Page:The Economic Journal Volume 1.djvu/713

EVOLUTION OF SOCIALIST PROGRAMME IN GERMANY 691 was able, not merely to create the new doctrine and by stamping to conjure from the ground the fighting hosts of the Social State, but also to set up a permanent dictatorship, as uncontested as it was generally approved. No wonder then that the whole party bore the impress of his name, nor unjustly were they spoken of as Lassalleaner. 2. THE PROGRAMME OF THE ' INTERNATIONAL LABOUR ASSOCIATION ' AND OF THE ? SOCIAL DEMOCRATIC LABOUR PARTY" (1864--1869). The most formidable opponent to the organization created by Lassalle, sprang not directly from the bosom of the 'middle classes,' but from the soil proper to the negatively critical con- ception of society as at present constituted. For it was just the elements of the older German Communism with their chief, Karl Marx, in London, who could approve neither of Lassalle's theory nor of the tactics he pursued. The whole principle and concep- tion of the iron law of wages was enough to arouse extreme repugnance in Karl Marx, who had built up his pessimistic theory of wages, as the 'value of labour-force' in a bourgeois economic r?gime, on his general doctrine of the value of commodities and of a surplus in labour-forces (the ' industrial reserve army '). Besides, the proposal of productive associations as the panacea for all social evils was equally calculated to call forth the full dis- pleasure of the Communist thinker, who as early as 1852 (in the 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte) had declared that the prole- tariate ought not to entangle themselves in academic experi- merits such as Banks of Exchange and Workmen's Associations, but 'should seek to overthrow the old world by their own great aggregate of means.' Nor finally could Communists fail to assume a sceptical attitude in face of the transcendent value placed by Lassallites on universal suffrage, for it was not through parliamentary majorities that Marx believed he could lead Com- munism ? victory. He looked for salvation solely to wider economic development, to the ever-growing destitution of the masses and to the self-annihilation of middle-class society which would inevitably follow. And he accordingly announced openly to the working-men of Germany, by the mouth of Wilhelm Liebknecht, his ablest and most loyal pupil, that Socialism was simply a question of the preponderance of power, which for this reason could not be solved by any parliament in the world. YY2