Co-founder of the Eisenach party and drafter of the Gotha Programme
"Nobody has combatted State Socialism more than we German Socialists, nobody has shown more distinctively than I, that State Socialism is really State capitalism!" — 'Our Recent Congress' (1896)
Born in Giessen, he joined the risings of 1848 and fled by way of Switzerland to London, where he spent twelve years as a close associate of Marx and Engels. In 1869 he founded the Social Democratic Workers' Party with August Bebel at Eisenach; arrested for opposing war credits, he was convicted at the Leipzig treason trial of 1872. He was the man who brought off the Gotha unity congress of 1875 and drafted its programme, the document Marx took apart line by line. From 1890 until his death he edited the party paper Vorwärts. He was the father of Karl Liebknecht.
Career Timeline
- 1848–1849Fought in the Baden rising and fled to Switzerland after its defeat
- 1850–1862Exile in London, close to Marx and Engels, and a member of the Communist League
- 1869Co-founded the Social Democratic Workers' Party at Eisenach with Bebel
- 1870–1872Arrested for opposing war credits; sentenced to two years' fortress confinement at the Leipzig treason trial
- 1875Led the Gotha unity congress and drafted the programme that merged the party with the Lassalleans
- 1878–1890Held the party together as a Reichstag deputy under the Anti-Socialist Laws
- 1890–1900Editor-in-chief of the party paper Vorwärts
- 1900Died in Charlottenburg
The Gotha Programme — The Price of Unity
The unity congress held in Gotha in May 1875 was the greatest gamble of Liebknecht's political life. Bringing together the Marxist SDAP (Eisenachers) and the Lassallean ADAV, Liebknecht personally drafted the compromise programme. He secured a democratic party structure but conceded the Lassallean 'iron law of wages' and the demand for state-aided producer cooperatives. For Liebknecht, organisational unity trumped programmatic purity. Marx, reading the draft in London, was enraged and wrote the Critique of the Gotha Programme, warning that 'every step of real movement is more important than a dozen programmes.' Liebknecht, however, suppressed the critique entirely. Even August Bebel was kept unaware of its existence. Marx's text remained buried for sixteen years until Engels published it in Die Neue Zeit in 1891. Ironically, the compromise document Liebknecht wrote to achieve unity provoked Marx to produce his most systematic vision of the future society: the dictatorship of the proletariat, the two phases of communism, and the principle 'from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.'