Die Neue Zeit
11th January 2010, 06:58
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/03/24.htm
1. The whole of Germany shall be declared a single and indivisible republic.
2. Every German, having reached the age of 21, shall have the right to vote and to be elected, provided he has not been convicted of a criminal offence.
3. Representatives of the people shall receive payment so that workers, too, shall be able to become members of the German parliament.
4. Universal arming of the people. In future the armies shall be simultaneously labour armies, so that the troops shall not, as formerly, merely consume, but shall produce more than is necessary for their upkeep.
This will moreover be conducive to the organisation of labour.
5. Legal services shall be free of charge.
[...]
The measures specified in Nos. 6, 7, 8 and 9 are to be adopted in order to reduce the communal and other burdens hitherto imposed upon the peasants and small tenant farmers without curtailing the means available for defraying state expenses and without imperilling production.
The landowner in the strict sense, who is neither a peasant nor a tenant farmer, has no share in production. Consumption on his part is, therefore, nothing but abuse.
10. A state bank, whose paper issues are legal tender, shall replace all private banks.
This measure will make it possible to regulate the credit system in the interest of the people as a whole, and will thus undermine the dominion of the big financial magnates [...]
12. All civil servants shall receive the same salary, the only exception being that civil servants who have a family to support and who therefore have greater requirements, shall receive a higher salary.
One of the usual bourgeois snipes at Marx is that he was sort of an economic determinist, and contrasted it with one Joseph Schumpeter:
http://www.economist.com/businessfinance/displaystory.cfm?story_id=14488855
For Marx, economic forces would come to destroy the political and social superstructure of capitalism. In Schumpeter's world, the process works in reverse. The social justification for capitalism is eroded by growing hostility towards the cultural conditions of an advanced capitalist state.
For example, before the Paris Commune, Marx didn't have much to say about the features of "proletarian states" which made them "proletarian states." He just mentioned his common position with non-communist proletarian activists about the need for the proletariat to become the ruling class politically ("conquest of political power" in the Manifesto)... after the initial tasks of organizing it into a class for itself a la Lukacs and establishing proletarian hegemony a la Gramsci ("overthrow of the bourgeois supremacy" in the Manifesto).
The third and twelfth demands are not identical to the average workers' wage measure enacted by the Paris Commune, and the former is definitely a measure for the bourgeois-constitutionalist revolution.
The fourth demand does not explicitly call for militias, since the famous Swiss militias did not emerge until 1848.
Nowhere in his works before 1871 does he mention the recallability of all public officials as a political imperative, nor does he mention jury sovereignty (OK, he never mentioned this specific one after 1871, instead settling for the Commune's elections for all judges).
Thoughts?
1. The whole of Germany shall be declared a single and indivisible republic.
2. Every German, having reached the age of 21, shall have the right to vote and to be elected, provided he has not been convicted of a criminal offence.
3. Representatives of the people shall receive payment so that workers, too, shall be able to become members of the German parliament.
4. Universal arming of the people. In future the armies shall be simultaneously labour armies, so that the troops shall not, as formerly, merely consume, but shall produce more than is necessary for their upkeep.
This will moreover be conducive to the organisation of labour.
5. Legal services shall be free of charge.
[...]
The measures specified in Nos. 6, 7, 8 and 9 are to be adopted in order to reduce the communal and other burdens hitherto imposed upon the peasants and small tenant farmers without curtailing the means available for defraying state expenses and without imperilling production.
The landowner in the strict sense, who is neither a peasant nor a tenant farmer, has no share in production. Consumption on his part is, therefore, nothing but abuse.
10. A state bank, whose paper issues are legal tender, shall replace all private banks.
This measure will make it possible to regulate the credit system in the interest of the people as a whole, and will thus undermine the dominion of the big financial magnates [...]
12. All civil servants shall receive the same salary, the only exception being that civil servants who have a family to support and who therefore have greater requirements, shall receive a higher salary.
One of the usual bourgeois snipes at Marx is that he was sort of an economic determinist, and contrasted it with one Joseph Schumpeter:
http://www.economist.com/businessfinance/displaystory.cfm?story_id=14488855
For Marx, economic forces would come to destroy the political and social superstructure of capitalism. In Schumpeter's world, the process works in reverse. The social justification for capitalism is eroded by growing hostility towards the cultural conditions of an advanced capitalist state.
For example, before the Paris Commune, Marx didn't have much to say about the features of "proletarian states" which made them "proletarian states." He just mentioned his common position with non-communist proletarian activists about the need for the proletariat to become the ruling class politically ("conquest of political power" in the Manifesto)... after the initial tasks of organizing it into a class for itself a la Lukacs and establishing proletarian hegemony a la Gramsci ("overthrow of the bourgeois supremacy" in the Manifesto).
The third and twelfth demands are not identical to the average workers' wage measure enacted by the Paris Commune, and the former is definitely a measure for the bourgeois-constitutionalist revolution.
The fourth demand does not explicitly call for militias, since the famous Swiss militias did not emerge until 1848.
Nowhere in his works before 1871 does he mention the recallability of all public officials as a political imperative, nor does he mention jury sovereignty (OK, he never mentioned this specific one after 1871, instead settling for the Commune's elections for all judges).
Thoughts?