From each according to his ability, to each according to his need (or needs) is a slogan popularised by Karl Marx in his 1875 Critique of the Gotha Program.[1] In German, "Jeder nach seinen Fähigkeiten, jedem nach seinen Bedürfnissen!". The phrase summarizes the principles that, in a communist society, every person should contribute to society to the best of his or her ability and consume from society in proportion to his or her needs. In the Marxist view, such an arrangement will be made possible by the abundance of goods and services that a developed communist society will produce; the idea is that there will be enough to satisfy everyone's needs.[2][3]
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The complete paragraph containing Marx's statement of the creed in the 'Critique of the Gotha Program' is as follows:
Although Marx is popularly thought of as the originator of the phrase, the slogan was common to the socialist movement and was first used by Louis Blanc in 1839, in "The organization of work",[4] as a revision of a quote by the utopian socialist Henri de Saint Simon, who claimed that each should be rewarded according to how much he works. The origin of this phrasing has also been attributed to the French communist Morelly,[5] who proposed in his 1755 Code of Nature "Sacred and Fundamental Laws that would tear out the roots of vice and of all the evils of a society" including
| “ | I. Nothing in society will belong to anyone, either as a personal possession or as capital goods, except the things for which the person has immediate use, for either his needs, his pleasures, or his daily work. II. Every citizen will be a public man, sustained by, supported by, and occupied at the public expense. III. Every citizen will make his particular contribution to the activities of the community according to his capacity, his talent and his age; it is on this basis that his duties will be determined, in conformity with the distributive laws.[6] |
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Marx delineated the specific conditions under which such a creed would be applicable—a society where technology and social organization had substantially eliminated the need for physical labor in the production of things, where "labor has become not only a means of life but life's prime want".[7] Marx explained his belief that, in such a society, each person would be motivated to work for the good of society despite the absence of a social mechanism compelling them to work, because work would have become a pleasurable and creative activity. Marx intended the initial part of his slogan, "from each according to his ability" to suggest not merely that each person should work as hard as they can, but that each person should best develop their particular talents.
Claiming themselves to be at a "lower stage of communism (i.e., "socialism", in line with Marx's terminology),[8] the Soviet Union adapted the formula as: "From each according to his ability, to each according to his work (labour investment)".[9]