“Free State — what is this? It is by no means the aim of the workers [..] to set the State free. [..] [T]oday [..] the forms

“Free State — what is this?

It is by no means the aim of the workers [..] to set the State free. [..] [T]oday [..] the forms of State are more free or less free to the extent that they restrict the ‘freedom of the State’.

The German Workers’ party — at least if it adopts the program — shows that its socialist ideas are not even skin-deep; in that, instead of treating existing society [..] as the basis of the existing State (or of the future State in the case of future society), it treats the State rather as an independent entity that possesses its own intellectual, ethical, and libertarian bases.

[..] [D]ifferent States of the different civilized countries [..] all have this in common: that they are based on modern bourgeois society, only one more or less capitalistically developed. They have, therefore, also certain essential characteristics in common. In this sense, it is possible to speak of the 'present-day State’ in contrast with the future, in which its present root, bourgeois society, will have died off.

The question then arises: What transformation will the State undergo in communist society? [..] [O]ne does not get a flea-hop nearer to the [answer] by a thousand-fold combination of the word 'people’ with the word 'State’.

[..] Its political demands contain nothing beyond the old democratic litany familiar to all: universal suffrage, direct legislation, popular rights, a people’s militia, etc. [..] They are all demands which, insofar as they are not exaggerated in fantastic presentation, have already been realized. Only the State to which they belong does not lie within the borders of the German Empire, but in Switzerland, the United States, etc. This sort of 'State of the future’ is a present-day State, although existing outside [..] of the German Empire.

[..] [A]ll those pretty little gewgaws rest on the recognition of the so-called sovereignty of the people and hence are appropriate only in a democratic republic.

[..] [O]ne should not have resorted [..] to the subterfuge [..] of demanding things which have meaning only in a democratic republic from a State which is nothing but a police-guarded military despotism, embellished with parliamentary forms, alloyed with a feudal admixture, already influenced by the bourgeoisie.

[..] That, in fact, by the word 'State’ is meant the government machine [..] is shown by the words 'the German Workers’ party demands as the economic basis of the state: a single progressive income tax’, etc. Taxes are the economic basis of the government machinery and of nothing else. In the State of the future, existing in Switzerland, this demand has been pretty well fulfilled. Income tax presupposes various sources of income of the various social classes, and hence capitalist society. It is, therefore, nothing remarkable that the Liverpool financial reformers [..] are putting forward the same demand as the program.

[..] [T]he whole program, for all its democratic clang, is tainted through and through by the Lassallean 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.”

–Karl Marx, “Critique of the Gotha Programme: IV” (1875)