A Critique of the Draft Social-Democratic Programme of 1891
Zur Kritik des sozialdemokratischen Programmentwurfes 1891
Engels’s comments of June 1891 on the Party Executive’s draft of what became the Erfurt Programme of German Social-Democracy, published by Kautsky only in 1901. After detailed criticism of the theoretical preamble, he attacks the political demands for leaving out the main thing: the party can come to power only in a democratic republic, “the specific form for the dictatorship of the proletariat”, and the hope that Germany will grow peacefully into socialism under its half-absolutist constitution is opportunism.
- Edition
- Translated for the Compendium from the German text first published in Die Neue Zeit, XX. Jahrgang, 1. Band, Nr. 1 (Stuttgart, October 1901), pp. 5–13, with the editors’ preliminary note and footnotes; the appendix, which the editors could not find in 1901, is translated from Engels’s manuscript text as printed in Marx-Engels-Werke, vol. 22 (Berlin, 1963), without that edition’s notes.
- Source
- Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung, Die Neue Zeit online edition
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Contents
- I The Preamble, in Ten Paragraphs 12 min 28
Engels welcomes the Executive’s draft as an advance on the Gotha Programme, free of Lassallean remnants. He urges a short, precise programme that trusts the workers’ intelligence, and goes through the ten paragraphs of the theoretical preamble: cutting redundant words, correcting the account of the owning classes, replacing growing “misery” with growing insecurity, noting that joint-stock companies and trusts are ending private production, adding the abolition of “classes themselves” and “equal duties”, and proposing a closing sentence that the party must do the work the cowardly German bourgeoisie left undone.
- II Political Demands 13 min 24
The draft’s political demands omit the main point. The Empire’s constitution leaves real power with the government, so talk of peacefully “growing into socialism” is opportunism. The party can come to power only in a democratic republic, “the specific form for the dictatorship of the proletariat”. Since that cannot be demanded legally, Engels proposes the concentration of power in the people’s representatives, a unitary republic replacing both the petty states and Prussia, and complete local self-government by elected officials. He then comments on individual demands, including separation of church and state and the risks of nationalisation under Caprivi.
- III Economic Demands 1 min 4
In a short section on the demands for the protection of labour, Engels stresses that in Germany the right of combination needs protecting against the state itself. He warns that chambers of labour composed half of workers and half of employers would always have employer majorities, and prefers a separate workers’ chamber. He recommends comparing the French programme.
- Appendix to Section I 4 min 6
Engels’s proposed wording for the ten paragraphs, written into the draft: the social means of labour as means of exploitation; growing insecurity rather than misery; the ruin of the middle strata; planned socialist production; the working class’s self-emancipation; and a closing sentence that the party must clear away feudal and absolutist remnants, the work the bourgeois parties were too cowardly to do.