30 Jan 2024 7:16 am
(PART II of III)
Cannonpointer: "An example: Marx said, "From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs." Lovely statement - but it ignores a few things."
Cannonpointer either ignores or, like nearly everyone, is unaware that Dr. Marx didn't originate "From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs," which changes everything and makes Cannonpointer's point moot. Though popular/capitalist culture inaccurately attributes the quote to Marx as its originator, the mantra was shared within the socialist movement. It's widely thought that the phrase originated with the French utopian socialist Etienne-Gabriel Morelly, who offered it in his Code of Nature..." of 1755, some 65 years before Marx's birth. The French socialist Louis Blanc employed the phrase in his The Organization of Work (1839), which served as the platform for the then-German Socialist Party titled The Gotha Programme. Karl Marx merely critiqued the phrase "From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs" within his Critique of the Gotha Programme (1875). As readers can see, Dr. Marx only formally used the expression 120 years after its origination.
This fact changes everything and makes Cannonpointer's point moot because Etienne-Gabriel Morelly and Louis Blanc used the phrase in relation to their vision of socialist society rather than the later stage of socialist society known as communist society.
In critiquing "From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs," Marx wrote: "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!" --The Critique of the Gotha Programme.
So, what Cannonpointer went on to write about economic surpluses and men striving to become useful and their usefulness being rewarded would be true if Marx, like Blanc and Morelly before him, employed the phrase about socialism, but he didn't do that. Instead, as one can see from the lengthy quote above, Marx placed the phrase within the framework of communist society, the classless and, therefore, stateless stage of human social evolution in which the need for work has been eliminated due to automation. Hence, his "... after the enslaving subordination of the individual to the division of labor, and therewith also the antithesis between mental and physical labor, has vanished..."
Nonetheless, much of Cannonpointer's bullet points raise essential issues that must be addressed. For example, he wrote, "People won't be happy having only their needs met. They have wants in addition to needs." To be sure.(To be continued within PART III)
(END OF PART II)