Socialism is a lot more than a single economic exchange - its a system. Perhaps what they're describing is cooperative or risk-sharing. But its no more 'Socialism' with a big-S than its Monarchy. To quote Billy Crystal - I eat a burrito - I'm not Mexican.
You know what's really socialistic? The systems inside any large company. You need a computer and a cubical? These things will be provided to you, in return for your work. Nothing reasonable is denied as long as your productivity justifies it, comrade!
"From each according to his ability, to each according to his need." -- Karl Marx. Not a misquote.
actually... no. Companies are still pretty capitalistic considering the owners/shareholders get all the major money out of it without putting any "effort" in. Though i guess socialism would be a like an employee-owned company where everyone gets a share of the total profit etc. Or where they decide as a whole what to do with the surplus (get a pool table, or heck even an indoor POOL!)
Marxism is not the only socialist ideology, nor the first. Tying socialism to Marx is a good way of restricting your view.
And since you make the explicit point that you're not misquoting: No, but the quote you give is severely out of context.
Marx very specifically did NOT believe that this would be the case for _socialist_ society, but for a well developed _communist_ society, and that in any case he makes the case that it is really a distraction.
The quote is from Critique of the Gotha Programme, a critique of a draft programme of the United Workers Party of Germany.
The full paragraph reads "In a higher phase of communist society, after the enslaving subordination of the individual to the division of labor, and therewith also the antithesis between mental and physical labor, has vanished; after labor 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 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!"
This was part of Marx' criticism of this phrase in the programme:
'3. "The emancipation of labor demands the promotion of the instruments of labor to the common property of society and the co-operative regulation of the total labor, with a fair distribution of the proceeds of labor.'
Marx made the point that while this is desired endgoal in a communist society, the above programme point is largely meaningless in terms of practical policy for a revolutionary party that has communism as its goal, as the distribution of wealth can not reasonably be treated separate from the ownership and control of the means of production. Thus focusing on redistribution is effectively making an own-goal, playing right into the hands of the ruling classes and/or reformists by changing focus away from the necessity of restructuring society and the control of labor.
He goes on after the most famous part of the quote, to say:
'I have dealt more at length with the "undiminished" proceeds of labor, on the one hand, and with "equal right" and "fair distribution", on the other, in order to show what a crime it is to attempt, on the one hand, to force on our Party again, as dogmas, ideas which in a certain period had some meaning but have now become obsolete verbal rubbish, while again perverting, on the other, the realistic outlook, which it cost so much effort to instill into the Party but which has now taken root in it, by means of ideological nonsense about right and other trash so common among the democrats and French socialists.
Quite apart from the analysis so far given, it was in general a mistake to make a fuss about so-called distribution and put the principal stress on it.
Any distribution whatever of the means of consumption is only a consequence of the distribution of the conditions of production themselves. The latter distribution, however, is a feature of the mode of production itself. The capitalist mode of production, for example, rests on the fact that the material conditions of production are in the hands of nonworkers in the form of property in capital and land, while the masses are only owners of the personal condition of production, of labor power. If the elements of production are so distributed, then the present-day distribution of the means of consumption results automatically. If the material conditions of production are the co-operative property of the workers themselves, then there likewise results a distribution of the means of consumption different from the present one. Vulgar socialism (and from it in turn a section of the democrats) has taken over from the bourgeois economists the consideration and treatment of distribution as independent of the mode of production and hence the presentation of socialism as turning principally on distribution. After the real relation has long been made clear, why retrogress again?'
In other words: Marx saw the focus on redistribution as largely _missing the point_. The main issue, according to Marx, is the mode of production: ownership of the means of production and conditions under which people work.
Thus the systems inside any large company, no matter how much you "spread the wealth around" is a sideshow: Unless it alters the decision process, ultimately the distinct capitalist distribution of wealth eventually asserts itself. And just how many capitalist companies do you know where an objective measure of productivity, rather than hierarchy, is used to determine what is available to most employees?
There may be socialist ideologies that might fit your idea - various meritocratic systems, such as Saint Simon's original technocratic meritocracy, for example might be a better fit. But Marxist it isn't.
