The Wild Reed: The Biblical Roots of “From Each According to Ability; To Each According to Need”

Earlier this month, Democratic presidential candidate Marianne Williamson appeared on Sean Hannity’s show on the Fox News network. Hannity is a notorious blowhard who constantly interrupts and steamrolls his guests and attempts to play “gotcha” with them. He was true to form when “interviewing” (if you can call it that) Marianne, who, to her credit, more than held her own. “She was quick and clever and delivered,” noted one YouTube commenter in the days after the segment was broadcast. “She actually demolished Sean on his own show,” said another.

At one point when pressing Marianne on the type of economic system she supports, Hannity attemptd a gotcha moment by trying to get her to agree with the following quote by Karl Marx.

From each according to ability;
to each according to need.

Marianne clearly did not recognize the quote as coming from Marx, which was a pity as she could have turned it around on Hannity, a self-avowed Christian, by highlighting that this particular phrase has its roots in the Bible.

In a 2021 article for The Conversation, Belgian philosopher Luc Bovens notes that although the phrase “From each according to ability; to each according to need” was popularized by Marx (left) in his 1875 Critique of the Gotha Program, its origins are in eighteenth and nineteenth-century France where a number of philosphers – “all committed Christians whose social programs were inspired by their faith” – borrowed versions of the phrase “from French Bible translations of the time, and defended them on scriptural grounds.”

Following is an excerpt from Bovens’ article.

“To each according to needs” comes from the Book of Acts documenting the practices of early Christian communities in Jerusalem. In the Book of Acts, believers “were together and had all things in common” and sold their possessions and distributed the proceeds within the community “as any had needs.”

In French philosopher Étienne Cabet’s utopian novel Voyage en Icarie, Cabet tells of a fictional community who practice similar communal living arrangements. He later went to the U.S. and founded a number of “Icarian communities” in the second half of the 19th century, that practiced communal ownership of goods and were governed by egalitarian ideals.

“From each according to ability,” is likewise found in the Book of Acts: “So the disciples determined, everyone according to his ability, to send relief to the brothers living in Judea.” Cabet and [French socialist politician] Louis Blanc both construed this phrase as a call for Christian servitude. They believed society to be a cooperative venture in which people of means should contribute more.

“To each according to ability” is in the Gospel of Matthew. In the Parable of the Talents, a master gives his servants different amounts of money – or “talents” – and goes away on a journey: “To one he gave five talents, to another two, to another one, to each according to his ability.” Upon his return, he praises the servants who have invested and increased their allotment but condemns the one who buried the money and simply returned it.

For [French political theorist] Henri de Saint-Simon, the phrase meant putting jobs and resources in the hands of the most qualified and entrepreneurial people and taking them away from nobility. This would lead to greater productivity, benefiting everyone, and in particular, the most disadvantaged socio-economic groups in society.

. . . [Today] “To each according to need” can be applied to the debate over health care. The aim is to take the provision of health care away from market forces and to make it freely accessible to all who need it. “From each according to ability” is what underlies a concern for the common good and a conception of society as a cooperative venture, with mandatory public service as a matching policy proposal.

“To each according to ability” is at the core of equal opportunity – an ideal that underlies affirmative action legislation and various policies to increase the accessibility of college. “To each according to work” maps onto the ideal of equal pay for equal work and the push for minimal wage policies, mainly benefiting manual labor jobs.

1 comment:

Percy8:39 AM
The fundamental and intractable problem for socialism in any invocation of the Bible in this regard is that the Bible is not thereby describing or prescribing a system of state-enforced property rights (individual or collective). It's a mirror image of the problem Christians faced regarding the use of deadly force when they began to dominate the government of states: Jesus stipulated in John 18:36 that his kingdom was not a worldly state, and Pilate clearly understood the strangeness of what Jesus was claiming in that dialogue such that he knew that he could not lawfully condemn Jesus to death for violating Roman law (Pilate understood that quintessentially Roman legal thing, jurisdiction).

One can certainly credibly skewer soi disant Christian nationalist MAGA-heads that they fundamentally contradict the Bible in their econo-social prescriptions. But socialism qua socialism can't credibly pivot a binary to thereby claim it fulfills them. In reality, the binary is a false one composed of merely partial truths.

Tuesday, May 30, 2023

The Biblical Roots of “From Each According to Ability; To Each According to Need”

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