The domination of the capitalist over the worker is thus the domination of the thing over man, of dead labour over living labour, of the product over the producer; for the commodities which become the means of domination (in fact only over the worker) are themselves merely the results of the productive process, its products.

The supreme ideal of capitalist production is—at the same time as it increases net produce in a relative way—to reduce as much as possible the number of those who live on wages, and to increase as much as possible the number of those who live on net produce.

[...] with an equal performance of labour, and hence an equal share in the social consumption fund, one will in fact receive more than another, one will be richer than another, and so on. To avoid all these defects, right instead of being equal would have to be unequal. But these defects are inevitable in the first phase of communist society as it is when it has just emerged after prolonged birth pangs from capitalist society. Right can never be higher than the economic structure of society and its cultural development conditioned thereby.

In a higher phase of communist society, after the enslaving subordination of the individual to the division of labour, and therewith also the antithesis between mental and physical labour, has vanished; after labour has become not only a means of life but life’s prime want; after the productive forces have also increased with the all-round development of the individual, and all the springs of co-operative wealth flow more abundantly—only 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!