> A quotation from Marx answes all objections. I bow before die heiligi
> Schrift.
Quotations from Marx are relevant to the question of what Marx means. The question as to whether what he means is true is, of course, a different question which can't be answered simply by showing that it is in fact what he means.
As was obvious, I was using the quotations to address a question of the first kind. Specifically, I was disputing the interpretive claims implicit in the following:
>>> I had understood your position to be that income would be conditional
>>> on work.
>>
>> Oh, like Marx, I do hold this, for those able to work. "From each according
>> to his abilities, to each according to his needs." But for me the reason
>> isn't a matter of negative incentives.
> But seriously, first, Marx is quite clear that "from each . . . to
> each" is not a principle of distribute justice, because justice requiires
> treating like individuals alike, and there are no relevantly like
> individuals.
It's "right" understood as "the application of an equal standard" that is at issue in the discussion to which I take you to be referring here. "Right" in this sense is "stigmatized by a bourgeois limitation." Since it ignores individual differences it is necessarily a "right of inequality".
These general points about "right" are made in the context of criticizing a particular "equal right", a principle of distribution that makes income "conditional on work".
"In spite of this advance, this equal right is still constantly stigmatized by a bourgeois limitation. The right of the producers is proportional to the labour they supply; the equality consists in the fact that measurement is made with an equal standard, labour.
"But one man is superior to another physically, or mentally, and supplies more labour in the same time, or can labour for a longer time; and labour, to serve as a measure, must be defined by its duration or intensity, otherwise it ceases to be a standard of measurement. This equal right is an unequal right for unequal labour. It recognizes no class differences, because everyone is only a worker like everyone else; but it tacitly recognizes unequal individual endowment, and thus productive capacity, as a natural privilege. It is, therefore, a right of inequality, in its content, like every right. Right, by its very nature, can consist only in the application of an equal standard; but unequal individuals (and they would not be different individuals if they were not unequal) are measurable only by an equal standard insofar as they are brought under an equal point of view, are taken from one definite side only - for instance, in the present case, are regarded only as workers and nothing more is seen in them, everything else being ignored. 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 labour, and hence an equal share in the social consumption fund, one will in fact receive more than another, one will be richer than another, and so on. To avoid all these defects, right, instead of being equal, would have to be unequal.
"But these defects are inevitable in the first phase of communist society as it is when it has just emerged after prolonged birth pangs from capitalist society. Right can never be higher than the economic structure of society and its cultural development conditioned thereby." (Marx, Critique of the Gotha Programme)
The ideal distribution principle "from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs" is (a) not a principle that makes income conditional on work and (b) not "stigmatized by a bourgeois limitation."
"Bourgeois" in this context means ethical principles derived from the idea of "man" as "egoistic man". A related criticism of the conception of freedom as "rights" is found in "On the Jewish Question".
"All emancipation is a reduction of the human world and relationships to man himself.
"Political emancipation is the reduction of man, on the one hand, to a member of civil society, to an egoistic, independent individual, and, on the other hand, to a citizen, a juridical person.
"Only when the real, individual man re-absorbs in himself the abstract citizen, and as an individual human being has become a species-being in his everyday life, in his particular work, and in his particular situation, only when man has recognized and organized his 'own powers' as social powers, and, consequently, no longer separates social power from himself in the shape of political power, only then will human emancipation have been accomplished."
When this occurs distribution can and will be in accordance with what each individual "needs" to become and live as "a species-being" i.e. as a universally developed individual.
Ted