There is a fundamental difference, however, which is that Gray and Proudhon's system operates within the context of continued commodity production and exchange, and so of competition within the market, whereas what Marx describes is a situation after commodity production has ceased, and where society has moved to the democratically planned production of products. Albeit, this implies continued constraints on distribution, so that it is still not possible to implement the communist principle of “from each according to their ability, to each according to their needs.”
“What we have to deal with here is a communist society, not as it has developed on its own foundations, but, on the contrary, just as it emerges from capitalist society; which is thus in every respect, economically, morally, and intellectually, still stamped with the birthmarks of the old society from whose womb it emerges...
Here, obviously, the same principle prevails as that which regulates the exchange of commodities, as far as this is exchange of equal values. Content and form are changed, because under the altered circumstances no one can give anything except his labour, and because, on the other hand, nothing can pass to the ownership of individuals, except individual means of consumption. But as far as the distribution of the latter among the individual producers is concerned, the same principle prevails as in the exchange of commodity equivalents: a given amount of labour in one form is exchanged for an equal amount of labour in another form.”
(Critique of the Gotha Programme)
This equal right is still bourgeois right, precisely because every individual is different and not equal, so that to go beyond bourgeois right requires not equal, but unequal rights and obligations. One labourer is stronger or fitter than another, so that performing 8 hours labour is easier for them than for another; another may have children, whereas other workers do not, and so on. Yet, with equal right, both workers would get the same entitlement to 8 hours labour equivalent in products, even though the stronger/fitter worker has expended less energy, and the second worker requires more products, in order to meet the needs of their children.
Its notable, here, that there is none of the ideas of liberal welfarism in Marx. Even in this lower stage of communism, the decision of workers to have children is not something that society should compensate them for, that being something left to the higher stage of communism, when the principles of unequal right can be applied.
“This equal right is an unequal right for unequal labour. It recognizes no class differences, because everyone is only a worker like everyone else; but it tacitly recognizes unequal individual endowment, and thus productive capacity, as a natural privilege. It is, therefore, a right of inequality, in its content, like every right. Right, by its very nature, can consist only in the application of an equal standard; but unequal individuals (and they would not be different individuals if they were not unequal) are measurable only by an equal standard insofar as they are brought under an equal point of view, are taken from one definite side only – for instance, in the present case, are regarded only as workers and nothing more is seen in them, everything else being ignored. Further, one worker is married, another is not; one has more children than another, and so on and so forth. Thus, with an equal performance of labour, and hence an equal in the social consumption fund, one will in fact receive more than another, one will be richer than another, and so on. To avoid all these defects, right, instead of being equal, would have to be unequal.
But these defects are inevitable in the first phase of communist society as it is when it has just emerged after prolonged birth pangs from capitalist society. Right can never be higher than the economic structure of society and its cultural development conditioned thereby.
In a higher phase of communist society, after the enslaving subordination of the individual to the division of labour, and therewith also the antithesis between mental and physical labour, has vanished; after labour 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!”
(Critique of the Gotha Programme)
As Lenin described in his writings on economic romanticism, the Narodniks made exactly the same errors as Gray and Proudhon. Marx deals with the errors of Gray and Proudhon, in this regard, in The Poverty of Philosophy.
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