Die Neue Zeit
18th June 2010, 05:19
When I posted this last night:
Lassalle wasn't an oscillator. He came to despise the liberal bourgeoisie, talked about the workers being a Fourth Estate, wanted universal suffrage (his other "single-issue" campaign), etc.
It was Lassalle who attacked the cooperativist Schultze-Delitzsch for being the true creator of what we know today as narrow economism ("self-help" in the economic field, leave politics to the liberals). Lenin and the other Russian Erfurtists (including Rabocheye Delo, in fact) merely tried to emulate Lassalle in their struggle against Credo and Rabochaya Mysl (the narrow economists in Russia)... all before the split in Russian Erfurtism that led to WITBD (against the slippery-slope approach of the still-Erfurtist Rabocheye Delo).
[Now's not the right time to repeat my cheap shot equating Trotsky's TP with Rabocheye Delo's slippery-slope approach. :D ]
I was reading the book Central European Democracy and Its Background, from p.14 onwards per Google Books:
http://books.google.ca/books?id=_LIF8i1OW6gC&pg=PA12&lpg=PA12&dq=lassalle+Schultze-Delitzsch&source=bl&ots=Fhg8Vj6L0u&sig=lxFP-CFWOKBZ8Pk8tY5_2CNhvfs&hl=en&ei=fvIaTJmdH4baNdePrbwM&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CBYQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=lassalle%20Schultze-Delitzsch&f=false
Lassalle's bargaining position in relation to Bismarck, however, consisted precisely in the chance that, if an agreement entered into by him was supported by the workers, Bismarck could dissolve the oppositional Parliament without risk of serious disorder; in compensation Lassalle hoped to obtain manhood suffrage, thereby enabling the workers' party to become a powerful partner in a coalition with either of the major parties. In his answer to the Leipzig workers' committee, dated 1st March 1863, Lassalle developed the plan of his political campaign. He had to show that the workers needed a political party which could obtain, and operate with, manhood suffrage; any diversion from this objective was an evil. Hence his concentration upon a polemic with Schultze-Delitzsch, who had said that the workers needed "self-help" in the economic field, and should leave politics to the Liberals.
Schultze-Delitzsch had taught the German lower middle classes that they should not look for the help of the Prussian State to preserve the patriarchal order of things in which there was an appropriate place for the guild-master, but should help themselves by co-operative effort. There was no inherent reason why a Socialist should refute this statement: Socialist criticism was invited by Schultze's interpretation of the position of the working class as identical with that of the lower middle class. But in order to refute Schultze, Lassalle produced the formula "State help versus self-help," the State help being that of a State brought under pressure by manhood suffrage, the Self-help that of Schultze-Delitzsch. Marx and Engels, whose main message in those years was that "the emancipation of the working class can only come from the workers themselves," quite apart from their hostility to the Prussian State with which Lassalle was bargaining, were bound to reject a propaganda which denounced "self-help" in order to criticize the co-operative utopia. The argument Lassalle used to prove the futility of "self-help" implied also that of trade unionism.
[...]
In discussing alternatives to capitalism, Lassalle replaced Schultze's co-operative utopia by another, namely Producers' Associations with State help, which Louis Blanc had demanded as early as 1848.
[...]
In the minds of the German workers, the conception of the society to come as a complex of producers' associations served as propaganda for the rejection of capitalist exploitation; the polemic against "self-help" meant only the rejection of utopian dreams that workers might turn into capitalists by saving; and the "iron law of wages" was but another way of saying that the maximum achievement in the industrial field could not dispense what the need for political action. This interpretation of Lassalleism was eventually accepted by the German labour movement, and Bebel, the man who contributed most to the overthrow of the Lassallean sect and its specifically Prussian-oriented policies, wrote forty years later that he, like nearly all those who became Socialists during that period, had come to Marx through Lassalle.
Lassalle wasn't an oscillator. He came to despise the liberal bourgeoisie, talked about the workers being a Fourth Estate, wanted universal suffrage (his other "single-issue" campaign), etc.
It was Lassalle who attacked the cooperativist Schultze-Delitzsch for being the true creator of what we know today as narrow economism ("self-help" in the economic field, leave politics to the liberals). Lenin and the other Russian Erfurtists (including Rabocheye Delo, in fact) merely tried to emulate Lassalle in their struggle against Credo and Rabochaya Mysl (the narrow economists in Russia)... all before the split in Russian Erfurtism that led to WITBD (against the slippery-slope approach of the still-Erfurtist Rabocheye Delo).
[Now's not the right time to repeat my cheap shot equating Trotsky's TP with Rabocheye Delo's slippery-slope approach. :D ]
I was reading the book Central European Democracy and Its Background, from p.14 onwards per Google Books:
http://books.google.ca/books?id=_LIF8i1OW6gC&pg=PA12&lpg=PA12&dq=lassalle+Schultze-Delitzsch&source=bl&ots=Fhg8Vj6L0u&sig=lxFP-CFWOKBZ8Pk8tY5_2CNhvfs&hl=en&ei=fvIaTJmdH4baNdePrbwM&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CBYQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=lassalle%20Schultze-Delitzsch&f=false
Lassalle's bargaining position in relation to Bismarck, however, consisted precisely in the chance that, if an agreement entered into by him was supported by the workers, Bismarck could dissolve the oppositional Parliament without risk of serious disorder; in compensation Lassalle hoped to obtain manhood suffrage, thereby enabling the workers' party to become a powerful partner in a coalition with either of the major parties. In his answer to the Leipzig workers' committee, dated 1st March 1863, Lassalle developed the plan of his political campaign. He had to show that the workers needed a political party which could obtain, and operate with, manhood suffrage; any diversion from this objective was an evil. Hence his concentration upon a polemic with Schultze-Delitzsch, who had said that the workers needed "self-help" in the economic field, and should leave politics to the Liberals.
Schultze-Delitzsch had taught the German lower middle classes that they should not look for the help of the Prussian State to preserve the patriarchal order of things in which there was an appropriate place for the guild-master, but should help themselves by co-operative effort. There was no inherent reason why a Socialist should refute this statement: Socialist criticism was invited by Schultze's interpretation of the position of the working class as identical with that of the lower middle class. But in order to refute Schultze, Lassalle produced the formula "State help versus self-help," the State help being that of a State brought under pressure by manhood suffrage, the Self-help that of Schultze-Delitzsch. Marx and Engels, whose main message in those years was that "the emancipation of the working class can only come from the workers themselves," quite apart from their hostility to the Prussian State with which Lassalle was bargaining, were bound to reject a propaganda which denounced "self-help" in order to criticize the co-operative utopia. The argument Lassalle used to prove the futility of "self-help" implied also that of trade unionism.
[...]
In discussing alternatives to capitalism, Lassalle replaced Schultze's co-operative utopia by another, namely Producers' Associations with State help, which Louis Blanc had demanded as early as 1848.
[...]
In the minds of the German workers, the conception of the society to come as a complex of producers' associations served as propaganda for the rejection of capitalist exploitation; the polemic against "self-help" meant only the rejection of utopian dreams that workers might turn into capitalists by saving; and the "iron law of wages" was but another way of saying that the maximum achievement in the industrial field could not dispense what the need for political action. This interpretation of Lassalleism was eventually accepted by the German labour movement, and Bebel, the man who contributed most to the overthrow of the Lassallean sect and its specifically Prussian-oriented policies, wrote forty years later that he, like nearly all those who became Socialists during that period, had come to Marx through Lassalle.