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Part II: “From each to his ability, to each to his need”: Understanding the Difference Between Marxist Socialist and Capitalist Value Systems
In Part I of my response to Laurent Ross’s series of critiques of Marx’s communist principle of “from each to his ability, to each to his need,” upon which I relied to question America’s cultural ideal of meritocracy as a central ideology undergirding class inequality in the capitalist system, I focused on how Marx talks about how we value work and people and how he imagines what people “deserve” in a socialist political economy.
I hoped to have elaborated Marx’s idea that in the communist society he imagines, people share in the collectively produced wealth and resources according to their need, as opposed to receiving distributions on the basis of an imaginary exchange value placed on their labor as a commodity. I offered Marx’s words from Critique of the Gotha Program, where he stresses, “Within the co-operative society based on common ownership of the means of production, the producers do not exchange their products; just as little does the labour employed on the products appear as the value of these products, as a material quality possessed by them . . .”
In Part I, I emphasized that Mr. Ross’s thinking seemed stalled within the forms of the bourgeois economic value system Marx…
