II.

"Proceeding upon these principles, the German Labor Party strives by all legal means for the free state and........... the socialist society, the abolition of the wage-system with the iron law of wages and ...... exploitation in every form; the removal of all social and political inequality."

The "free" state, I shall refer to later on. So in the future, the German Labor Party has to believe in Lassalle's "iron law of wages." That it may not be lost, the nonsense is perpetrated of speaking of “abolition of the wage-system" (it should be called, system of wage-labor) with the "iron law of wages." If I abolish wage-labor, I of course also abolish its laws be they iron or spongy. But Lassalle's contention with wage-labor turns almost wholly upon this so-called law. In order then, to prove the Lassallian sect has been victorious, it is necessary to abolish the "Wage-system with the iron law of wages" and not without it.

It is well known that of the "iron law of wages," nothing belongs to Lassalle except the word "iron," borrowed from Goethe's "eternal, great iron laws!" The word iron is a sign by which the orthodox believers recognize one another. But if I take the law with Lassalle's seal and therefore in his sense, I must also take it with his proof. And what is that? As Lange already showed soon after Lassalle's death: the Malthusian theory of population, preached by Lange himself. But if this is correct, I can not abolish the law though I abolish wage-labor a hundred times, because the law then governs not alone the system of wage-labor but every social system. Upon just this base, the economists have proven for over fifty years that Socialism can not abolish misery which is grounded in nature, but can only generalize it and at the same time, distribute it over the whole surface of society.

But all this is not the chief point. Entirely apart from the false Lassallian conception of the law, the truly enraging step backward consists in this: since Lassalle's death, the scientific insight has broken its way into our party that wages are not what they appear to be, namely, the value, respectively the price, of labor, but only a masked form for the value, respectively the price, of labor-power. Thereby the whole hitherto bourgeois conception of wages as well as the whole criticism hitherto directed against it, were once and for all thrown overboard and it was made clear that the wage-worker has only the permission to work for his own life, i. e. to live, only in so far as he works a certain time for

nothing for the capitalist, therefore also for the latter's coconsumer of surplus value; that the whole system of capitalist production, therefore, turns upon the prolonging of this gratis work, by extension of the workday or by development of the productivity, respectively the greater tension of the labor-power etc.; that consequently, the system of wagelabor is a system of slavery and indeed of a slavery that becomes harder in the same degree as the productive forces of labor develop, whether the workers receive larger or smaller payment. And after this insight has more and more broken its way in our party, they turn back to Lassalle's dogmas although they must now know that Lassalle did not know what wages were, but following the bourgeois economists, took the appearance for the substance of the matter.

It is just as if among slaves who at last have discovered the secret of slavery and have broken out in rebellion, some slave prejudiced by obsolete ideas, were to inscribe in the program of the rebellion: slavery must be abolished because under the system of slavery, the cost of feeding the slaves can not exceed a certain low maximum.

The mere fact that the representatives of our party were capable of committing such a monstrous attack upon the insight spread among the mass of the party, proves not only with what they went to work in the drafting of the compromise program!

frivolity

Instead of the uncertain concluding phrase of the sentence, "the removal of all social and political inequality," it should read: that with the abolition of the class differences, all social and political inequality originating in them, would disappear of itself.

III.

"In order to usher in the solution of the social question, the German Labor Party demands the establishment of productive federations with state aid, under democratic control by the working people. The productive federations are to be called into life for manufacture and agriculture upon such a scale that the socialist organization of the whole of labor shall arise out of them."

According to the Lassallian "iron law of wages," the remedy of a prophet! It is "ushered in," in worthy manner. In place of the existing class-struggle there appears the phrase of a newspaper writer: the "social question" whose "solution" will be ushered in. The "Socialist organization of the whole of labor" "arises," instead of from the revolutionary transformative process of society, from the "state

aid" which the state gives to productive federations which it and not the worker "calls into life."

This is worthy of the imagination of Lassalle, that with state loans, a new society can be built as easily as a new railroad!

**

shame the "state aid"

is placed under

Out of ** the democratic control of the "working people." First: the majority of the "working people" in Germany consists of peasants and not of proletarians.

Second: "democratic" means in German, governing by the people. What does "the governing by the people, control by the working people" mean? And this above all, from working people who by these demands which they made upon the state, express their full consciousness that they neither govern nor are ripe for governing.

It is superfluous to enter here upon a criticism of the recipes written in contradiction of the French socialists by Buchez under Louis Philippe and subscribed to by the reactionary workers of the "Atelier." The main offense does not consist in that these specific wonder-cures have been put into the program, but in general, that there is a retrogression from the standpoint of a class movement to that of a sect movement.

That the workers wish to establish the conditions of confederate production upon a social and firstly by themselves, upon a national standard, only means that they work for the overthrow of the present conditions of production and has nothing in common with the founding of co-operative colonies with state aid. As far as the present co-operative colonies are concerned, they are of value only in so far as they are independent creations of the workers, protected neither by the governments nor by the bourgeois.

IV.

I come now to the democratic portion.
A. "Free foundation of the state."

First, according to II, the German Labor Party strives for "the free state!" Free state what is that? By no means is it the object of those workers who have got rid of the narrow reasoning peculiar to the ruled, to make the state free. In the German empire, the state is almost as "free" as in Russia. The freedom consists in transforming the state from an organ having authority over society into one entirely subordinate to it, and today also, the political forms are freer or less free according to the degree in which they limit the "freedom of the state."

The German Labor Party, - at least, if it adopts the program shows that its socialist ideas are not even skindeep; for instead of treating existing society (and this holds good for every future society) as the foundation of the existing state (or future for future society), it treats the state rather as an independent existence which possesses its own intellectual, moral, free foundation.

And then the base misuse that the program makes of the phrase "present state", "present society," and the still baser misunderstanding which it causes in regard to the state upon which its demands are directed.

"Present society" is capitalist society, that exists in all civilized countries more or less free from mediaeval addition, more or less modified by the special historic development of each country, more or less developed. On the other hand, the "present state" changes with the boundary of the country. It is different in the Prussian-German empire than in Switzerland, different in England than in the United States. The "present state" therefore, is a fiction.

But after all, the various states of the various civilized countries despite their. motley difference in form, all have that in common, that they rest upon the ground of modern bourgeois society, only one more, one less capitalistically developed. Therefore they also have certain important characteristics in common. In this sense, is it possible to speak of the "present state" in contrast to the future, in which its present root, bourgeois society, is dead.

Then the question arises: what transformation will the character of the state undergo in becoming a communist society? In other words, what social functions will be left there, which are analogous to the present functions of the state? This question is to be answered only scientifically and it is impossible by combining the word people with the word state a thousand times, to reach even the length of a flea's jump, nearer to the solution of the problem.

Between the capitalist and the communist society, lies the period of the revolutionary transformation of the one into the other. To this there corresponds also a political transition period, in which the state can be nothing else than the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat.

But the program has to do with neither the last nor with the future character of the state of the communist society.

Its political demands contain nothing more than the old democratic litany, known to all the world: universal suffrage, direct legislation, popular law, popular defence etc. They are

merely an echo of the bourgeois people's party, of the peace and liberty band. They are simply demands which, in so far as they are not exaggerated into fantastic notions, are already realized. Only the state to which they belong, lies not within the boundary of the German empire but in Switzerland, the United States etc. This kind of a "Future L state" is the state of to-day, although existing outside of "the frame" of the German empire.

But one thing is forgotten. Since the German Labor Party expressly declares that it moves within the "present national state", consequently its state, the Prussian-German empire, its demands would otherwise be also for the greatest part senseless, as a person demands only that which he has not-it must not forget the chief thing, namely that all those beautiful little matters depend upon the recognition of the socalled sovereignty of the people; that therefore they are in place, only in a democratic republic.

* *

As one is not in position-and wisely, for the conditions command caution-to demand the democratic republic, as the French labor program did under Louis Phillippe and under Louis Napoleon-so too, one ought not to flee to the * pretense of demanding things which have sense only in a democratic republic, from a state that is nothing else than a military despotism, embellished with parliamentary forms, mixed with feudal additions, already influenced by the bourgeoisie, bureaucratically constructed, guarded by the police,

* * *

Even the vulgar democracy that sees the millennium in the democratic republic and has no suspicion that it is in just this last form of state of bourgeois society that the classstruggle has to be definitely fought out even it stands mountain high above such a kind of democracy, within the boundaries of what is permitted by the police and what is logically forbidden.

The very words: "the German Labor Party demands as economical foundation of the state: a single progressive income tax etc.", show that in fact, by "state" is understood the machine of government or the state, in so far as by division of labor, it forms an economic foundation of the governmental machinery and of nothing else. In the "future state" existing in Switzerland, this demand is tolerably fulfilled. Income tax presupposes the different sources of income of the different social classes, consequently capitalist society. It is therefore not strange that the financial-reformers of Liverpool-bourgeois with Gladstone's brother at their head -put forth the same demand as does the program.