Karl Marx: A Biography

SELECT CRITICAL BIBLIOGRAPHY^214

nation of the individual to the division of labour, and therewith also

the antithesis between mental and physical labour, has vanished; after

labour has become not only a means of life but life's prime want;

after the productive forces have also increased with the all-round devel-

opment of the individual, and all the springs of co-operative wealth

flow more abundandy - only then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois

right be crossed in its entirety and society inscribe on its banners: from

each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!^74

Marx summed up his criticism of this section of the programme by saying:

Vulgar socialism (and from it in turn a section of the democracy) has

taken over from the bourgeois economists the consideration and treat-

ment of distribution as independent of the mode of production and

hence the presentation of socialism as turning principally on distri-

bution. After the real relation has long been made clear, why retrogress

again?^75

Marx's second basic criticism was of the section where the programme

called for a 'free state' and 'the abolition of the wage system together

with the iron law of wages'. Marx replied that wages were not the value

of labour, but the value of labour power. This fact made it clear that

the whole capitalist system of production turns on the increase of

this gratis labour by extending the working day or by developing the

productivity, that is, increasing the intensity of labour power, etc.; that,

consequendy, the system of wage-labour is a system of slavery, and

indeed of a slavery which becomes more severe proportionate to the

development of the social productive forces of labour, whether the

worker receives better or worse payment.^76

The programme's solution to the problem was as misguided as its formu-
lation: it proposed state-aided workers' co-operatives instead of the revol-
utionary transformation of society.
Turning to the proposal for a 'free state' Marx roundly declared that
this could not be an aim of workers worthy of the name 'socialist'.
Marx put the question: 'What transformation will the state undergo in
c ommunist society? What social functions will remain in existence that
are analogous to present functions of the state?' He did not answer this
question specifically, but said: 'Between capitalist and communist society
lies the period of the revolutionary transformation of the one into the
other. There corresponds to this also a political transition period in which
the state can be nothing but the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat.''''''
In fact, the programme contained, according to Marx, nothing but the
'old familiar democratic litany' - universal suffrage, direct legislation,