On the surface this sounds like a terrible and extreme mindset, so I thought about how one might go about disproving it.
Clearly if everyone owned enough productive land to be self-sufficient it would be false. We are told this is still theoretically possible, but it's a finite resource so it's not a given.
Conversely, if one person owned all the land with the arbitrary power of taxing or restricting its use... that would make it true. Similarly with two, three, a dozen...
So contrary to my bias, it would seem a safer bet to consider it true (absent better info or theory)... and its truth may simply be a matter of degrees. I wonder where the logical (almost mathematical or numeric) tipping point is, and how the problem could more precisely be defined or measured.
Unfortunately this mindset is so common that even most "Marxist" movements have corrupted the "to which according to his needs" to "which according to his work/contributions".
Marxists movements have not corrupted it, you just haven’t studied Marxism, specifically Marx’s Critique of the Gotha Programme, from which that phase came.
The end goal is the “higher phase” of communism, in which it is to be, “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.”
However, before reaching the end goal of communism, one must go through the “lower phase” of socialism, wherein it is, “to each according to his contribution.” But even so, in this phase the state is still to provide a social safety net for those unable to work.
Communism has not been yet been reached, as any communist party of any socialist state will tell you themselves. It’s a long-term project, and it probably can’t be reached until socialism has been spread around the world, because as long as capitalist/imperialist states exist, they will attack the socialist states.
