Politics & Power Quote by Karl Marx

Marx is doing two things at once here: sketching an ethical horizon and policing the timeline for reaching it. The famous line is less a warm fuzzy slogan than a conditional clause with teeth. “In a higher phase” is the key throttle. It tells readers: don’t confuse the messy, bargain-basement “socialism” of transition with the end-state communism that supposedly makes moral arithmetic unnecessary.

The target is “bourgeois right,” Marx’s acidic shorthand for the liberal idea that fairness is best measured by equal rules, equal exchange, and proportional reward. He calls it a “narrow horizon” because, in his view, it smuggles market logic into every corner of life: you get what you earn, you earn what you negotiate, and need is treated as a private problem. Even attempts at equality can reproduce inequality if they’re still calibrated by labor-time, productivity, and formally equal rights for unequal people.

Context matters: this comes from the Critique of the Gotha Program (1875), written as Marx scolds German socialists for fuzzy compromises and premature rhetoric. He’s warning against printing utopia on the banner before the material conditions exist to sustain it. The subtext is a defensive move against the charge of naive idealism: communism isn’t a sermon, it’s a stage that arrives only after scarcity and class antagonism have been structurally reduced.

Rhetorically, the line works because it flips the moral burden. Instead of asking why society should provide for need, it asks why we accept a system that treats need as illegitimate unless it can be “earned.”