Are there economic laws of socialism?

Monthly Review, July-August, 1985 by Harry Magdoff

3. The Economic Law of Distribution According to Work. Underlying this "law" is a fundamental socialist tenet: if distribution of consumer goods is to be based on work performed, then unearned income is eliminated. But a great deal more is meant, for the "law" commands that higher pay be granted to skilled workers, more efficient producers, and those engaged in more difficult work (e.g., in steel making and coal mining). Since this may seem like a contradiction to the socialist ideal of equality, Marx is called upon the doctrinal support. In his Critique of the Gotha Program, Marx states:

We are dealing here with a communist society, not as it has developed on its own foundations, but on the contrary, just as it emerges from capitalist society. In every respect, economically, morally, intellectually, it is thus still stamped with the birth-marks of the old society from whose womb it has emerged. Accordingly, the individual producer gets back from society--after the deductions [to replace the means of production used up, to provide for the expansion of production, and to build an insurance reserve in case of accidents]--exactly what he has given it. What he has given it is his individual quantum of labor.

While Marx's warning arises from his concern for realism, the ideologues go much further by incorporating practice into an absolute law. They go so far as to insist that equal distribution is incompatible with the first stage if communism. At every stumbling block in the advance of production, they cry out for even greater pay differentials as a spur to productivity. If, however, Marx is to be the guide, then his additional observations should also be heeded. He proclaims an eventual goal of equal distribution.

in a more advanced phase of communist society, when the enslaving subjugation of individuals to the division of labor, and thereby the antithesis between intellectual and physical labor, has disappeared; when labor is no longer just a means of keeping alive but has itself become a vital need; when the all-around developmend of individuals has increased their productive powers and all the springs of cooperative wealth flow more abundantly.

Clearly, this ideal is a long, long way off. But if it is ever to be approximated, it won't be done overnight. The higher phase of communism cannot be inaugurated on a given day. If the enslaving division of labor is ever to be abolished, if the antithesis between intellectual and physical labor is ever to be overcome, if labor itself is to become a vital need, then it can only come about in an evolutionary process, slow as that progress may have to be. If, on the other hand, distribution according to work, and the other features of the production system that go along with the enforcement of that rule, are to remain an inalterable commandment, the evolutionary process can never begin. The reason given for the continuation of inequality is the practical inability to ignore the capitalist inheritance. But to the extent that the practice of inequality in pay (and the distribution of goods and services by nonmonetary means to privileged elite) becomes entrenched in the operations of existing socialist societies, supported by the insistence that it is in accord with an objective law that dare not be violated, the economic, moral, and intellectual aspects of capitalist inheritance are reinforced and continually reproduced.