Marx on rights and equality "Fair deals" or a new society?

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Ferdinand Lassalle: a founder of the German workers' movement, but his followers substituted vague talk of equal rights' for scientific politic: "NEXT TO the Communist Manifesto of 1847-8 and the 'Gener: Introduction' to the Critique of Political Economy of 1857, the Critique of the Gotha Programme of 1875 is, of all Karl Marx's shorter works, the most complete, lucid and forceful expression of the bases and consequences of his economic and social theory". It is also not easy reading. In it, Marx unsparingly critic ises the draft programme produced for the unification congress in Gotha that year of the two German Socialist parties.

On item after item, he points out, the programme has used phrases which conceal a not-very-radical meaning beneath a radical appearance. The worker's right to the "undiminished proceed of labour"; "equitable distribution of the proceeds of labour"; the idea that all other classes are "one reactionary mass" in contrast to the working class; the "iron law of wages" (that wages can never rise above bare subsistence); the "free state" — all thes The Introduction' to the Critique of the Gotha Programme from which we print excerpts here was written in 1922 by Karl Korsch, one of the many brilliant theorists who flourished in the great Marxist renaissance of the early Communist International under Lenin and Trotsky, but were crushed or pushed out as the Korsch was a member of the German Communist Party, and ir 1923-5 editor of its theoretical journal. Rebelling against Stalinism after 1925, he moved to an ultra-left position. After being expelled from the CP in 1926 he formed an independent group, but that soon collapsed and Korsch turned to purely theoretical work. Despite their political differences he had close relations with Berthold Brecht. In his later years, isolated in exile in the US, he moved away from Marxism. He died in 1961.

THE CENTRAL target of all Marx's criticisms of the Gotha Programme is the Lassallean and Social Democratic conception of the State and of society, which is thoroughly ideological.

At the same time it was still held by most German Social Democrats and it was very clearly articulated in the draft Programme.

This was a fateful time for the socialist movement. The most numerous socialist workers' party which the world has so far seen was coming into existence. For Marx it was once again necessary to protest - in an unequivocally vigorous way, as always, against opportunism - at a draft Programme which contained the characteristic ideological errors of Lassallean socialism, scientifically long outdated and now merely heated up again.

In doing so, Marx had to affirm the validity in all its rigour and results of the basic 'materialist' principle of which he had summed up some decades before in the following pregnant passage: 'Legal relations as well as forms of the state are to be grasped neither from themselves nor from the so-called general development of the human mind, but rather have their roots in the material conditions of life, the sum total of which Hegel, following the example of the Englishmen and Frenchmen of the eighteenth century, combined under the name of "civil society" • However, the anatomy of civil society is to be sought in political economy?

In direct contradiction to this materialist and economic conception of Marx, the Gotha Programme in its very first sentence accepts the throughly ideological position of Lassalle, agording to which the claim of all members of society to the product of their labour should be based on the idea of 'equal right' . Founded on this lofty principle, it proceeds consistently •in" section II to demand a 'free State' in which 'all social and political inequality' is overcome, and ends by making only one socio economic demand - the establishment of producers' cooperatives 'with State aid' The draft (and the definitive version of the Programme) add to this no less than seven purely political and bourgeois-democratic demands. According to Engels every one of these 'directly and literally coincides with the formulations are ripped to shreds.

Stalin faction took control.

for any understanding of M arxist communism, but which is regarded today as 'meaningless' by all his opponents and even by some of his followers.

This discovery is that wages are not, as the bourgeois economists would have it, the value (or price) of labour but only 'a masked form of the value or price of labour power' , which is sold on the labour market as a commodity before it is employed productively (as labour) in the capitalist's enterprise.

It is not without justification, nor out of blind hostility to Lassalle and his followers, that Karl Marx lays such emphatic stress on these key aspects of his. theory of surplus value and fights Lassalle's slogan 'the iron law of wages' with such merciless vigour.

The idea that wages are the value of labour power and not of labour is not merely intended (as some people have thought) to enable Marxist economic theory and science to have a clearer and simpler conceptual structure. On the contrary this discovery contains the nucleus of the true essence of class contradictions within capitalist society. It provides a systematic explanation of the material reasons why these class contradictions arose and why they have developed and sharpened in spite of a continuing rise in the productive power of social labour. It also explains why this very rise in productivity eventually creates the 'material' possibility and necessity of a complete abolition of class contradictions in a communist society.

By contrast, the theory of the 'iron law of wages is based partly on natural science and partly on the philosophy of Right. It can neither explain the real social origin of class contradictions nor is it able, except on ethical and idealist grounds, to argue for the necessity of a . real 'supersession' of this law and with it of the 'curse' it imposes on the working class. (This is why Lassalle's dogma, now adopted by the bourgeois economists, is such a danger tọ the proletariat's struggle for emancipation).

Once this important connection is realised, the full import of the striking comparison made at the end of section III immediately becomes comprehensible. There Marx says* that to base the workers' struggle for emancipation on Lassalle's iron law of wages? would be like basing a slave rebellion on the undernourishment involved in the slave system.

• Marx, in the Critique of the Gotha Programme, sets out the total contradiction between the ideological state socialism of Lassalle and his own materialist communism. As he never tires of saying, the Lassalleans do not have communist society as their final aim, but only a dreary middle position.

It is true that the latter will have overcome private ownership of the means of production and related 'inequalities' and 'injustices' in the distribution of goods. But in every other respect - economically, ethically and spiritually - it will still bear the stamp of the old capitalist society of today. August Bel was Marx's closest ally in the German workers'movement: but even he saw the criticisms by Marx and Engels as the quibbles of two cantankerous 'old men in London' THE DRAFT programme called for "equitable distribution of the proceeds of labour". Marx comments: .

What is 'equitable distribution'?

Do not the bourgeois assert that the present-day distribution is 'equitable! And is it not, in tact, the only 'equitable' distribution on the basis of the present-day mode of production? Are economic relations regulated by legal conceptions or do not, on the contrary, legal relations arise from economic ones? Have not also the socialist sectarians the most varied notions about 'equitable' distribution?

Within the cooperative society based on common ownership of the means of production, the producers do not exchange their products; just as little does the labour employed on the products appear here as the value of these products, as a material quality possessed by them, since now, in contrast to capitalist society, individual labour no longer exists in an indirect fashion but directly as a component part of the total labour. The phrase 'proceeds of labour' _ objectionable even today on account of its ambiguity, thus loses all meaning.

What we have to deal with here is a communist society, not as it has developed on its own foundations, but, on the contrary, as it emerges from capitalist society; which is thus in every respect, economically, morally, and intellectually, still stamped with the birthmarks of the old society from whose womb it emerges. Accordingly the individual producer receives back from society - after the deductions have been made - exactly what he gives to it.

What he has given to it is his individual amount of labour... He receives a certificate from society that he has furnished such and such an amount of labour (after deducting his labour for the common fund), and with this certificate he draws from the social stock of means of consumption as much as costs the same amount of labour. The same amount of labour which he has given to socięty in one form, he receives back another...

Equal right here is still in principle, bourgeois right, although principle and practice are no longer in conflict, while the exchange of equivalents in commodity exchange only exists on the average and not in the indiviCritique of the Gotha Programme, 30p; Wagr price and profit, 40p;

Communist Manifesto 60p; Capital volume 1 dual case.

In spite of this advance, this equal right is still stigmatised by a bourgeois limitation. The right of the producers is proportional to the labour. they supply; the equality consists in the fact that measurement is made with an equal standard, labour....

Right by its very nature can only consist in the application of an equal standard; but unequal individuals (and they would not be different individuals if they were not unequal) are only measurable by an equal standard in so far as they are brought under an equal point of view, are taken from one definite side only, e.g. in the present case are regarded only as workers, and nothing more is seen in them, everything else being ignored.

(But some workers can do more labour. in a given time than others; and some have more children, or different personal circumstances, etc. 'Thus... one will in fact... be richer than another..'/ But these defects are inevitable in the first phase of communist society as it is when it has just emerged after prolonged birth pangs from capitalist society. Right can never be higher than the economic structure of society and the cultural development thereby determined.

In a higher phase of communist society, after the enslaving subordination of individuals under division of labour, and therewith also the antithesis between mental and physical labour, has vanished; after labour, from a mere means of life, has itself become the prime necessity of life; after the productive forces have also increased with the all-round development of the individual, and all the springs of cooperative wealth flow more abundantly - only then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be fully left behind and society inscribe on its banners: from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!

I have dealt more at length withthe 'undiminished proceeds of labour' on the one hand, and with 'equal right and equitable distrion the other, in order to show what a crime it is to atttempt,... (to) pervert the realistic outlook, which has cost so much by means of ideological nonsense about 'right' and other trash common among the democrats and French Socialists.

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effort to instill into the party, but which has now taken root in it,