Quoting Marx, Orlando WFT TV anchor woman Barbara West asked Joe Biden, how Senator Obama was not being a Marxist if he intended to "spread the wealth around?"
The short answer to the above question is of course, "Are you joking?"
The long answer requires reconstructing the Marx quote in the context of Marx’s Critique of the Gotha Program Part 1 , and then comparing Marx’s radically anti-capitalist arguments to Obama’s concept of "spreading the wealth around".
I will demonstrate that quoting Marx proves to be a poor attack tactic because it allows Obama supporters to use Marx’s own words to radically differentiate Obama’s idea of "spreading the wealth".
With little effort, I can reveal the ridiculous nature of the accusation and explain "the joke" to those right wingers who thought it would be cute to compare Marx and Barack Obama.
Moreover, I will try to counter the more "diffuse" accusation by Right-wingers recently, that Obama’s ideas compare to socialism.
I suggest below that neutralizing such accusations are achieved by outlining the fundamental difference between socialists governments (which prioritize the administration of "public welfare" over the guarantees of political freedom and the protection of individual liberties) with a Democratic Republic that promotes "public welfare" by guaranteeing political freedom and protecting individual liberties.
Barbara West from Orlando WFT TV suggested,
You may recognize this famous quote: "From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs." That’s from Karl Marx. How is Senator Obama not being a Marxist if he intends to spread the wealth around?
In .33 seconds, a Google search tracks down the Marx quote provided by Wikipedia that Barbara West uses, "From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs".
[Here is the more complete quote]
"In a higher phase of communist society, after the enslaving subordination of the individual to the division of labor, and therewith also the antithesis between mental and physical labor, has vanished; after labor has become not only a means of life but life's prime want; after the productive forces have also increased with the all-around development of the individual, and all the springs of co-operative wealth flow more abundantly—only then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be crossed in its entirety and society inscribe on its banners: From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!"
The above quote is from Marx’s Critique of the Gotha Program Part 1, and it speaks first and foremost of labor.
In order to understand what he is saying about labor in the above quote, we must first understand Marx’s most primordial thesis that he puts forth in his Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844:
"Man makes his life activity itself the object of his will and his consciousness....Through and because of this production, nature appears as his work and his reality. The object of labor is, therefore, the objectification of man’s species life: for he ...contemplates himself in a world that he has created." (Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, trans. By Martin Milligan, p.113)
Marx suggests that Man first becomes "self-conscious" through labor, or through the product of labor Man "contemplates himself in a world that he has created". Here Marx continues the German Idealist tradition by suggesting that individual autonomous self-consciousness is the basis of self-government.
If we accept Marx’s above claim that "labor as objectification" is constitutive of self-conscious freedom, then we can advance to Marx’s second claim that suggests that "capitalist property relations" somehow negate this self-affirmation that is intrinsic in labor.
"In proportion as labor develops socially, and becomes thereby a source of wealth and culture, poverty and destitution develop among the workers, and wealth and culture among the nonworkers."
This is the law of all history hitherto.
So here Marx agrees that in capitalism the worker is inevitably ruined.
In present-day society, the instruments of labor are the monopoly of the landowners (the monopoly of property in land is even the basis of the monopoly of capital) and the capitalists.
"The emancipation of labor demands the promotion of the instruments of labor to the... conversion into the common property of society and the co-operative regulation of the total labor, with the undiminished distribution of the proceeds of labor."
So here we have it, Marx suggests that the instruments of labor should be made the common property of society. In other words he is suggesting that private property (in relation to the modes of production) should be abolished.
Marx then suggests that there should be the "undiminished distribution" of the proceeds of labor.
So now if we go back to Barbara West’s ridiculous question again:
How is Senator Obama not being a Marxist if he intends to spread the wealth around?
Well, let's see, first of all Obama has not called for the dissolution of "the instruments of labor" into the common property of society!
Just for fun let's continue to take Barbara West's question seriously.
Marx soon takes back his statement that workers should receive the "undiminished distribution" of the labor process.
Before [the proceeds of labor] is divided among the individuals, there has to be deducted again, from it: First, the general costs of administration not belonging to production. This part will, from the outset, be very considerably restricted in comparison with present-day society, and it diminishes in proportion as the new society develops. Second, that which is intended for the common satisfaction of needs, such as schools, health services, etc. From the outset, this part grows considerably in comparison with present-day society, and it grows in proportion as the new society develops. Third, funds for those unable to work, etc., in short, for what is included under so-called official poor relief today...
...The "undiminished" proceeds of labor have already unnoticeably become converted into the "diminished" proceeds, although what the producer is deprived of in his capacity as a private individual benefits him directly or indirectly in his capacity as a member of society.
So for Marx from the "undiminished proceeds of labor", the costs of the administration of a public welfare is to be deducted, before the proceeds are distributed to individuals.
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 labor employed on the products appear here as the value of these products, as a material quality possessed by them, since now, in contrast to capitalist society, individual labor no longer exists in an indirect fashion but directly as a component part of total labor. The phrase "proceeds of labor", objectionable also today on account of its ambiguity, thus loses all meaning.
Marx has abolished private ownership of the means of production, so the producers no longer exchange their products as commodities in the market because the products are owned commonly. Additionally, producers and laborers at this point are no longer at odds with one another but are now components of the total labor.
So again, let’s go back to Barbara West’s preposterous question:
How is Senator Obama not being a Marxist if he intends to spread the wealth around?
What? Are you joking?
To summarize, Marx believed that capitalism through the interaction of commodity exchange destroys freedom, whereas Obama/Biden believe that the "free market" is a mode exercising freedom.
Yet at the same time, an Obama/Biden administration recognize, as history and recent events have demonstrated, that if the market is left uncontrolled and unregulated, the contingencies inherent in market relations can endanger our capacity to exercise our individual liberties.
Marx’s view on Capitalism is in stark contrast to the view of "political" economists like Steuart, Smith, Ricardo and of course most Americans who think that the principles of liberty are actually operative capitalism.
According to the political economists, capitalism has emancipated individuals from the hierarchy and natural determination of past tradition, desacralizing nature by subsuming it under the universal hold of commodity relations, and setting individuals against one another in the social equality of their interdependent need.
Capitalism has put in motion the commodity circulation in which individuals can exercise their civil right to decide what they want and to satisfy their needs through freely chosen action. In this way, the basic relations between the members of civil society are mediated by commodities.
Marx calls into question the justice of this commodity mediation, arguing that commodity exchange gives rise to the reification of commodity fetishism, where the social relations between individuals figure as relations between things ruling over men’s lives.
Contrast this with the idea of commodity exchange as the medium in which participating individuals recognize one another both as free persons, objectively owning their respective goods, and as free members of civil society, exercising the common right of satisfying the needs of their own choosing.
Yet left up to contingency, the unregulated and uncontrolled free market econonomy can easily lord over all other spheres of civil society creating unprecedented wealth and poverty side by side, or unemployment and overproduction that completely endangers the personal liberties that government has set out to protect.
Obama's idea of "spreading the wealth around" by raising taxes on those who earn more than $250,000 is an effort to recalibrate the economic medium in which we excercise our personal liberties. It is not the subordination of government to the ends of public welfare.