Leon Trotsky
‘you gentlemen who think you have a mission
to teach us of the 7 deadly sins
should first sort out the basic food position
then do your preaching that’s where it begins’
(Brecht, Three Penny Opera)
This new edition of Marx’s 1875 Critique of the Gotha Program, which
comes with a new translation,should be welcomed.
At the beginning of the 1870s, there were two main socialist parties in
Germany. The Social Democratic Workers Party founded by Karl Marx’s
collaborator, Wilhelm Liebknecht, at a congress in Eisenach in 1869, and the
General German Workers Association was founded by the late Ferdinand Lassalle
in 1863.
Marx’s criticism of Lassalle contained in Critique of the Gotha program
was not episodic but was profound and had far-reaching significance for the
German (and international) workers movement. Marx’s letters to Engels on the
subject of Lassalle, and, for that matter, his direct correspondence with
Lassalle, retain immense political and theoretical use.
According to a document of the founding of the Socialist Equality Party
(Germany), “ the SPD was never a homogeneous party. The unification conference
in 1875 in Gotha made numerous concessions to the supporters of Ferdinand
Lassalle, who had died in 1864. Marx sharply criticised the Gotha Programme,
which he accused of being “tainted through and through by the Lassallean sect’s
servile belief in the state”. Lassalle had wanted to establish socialism with
the help of the Prussian state, which he regarded as an institution standing
above the classes. He had even met secretly with Bismarck in order to exploit
the latter’s conflicts with the bourgeoisie in the interests of the working
class. Lassalle justified this opportunist “alliance with absolutist and feudal
opponents against the bourgeoisie” (Marx) by saying that in relation to the
working class, “all other classes are only one reactionary mass”. This
ultra-left cliché blurred the difference between the democratic petty
bourgeoisie, the liberal bourgeoisie and the feudal reaction. It was also
reproduced in the Gotha Programme and was angrily rejected by Marx”.
The Critique of the Gotha Program has, in some radical and academic
circles, been seen as the Marxist movement finally showing what the future will
look like under socialism. At best, this is a miss reading of the book or, worse,
a silly deception.
As the Marxist economist Nick Beams points out, “The development of a
socialist society will not occur according to a series of prescriptions and
rules laid down by an individual, a political party or a governmental
authority. Rather, it will develop based on the activity of the members of
society who, for the first time in history, consciously regulate and control
their social organisation as part of their daily lives, free from the
domination and prescriptions of either the “free market” or a bureaucratic
authority standing over and above them. In one of his earliest writings, Marx
made clear that “only when man has recognised and organised his powers as
social forces, and consequently no longer separates social power from himself
in the shape of political power, only then will human emancipation have been
accomplished” (Marx, On the Jewish Question, Collected Works, Volume 3, p.
168).[1]
While this new translation of a Marxist classic is welcomed, it comes
with a health warning. The politics of the organisation that produced it, to
put it crudely, stink. The Marxist-Humanist Current was founded in the US by
the State Capitalist Raya Dunayevskaya. Along with C L R, James Dunayevskaya, disagreed
with Leon Trotsky's definition of the Soviet Union as a degenerated workers'
state and its bureaucracy as a caste, not a social class. During his time in the
Socialist Workers Party(SWP), James, alongside Raya Dunayevskay, formed the
Johnson-Forrest tendency that the Soviet Union represented a new form of
"state capitalism" with imperialist tendencies. James exclaimed in
his complete and open break with the Fourth International's perspectives:
"Orthodox Trotskyism can find no objective necessity for an imperialist
war between Stalinist Russia and American imperialism. It is the only political
tendency in the world which cannot recognise that the conflict is a struggle between
two powers for world mastery." [State Capitalism and World Revolution,
1950]. James would desert the SWP over its correct position in the Korean War.
Moreover, the outbreak of the Korean War was the major postwar event which put
the state capitalists to the test and decisively exposed them as apologists for
imperialism within the workers' movement.
The Marxist Humanist Current has nothing to do with Marxism. It does not
see the modern working class as revolutionary and has no interest in building a
revolutionary party. The Current concentrates not on the working class but on the
petty bourgeoisie.
As Peter Linebaugh states in his afterword, “We are at the edge of the
abyss staring into the “ecological rift”’. His answer to mankind's problems is
to rely on a rising among black and brown people, women, indigenous peoples,
and the rebels against extinctions that will “become components of ‘the real
movement’ that conquers as well as resists: ‘We can pluck the living flower to
re-create the commons.’
Ironically, Marx’s Critique of the Gotha Program, while aimed at the Lassalelans
of the 19th century, could also be a scathing critique of their
modern-day counterparts in the Marxist Humanist Current.
[1] Some questions and answers on
life under socialism-https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2002/05/corr-m30.html
