I realise you're intentionally oversimplifying, but it's worth pointing out that Marx wrote page up and page down to complain about simplistic ideas about redistribution, including simplistic ideas put forward by other socialists and communists about the practical politics of redistribution.
To Marx, under socialism it seemed reasonable to push individual incomes closer to an equal proportion of their contribution to production (but even then distorted in various way by welfare), while under communism he made the point that distribution would explicitly be unequal not just as a side effect of imperfections, but as a fundamental property of the system, because the goal according Marx would be for distribution to follow need independent of your ability to produce, and peoples needs are wildly divergent.
Under no circumstances did he advocate a "flat" equal distribution per person (nor anything similar to that). Instead he explicitly argued for unequal distribution. In the Critique of the Gotha Program, he wrote:
"Further, one worker is married, another is not; one has more children than another, and so on and so forth. Thus, with an equal performance of labor, and hence an equal 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."
He then went on to argue the famous "from each according to ability, to each according to his needs!" [as a goal for an advanced communist society] after explicitly pointing out the unequal nature of such redistribution, and went on to write:
"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."
Instead, according to Marx "any distribution whatever of the means of consumption is only a consequence of the distribution of the conditions of production themselves" - in other words, it is the working class control of the means of production that is important; redistribution would follow from that - an argument that e.g. the Bolsheviks either learned from or ignored, depending on how cynical you are about their intentions, when they started reigning in their early experiments in worker control in favour of the control of their party.
I realise you're intentionally oversimplifying, but it's worth pointing out that Marx wrote page up and page down to complain about simplistic ideas about redistribution, including simplistic ideas put forward by other socialists and communists about the practical politics of redistribution.
To Marx, under socialism it seemed reasonable to push individual incomes closer to an equal proportion of their contribution to production (but even then distorted in various way by welfare), while under communism he made the point that distribution would explicitly be unequal not just as a side effect of imperfections, but as a fundamental property of the system, because the goal according Marx would be for distribution to follow need independent of your ability to produce, and peoples needs are wildly divergent.
Under no circumstances did he advocate a "flat" equal distribution per person (nor anything similar to that). Instead he explicitly argued for unequal distribution. In the Critique of the Gotha Program, he wrote:
"Further, one worker is married, another is not; one has more children than another, and so on and so forth. Thus, with an equal performance of labor, and hence an equal 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."
He then went on to argue the famous "from each according to ability, to each according to his needs!" [as a goal for an advanced communist society] after explicitly pointing out the unequal nature of such redistribution, and went on to write:
"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."
Instead, according to Marx "any distribution whatever of the means of consumption is only a consequence of the distribution of the conditions of production themselves" - in other words, it is the working class control of the means of production that is important; redistribution would follow from that - an argument that e.g. the Bolsheviks either learned from or ignored, depending on how cynical you are about their intentions, when they started reigning in their early experiments in worker control in favour of the control of their party.