>At 05:32 PM 3/14/01 -0600, Forstater, Mathew wrote:
>>I am basically with you, Yoshie. Short of true socialist revolution
>>(where I am still not completely sure what that would be in all the
>>details) the minimum within the present context we need is
>>guaranteed job (no means tests, no time limits, with health care
>>and child care) at living wage and/or guaranteed basic income,
>>where "job" is defined so broadly that it includes going to school,
>>taking care of your children, working in the community garden,
>>increasing all kinds of community and social services,
>>environmental protection, WPA type oral histories, arts, etc.
<snip>
>That, in fact, by the word "state" is meant the government machine, or the
>state insofar as it forms a special organism separated from society through
>division of labor, 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 —
>bourgeois headed by Gladstone's brother — are putting forward the same
>demand as the program.
>
><...>
>
>But the 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.
>
>http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1870/gotha/ch04.htm
If only the proletariat in the USA had made such a progress as to build a strong reformist workers' party which must be sharply criticized a la Marx's revolutionary "Critique of the Gotha Programme." :-)
Yoshie