Marx on Human and Inhuman Needs

Marx, at least twice, in the Critique of the Gotha Programme and The German Ideology , repeats the old socialist slogan ‘to each according to his needs’, interpreted as it usually was to mean that the goods of society should be distributed on the basis of genuine needs and not any other principle. When it came to deciding how genuine needs were to be identified most socialists of his time were happy to allow the principle of equality, taken in conjunction with the provision of basic necessities for survival for all, to decide the issue. In other words, genuine needs were by definition those equal needs for survival common to all and nothing more. Most socialists expected that under socialism production would be regulated by the provision of just-enough goods to satisfy these needs, so the problem of how to distribute a surplus did not arise.