What did Marx really mean...

[benhur]

...when he said: "from each according to his ability, to each according to his need."

Most people say this means equal pay, but I am not satisfied. It seems ridiculous that wages will be there in socialist societies. But even otherwise, how can a doctor and a plumber earn the same amount?:(

So I am assuming that every citizen will have their basic necessities fulfilled, and any extra work is done to 'access' more products and services, is that it? Which means, goods will be exchanged for other goods, with no paper money at all as a medium of exchange? Kinda like barter system?

Please provide some ideas.

[Led Zeppelin]

Most people say this means equal pay

No they don't, and if they do they're idiots who know nothing of Marxism.

I suggest you read Marx himself for a better understanding of this, or read State and Rev, the quote is explained there as well in the chapter on the "higher phase of communism".

[benhur]

No they don't, and if they do they're idiots who know nothing of Marxism.

I suggest you read Marx himself for a better understanding of this, or read State and Rev, the quote is explained there as well in the chapter on the "higher phase of communism".

Thanks, can you please point to a link, where it's specifically discussed?

[Led Zeppelin]

Thanks, can you please point to a link, where it's specifically discussed?

Sure: The Higher Phase of Communist Society (http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/staterev/ch05.htm#s4)

Hope that helps. :)

[Die Neue Zeit]

I prefer the original source itself:

http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1875/gotha/ch01.htm


Further, one worker is married, another is not; one has more children than another, and so on and so forth. Thus, with an equal performance of labor, and hence an equal in the social consumption fund, one will in fact receive more than another, one will be richer than another, and so on.

[mikelepore]

I believe the doctor and the plumber should get the same hourly income. The doctor's education should be free, and the time spent at the medical school should be compensated as work time, so the doctor has made no personal sacrifice that calls for a later adjustment with a large salary.

[Black Sheep]

Omg,wait a sec,i just realized this.:scared::scared::scared:

From each according to his ability

Isn't thatsomewhat, uhm, wrong?I mean since we use it as a slogan...! :

In a society where the production efficiency is ultra high,and where ALL of the its members are doing productive work and the goods are in abundance, one would not be needed to work according to his ability,but according to the amount of labor required to keep the production up a certain level!
Many speculate this could be close to 3-4 hours a day , like Kropotkin.

Your comments, please!

[SEKT]

Omg,wait a sec,i just realized this.:scared::scared::scared:

From each according to his ability

Isn't thatsomewhat, uhm, wrong?I mean since we use it as a slogan...! :

In a society where the production efficiency is ultra high,and where ALL of the its members are doing productive work and the goods are in abundance, one would not be needed to work according to his ability,but according to the amount of labor required to keep the production up a certain level!
Many speculate this could be close to 3-4 hours a day , like Kropotkin.

Your comments, please!

1st.- WTF????

2nd.- What does "in a society where the production efficency is ultra high" means??? If you specify productivity as to produce more or in a certain way you should keep in mind that in the communist society productivity will not mean the same as in capitalism, why? because in the communist society productivity will be defined as a mode of producing but by the necessities of people not of a market, people organizing the productive system by their own necessities in order to achieve a goal like this all kind of work will be required (manual, intelectual, the device of better tecnological techniques) so the time in which a person would work will be considerable lower than today but also the character of work (in capitalist society is only in an alienated form) will change, work won't be anymore a source of pain for people but a source of joy, a manner to repruduce its humanity with other humans so in a cualitative way it will be better.

3rd.- If the whole society by means of the individuals will be organized accordingly to its necessities and work won't be more alienated why the principle of From each according to his ability will be wrong??? I think that the problem in your case goes because you are still thinking in the communism as a stage after the capitalist society without an interruption but remember that you cannot define the communism using the categories for defining capitalism so in that sense what in happening is that you are trying to think in communism from the capitalist society without a cualitative and cuantitative progress wich is not linear but a break from capitalism to communism.:thumbdown:

[Niccolò Rossi]

In a society where the production efficiency is ultra high,and where ALL of the its members are doing productive work and the goods are in abundance, one would not be needed to work according to his ability,but according to the amount of labor required to keep the production up a certain level!
Many speculate this could be close to 3-4 hours a day , like Kropotkin.

Me thinks your reading a little too much into it.

Firstly, it is important to remember that "from each...to each" was meant to be a slogan and not a definitive law of communist labour and distribution procedures.

Secondly, it is important to take into mind the withering away of the division of labour and leisure (between 'work' and 'play', if you will) noted in the 1844 Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts.

Finally, I think you are defining ability as an absolute and not relatively. Assuming a hypothetical society of abundance where (as according to Kropotkin) individual men and women may only need to engage in 4 hours of 'work' a day (something I believe to be incorrect in taking work as a separate activity divorced from encompassing the entire sphere of creative human activity), it would nonsense to expect that this average quanitity of labour would have to be performed by all members of society including the elderly, sick or severly disabled. People able to contribute more would inevitably have to "pick up the slack", that is to say labour in accordance with their (relative) ability.

[Die Neue Zeit]

I believe the doctor and the plumber should get the same hourly income. The doctor's education should be free, and the time spent at the medical school should be compensated as work time, so the doctor has made no personal sacrifice that calls for a later adjustment with a large salary.

That's not what you said in this thread, though:

http://deleonism.org/forum/viewtopic.php?p=6770&highlight=cockshott#6770


De Leon suggested individual pay according to how many hours are put in and also how much effort the work requires, with the matter of how much effort the work requires being estimated by how many people apply to take each job during the initial iterations when the pay offered is more equal. Move the pay level up or down until the number of people applying for the work equals the number of people needed, then the pay level would represent how hard the work is.


I think so too, comparing office worker with office worker. However, comparing office worker with coal miner, etc., there might now be a difference in strenuosity, such that seventy minutes of work for the office worker might be the same personal sacrifice as sixty minutes of work for the coal miner. It seems to me that sacrifice is the real contribution that workers need to be paid for. The sacrifice of being at work instead of at leisure for x hours, and then the strenuosity appears to be a multiplied coefficient. That's units of time multiplied by some dimensionless ratio, which is units of time again.

[Coprolal1an]

I believe the doctor and the plumber should get the same hourly income. The doctor's education should be free, and the time spent at the medical school should be compensated as work time, so the doctor has made no personal sacrifice that calls for a later adjustment with a large salary.

You're still assuming that the difficulty of work for a doctor is on equal footing with that of doctors, insofar that it does not constitute any more 'personal sacrifice' than schooling to become a doctor.

[Drace]

Also, may I add...
What did Marx mean when he said "As far as I know, I'm not a Marxist"?

Yeah I'm not dumb enough to interpret that as him not being truthful of his works...

[Forward Union]

It was actually a Bakunin quote first "From each according their faculties, to each according their need"

But I can't find an online source.

[mikelepore]

Reply to Jacob and Coprol1am:

What I meant was, the work of a doctor and the work of a plumber seems about equally strenuous to me. One individual is good at remembering the symptoms of the influenza and knows how to confirm it with a diagnostic test; the other individual is good at remembering the symptoms of a defective thermostat wire and knows how to confirm it with a dianostic test. Both workers do most of their work on their feet, not much time at the desk. Both workers have to keep an array of special tools available. Neither worker bears the dangers known to a firefighter or electrical lineman or highrise construction worker. Neither worker has the extreme environment that a coal minor has. The strenuosity of the training period is different, but the strenuosity of a typical workday is about the same. So in a classless society, particularly if training is free and paid as time worked, I think the number of people who would decide to become doctors and plumbers would be generally unaffected by consideration of "how difficult" the quality of a workday is perceived to be. After all that, if it's still found that the numbers of people who choose each type of work is out of proportion to the numbers that society needs, society can fix it by giving a slightly larger compensation for the understaffed kind of work. I expect that such an income differential can be a small, whereas I expect that the premium given to a firefighter, work that involves both personal danger and physical strain, will be larger. These are my personal expectations, but, when the time comes, actual income premiums will be made by statisticians responsible for balancing workload or perhaps by a computer algorithm.

Anyway, I posted in this topic to show the novices that not all Marxists believe that "From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs" is a workable plan. I, for one, reject it as a 19th century utopian daydream.

[mikelepore]

What did Marx mean when he said "As far as I know, I'm not a Marxist"?...

Marx said that when he heard about a group of activists in France who had some goals or tactics that he disagreed with, but they were doing it in the name of "Marxism."

[mikelepore]

It was actually a Bakunin quote first "From each according their faculties, to each according their need"
But I can't find an online source.

I also looked online but had no luck. I haven't heard about Bakunin. I only remember from reading a biography of Marx, I can't remember which one because I read about six of them, which said the slogan appeared in the 1830s as the masthead of the French newspaper "Le Globe" that was associated with St. Simon's utopian socialist movement, and that the slogan also appeared in Louis Blanc's 1840 book "L'organisation du Travail" (The Organization of Work). Marx's usage was in 1875.

Whomever might have said it semi-modern times, all of them are paraphrasing a source that goes back almost 2000 years: "... distribution was made unto every man according as he had need." (Acts 4:35)

[mikelepore]

would not be needed to work according to his ability,but according to the amount of labor required to keep the production up a certain level

The people who take the slogan seriously are using the word "ability" to indicate that they want what usually called "the honor system." Showing up for work would be voluntary. Do whatever you think you can do. If you say you can't go in for the next few weeks because you have some personal stuff to attend to, okay. They expect the volunteering to add up to the total number of hours needed to match the consumption of goods and services.

Me, I'm the skeptic. A lifelong Marxist, but I dissent on this point. I think if people didn't get incomes according to personal time worked, and if good were free for the taking, production would approach zero just as consumption approaches infinity, a situation that would break down in about one day.

[mikelepore]

Firstly, it is important to remember that "from each...to each" was meant to be a slogan and not a definitive law of communist labour and distribution procedures.

That's a good point. But there are some groups, such as the Socialist Party of Great Britain, and the World Socialist Party U.S., etc. -- they are all associated at worldsocialism.org -- who take the slogan very literally as the very definition of classless society. The first half of the sentence meaning it would be voluntary to go to work, then a comma, then the second half of the sentence meaning that products would be free. (I enjoy arguing with them.)


Secondly, it is important to take into mind the withering away of the division of labour and leisure (between 'work' and 'play', if you will) noted in the 1844 Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts.

It seems to me there will always have to be some activities that we do just to get the results that they bring, and we would eliminate those activities if we could get the same results without those activities -- that's work -- and other activities that we do for their own sake, just to spend our time on them, and not to obtain separate results -- that's play.

[Niccolò Rossi]

The first half of the sentence meaning it would be voluntary to go to work, then a comma, then the second half of the sentence meaning that products would be free.

I don't necessarily disagree with the above. In communist society the individual must be able to freely and consciously engage in productive labour for their the material benefit of the collective and thus the individual. Labour must not be coerced. Adding to that, insofar as their exists an abundance of a particular good/service (with reference to consumer demand), it must be freely distributed according to need (which is of course subjective and thus it will only the individual can themselves determine it). In the case of a scarcity of the good/service in question it will of course need to be "rationed", but the mechanism by which this rationing aught to be carried out is certainly debatable.


It seems to me there will always have to be some activities that we do just to get the results that they bring, and we would eliminate those activities if we could get the same results without those activities -- that's work -- and other activities that we do for their own sake, just to spend our time on them, and not to obtain separate results -- that's play.

I think this is a division that communist production will act to corrode. Productive activity (i.e. work) will lose it's alienating and debasing nature and will become, insofar as is possible, a fulfilling and freely engaged in activity.

[mikelepore]

Ultimately it's an unanswered psychology question. We can't be certain today whether motivation needs a personal and material element, or whether people would go to work with the numbers and frequencies needed because they know intellectually that society needs it. However, it's possible to make the choice that lets us err on the side of caution. We don't want to have a socioeconomic change and then suddenly find that the electric lights go out because not enough workers showed up. If a classless society begins with the use of a work time based currency, it will later be possible to perform incremental tests on human responses. For example, society can make the food free, while still expecting people to work a given number of hours to obtain hobby equipment.

[Sendo]

It's just a slogan. It's meant to put humans and human ability over profits. It's meant to be antithesis to "the bottom line". A guiding principle, really, not to be taken that we have some all seeing machine assign you X hours based on height and then divy out X goods based on your body weight.