There is an easy mistake to make when interpreting Marx’s famous comment of the principle that would represent a communist society. “From each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs” is not merely a principle for distributing work and the outputs of work. It has a much richer underlying meaning, in which our needs include those things which allows us to develop and use our skills and abilities, which in turn are used to help develop and meet the rest of our needs.
This has important consequences for how we understand the communist society that we are trying to build, and I get into this in the rest of this post.
Rediscovering the Proper Reading of Marx
David Graeber, in his book on Debt, uses a conceptual framework of the ways that people in societies relate to each other: Communism, Hierarchy, and Exchange. (Pages 94-113). In the section on Communism, he defines it as the modes of social interaction in which people act according to the principle: “from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs". So far, nothing too out of the ordinary—Written in Marx’s Critique of the Gotha Program, this is the practical, materialist principle that Marx takes to represent communist society, as opposed to the morally obfuscatory, idealist language of “rights”.
Marx uses this principle in reference to a future communist society. But taking this principle at its face, Graeber gives an interesting example of people acting according to this phrase in contemporary, everyday life. This is where things start to get interesting.
Almost everyone follows this principle if they are collaborating on some common project. If someone fixing a broken water pipe says, "Hand me the wrench," his co-worker will not, generally speaking say, "And what do I get for it?"—even if they are working for Exxon Mobil, Burger King, or Goldman Sachs. The reason is simple efficiency (ironically enough, considering the conventional wisdom that "communism just doesn't work"): if you really care about getting something done, the most efficient way to go about it is obviously to allocate tasks by ability and give people whatever they need to do them.
— David Graeber, Debt: The First 5000 Years
Graeber’s example here changed the way I used to think about the phrase: “From each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs”—and I believe Graeber’s reading is closer to Marx’s intention than my prior understanding. And yes, I also see the irony of a proclaimed communist developing their understanding of Marx by reading Graeber, an anarchist.
The Vulgar Reading
I used to think about the “from abilities / to needs” quote in terms of basic principles for society to assign labor and distribute remuneraton for labor done. That is, for the things that people were skilled at, they would apply their effort to support society, and ultimately get material benefits according to a distributive principle based on some societal judgment of what needs they have.
But this vulgar reading leaves open a coercive possibility that always bugged me: it seems like the phrase “from each according to their abilities” implies a potential justification for coercion! An unnuanced reading might justify a “communist” society which puts large social pressures on people to produce, if they have the ability to do so, regardless of whether or not they have the actual desire to do so.
Let’s also look at how our understanding changes about the second part of the phrase: “to each according to their needs.” The vulgar reading of this is simply that society would supply people according to their needs via things like “purchasing power”, services, and a thoughtfully-designed built-environment. This is akin to how we might imagine a society to be designed with differently-abled folks in mind. Of course, these are good goals, and would take considerable priority in a communist society, but there’s much more than merely that!
The Original, Nuanced Reading
Marx, of course, is a much more developed and nuanced thinker than what someone with the vulgar reading gives him credit for. Graeber’s reading is pretty much the proper reading of the phrase. Notably, Graeber doesn’t think that a society based on that principle alone is possible. But I nevertheless believe it is the goal we should be striving for—a society which is dominantly structured accordingly to that communist principle.
“From each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs” is not about a mere transaction principle between people.
Graeber’s example of construction workers working according to the communist principle shows people engaging in a collective project. In this project, it is second nature that we would give people the tools to do what allows them to fully apply their abilities/skills, and it is natural to assume that people would apply their personal abilities toward achieving the shared goal of the project.
A communist society would be similar—people would act with shared goals, democratically decided. These goals, we imagine, would generally revolve around how we can build a world that meets everyone’s needs—including the need to promote each person’s meaningful opportunities for things like self-development, social connections, and achievement of self-directed and communally-directed goals.
We need certain environmental affordances to most effectively activate our abilities. Our labor is not coerced, but freely given because people have a natural desire to build a good world alongside each other, and social relations would be set up to allow us to engage in that collective project. Clearly, coercive extraction of labor power—exploitation—would not be part of the world we are trying to build.
The Interconnection of Ability and Needs
The clearest difference between the vulgar reading and the nuanced reading is that, in the nuanced reading, there isn’t a huge conceptual separation between “labor” and “leisure”. People are given things according to their needs, but their needs include the things they require to apply their abilities effectively. A carpenter would be given a hammer on a building project, just as people in a communist society would be supplied with what they need to be able to actively participate in building a wonderful world that we all want to live in.
The reason we can easily misread and miss this point, is that we are so used to living in capitalist society. It is a wrong assumption that laboring is something we would want to avoid, rather than engage in freely. In general, when a person’s needs are met, they would want to be a part of actively creating and maintaining the world and society. This kind of fulfilling labor is what we would engage in naturally, in our leisure time. This is not to say that we won’t also play games and goof off, but that the labor necessary to maintain and develop society would be indistinguishable from the creative and fulfilling part of “leisure”.
If it matters to people, there is also good reason to believe that this is the proper reading of Marx—that this nuance is what he meant in his writings.
In the very same sentence in which Marx writes that a properly communist society would proclaim, “From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs”, he writes out several high standards that such a society would be required to meet. One of these is the requirement that “labor has become not only a means to life but life’s prime desire and necessity”. Laboring to change and maintain the world, expressing our skills and abilities while doing so, has become “life’s prime desire and necessity”! So this means that when he says “to each according to their needs”, he is referring also to those “needs” which would allow us to engage in these life-affirming interactions with the rest of the world.
In a communist society, we labor freely and uncoerced by others, so that we can support the free laboring and self-determination of all. We apply our abilities to support all of our needs, and fulfilling our needs includes directly supporting our abilities to build wonderful and satisfying lives with each other.
This is a world which is obviously worth fighting for. I feel proud to commit my life to this project, like the many who came before me, the many who struggle alongside me, and the many who will come after.