5 Feb 2024 7:27 am
(PART I OF V)
I wrote: "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."
Cannonpointer: "It's from Marx's Critique of the Gotha Programme, available on eBay. If it weren't (and it is) an aphorism with which Marx was sanguine, it would be easy to quote him saying the reverse."
Yes, it's in Marx's Critique of the Gotha Programme. "Critique" is the keyword here because Marx was critiquing the writings of another; in this case, the writings of the French socialist Louis Blanc, who used the phrase "From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs" in his The Organization of Work (1839), which served as the platform for the then-German Socialist Party titled The Gotha Programme. CC Moreover, Dr. Marx did "say the reverse" when, while critiquing the phrase, he 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.
I also noted that From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs "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 ... As readers can see, Dr. Marx only formally used the expression 120 years after its origination."
Regarding reiteration, in reaction to my quoting Marx's "In a higher phase of communist society, after the enslaving subordination...," Cannonpointer wrote, "Sweet Jesus. You JUST GOT THROUGH denying he said it, and now you quote him saying it."
Again, I quoted Marx as repeating the phrase to critique it, not saying/originating it.
Cannonpointer: "The more dependencies and contingencies you build into a system, the larger-writ Murphy's Law in the matter." I've not referred to any dependencies and contingencies except that establishing a socialist society depends upon the social ownership and democratic administration of the means of production in its totality. Marx's criticism of Blanc's and Morelly's "From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs" affirms their misunderstanding, not an indication of any contingency.
http://www.slp.org/pdf/statements/siu_chart.pdf
(END OF PART I)