Critique of the Gotha Programme
Kritik des Gothaer Programms (Randglossen zum Programm der deutschen Arbeiterpartei)
Marx’s marginal notes of 1875 on the draft programme uniting the two German workers’ parties: a critique of Lassalle’s ideas, and his only extended sketch of a communist society, with its first and higher phases, “from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs”, and the “revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat”.
- Edition
- Translated for the Compendium from the text published by Engels in Die Neue Zeit, IX. Jahrgang, I. Band, Nr. 18 (1891), with Engels’s foreword and the letter to Bracke. Engels’s 1891 omissions are kept as dots and his milder substitutions in square brackets; words restored by the Compendium where the scan is illegible are in ⟨angle brackets⟩.
- Source
- Die Neue Zeit (1891), via Internet Archive
Start reading 54 min audiobook
Quiz
Test your reading. The short quiz draws 11 questions at random from 37; score 80% for a silver medal. The full quiz asks all 37; a perfect score earns gold.
Contents
- Engels’s Foreword (1891) 3 min 6
Engels explains why he is publishing, sixteen years later, Marx’s private critique of the programme adopted when the two German workers’ parties united at Gotha in 1875: the party is drafting a new programme, and the document sets out for the first time Marx’s position on Lassalle’s economics and tactics. He has cut a few sharp personal remarks and, for legal reasons, a few sentences, marking them with dots, and softened some phrases, marking them with square brackets.
- Letter to Wilhelm Bracke (5 May 1875) 3 min 7
Marx’s covering letter asks Bracke to pass the notes to the Eisenach party’s leaders. He writes because he will not give the programme even the recognition of silence, and because Bakunin and others wrongly believe he directs the party from London. A programme of principles is a public landmark; if unity required compromise, an agreement for common action would have been better than conceding Lassallean articles of faith. The programme, he concludes, is worthless.
- I Part I: Labour, Its Proceeds, and Distribution 26 min 33
Marx dissects the programme’s first five paragraphs. Labour is not the source of all wealth: nature is too, and whoever owns the conditions of labour controls those who own only their labour-power. The Lassallean “undiminished proceeds of labour” are impossible: in a communist society the total product must first cover replacement, expansion, reserves, administration, common needs and support for those unable to work. In the first phase of communism, still marked by the old society, each worker receives goods according to the labour he contributes, an equal right that is still “bourgeois” because it ignores unequal abilities and needs. Only in a higher phase, when labour has become life’s prime need and wealth flows abundantly, can society write on its banners: from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs. Distribution follows from ownership of the means of production. Marx also attacks the claim that all other classes form “one reactionary mass” and the programme’s narrowly national idea of internationalism.
- II Part II: The “Iron Law of Wages” 5 min 9
The programme’s commitment to abolishing the wage system “together with the iron law of wages” enshrines Lassalle’s doctrine, which rests on Malthus and would make poverty a law of nature that socialism could not abolish either. Since Lassalle’s death the party had learned that wages are the disguised price of labour-power, and that wage labour is a form of slavery however well it is paid. To return to Lassalle’s dogma is a monstrous step backwards.
- III Part III: Co-operatives with State Aid 3 min 6
Lassalle’s remedy, producers’ co-operatives founded with state aid, replaces the class struggle with a journalist’s “social question” and makes the existing state the creator of socialism. Most of Germany’s working people are peasants, and a people that petitions the state for aid admits it is not ready to rule. Co-operatives are valuable only as independent creations of the workers themselves.
- IV Part IV: The State, Democracy and the Demands of the Programme 14 min 20
The demand for a “free state” misunderstands the matter: freedom means subordinating the state to society. “The present-day state” is a fiction, since states differ while capitalist society is common to all. Between capitalist and communist society lies a period of revolutionary transformation, with a corresponding political transition whose state can only be “the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat.” The programme’s democratic demands, already realised in Switzerland and the United States, make sense only in a democratic republic, which the party dares not demand from Bismarck’s military despotism. Marx criticises education “by the state,” defends religious freedom while urging freedom from religion, and comments on the demands for a normal working day, limits on women’s and child labour, factory inspection, prison labour and liability for accidents. He closes: “I have spoken and saved my soul.”