Karl Marx
Critique of the Gotha Programme
III
"The German Workers' party, in order to pave the way to the solution
of the social question, demands the establishment of producers' co-operative
societies with state aid under the democratic control of the toiling people.
The producers' co-operative societies are to be called into being for industry
and agriculture on such a scale that the socialist organization of the
total labor will arise from them."
After the Lassallean "iron law of wages", the physic
of the prophet. The way to it is "paved" in worthy fashion. In place of
the existing class struggle appears a newspaper scribbler's phrase: "the
social question", to the "solution" of which one "paves the way".
Instead of arising from the revolutionary process of transformation
of society, the "socialist organization of the total labor" "arises" from
the "state aid" that the state gives to the producers' co-operative societies
and which the state, not the workers, "calls into being". It is
worthy of Lassalle's imagination that with state loans one can build a
new society just as well as a new railway!
From the remnants of a sense of shame, "state aid" has been put
-- under the democratic control of the "toiling people".
In the first place, the majority of the "toiling people" in Germany
consists of peasants, not proletarians.
Second, "democratic" means in German "Volksherrschaftlich" [by
the rule of the people]. But what does "control by the rule of the people
of the toiling people" mean? And particularly in the case of a toiling
people which, through these demands that it puts to the state, expresses
its full consciousness that it neither rules nor is ripe for ruling!
It would be superfluous to deal here with the criticism of the
recipe prescribed by Buchez in the reign of Louis Philippe, in opposition
to the French socialists and accepted by the reactionary workers, of the
Atelier. The chief offense does not lie in having inscribed this specific
nostrum in the program, but in taking, in general, a retrograde step from
the standpoint of a class movement to that of a sectarian movement.
That the workers desire to establish the conditions for co-operative
production on a social scale, and first of all on a national scale, in
their own country, only means that they are working to revolutionize the
present conditions of production, and it has nothing in common with the
foundation of co-operative societies with state aid. But as far as the
present co-operative societies are concerned, they are of value only
insofar as they are the independent creations of the workers and not protégés
either of the governments or of the bourgeois.
Next: Section IV