The 150th Anniversary of the Critique of the Gotha Programme

Marcello Musto

2025 is a significant date: the 150th anniversary of one of his most im­portant political writings of Karl Marx. In 1875, the General Ger­man Workers' Association, founded by Ferdinand Lassalle, and the Workers' Social Democratic Party, associated with Marx, united into a single politi­cal force: the Socialist Workers' Party of Germany. Marx and Engels were not consulted about this, and as a demonstration of how marginal their influence was on the concrete decisions of the German social democracy, they received the draft of the political programme -based on Lassallean state socialism -only after the decision had been made. Marx, therefore, felt com­pelled to write a lengthy critique in which he harshly condemned the political document that was the basis of the reunification con­gress held in the city of Gotha.

The text was sent by letter to the social democratic leader Wilhelm Bracke, circulated only within the circle of militants closest to Marx and Engels, and remained unpublished. In this context, Engels wrote to August Bebel (one of the main figures of German social democracy of the time) that he could not "forgive his not having told us a single word about the whole business"; and he warned that he and Marx could "never give [their] allegiance to a new party" set up on the basis of Lassallean state so­cialism. Despite this sharp declaration, the leaders who had been active in building what would become the Socialist Workers' Party of Germany (SAPD) did not change their positions.

Marx therefore felt obliged to write a long critique of the draft programme for the unification congress to be held on 22 May 1875 in the city of Gotha. In the letter accompanying his text, he recognised that "every step of real movement is more impor­tant than a dozen programmes". But in the case of "programmes of principles", they had to be written with great care, since they set "benchmarks for all the world to ... gauge how far the party [has] progressed". In the Critique of the Gotha Prog­ramme, Marx inveighed against the numerous imprecisions and mistakes in the new manifesto drafted in Germany. For ex­ample, in criticising the concept of "fair distribution", he asked polemically: "Do not the bourgeois assert that present-day distribution is "fair"? And is it not, in fact, the only "fair" distribution on the basis of the present-day mode of production?" In his view, the political demand to be inserted into the programme was not Lassalle's "undiminished proceeds of labour" for every worker, but the transformation of the mode of production. Marx explained, with his customary rigour, that Lassalle "did not know what wages were". Following bourgeois economists, he "took the appearance for the essence of the matter". Marx explained that "wages are not what they appear to be, namely the value, or price, of labour, but only a masked form for the value, or price, of labour power. Thereby the whole bourgeois conception of wages hitherto, as well as all the criticism hitherto directed against this conception, was thrown overboard once for all and it was made clear that the wage-worker has permission to work for his own subsistence, that is, to live only insofar as he works for a certain time gratis for the capitalist (and hence also for the latter's co-consumers of surplus value)".

Another controversial point concerned the role of the state. Marx maintained that capital­ism could be overthrown only through the "revolutionary transformation of society". The Lassalleans held that "socialist organisation of the total labour arises from the state aid that the state gives to the producers' co-operative societies which the state, not the worker, calls into being." For Marx, however, "co­operative societies [were] of value only insofar as they [were] the independent creations of the workers and not proteges either of governments or of the bourgeois"; the idea "that with state loans one can build a new society just as well as a new rail­way" was typical of Lassalle's theoretical ambiguities.

All in all, Marx observed that the political manifesto for the fusion congress showed that socialist ideas were having a hard time penetrating the German workers' organisations. In keep­ing with his early convictions

"that in true democracy the state is annihilated", in the Critique of the Gotha Programme he emphasised that it was wrong on their part to treat "the state as an independent entity that possesses its own intellectual, ethical and libertarian bases", instead of "treating existing society as ... the basis of the existing state". By contrast, Wilhelm Liebknecht and other German socialist leaders defended their tactical decision to compromise on programme, on the grounds that this was necessary to achieve a unified party. Once again, Marx had to face up to the great distance between choices made in Berlin and in London (where he lived since 1849).

The text was published by Engel sonly after Marx's death, in 1891, the year of approval of the Erfurt Programme, which was much closer to Marx's political ideas. It was printed in Die Neue Zeit, the main theoretical journal of the Social Democratic Party of Germany, with some passages softened and with a brief introduction by Engels explaining the genesis of the text. It must be considered as one of the main political writ­ings of Marx and worth to re­read to understand what does it really mean to practise an anti-capitalist politics.

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Vol 58, No. 14 - 17, Sep 28 - Oct 25, 2025