Critique of the Gotha Programme
Engels’s Foreword (1891)
Section summary
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.
The manuscript printed here — the covering letter to Bracke as well as the critique of the draft programme — was sent to Bracke in 1875, shortly before the Gotha unity congress, to be passed on to Geib, Auer, Bebel and Liebknecht and afterwards returned to Marx. Since the Halle party congress has put the discussion of the Gotha programme on the party’s agenda, I believe I would be guilty of suppression if I withheld from the public any longer this important — perhaps the most important — document bearing on that discussion.
But the manuscript has another and more far-reaching significance. Here, for the first time, Marx’s position on the course that Lassalle took from the moment he entered the agitation is set out clearly and firmly, both as regards Lassalle’s economic principles and his tactics.
The unsparing sharpness with which the draft programme is dissected here, the relentlessness with which the conclusions reached are stated and the weak points of the draft laid bare — none of this can give offence today, fifteen years later. Specific Lassalleans survive only abroad, as isolated ruins, and at Halle the Gotha programme was given up as wholly inadequate even by its own authors.
Nevertheless, where it made no difference to the substance, I have left out a few sharply personal expressions and judgements and replaced them with dots. Marx would do the same himself if he were publishing the manuscript today. The vehemence of its language in places was provoked by two circumstances. First, Marx and I were more closely bound up with the German movement than with any other; the decided step backwards shown in this draft programme was therefore bound to stir us particularly strongly. Second, we were at that time, barely two years after the Hague congress of the International, engaged in the fiercest struggle with Bakunin and his anarchists, who held us responsible for everything that happened in the labour movement in Germany; we therefore had to expect that the secret paternity of this programme too would be laid at our door. These considerations no longer apply, and with them the need for the passages in question.
For reasons of the press laws, too, a few sentences are only indicated by dots. Where I have had to choose a milder expression, it is placed in square brackets. Otherwise the text is reproduced word for word.