<HTML><BODY style="word-wrap: break-word; -khtml-nbsp-mode: space; -khtml-line-break: after-white-space; "><DIV><DIV>Justin wrote:</DIV><BR class="Apple-interchange-newline"><BLOCKQUOTE type="cite"><P style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px"><FONT face="Helvetica" size="3" style="font: 12.0px Helvetica">Even assuming a "to each according to his needs"</FONT></P> <P style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px"><FONT face="Helvetica" size="3" style="font: 12.0px Helvetica">(insofar as the plan can provide that) form of</FONT></P> <P style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px"><FONT face="Helvetica" size="3" style="font: 12.0px Helvetica">remuneration, people will still, in their desire</FONT></P> <P style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px"><FONT face="Helvetica" size="3" style="font: 12.0px Helvetica">(wholly altruistic, we may assume) to reach the plan</FONT></P> <P style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px"><FONT face="Helvetica" size="3" style="font: 12.0px Helvetica">target, have an incentive to say they need more than</FONT></P> <P style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px"><FONT face="Helvetica" size="3" style="font: 12.0px Helvetica">they really do and that they can do less than they</FONT></P> <P style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px"><FONT face="Helvetica" size="3" style="font: 12.0px Helvetica">really can. That way they will be more likely to hit</FONT></P> <P style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px"><FONT face="Helvetica" size="3" style="font: 12.0px Helvetica">the target -- but the whole system will be full of</FONT></P> <P style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px"><FONT face="Helvetica" size="3" style="font: 12.0px Helvetica">misinformation.</FONT></P></BLOCKQUOTE></DIV><DIV><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV><DIV>"From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs" isn't an altruistic principle of "right", i.e. it doesn't involve any sacrifice of "self-interest". It actualizes rational self-interest . </DIV><DIV><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV><DIV>Rational self=interest is in living a "good" life. According to Marx (and the tradition in ethics from which the idea derives), such a life has three internally related aspects: aesthetic, intellectual and ethical. It is the activity of creating and appropriating beauty and truth within relations of mutual recognition, the "higher" end in itself activity that defines "the true realm of freedom". </DIV><DIV><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV><DIV>The "needs" that must be met to make such a life practicable are for the developed capabilities and the other means the activity requires. All individuals must be provided with what they "need" in this sense because relations of mutual recognition require fully developed individuals provided with the material and other means required for the activities that constitute the content of such relations.</DIV><DIV><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV><DIV>This is the meaning of Marx's acceptance of the ideas that "correctly understood interest is the principle of all morality" and that, rationally understood, "private interest" coincides with "the interest of humanity." In we interpret "interest" in terms of the above idea of the "good" life, we get what Marx claims is the true form of "freedom" and "individualism": "man ... is free ... through the positive power to assert his true individuality".</DIV><DIV><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">"If man draws all his knowledge, sensation, etc., from the world of the senses and the experience gained in it, then what has to be done is to arrange the empirical world in such a way that man experiences and becomes accustomed to what is truly human in it and that he becomes aware of himself as man. If correctly understood interest is the principle of all morality, man’s private interest must be made to coincide with the interest of humanity. If man is unfree in the materialistic sense, i.e., is free not through the negative power to avoid this or that, but through the positive power to assert his true individuality, crime must not be punished in the individual, but the anti-social sources of crime must be destroyed, and each man must be given social scope for the vital manifestation of his being. If man is shaped by environment, his environment must be made human."</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><<A href="http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/holy-family/ch06_3_d.htm">http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/holy-family/ch06_3_d.htm</A>></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">It also indicates the meaning of Marx's claim that "the greatest wealth" is "the other human being", i.e. the true "good" is a relation of mutual recognition.</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">"It will be seen how in place of the wealth and poverty of political economy come the rich human being and the rich human need. The rich human being is simultaneously the human being in need of a totality of human manifestations of life – the man in whom his own realisation exists as an inner necessity, as need. Not only wealth, but likewise the poverty of man – under the assumption of socialism – receives in equal measure a human and therefore social significance.</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><SPAN class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </SPAN>“Poverty is the passive bond which causes the human being to experience the need of the greatest wealth – the other human being.”</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><A href="http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/manuscripts/comm.htm">http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/manuscripts/comm.htm</A></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">These passages are from Marx's "early" writings. They are reiterated, however, in his "late writings" as is, in a certain sense, made evident by the passage from the Critique of the Gotha Programme setting out the ideal principle of right as involving "to each according to his needs" and giving, as a requirement for the practicability of the principle, the full development "of the intellectual and moral powers."</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">So the "planning" through which "freely associated" "universally developed individuals" would organize the activity of meeting their "needs" (the instrumental activity that defines "the realm of necessity" of an ideal community) is not the "planning" criticized by von Mises and Hayek. The latter adopt a conception of "being" and of "human being" radically inconsistent with Marx's.</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">It also isn't the "planning" implemented in the Soviet Union, i.e. planning there wasn't part of the organization of production by "freely associated" "universally developed individuals". </DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">In the activities "planned" by the latter, "the enslaving subordination of the individual to the division of labor, and therewith also the antithesis between mental and physical labor, has vanished" and "labor has become not only a means of life but life's prime want".</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">"Free time -- which is both idle time and time for higher activity -- has naturally transformed its possessor into a different subject, and he then enters into the direct production process as this different subject. This process is then both discipline, as regards the human being in the process of becoming; and, at the same time, practice [Ausübung], experimental science, materially creative and objectifying science, as regards the human being who has become, in whose head exists the accumulated knowledge of society. For both, in so far as labour requires practical use of the hands and free bodily movement, as in agriculture, at the same time exercise."</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><A href="http://marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1857/grundrisse/ch14.htm">http://marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1857/grundrisse/ch14.htm</A></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">Ted</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV><DIV><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV><DIV><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV><DIV><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV></BODY></HTML>