Wednesday 16 September 2020

What The Friends of the People Are, Part III - Part 45

Marx had also warned about such dangers. Marx told Lassalle to his face, in 1862, that he was the model of the future workers' dictator, and, in The Critique of the Gotha Programme, warns against the idea that the state can be used as the means for creating socialism. 

“Instead of arising from the revolutionary process of transformation of society, the "socialist organisation of the total labour" "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!.. 

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 revolutionise 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... 

The German Workers' party — at least if it adopts the program — shows that its socialist ideas are not even skin-deep; in that, instead of treating existing society (and this holds good for any future one) as the basis of the existing state (or of the future state in the case of future society), it treats the state rather as an independent entity that possesses its own intellectual, ethical, and libertarian bases... 

But the whole program, for all its democratic clang, is tainted through and through by the Lassallean sect's servile belief in the state, or, what is no better, by a democratic belief in miracles; or rather it is a compromise between these two kinds of belief in miracles, both equally remote from socialism.” 

Engels made the same point in his Critique of the Erfurt Programme, objecting to all state socialism, in relation to calls for the development of welfarism. 

“These points demand that the following should be taken over by the state: (1) the bar, (2)medical services, (3) pharmaceutics, dentistry, midwifery, nursing, etc., etc., and later the demand is advanced that workers’ insurance become a state concern. Can all this be entrusted to Mr. von Caprivi? And is it compatible with the rejection of all state socialism, as stated above?” 

But, the real inheritors of this trend are the various manifestations of this petty-bourgeois mentality, as expressed by the anarchists and terrorists. 

“This development of Narodism was altogether natural and inevitable, because the doctrine was based on the purely mythical idea of peasant economy being a special (communal) system: the myth dissolved when it came into contact with reality, and peasant socialism turned into radical-democratic representation of the petty bourgeois peasantry.” (p 277)


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