Provision according to Need or Productive Power?

[Oswy]

Most of us will be familiar with Marx's maxim:

"From each according to his ability, to each according to his need"

I'm all in favour of this, it's simply the most rational way to organise a society. Nevertheless, does personal provision according to need not, at least at the technical level, come into conflict with another socialist notion that the worker should receive the 'full benefit' of his labour, i.e. that it should not be alienated from him? My view would be that when our needs are satisfied regardless of how productive we are individually then a direct relationship between how hard I work and my reward becomes a triviality. Yet the redistribution of products and resources to meet need seems to have at least the potential to strongly mediate the extent to which we as individuals can expect the full benefit of our labour - because in some cases part of that benefit will be transfered to others.

Is it thus better to suggest that under socialism the principle of satisfying everyone's needs comes before the principle that the fruits of an individual's labour not be alientated from them, or am I missing something?

[Victus Mortuum]

Is it thus better to suggest that under socialism the principle of satisfying everyone's needs comes before the principle that the fruits of an individual's labour not be alientated from them, or am I missing something?

If workers have radical-democratic control over the fruits of their labor, then that labor and the product is not alienated from them at all. "From each according..." is the mechanism that workers would choose to organize their society according to over time if they had actual control of things. Distribution according to labor is the mechanism that would be the immediate result of a worker-control revolution, with according to 'need' being the long term result as the restraints of capitalism are lifted from society's consciousness.

[PoliticalNightmare]

Apparently it wasn't Marx who originally coined that term:

http://www.revleft.com/vb/showpost.php?p=1895124&postcount=16

From the thread:

http://www.revleft.com/vb/labour-value-t142954/index.html?t=142954

[Victus Mortuum]

Also, you can read this for some brief history of the term:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/From_each_according_to_his_ability_to_each_accordi ng_to_his_need

[penguinfoot]

with another socialist notion that the worker should receive the 'full benefit' of his labour, i.e. that it should not be alienated from him?

This is not a notion that has anything to do with the Marxist tradition, it has a lot more in common with the so-called Ricardian socialists, and was something that Marx in fact consistently opposed in his Critique of the Gotha Programme, which is well worth a read. In that text he makes it clear that even in a communist society workers would not receive the full value of what they produce because there would still be a need to make various deductions in order to provide for various social functions, including giving support for those cannot work for one reason or another, the building up and repair the means of production, and the need to guard against sudden emergencies in the form of natural disasters and so on, and the closest that Marx comes to advocating that workers should receive the value of what they produce or at least that distribution should be determined by the outputs of individual workers is the principle that he articles for the transition between capitalism and communism, which is "to each according to his labour", and yet Marx himself is insistent that this principle is needed only whilst the cultural and ideological impacts of capitalism remain in existence, and that it is flawed from a communist standpoint because it only considers the individual from the standpoint of them being a laborer, such that the communist system of distribution, based around "from each according to his needs", will acknowledge the specificity and uniqueness of each individual inhabitant of a communist society, by allowing individuals to consume what they like, rather than regulating their consumption through an externally-imposed standard.

The meaning of alienation being transcended for Marx is not that each individual receives the full value of their labour as such, it is that the human qualities that are repressed in capitalist societies are allowed to express themselves once human beings are no longer dominated by the products of their own activity - the concept of human nature that underpins Marx's account of alienation is one that sees human beings as active agents who manifest their own desires and impulses through interaction with the natural world and through the process of objectification, which does not have the same meaning, as, say, the objectification of women, but means that the desires and impulses of human beings are expressed through the act of production and creation, such that they come to be embodied in objects of one form or another, rather than through a more Aristotelean ideal of seclusion and mental contemplation.