Karl Marx
Critique of the Gotha Programme
"Starting from these basic principles, the German workers' partystrives by all legal means for the free state—and—socialist society:that abolition of the wage system together with the iron law of wages --and—exploitation in every form; the elimination of all social and politicalinequality."
I shall return to the "free" state later.
So, in future, the German Workers' party has got to believe inLassalle's "iron law of wages"! That this may not be lost, the nonsenseis perpetrated of speaking of the "abolition of the wage system" (it shouldread: system of wage labor), "together with the iron law of wages". IfI abolish wage labor, then naturally I abolish its laws also, whether theyare of "iron" or sponge. But Lassalle's attack on wage labor turns almostsolely on this so-called law. In order, therefore, to prove that Lassalle'ssect has conquered, the "wage system" must be abolished "together withthe iron law of wages" and not without it.
It is well known that nothing of the "iron law of wages" is Lassalle'sexcept the word "iron" borrowed from Goethe's "great, eternal iron laws". [1]The word "iron" is a label by which the true believers recognize one another.But if I take the law with Lassalle's stamp on it, and consequently inhis sense, then I must also take it with his substantiation for it. Andwhat is that? As Lange already showed, shortly after Lassalle's death,it is the Malthusian theory of population (preached by Lange himself).But if this theory is correct, then again I cannot abolish the law evenif I abolish wage labor a hundred times over, because the law then governsnot only the system of wage labor but every social system. Basingthemselves directly on this, the economists have been proving for 50 yearsand more that socialism cannot abolish poverty, which has its basis innature, but can only make it general, distribute it simultaneouslyover the whole surface of society!
But all this is not the main thing. Quite apart from the falseLassallean formulation of the law, the truly outrageous retrogression consistsin the following:
Since Lassalle's death, there has asserted itself in our partythe scientific understanding that wages are not what they appear to be-- namely, the value, or price, of labor—but onlya masked form for the value, or price, of labor power.Thereby, the whole bourgeois conception of wages hitherto, as well as allthe criticism hitherto directed against this conception, was thrown overboardonce and for all. It was made clear that the wage worker has permissionto work for his own subsistence—that is, to live, only insofaras he works for a certain time gratis for the capitalist (and hence alsofor the latter's co-consumers of surplus value); that the whole capitalistsystem of production turns on the increase of this gratis labor by extendingthe working day, or by developing the productivity—that is, increasingthe intensity or labor power, etc.; that, consequently, the system of wagelabor is a system of slavery, and indeed of a slavery which becomes moresevere in proportion as the social productive forces of labor develop,whether the worker receives better or worse payment. And after this understandinghas gained more and more ground in our party, some return to Lassalle'sdogma although they must have known that Lassalle did not know whatwages were, but, following in the wake of the bourgeois economists, tookthe appearance for the essence of the matter.
It is as if, among slaves who have at last got behind the secretof slavery and broken out in rebellion, a slave still in thrall to obsoletenotions were to inscribe on the program of the rebellion: Slavery mustbe abolished because the feeding of slaves in the system of slavery cannotexceed a certain low maximum!
Does not the mere fact that the representatives of our party werecapable of perpetrating such a monstrous attack on the understanding thathas spread among the mass of our party prove, by itself, with what criminallevity and with what lack of conscience they set to work in drawing upthis compromise program!
Instead of the indefinite concluding phrase of the paragraph,"the elimination of all social and political inequality", it ought to havebeen said that with the abolition of class distinctions all social andpolitical inequality arising from them would disappear of itself.
[1]Quoted from Goethe's Das Göttliche