“From Each According to His Abilities,
to Each According to His Needs!”

On Marx’s Critique of a Utopian Formula of Distribution

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The formula “From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs!” is one of the most frequently quoted sentences from Marx’s work. At the same time, it is one of the most misunderstood. It is usually read as a positive shorthand definition of communism: as a just rule of distribution for a future society, as a humanist ideal, or as a moral counterimage to capitalist competition. In socialist, communist, and anarchist literature, it often appears as the immediate slogan of a liberated society. But precisely in this way, the actual point of the famous passage in the Critique of the Gotha Program is missed.