“From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs” is often treated as Marx’s definition of “real communism.” But what if Marx’s point was precisely the opposite: that communism cannot be reduced to a formula of distribution? Hermann Lueer argues in his article that the common fixation on “fair distribution” and “free access” reproduces precisely the vulgar-socialist standpoint Marx was attacking — “the consideration and treatment of distribution as independent of the mode of production and hence the presentation of socialism as turning principally on distribution.”
Marx’s real emphasis lies elsewhere: not on devising a supposedly communist principle of distribution, but on abolishing the capitalist relations of production and bringing social production under the conscious control of the associated producers themselves.