II. Part II: The “Iron Law of Wages”

I shall come back to the “free” state later.

So in future the German workers’ party has to believe in Lassalle’s “iron law of wages”! So that it should not be lost, the nonsense is committed of speaking of the “abolition of the wage system” (it should read: the system of wage labour) “together with the iron law of wages”. If I abolish wage labour, I naturally abolish its laws too, whether they are “iron” or spongy. But Lassalle’s attack on wage labour turns almost entirely on this so-called law. In order to prove that the Lassallean sect has won, therefore, the “wage system together with the iron law of wages” must be abolished, and not without it.

Of the “iron law of wages”, as is well known, nothing belongs to Lassalle except the word “iron”, borrowed from Goethe’s “eternal, iron, great laws”. The word iron is a mark by which the orthodox recognise one another. But if I take the law with Lassalle’s stamp on it, and so in his sense, I must also take it with his grounds for it. And what are they? As Lange showed shortly after Lassalle’s death: the Malthusian theory of population (preached by Lange himself). But if that theory is correct, then again I cannot abolish the law even if I abolish wage labour a hundred times over, because the law then governs not only the system of wage labour but every social system. Basing themselves precisely on this, the economists have for fifty years and more been proving that socialism cannot abolish poverty, which is grounded in nature, but can only make it general, distributing it evenly over the whole surface of society!

But all this is not the main thing. Quite apart from the false Lassallean version of the law, the truly outrageous step backwards consists in this:

Since Lassalle’s death the scientific insight has made its way in our party that wages are not what they appear to be, namely the value, or price, of labour, but only a disguised form of the value, or price, of labour-power. With this, the whole previous bourgeois conception of wages, as well as all the criticism hitherto directed against it, was thrown overboard once and for all, and it was made clear that the wage-worker has permission to work for his own livelihood, that is, to live, only in so far as he works a certain time for nothing for the capitalist (and hence also for those who share in consuming surplus-value with him); that the whole capitalist system of production turns on lengthening this free labour, by extending the working day or by developing productivity, that is, by greater strain on labour-power, etc.; and that the system of wage labour is therefore a system of slavery, and indeed of a slavery that grows harsher in the same measure as the social productive forces of labour develop, whether the worker receives better or worse pay. And after this insight has made more and more headway in our party, people return to Lassalle’s dogmas, although they must by now have known that Lassalle did not know what wages were, but, following the bourgeois economists, took the appearance for the essence of the thing.

It is as if, among slaves who had at last found out the secret of slavery and broken out in rebellion, a slave still caught in outdated notions were to write in the programme of the rebellion: slavery must be abolished because the upkeep of slaves under the system of slavery cannot exceed a certain low maximum!

Does not the mere fact that the representatives of our party were capable of committing such a monstrous outrage on the insight widespread among the mass of the party prove by itself with what . . . levity . . . they set to work in drawing up the compromise programme!

Instead of the indefinite closing phrase of the paragraph, “the removal of all social and political inequality”, it should have been said that with the abolition of class distinctions all the social and political inequality arising from them disappears of itself.