lassalle was a Prussian Jurist and socialist theorist. Though he was friends with Marx, Marx criticized Lassalle’s belief that the German state was a vehicle for socialism. Marx, on the other hand, viewed the German state as fundamentally captured by and structured in accordance with the needs of capitalist interests. The Gotha Program was its 1875 political program, which was only partially influenced by the ideas of Marx and Engels.
[10] Marx was notably a critic of the political left (or the broader movement of socialists, anarchists, and communists united behind the goal of economic egalitarianism and internationalism) of his time. Though he was a strong advocate for the working class and their needs, he thought the workers needed the correct theoretical understanding of their circumstances to abolish exploitation, and so often critiqued ideas from various socialists, communists, social democrats, and anarchists.
[11] Jon Elster argues that the difference between these principles and their ultimate justification seems at odds with other parts of Marx’s philosophy (222, 1985). As he argues, Marx rejects transhistorical principles of justice, but the principle of “from each according to their ability, to each according to their need” is surely such a principle! Sean Sayers, on the other hand, argues that this is not an abstract moral principle but an ideal which is only made real through historical progress (120-121, 1998).
[12] For an account of Marx’s theory of historical development, see Karl Marx’s Theory of History by Angus Taylor. His theory was a materialist reinterpretation of Hegel’s idealist dialectic of philosophical history. Marx believed that every class society was ridden with internal contradictions which would eventually cause it to collapse and necessitate a new social order. The contradictions within feudalism led to the emergence of capitalism, which was a process that culminated in events like the French revolution. Marx thought that capitalism, in turn, would necessarily lead to socialism eventually.
Marx’s theory was not entirely mechanistic, as he argues that workers in Germany can learn from the suffering of English workers to avoid their fate and bring about socialism more quickly (see Capital Vol. I, “Preface to the First German Edition” by Karl Marx). However, he clearly thought that economic crises were a mechanistic consequence of the contradictions within market economies, and that these crises would necessitate a socialist economy eventually. He likewise saw the stages of communism described in the “Critique of the Gotha Program” as necessary historical developments once capitalism had been abolished. However, it is notable that even here Marx’s description of socialism is sparse—he thought it was impossible to provide a detailed account of the specifics of future development.
[13] Egalitarianism, or the promotion of equality, was a concept which was understood in various ways by different groups of capitalists and socialists. Engels provides a Marxist account of the history of egalitarianism as a political and moral ideal in his Anti-Dühring (Engels, 124-129), tracing it back to Christianity through the development of capitalism and socialism.
[14] Marx, “Critique of the Gotha Program,” section I (emphasis Marx’s).
[15] This injustice is socially necessary, as people are still habituated to being “incentivized” to work. It will take time for humanity to develop sufficiently to bring about a more egalitarian model.
The idea that it could take generations to undo the norms habituated under capitalism is also found in the work of Friedrich Engels. In his On the Family, Private Property and the State, Engels argues that the sexual morality of the future will be more advanced than anything today because love will no longer be subject to wealth and power: “But what will there be new? That will be answered when a new generation has grown up: a generation of men who never in their lives have known what it is to buy a woman’s surrender with money or any other social instrument of power; a generation of women who have never known what it is to give themselves to a man from any other considerations than real love or to refuse to give themselves to their lover from fear of the economic consequences” (Engels, 114).
[16] In her analysis, Carol Gould understands the “Critique of the Gotha Program” through Marx’s claims in the Grundrisse that machinery enables people to develop freely, at least within the boundaries of the productive capacities of society and nature, to build a more comprehensive picture of Marx’s notion of socialism and cooperation (Gould, 66-68). She argues that the strongest model for such a society is a form of democratic socialism (or “communal society” and “mutuality” in her words) where democratic freedoms extends not only to the government but the workplace (177-178).
[17] The notion that we are beings who engage in social labor is fundamental to Marx and Engels alike and is a theme that runs from the 1844 Manuscripts to the “Critique of the Gotha Program.” In an article for Die Neue Zeit which was later incorporated into his posthumously published Dialectics of Nature, Engels even argues we evolved our hands and vocal abilities for the purpose of enabling labor (“The Part Played by Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man,” 279-296). The defining feature of history is the development of increasingly complicated ways of organizing society and working alongside one another to realize our needs.
[18] After the previously mentioned quote from the third volume of Capital, Marx goes on to say that the true realm of freedom depends on the realm of material necessity; “But this remains a realm of necessity. The true realm of freedom, the development of human powers as an end in itself, begins beyond it, though it can only flourish with this realm of necessity as its basis” (Marx 1981, 959). What Marx means by this is that we will be free to develop our skills, talents and desires however this realm of freedom depends on realizing our material needs in an efficient but humane way.
[19] For Marx, human beings are born with a certain number of basic needs which are relatively universal, but on top of these are new needs which stem from the development of our capacities. One example might be our contemporary need for instrumental music. This development of needs is explored in many places by Marx, most notably in his early 1844 Manuscripts. Agnes Heller also describes this enrichment of need in Marx’s theory in detail (Heller, 40-66).
[20] Agnes Heller gives the following account of the abolition of the division between mental and physical labor: “So according to Marx’s view of the future, there will in effect be no specialized workers involved in ‘purely intellectual’ or ‘purely manual’ activities. This does not mean, however, that there will be no specialized intellectual activity in productive labor or in the control of production: it simply means that the specialized activity performed in production does not determine the direction of a person’s intellectual activity during their free time, and that it does not determine their chosen form of self-realization” (Heller, 107). That is to say, there will still be specialized manual and intellectual tasks, but one’s life will not be reduced to one or the other, manual and intellectual labor will have equal value, and all labor will have an intellectual component.
[21] This ought to be understood from Marx’s reluctance to create blueprints for a socialist society, preferring to keep his descriptions of communism abstract. For Marx, he can only grasp the general principles of such society and it must be the workers themselves who fill in the details.
[22] In his third volume of Capital, Marx provides a bit more detail about what such a society will look like: “Freedom, in this sphere, can consist only in this, that socialized man, the associated producers, govern the human metabolism with nature in a rational way, bringing it under their collective control instead of being dominated by it as a blind power; accomplishing it with the least expenditure of energy and in conditions most worthy and appropriate for their human nature” (Marx 1981, 959).
[23] A part of this development would be the automation of as many tedious, uncomfortable, or dangerous jobs as possible. Marx describes the difference between how machines are deployed under capitalism as the human being becoming reduced to a cog or implement of the machine, where socialism would deploy machinery to reduce the burdens of labor. He makes this distinction in a number of places, most notably in the fragment on the machine in his unpublished Grundrisse (699-712).
References
Blanc, Louis. Plus de Girondins. Edited by Charles Joudert, 1851
Bloch, Ernst. Translated by Plaice, Neville et. Al.. The Principle of Hope Vol. I, II & III. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1986 [1954-1959]
Bovens, Luc & Lutz, Adrien. ‘From Each according to Ability; To Each according to Needs’: Origin, Meaning, and Development of Socialist Slogans. History of Political Economy, volume 51 Issue 2, 2019
Elster, Jon. Making Sense of Marx. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985
Engels, Friedrich. Anti-Dühring, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1975 [1876]
Engels, Friedrich. The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State. New York, New York: Penguin Books, 2010 [1884]
Engels, Friedrich. The Dialectics of Nature. New York: International Publishers, 1940 [1883]
Engels, Friedrich. Translated by Edward Aveling. Socialism, Utopian and Scientific, in Marx and Engels Selected Work Vol. 3. Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1970 [1880]
Gould, Carol. “Socializing the Means of Free Development”. Philosophical Topics, Volume 48, Issue 2, 2020
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Related Essays
Karl Marx’s Theory of History by Angus Taylor
Defining Capitalism and Socialism by Thomas Metcalf
Marx’s Concept of Alienation by Dan Lowe
Distributive Justice: How Should Resources be Allocated? by Dick Timmer and Tim Meijers
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About the Author
Sam Badger was born in the United Kingdom but grew up in California. He received his PhD in philosophy from the University of South Florida in Spring, 2022. He currently works as an adjunct professor at the University of South Florida and at a few community colleges.
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