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 Drafted by Karl Kautsky and Eduard Bernstein, this program superseded the Gotha Program and was closer to Marx and Engels’ views.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.