Critique of the Gotha Programme
고타강령 비판
Marginal notes Marx wrote in 1875 beside the draft programme on which two German workers' parties were about to merge. Sent through Bracke, they were read by the leadership alone and largely ignored by the congress. The manuscript stayed buried for more than fifteen years until Engels published an abridged text in Die Neue Zeit in 1891. It takes the Lassallean slogans in turn (the undiminished proceeds of labour, fair distribution, the iron law of wages, state-aided co-operatives, the free state) and puts in their place the two phases of communist society and the sentence that the state of the transition period 'can be nothing but the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat'. It is Marx's last answer to the idea of the state as the instrument of socialism.
In depth
Written as a Warning, Not a Toast
In May 1875 two German workers' parties were about to merge at Gotha. On one side stood the Eisenachers: the Social Democratic Workers' Party of Wilhelm Liebknecht and August Bebel, close to Marx and Engels; on the other, the General German Workers' Association founded by Ferdinand Lassalle in 1863. Gathering the scattered forces under Bismarck's empire might have been welcome news. What came from London was not congratulation.
Marx wrote notes in the margin of the draft programme. The original title is 'Marginal Notes on the Programme of the German Workers' Party'; 'Critique of the Gotha Programme' came later. The manuscript, written in late April or early May 1875, went to Wilhelm Bracke to be passed round Geib, Auer, Bebel and Liebknecht and then returned to Marx. The congress effectively ignored it. The programme was adopted with minor changes and the new party became the Socialist Workers' Party of Germany.
What It Took Aim At
The critique proceeds by taking the programme's sentences in order, and its targets are the pieces of Lassalle's legacy embedded in them. The undiminished proceeds of labour collapse before the list of deductions no society can avoid; of the iron law of wages, nothing is Lassalle's except a word borrowed from Goethe; to state-aided co-operatives the answer is a single sentence, that building a new society with state loans as one builds a new railway is worthy of Lassalle's imagination; and to the goal of a 'free state' Marx replies that freedom consists in converting the state from an organ superimposed upon society into one completely subordinate to it.
Pushed to its end, the argument about distribution reaches the famous passage dividing communist society into a lower and a higher phase, and leaves behind the sentence defining the state of the transition period as the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat. A detailed reading that follows the programme clause by clause, with the text quoted at length, is kept in the guided reading of the Critique of the Gotha Programme. This entry is about the document itself: how it was written, buried, published, and what it left behind.
Fifteen Years of Silence, and an Abridged Text
Marx never published the manuscript. Bismarck was jailing Eisenacher leaders at the time, and he had no intention of wrecking the merger.
When the Halle congress of 1890 put revision of the Gotha Programme on the agenda, Engels judged that it could be withheld no longer. In his foreword of 6 January 1891 he wrote that to keep it back any longer would make him guilty of suppression. The leadership objected; Engels published it anyway, in Kautsky's Die Neue Zeit. What appeared, though, was an abridgement. As his foreword states, 'a few sharp personal expressions and judgments' were replaced by dots, some sentences survive only as dots because of the Press Law, and softened wordings were put in square brackets. The printed text is not the manuscript.
What the Document Left Behind
In 1917 Lenin gave the whole of chapter 5 of The State and Revolution over to commentary on it. That chapter is where the 'lower phase' acquired the name socialism and the 'higher phase' the name communism, and the socialism/communism distinction used across the twentieth century comes from it. Article 12 of the 1936 Soviet Constitution, setting down 'From each according to his ability, to each according to his work' as the principle of socialism, belongs to the same line, according to work, not to needs: the formula of the lower phase, written into a constitution.
The reason to read the document now is slightly different. The idea that state ownership and state subsidy amount to socialism was already the programme of a workers' party in 1875, and Marx refused it on the spot. That is why 'state socialism' never became a name the Marxist tradition used for itself.
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- Marxists Internet Archive Marx/Engels Selected Works: 'Written: April or early May, 1875… First Published: Abridged in the journal Die Neue Zeit, Bd. 1, No. 18, 1890-91.' The abridgement is the published text, not the manuscript
- Marxists Internet Archive Part I: 'Labor is not the source of all wealth. Nature is just as much the source of use values'; the list of deductions from the total social product; 'equal right here is still in principle – bourgeois right'; and 'only then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be crossed in its entirety and society inscribe on its banners: From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!'
- Marxists Internet Archive Part II on the iron law of wages: 'It is well known that nothing of the "iron law of wages" is Lassalle's except the word "iron" borrowed from Goethe's "great, eternal iron laws"'; the Malthusian grounding by way of Lange; and the correction that wages are 'only a masked form for the value, or price, of labor power'
- Marxists Internet Archive Part III on state-aided co-operatives: 'It is worthy of Lassalle's imagination that with state loans one can build a new society just as well as a new railway!' and 'they are of value only insofar as they are the independent creations of the workers and not protégés either of the governments or of the bourgeois'
- Marxists Internet Archive Part IV on the 'free state': 'Freedom consists in converting the state from an organ superimposed upon society into one completely subordinate to it', and 'Between capitalist and communist society there lies the period of the revolutionary transformation of the one into the other. Corresponding to this is also a political transition period in which the state can be nothing but the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat.'
- Marxists Internet Archive Engels's foreword, London, 6 January 1891: the manuscript 'was sent in 1875, shortly before the Gotha Unity Congress, to Bracke for communication to Geib, Auer, Bebel, and Liebknecht and subsequent return to Marx'; the Halle Congress put the Gotha Programme on the agenda, so withholding it any longer would make him 'guilty of suppression'; and 'I have omitted a few sharp personal expressions and judgments where these were immaterial, and replaced them by dots'
- Wikipedia (EN) the May 1875 Gotha congress at which the Eisenacher Social Democratic Workers' Party and the Lassallean General German Workers' Association merged into the Socialist Workers' Party of Germany, adopting the programme with minor changes despite Marx's objections; Engels published the text in Die Neue Zeit in 1891 over the leadership's attempt to suppress it
- Marxists Internet Archive chapter 5, the commentary on the Critique: 'What is usually called socialism was termed by Marx the "first", or lower, phase of communist society'; 'under communism there remains for a time not only bourgeois law, but even the bourgeois state, without the bourgeoisie!'; and the reading of the higher phase
- Marxists Internet Archive Constitution of the USSR (1936), Article 12: 'In the U.S.S.R. work is a duty and a matter of honour for every able-bodied citizen, in accordance with the principle: "He who does not work, neither shall he eat." The principle applied in the U.S.S.R. is that of socialism: "From each according to his ability, to each according to his work."'