IV. Part IV: The State, Democracy and the Demands of the Programme

I come now to the democratic section.

First of all, according to II, the German workers’ party strives for “the free state”.

Free state — what is that?

It is by no means the aim of workers who have shaken off the narrow mentality of humble subjects to make the state “free”. In the German Empire the “state” is almost as “free” as in Russia. Freedom consists in converting the state from an organ standing above society into one completely subordinate to it; and today too, forms of state are more free or less free in the measure that they restrict the “freedom of the state”.

The German workers’ party — at least if it adopts this programme as its own — shows that its socialist ideas are not even skin-deep; for instead of treating existing society (and the same holds for any future one) as the basis of the existing state (or of the future state, for future society), it treats the state rather as an independent entity possessing its own intellectual, moral and liberal foundations.

And then there is the wild misuse the programme makes of the words “present-day state” and “present-day society”, and the still wilder misconception it creates about the state to which it addresses its demands!

“Present-day society” is capitalist society, which exists in all civilised countries, more or less free of medieval admixture, more or less modified by the particular historical development of each country, more or less developed. The “present-day state”, on the other hand, changes with each country’s frontier. It is different in the Prusso-German Empire from what it is in Switzerland, different in England from what it is in the United States. “The present-day state” is therefore a fiction.

Nevertheless, the different states of the different civilised countries, in spite of their motley diversity of form, all have this in common: that they stand on the ground of modern bourgeois society, only one more, another less capitalistically developed. They therefore also have certain essential characteristics in common. In this sense one can speak of “present-day statehood”, in contrast to the future, in which its present root, bourgeois society, will have died away.

The question then arises: what transformation will statehood undergo in a communist society? In other words, what social functions will remain there that are analogous to present-day functions of the state? This question can only be answered scientifically, and one does not get a flea-hop nearer to the problem by combining the word people with the word state a thousand times over.

Between capitalist and communist society lies the period of the revolutionary transformation of the one into the other. Corresponding to this there is also a political transition period, whose state can be nothing other than the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat.

Now the programme deals neither with the latter nor with the future statehood of communist society.

Its political demands contain nothing beyond the old democratic litany familiar to all the world: universal suffrage, direct legislation, popular rights, a people’s militia, etc. They are a mere echo of the bourgeois People’s Party and of the League of Peace and Freedom. They are all demands which, in so far as they are not inflated into fantastic notions, have already been realised. Only the state to which they belong does not lie within the borders of the German Empire, but in Switzerland, the United States, etc. This sort of “state of the future” is a present-day state, although one existing outside “the framework” of the German Empire.

But one thing has been forgotten. Since the German workers’ party expressly declares that it acts within “the present-day national state”, and hence within its own state, the Prusso-German Empire — otherwise its demands would for the most part be meaningless, since one demands only what one has not got — it should not have forgotten the main thing, namely that all those pretty little trifles rest on the recognition of the so-called sovereignty of the people, and are therefore in place only in a democratic republic.

Since one is [not in a position] — and wisely so, for circumstances call for caution — to demand the democratic republic, as the French workers’ programmes under Louis Philippe and under Louis Napoleon did, one should not have resorted to the . . . subterfuge of demanding things that have meaning only in a democratic republic from a state which is nothing but a military despotism, decked out with parliamentary forms, alloyed with feudal admixture, already influenced by the bourgeoisie, bureaucratically built and guarded by the police.

Even vulgar democracy, which sees the millennium in the democratic republic and has no inkling that it is precisely in this last form of state of bourgeois society that the class struggle has to be fought out to a decision — even it stands mountains above this kind of democratism within the limits of what the police permit and logic forbids.

That by “state” is in fact meant the government machine, or the state in so far as it forms a special organism separated from society by the division of labour, is shown already by the words: “The German workers’ party demands as the economic basis of the state: a single progressive income tax, etc.” Taxes are the economic basis of the government machinery and of nothing else. In the state of the future existing in Switzerland, this demand is pretty well fulfilled. Income tax presupposes the different sources of income of the different social classes, and hence capitalist society. It is therefore nothing remarkable that the Liverpool Financial Reformers — bourgeois headed by Gladstone’s brother — put forward the same demand as the programme.

Equal education of the people? What do they imagine these words to mean? Do they believe that in present-day society (and it is only with that that one has to deal) education can be equal for all classes? Or is it demanded that the upper classes too shall be compulsorily reduced to the modicum of education — the elementary school — that alone is compatible with the economic conditions not only of the wage-workers but of the peasants as well?

“Universal compulsory school attendance. Free instruction.” The former exists even in Germany, the latter in Switzerland and the United States for elementary schools. If in some states of the latter higher educational institutions are also “free”, that in fact only means defraying the cost of the education of the upper classes from the general tax revenue. Incidentally, the same holds for the “free administration of justice” demanded under A, 5. Criminal justice is to be had free everywhere; civil justice turns almost entirely on conflicts over property and so concerns almost exclusively the propertied classes. Are they to carry on their lawsuits at the expense of the public purse?

The paragraph on schools should at least have demanded technical schools (theoretical and practical) in combination with the elementary school.

“Education of the people by the state” is altogether objectionable. To determine by a general law the funds of the elementary schools, the qualifications of the teaching staff, the branches of instruction, etc., and, as happens in the United States, to supervise the fulfilment of these legal requirements through state inspectors, is something quite different from appointing the state as the educator of the people! Government and church should rather be equally excluded from any influence on the school. In the Prusso-German Empire, of all places (and one should not take refuge in the lame excuse that one is speaking of a “state of the future”; we have seen what that amounts to), it is on the contrary the state that needs a very rough education by the people.

But the whole programme, for all its democratic jingle, is tainted through and through by the Lassallean sect’s servile belief in the state, or, what is no better, by democratic belief in miracles; or rather it is a compromise between these two kinds of belief in miracles, both equally remote from socialism.

“Freedom of science” says a paragraph of the Prussian constitution. Why, then, here?

“Freedom of conscience”! If one wanted, at this time of the Kulturkampf, to remind liberalism of its old catchwords, it could surely have been done only in this form: Everyone should be able to attend to his religious . . . [needs] without the police sticking their noses in. But the workers’ party ought at any rate to have expressed on this occasion its awareness that bourgeois “freedom of conscience” is nothing but the toleration of every possible kind of religious freedom of conscience, and that for its part it endeavours rather to free consciences from the spectre of religion. But one chooses not to rise above the bourgeois level.

I have now come to the end, for the appendix that now follows in the programme is not a characteristic component of it. I can therefore be very brief here.

In no other country has the workers’ party confined itself to so indefinite a demand; it has always fixed the length of the working day that it considers normal under the given circumstances.

The standardisation of the working day must already include the restriction of women’s labour, in so far as it concerns the duration, breaks, etc., of the working day; otherwise it can only mean the exclusion of women from branches of labour that are especially unhealthy for the female body or morally objectionable for the female sex. If that is what was meant, it should have been said.

“Prohibition of child labour”! Here it was absolutely necessary to state the age limit.

A general prohibition of child labour is incompatible with the existence of large-scale industry and therefore an empty, pious wish.

Carrying it out — if it were possible — would be reactionary, since, with strict regulation of working time according to the different age groups and other precautions for the protection of children, an early combination of productive labour with education is one of the most powerful means of transforming present-day society.

In view of the Prusso-German state, it should definitely have been demanded that the inspectors be removable only by a court of law; that any worker can denounce them to the courts for neglect of duty; and that they must belong to the medical profession.

A petty demand in a general workers’ programme. In any case it should have been stated clearly that the workers have no wish, out of competitive envy, to see ordinary criminals treated like cattle, and above all do not want to cut them off from their only means of reform, productive labour. That was surely the least one might have expected of socialists.

It should have been stated what is meant by an “effective” liability law.

It may be noted in passing that, in speaking of the normal working day, the part of factory legislation that ⟨prescribes⟩ health measures and safeguards against danger, etc., has been overlooked. The liability law comes into effect only when these regulations are ⟨infringed⟩.

Dixi et salvavi animam meam.