Critique of the Gotha Programme
III. Part III: Co-operatives with State Aid
Section summary
Lassalle’s remedy, producers’ co-operatives founded with state aid, replaces the class struggle with a journalist’s “social question” and makes the existing state the creator of socialism. Most of Germany’s working people are peasants, and a people that petitions the state for aid admits it is not ready to rule. Co-operatives are valuable only as independent creations of the workers themselves.
“In order to pave the way for the solution of the social question, the German workers’ party demands the establishment of producers’ co-operative societies with state aid under the democratic control of the working people. The producers’ co-operatives are to be called into being for industry and agriculture on such a scale that the socialist organisation of the total labour will arise from them.”
After the Lassallean “iron law of wages”, the prophet’s cure. The way is “paved” for it in worthy fashion. In place of the existing class struggle comes a newspaper writer’s phrase, “the social question”, for whose “solution” the way is being “paved”. 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 producers’ co-operatives which it, not the worker, “calls into being”. This is worthy of Lassalle’s fancy that one can build a new society with state loans just as well as a new railway!
In the first place, the majority of “the working people” in Germany consists of peasants, not proletarians.
Second, “democratic” means in German “volksherrschaftlich” [ruled by the people]. But what is meant by “the people-ruled control of the working people”? And especially in the case of a working people which, by these very demands that it addresses to the state, declares its full awareness that it is neither in power nor ripe for power!
It is superfluous to go here into a criticism of the recipe prescribed by Buchez under Louis Philippe in opposition to the French socialists, and accepted by the reactionary workers of the Atelier. The chief offence, moreover, lies not in having written this specific miracle cure into the programme, but in going back at all from the standpoint of a class movement to that of a sectarian movement.
That the workers want to establish the conditions of co-operative production on a social scale, and first of all in their own country on a national scale, only means that they are working to overturn the present conditions of production, and has nothing in common with founding co-operative societies with state aid. As for the present co-operative societies, they are of value only in so far as they are independent creations of the workers, protected neither by the governments nor by the bourgeois.