In other words, all these reforms are designed not with the purpose that the reformists and revisionists, like Bernstein, attach to to them, of ameliorating the workers condition, and approaching Socialism step by step, but simply of freeing the workers, getting the state off their back, and enabling them to engage in their own self-activity and self-government. It is certainly not to suggest that Socialism can be achieved in a Fabian, gradualist manner by appealing to that state to progressively dismantle capitalism and act on behalf of the workers.
When, in 1848, the French social-democrats saw in the state this kind of class neutral mechanism, it prompted Marx to write, in The Eighteenth Brumaire,
“All revolutions perfected this machine instead of breaking it. The parties, which alternately contended for domination, regarded the possession of this huge state structure as the chief spoils of the victor."
Similarly, when the Lassalleans put forward this idea that the state could be used to provide “state aid” to create state sponsored cooperatives or to establish nationalised industries, Marx wrote in the Critique of the Gotha Programme,
“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!
From the remnants of a sense of shame, "state aid" has been put -- under the democratic control of the "toiling people"...
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.”
And, similarly, Marx argued in favour of establishing state school inspectors in the same way as the establishment of Factory Inspectors. His argument for that was two-fold. Firstly, at the time, many workers themselves were uneducated, and were led to set their children to work to earn wages, so that it was necessary to set some minimum standards for the education their children received. Remember that, at this point, education for young workers was provided by employers. So, having the state set and police these minimum standards was again simply a means of achieving by a general reform what would otherwise have had to be negotiated by workers with each employer.
In the programme Marx wrote for the First International, he writes,
“The working man is no free agent. In too many cases, he is even too ignorant to understand the true interest of his child, or the normal conditions of human development. However, the more enlightened part of the working class fully understands that the future of its class, and, therefore, of mankind, altogether depends upon the formation of the rising working generation. They know that, before everything else, the children and juvenile workers must be saved from the crushing effects of the present system. This can only be effected by converting social reason into social force, and, under given circumstances, there exists no other method of doing so, than through general laws, enforced by the power of the state. In enforcing such laws, the working class do not fortify governmental power. On the contrary, they transform that power, now used against them, into their own agency. They effect by a general act what they would vainly attempt by a multitude of isolated individual efforts.”
But, Marx was adamant here too that Marxists should not propose or support such education being provided by the state itself. In the Critique of the Gotha Programme, he writes,
“"Elementary education by the state" is altogether objectionable. Defining by a general law the expenditures on the elementary schools, the qualifications of the teaching staff, the branches of instruction, etc., and, as is done in the United States, supervising the fulfilment of these legal specifications by state inspectors, is a very different thing from appointing the state as the educator of the people! Government and church should rather be equally excluded from any influence on the school. Particularly, indeed, in the Prusso-German Empire (and one should not take refuge in the rotten subterfuge that one is speaking of a "state of the future"; we have seen how matters stand in this respect) the state has need, on the contrary, of a very stern education by the people.”
And summarising this hostility to the role of the state, he continues,
“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.”
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