150 years since the Critique of the Gotha Programme

The Critique was a document based on a letter by Marx written in early May 1875 to the Social Democratic Workers’ Party of Germany (SDAP), with whom Marx and Friedrich Engels were in close association. The letter is named after the Gotha Programme, a proposed manifesto for a forthcoming party congress that was to take place in the town of Gotha. At that congress, the SDAP planned to merge with the General German Workers’ Association (ADAV), who were followers of Ferdinand Lassalle, to form a unified party.

Karl Marx’s ‘Critique of the Gotha Programme’ was written 150 years ago this week. It provides us with Marx’s most detailed pronouncements on revolutionary strategy, the meaning of the term ‘the dictatorship of the proletariat’, the nature of the period of transition from capitalism to communism, and the importance of internationalism.

A socialist activist and politician, Lassalle viewed the state as the expression of ‘the people’, not as a construct of any social class. He adopted a form of state socialism and rejected class struggle by the workers through trade unions. Instead he had a Malthusian theory of the”iron law of wages“, which argued that if wages rose above the subsistence level in an economy, the population would grow and more workers would compete, forcing wages down again. Marx and Engels had long rejected this theory of wages (see my book, Engels 200 pp40-42).

The Eisenachers sent the draft programme for a united party to Marx for comment. He found the programme significantly influenced by Lassalle and so responded with his Critique. However, at the congress held in Gotha in late May 1875 to set up the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD), the programme was accepted with only minor alterations, Marx’s critical letter was published by Engels only much later in 1891, when the SPD declared its intention of adopting a new programme, the result being the Erfurt Programme of 1891. Drafted by Karl Kautsky and Eduard Bernstein, this program superseded the Gotha Program and was closer to Marx and Engels’ views.

In the Critique, among other things, Marx attacked the Lassallean proposal for “state aid” rather than public ownership and the abolition of commodity production. Marx also noted that there was no mention of the organisation of the working class as a class: “and that is a point of the utmost importance, this being the proletariat’s true class organisation in which it fights its daily battles with capital”.

Marx objected to the program’s reference to a ‘free people’s state’. For Marx, “the state is merely a transitional institution of which use is made in the struggle, in the revolution, to keep down one’s enemies by force” so “it is utter nonsense to speak of a free people’s state; …as soon as there can be any question of freedom, the state as such ceases to exist.” This was (and is) a vital distinction between the views of Marx and Engels on the state in a post-capitalist society and the views of social democracy and Stalinism, which talks of ‘state socialism’.

Two stages of communism

Both Marx and Engels always referred to themselves as communists to make the distinction with earlier forms of socialism. They defined communism simply as the ‘dissolution of the mode of production and form of society based on exchange value.’ The most basic feature of communism in Marx’s critique is the overcoming of capitalism’s separation of the producers (labour) from the control of production. To reverse this entails a complete decommodification of labour power. Communist or ‘associated’ production would be planned and carried out by the producers and communities themselves, without the class-based intermediaries of wage labour, market and state.

In the Critique, Marx outlines two stages of communism after the capitalist mode of production has been replaced. In the first stage of communism: “What we have to deal with here is a communist society, not as it has developed on its own foundations, but, on the contrary, just as it emerges from capitalist society; which is thus in every respect, economically, morally, and intellectually, still stamped with the birthmarks of the old society from whose womb it emerges.”

So “accordingly, the individual producer receives back from society – after the deductions have been made – exactly what he gives to it. What he has given to it is his individual quantum of labour. For example, the social working day consists of the sum of the individual hours of work; the individual labour time of the individual producer is the part of the social working day contributed by him, his share in it.

The worker “receives a certificate from society that he has furnished such-and-such an amount of labour (after deducting his labour for the common funds); and with this certificate, he draws from the social stock of means of consumption as much as the same amount of labour cost. The same amount of labour which he has given to society in one form, he receives back in another. Since labour is always, together with nature, a fundamental ‘substance of wealth’, labour time is an important ‘measure of the cost of [wealth’s] production … even if exchange value is eliminated.’

Even in the lower stage of communism, there is no market, no exchange value, no money. During the new association’s lower phase, ‘the producers may … receive paper vouchers entitling them to withdraw from the social supplies of consumer goods a quantity corresponding to their labour–time’; but ‘these vouchers are not money. They do not circulate’ (Marx). Labour certificates are like theatre tickets – to be used once only.

Moreover, Marx assumed that, even in the first phase of communism, most of the total social product will not be distributed to people according to the labour time they perform in the form of labour certificates, but deducted for the common use ‘from the outset’. There will be expanded social services (education, health services, utilities and old age pensions) that are financed by deductions from the total product prior to its distribution among individuals. Hence ‘what the producer is deprived of in his capacity as a private individual benefits him directly or indirectly in his capacity as a member of society’.

Such social consumption will, in Marx’s view, be ‘considerably increased in comparison with present-day society and it increases in proportion as the new society develops’. And with a radical shortening of the working day, thanks to the rapid development of technology, the scope of labour certificates would be substantially narrowed over time.

Eventually “in a higher phase of communist society, after the enslaving subordination of the individual to the division of labour, and therewith also the antithesis between mental and physical labour, has vanished; after labour has become not only a means of life but life’s prime want; after the productive forces have also increased with the all-around development of the individual, and all the springs of co-operative wealth flow more abundantly – 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!”

The transition

From the Critique, we can also categorise a transitional economy between capitalism towards communism. There is a political transition period in which the state can be nothing but the revolutionary ‘dictatorship of the proletariat.’ The term, the dictatorship of the proletariat seems alien to ‘democracy’ as used now, but for Marx and Engels it was simply a description of the takeover of the state and economy by the working class. The term, dictatorship of the proletariat, came from the communist journalist Joseph Weydemeyer who in 1852 published an article entitled ‘Dictatorship of the Proletariat’ in the German language newspaper Turn-Zeitung. In that year, Marx wrote to him, stating: “Long before me, bourgeois historians had described the historical development of this struggle between the classes, as had bourgeois economists their economic anatomy. My own contribution was (1) to show that the existence of classes is merely bound up with certain historical phases in the development of production; (2) that the class struggle necessarily leads to the dictatorship of the proletariat; [and] (3) that this dictatorship, itself, constitutes no more than a transition to the abolition of all classes and to a classless society.”

Capitalism may have the trappings of ‘democracy’ with its somewhat blunted universal suffrage and elected leaders. In reality, this democracy is the dictatorship of capital: the rule of finance capital and big oligopolies controlling the ‘democratic’ institutions. The dictatorship of the proletariat would mean the democratic rule of the majority of working people ‘dictating’ to capital, not vice versa.

When asked to give an example of the dictatorship of the proletariat, both Marx and Engels replied: the Paris Commune. In the 1891 postscript to The Civil War in France (1872) pamphlet, Engels stated: ‘Well and good, gentlemen, do you want to know what this dictatorship looks like? Look at the Paris Commune. That was the Dictatorship of the Proletariat.’

Paris Commune

To avoid corruption, Engels had recommended that the Commune made use of two expedients. In this first place, it filled all posts, administrative, judicial, and educational, by election on the basis of universal suffrage of all concerned, with the right of the same electors to recall their delegate at any time. And, in the second place, all officials, high or low, were paid only the wages received by other workers. In this way, an effective barrier to place-hunting and careerism was set up, even apart from the binding mandates to delegates [and] to representative bodies, which were also added in profusion.

Engels’ second principle was that the elected should not earn more than the electors. This is not only a potent anti-corruption element; it also means that the principle that skilled workers should earn more than unskilled workers is a residue of archaic capitalist production relations. Workers are skilled either because of their inherent qualities (and there is no reason to reward them for this) or because they have benefited from the educational system. In either case, there is no reason to reward them more for this. Garbage refuse collectors are just as important to society as economics professors, if not more.

Those provisions were essential from the start for a workers’ state in transition to communism. Most important, there must be a progressive ‘withering away’ of state power (armies, police, officialdom). In this connection, Marx makes the essential distinction between those performing the function of capital (control and surveillance) and those who perform the function of labour (coordination and unity of the labour process). Marx makes an analogy with an orchestra, where the music director coordinates the musicians. Those performing the work of coordination and unity of the labour process are not managers in the usual meaning. They do not oversee and police, they are not agents of capital who exploit the labourers on behalf of capital. Rather, they are members of the collective labourer. Those performing the work of coordination and unity of the labour process are the opposite of managers in capitalist production relations.

Production in a transitional economy should be increasing the production of use values, that is, the goods workers themselves decide to produce in order to satisfy their needs as expressed by themselves, for example, environmental investments over arms. This requires planning and thus a democratic decision process. It also requires the common ownership of the means of production, democratic decision-making in investments and in the choice of the techniques in the various labour processes that are most suited for a full development of every worker’s potential.

These principles are the key indicators of a workers’ democracy making the transition to socialism/communism. Their expansion or disappearance indicates whether a society is moving towards or away from socialism/communism.

Internationalism

The dictatorship of the proletariat may begin in individual nation states, but such states cannot progress towards socialism, that is, the withering away of state machines towards the ‘administration of things’ unless the dictatorship spreads internationally into the major economies and eventually globally, just as the capitalist mode of production did.

Communist production is not simply inherited from capitalism, needing only to be signed into law by a newly elected socialist government. It requires ‘long struggles, through a series of historic processes, transforming circumstances and men’. Among these transformed circumstances will be ‘not only a change of distribution, but a new organisation of production, or rather the delivery (setting free) of the social forms of production … of their present class character, and their harmonious national and international coordination’. That means the ending of imperialism and its replacement by an association of nations based on democratic planning and common ownership.

Under these criteria, China is not moving ‘towards socialism’. It is a transitional economy that cannot move towards socialism because it lacks the key features of a workers’ democracy as outlined in the Critique; and is surrounded by imperialism. It is in a ‘trapped transition’. And it is in a ‘trapped transition’ which could eventually be reversed, as it proved for the Soviet Union. To avoid that and to move towards socialism, China must raise its productivity levels to that of the imperialist core to reduce working hours and scarcity in social needs and then end wage labour and monetary exchange. But that will not be possible without working-class revolutions in the imperialist core that can establish transitional economies there and then allow the democratic planning of production and distribution globally for social need not profit.

The Critique was in a short letter written by Marx 150 years ago. In 2025, it remains just as clear and relevant to understanding communism as the alternative to capitalism.

First off I want to apologize to my fellow Green Social Thought editorial board members for any misunderstandings caused by my use of the editorial ‘we’ in my previous article Why We Don’t Support Parecon. Since my name was the only one listed as author I did not stop to think that my poor choice of words would lead readers to think that I was speaking for the entire editorial board. I sincerely beg your pardon for this. The criticisms expressed in that article are mine alone.

Second I would like to thank Michael Albert for publishing my article and his response on Z-Net. I was surprised that my article got as much attention as it has. Mr. Albert is right to point out that I avoided critiquing specific elements of parecon, but it also misses the point of my article.

Third I want to make it clear that I speak as a disappointed former supporter of parecon. My fellow editorial board members will remember that 10 years ago, at the Surviving Climate Change conference held here in St Louis, I spoke rather passionately in favor of the model against David Schweikart, a well-known opponent of it. Since then doubts I had became amplified for reasons that may become evident below. I was forced to reconsider my support.

Actually in my article I wasn't completely dismissing parecon. If you read between the lines I was saying it might turn out to be everything Albert and Hahnel say it is, but that not enough evidence has been provided for me to say with any confidence one way or another. What I did was to fling down the gauntlet to see if Mr. Albert can give us something more substantial than mere arguments. I will be very disappointed if Mr. Albert is unable to provide some corroborating evidence, because then that means parecon is simply an interesting thought experiment, but nothing more than that. Carl Sagan once said, "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence." I have always found this questionable, since it implies a double standard whereby claims that fit the established view are given less scrutiny than claims that challenge it. However claiming to have found a way to completely dispense with markets is a pretty big claim. Shouldn't there be some corroborating evidence?

Here is what I mean by corroborating evidence. In the introduction to The Political Economy of Participatory Economics we find the following: "In chapter 6 we suggest computer simulations and social experiments that could substantiate the feasibility of participatory economics [1]. Have these computer simulations been run, did others replicate them, where can I find these results? What about the social experiments mentioned, where are they, how successful? I was sincerely hoping Mr. Albert would overwhelm me with exactly this kind of evidence, which would allow me to concede that the case for parecon is stronger than I thought.

Part of the reason I became disillusioned by parecon was because of my reading “Part 5: Theory and Practice: Institutions and Movement Building” in Real Utopia: Participatory Economics for the 21st Century, edited by Chris Spannos. In it three enterprises are mentioned that attempted to put parecon into practice, or at least those portions that could be put into practice in a single enterprise. None of them states that they were successful at creating balanced work complexes and payment according to effort and sacrifice, though great efforts were clearly made. These are supposed to be pillars of parecon. I will quote from the relevant articles.

Regarding the Mondragon Bookstore and Café in Winnipeg, and balanced work complexes: “but in practice it has been incredibly difficult to achieve that elusive, pure, and equitable “balanced job complex-particularly in areas that require greater levels of skill and training.”[2] Regarding payment for sacrifice and effort: “Paying people equal pay for equal effort would involve holding one’s coworkers accountable for say, getting things done at agreed-upon times. It would involve more systematic judgment and evaluation of effort on and off shift, than actually happens at Mondragon, precisely because many are reluctant to do so”[3]

Regarding the Newstandard, an on-line publication, and balanced work complexes; “At TNS we didn’t have the time to get very scientific about it and we also needed each staffer to work on things she was good at”[4]“when we divided up the work, we tried to make sure that each staffer was assigned roughly the same hours of each kind of work. It didn’t always come out equal, but we tried to address inequities by rotating tasks when possible and assigning new or temporary tasks according to who was low on certain types of work.”[5] I will note that rotating tasks is not the same thing as a balanced work complex. Regarding payment for effort and sacrifice: “All full time staff members were paid the same salary regardless of seniority. Though we started off having to receive pay in the form of “sweat equity,” by the end we were paying $21,000 per year, a living wage in most of the cities from which we worked.”[6] I will note that equality of pay is not payment according to sacrifice and effort.

The enterprise that seems to have come closest to realizing parecon norms was South End Press. In regard to payment for sacrifice and effort: “Salary Equalization, with provisos for assistance for those with dependents, special needs, or pegged to extreme effort” [7]. I again note that equality of wages is not exactly the same as payment for sacrifice and effort.  “Extreme effort” is not defined. Assistance for those with dependents or special needs, while admirable, is nowhere mentioned as a principle of parecon.

Regarding balanced work complexes: “Other jobs, like phone answering, chairing meetings, opening mail, cataloguing incoming manuscripts and cleaning the office were rotated on a monthly or weekly basis. The results of this arrangement of tasks would be we hoped, that everyone would have a relatively balanced job complex…” (italics mine). [8]

Rather than achieving balanced work complexes or payment according to effort and sacrifice, what we actually find is heavy reliance on rotation of tasks and equality of wages or salaries. In the literature of parecon neither do I find balanced work complexes defined as simple rotation of tasks, nor payment according to effort and sacrifice defined as simple equality of payment. It might be pointed out that no objective criteria are ever spelled out for what makes a work complex “balanced.” Just how do I measure sacrifice and effort? These pillars of parecon seem to be elusive in reality for people who are ideologically motivated to achieve it. What happens with people who are not so ideologically motivated, and who are simply trying to make a living?  Can we expect an entire society to maintain a high degree of ideological mobilization over an indefinite period of time? It is not that I disagree with the norms parecon promotes as ethical ideals; it is simply that as principles of a functioning economy they seem like vague criteria that are never actually met.

At the time of publishing, one of these enterprises, the Newstandard had gone out of business. Another, South End Press, has recently also gone out of business. I find that this does not inspire confidence. After all I am judging by the kinds of examples Albert and Hahnel themselves say could substantiate their claims! I also note that when pressed for evidence to substantiate his claims, Mr. Albert did not even attempt to refer to the material in Real Utopia: Participatory Economics for the 21st Century. This suggests to me that he himself finds the evidence unconvincing. For an extraordinary claim I find little to no evidence.

As a result I sought out Pat Devine’s Democracy and Economic Planning, which I had found out about in Michael Albert’s Stop the Killing Train. [9] His model of participatory planning through negotiated cooperation impressed me. The work seemed to have a strong empirical basis. He was able to show that some form of participatory planning had actually been used in Britain during the Second World War, [10] and that the Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI) was actually using a limited form in Japan, though he is also critical of the lack of participation by workers and consumers. [11] These are forms of planning that were deployed on a national scale. Many of the positive features that are found in parecon are found in Devine’s model, including full social ownership of the means of production [12] The major difference being that he does not claim to abolish market exchange, but rather market forces [13]. His proposal for the abolition of the social division of labor, with its five categories of activity seems to be more precise, and attainable, than balanced work complexes. [14] This is not the proper place for an examination of Democracy and Economic Planning. I reviewed it favorably in Green Social Thought’s predecessor, Synthesis/Regeneration (Participatory Planning S/R 53, Fall 2010).

This is how it stands in my view: participatory economics, or parecon, is a fascinating, tantalizing thought experiment, but I can’t say with any confidence that it is something that can function in actual world. I earnestly wish that Albert and Hahnel could provide me with the substantiation that they promised readers back when The Political Economy of Participatory Economics was published in 1991, some 27 years ago.

That is almost the entire time I was employed as an art teacher in the St. Louis Public Schools until I retired in 2017. In 1991 we were told that corroborating evidence was forthcoming. In 2018 we are told that corroborating evidence is unnecessary. This is disappointing and unconvincing.

I still hold out hope that someday they will be able to provide this evidence and change my mind. This is why I threw the gauntlet down in Why We Don’t Support Parecon, though again I am surprised that Mr. Albert actually noticed and responded to my article. Unfortunately I found his response disappointing, since he seems to admit that there is no way of providing evidence to back up his claims. Thus I am currently disillusioned by parecon, and find alternative models, such as that advanced by Pat Devine to be more convincing. Given a choice between a rational argument, and a rational argument based on evidence, I will choose the latter.

Footnotes:

The basic problem we have with parecon as advocated by Michael Albert is that we think he proposes blueprints for society without attempting to provide anything empirical to back up his claims. Whenever a criticism is raised, Albert’s response is to assert the beauty and elegance of his model, or to claim he has already considered this or that objection, so why are we being so critical? Of course, since the model is not functioning in the actual world, there is no evidence to falsify it, and Albert can always double down on its elegance in his ideal mindscape. What he does not give us is any evidence that his model can and will function in actuality, nor does he seem to recognize the need to provide any. This is strange coming from one who would no doubt in other contexts caution us against accepting things on faith alone, and who claims to speak scientifically.

After all doesn't evidence, repeatable experiments and/or observations, testable predictions, replication and confirmation count for anything? Can an un-falsifiable idea be scientific? Granted that what may not be testable today may be testable in another century or two, so we are not closed-minded on this count. The other side of the coin however, is that such an idea remains unproven or not proven. It might be true, but right now we can’t know that with any degree of confidence. Keep in mind that the 20^th century gave people some historical reasons for distrusting attempts to replace capitalism: are we doing our cause any good by espousing ideas that we cannot provide evidence for?

The problem is, quite frankly, that Michael Albert provides us with less evidence than even the cheesiest of cheesy UFO paperbacks attempts to provide us with-evidence-to back up his claims. He simply plays a game of positing an idea it is not currently possible to test, which cannot be falsified, and then steps back to watch his critics attempt to falsify what is un-falsifiable! Since of course they cannot do so he can simply reiterate his claims to the elegance of the model, and critics are made to look silly for tilting at windmills. This of course is why claims that cannot be falsified are often greeted suspiciously in the sciences.

Nor can we rest content with the rebuttal that 'we don't understand.' A proposal 'understood' by only Michael Albert and his acolytes is one that does not recommend itself to a mass, popular movement. This is not because the people aren't intelligent enough to 'understand,' but rather because we respect their intelligence far too much to recommend as the goal of a social movement a model whose authors can't back up what they make claims for.

Let supporters of parecon provide us as much evidence as provided by left economists such as Alec Nove in The Economics of Feasible Socialism, or Pat Devine in Democracy and Economic Planning, and we will change our minds. Those economists at least tried to examine real-world situations and make proposals based upon their researches. Perhaps their efforts fall short of Albert’s preconceived ideas of what ‘ought’ to be, but unfortunately we don’t live in an ideal world. Until then there is only one thing we need to ask about parecon and that is-“how do we falsify this?”

No more abstract arguments or songs to the elegance of the model- back up your claims! Unfortunately this is not likely to happen. Instead it can be predicted that any response from Albert on this matter, no matter how verbose or argumentative, can be boiled down to this statement: “Evidence? We don’t got to show you no stinking evidence!”