karl marx, critique of the gotha program

(528): a critique of, specifically, the use of the 'bourgeois' notion of 'fairness'--here the scientific vs. utopian distinction is in evidence.

(530): at first, then, as socialist society emerges from capitalism, the principle is simple--"the same amount of labour which he has given to society in one form he receive back in another." ["Here, equal right is still in principle bourgeois right, although principle and practice are no longer at loggerheads..." -- exactly, bringing--for the first time--the bourgeois principles into existence.]

(530): but, of course, and this is critical--"it tacitly recognizes unequal individual endowment and thus productive capacity as natural privileges. It is, therefore, a right of inequality, in its content, like every right."

(531): it is only in the "higher phase of communist society," once all the "nightmares of the past" are exorcised, can we say "From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!"

(531): and here, a nascent critique of left-kenyesianism: "Any distribution whatever of the means of consumption is only a consequence of the distribution of the conditions of production themselves." And then, "vulgar socialism... has taken over from the bourgeois economists the consideration and treatment of distribution as independent of the mode of production and hence the presentation of socialism as turning principally on distribution."

(532): calling for a more measured, historically-specific attitude towards the other class, who the Lasalleans have otherwise denounced as "one reactionary mass." [though the fundamental ontology of his revolution is not at all upset, but re-confirmed]

(534): the "iron" law of wages being exposed for its Malthusian roots

(535): "consequently, the system of wage labour is a system of slavery, and indeed of a slavery which becomes more sever in proportion as the social productive forces of labour develop, whether the worker receives better or worse payment." [the point about Marx believing in 'increasing pauperism' is simply not on--this, really, is the point, which--I'd argue--can be expressed in manifold ways, especially today]

(536): not at all willing to sanction the fetishizing of the State--fearing, we might say, any possibility of this State metastasizing into something outside of the proletariat ["as far as the present co-operative societies are concerned, they are of value only in so far as they are the independent creations of the workers and not proteges either of the government or of the bourgeois."]

(537): KEY: "Freedom consists in converting the state from an organ superimposed upon society into one completely subordinate to it, and today, too, the forms of state are more or less free to the extendt that they restrict the 'freedom of the state.'"

(538): the dictatorship of the proletariat--"they are all demands which, in so far as they are nto exaggerated in fantastic presentation, have already been realized..." but, key, that this is NOT AT ALL the present-day state, at the same time: one cannot demand "things which have meaning only in a democratic republic from a state which is nothing but a police-guarded military despotism." must, in other words, SMASH this state.

(539-540): there is a very healthy skepticism of the State apparatus, here, that has implications for Marxist critiques of social democracy, and the soviet state, alike [this is "tainted through and through by the Lasallean sect's servile belief in the state, or, what is no better, by a democratic belief in miracles, or rather it is a compromise between these two kinds of belief in miracles, both equally remote from socialism."]

(541): what is Marx saying, on child labor? confusing...