Above: Bebel, Liebknecht (top), Marx (middle), Tölcke [a Lassallean leader], Lassalle (below)
The Critique of the Gotha Programme is a critique of the programme drafted for the merger of two German socialist parties in 1875, the "Eisenachers" and the "Lassalleans", to form the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD). Gotha is the city in central Germany where the merger congress was held on 22-27 May 1875.
The SPD would become the foremost party of the pre-1914 socialist movement, and its left wing, with Luxemburg, Zetkin, Mehring, and Liebknecht, the foremost force after the Bolsheviks in the communist movement between 1917 and Stalinism.
The Critique produced only small amendments to the draft; ADAV brought greater numbers to the merger (16,500 vs 9,000); and even Bebel thought Marx's critique fussy. In Bebel's reminiscences (1911) he wrote: "It was no easy task to come to an understanding with the two old men in London. What we saw as clever calculation and skilful tactics, they saw as weakness and irresponsible compliance; after all, the fact of unification was the main thing. Logically, this carried further development within itself, and our friends and enemies continued to see to that..."
In fact ADAV was in disarray before the merger. The Lassallean leaders of 1875 played little part in the unified SPD. Hasselmann deliberately positioned himself as a maverick and oppositionist, eventually anarchistic, in the merged party. Hasenclever cooperated with Liebknecht and anyway soon moved away from the SPD centre, which was then in Leipzig. Tölcke (pictured above) had already fallen out with Hasselmann and Hasenclever before the Gotha Congress, and anyway focused on local activity in Dortmund. The Eisenachers dominated.
The main subsequent steps in the ideological consolidation of the SPD were the dispute around Engels' Anti-Dühring in 1877-8, Eduard Bernstein's editing in 1880-90 of its paper (then published from exile, because the SPD was illegal from 1878 to 1890), the 1891 Erfurt Programme which replaced the Gotha Programme, and the "revisionism debate" of 1898-1900. The Critique of the Gotha Programme was made public for the first time (by Kautsky) around the 1891 Erfurt Congress, and by then there were few Lassalle-enthusiasts complaining.
In the Critique – addressed to their "Eisenacher" comrades - Marx and Engels criticised the draft for "giving" too much to the "Lassalleans", but also expressed exasperation with flabby phrases which came into the draft from the Eisenachers.
It covers such ideas as:
• "the full proceeds of labour"
• "the iron law of wages"
• "the free people's state"
• the idea that all classes other than the working class are "one reactionary mass"
And it also contains Marx's only, though brief, discussion of the transitions between the socialist revolution (the overthrow of the capitalist state) and fully-functioning socialism. No previous socialist had any developed idea of such transitions.
The Communist Manifesto of 1848 was still in circulation, but that was a manifesto rather than a programme. The Critique was the first and decisive occasion for Marx and Engels to address the question of moving from general socialist and working-class aspirations, often of course vague and contradictory, to something precise enough to guide an organised party.
The Communist League, for which Marx and Engels wrote the Communist Manifesto, had German members. But many of them lived in exile, because of the repressive regime in the German states. In the 1848 revolution the League was overwhelmed, and it was effectively disbanded by 1850.
Political life in Germany was largely suppressed after that, especially in Prussia, by far the dominant state, although Prussia had an elected Assembly (with limited powers and elected on a biased property franchise).
But industry and cities were growing, and grew especially in the 1860s and 70s. The bourgeoisie became more assertive against the monarchies. One of its chief demands was for the unification of the 30-odd German states into one country.
There were two versions of that: a "bigger Germany" including Austria, or a "smaller Germany" without Austria and thus heavily dominated by Prussia, which was by far the biggest German state, with 25 million people in 1871, some 80% of the population of the "smaller Germany" which unified in that year. More left-wing and democratically-minded people supported the "bigger Germany", which they saw as impossible for any one dynasty to dominate. The "smaller Germany" version gained ground after Austria's defeat in the 1859-60 Franco-Italian-Austrian war, in which Austria was defeated and lost its possessions in northern Italy. It gained further ground with Prussia's successful wars against Denmark in 1863-4 (over Schleswig-Holstein) and against Austria (in 1866: it dissolved the German Confederation set up in 1815 which included Austria, and removed any Austrian voice in the administration of Schleswig-Holstein), and was made reality in 1871 after Prussia's successful war against France in 1870-1.
Political life revived in the 1860s. In 1861 a new king of Prussia, Wilhelm I, initially seen as reform-minded, took over. He faced conflict with rising bourgeois liberalism, which had a majority in the Assembly. He appointed Otto von Bismarck as "minister president", and Bismarck then became "chancellor" of the united Germany after 1871.
Bismarck was a conservative, but one who saw his role as managing inevitable progress in deft and conservative ways. In the 1880s he made Germany the first state in the world with workers' compensation for work injuries, sick pay, disability benefits, and old-age pensions. Prussia had already been one of the first states in the world with universal state education at elementary level.
In 1862 Wilhelm I amnestied people who had been criminalised for their role in 1848. Wilhelm Liebknecht, an 1848 revolutionary who had been living in exile in London, and a close associate of Marx and Engels, returned to Germany.
Ferdinand Lassalle, another 1848 revolutionary, a maverick who had spent many of the intervening years helping Countess Hatzfeldt with a court case and secured a good income as a result, started in 1862 an agitation for a workers' party.
There was a network of workers' associations across the country, mostly mutual-aid and educational groups of skilled-trades workers (who habitually moved a lot from city to city when young), often sponsored by bourgeois liberal philanthropists. There was also some localised and craft trade-union activity, though the big expansion of German trade unions came only from the 1890s, after the Anti-Socialist Law and after the expansion of the SPD.
The German Progress Party (the liberals) were not really a party in the modern sense, but more a cluster round a caucus in the Assembly. Bismarck would be able to split away a lot of them to form the National Liberals (from 1867), his main support-base in the Assembly.
In 1863 Lassalle launched the German General Workers' Association, ADAV. It was a party of sorts, and stated the aim of working-class power. Liebknecht joined at first, and Marx and Engels were sort-of friendly, but:
• In practice it aimed most of its fire against the Progress Party. That implied indifference to bourgeois democratic demands.
• In fact Lassalle entered into secret negotiations with Bismarck, aiming to get Bismarck to grant ADAV demands in return for e.g. support from Lassalle for Bismarck's war against Denmark to gain Schleswig-Holstein.
• And it was "little-German", Prussianist, rather than "big-German".
• It was nationalist. Liebknecht and his comrade August Bebel were jailed for opposing Prussia's 1870 war against France, but the ADAV supported the war (though it later opposed the annexation of Alsace-Lorraine and supported the Paris Commune).
• Its agitation centred round just two demands: state aid for producer cooperatives, and universal suffrage. Lassalle promoted those two demands as more or less sufficient for socialism and democracy, but simultaneously thought he could induce Bismarck to grant them. Bismarck did in fact introduce universal (male, 25-and-over) suffrage for the limited-powers all-German parliament after 1871. Germany was still mostly rural and local magnates would largely control peasant and small-town votes, so Bismarck's National Liberal Party and the Catholic Centre Party dominated easily for many years after 1871. Producer cooperatives had been a mainstay of many schools of socialism since Proudhon at least.
• Lassalle polemicised against the free-market liberals' idea of a "night-watchman" state, but in such a way as to glorify the state (which he hoped personally to lead) as a force in history.
• It was cool towards trade unions and trade-union action to raise wages.
• It was anti-feminist, opposed to women entering industrial jobs. Bebel's famous Woman and Socialism, written in prison, must surely have owed much to a will to dispel the Lassallean legacy on this point.
• Its regime was autocratic, certainly under Lassalle for the first year or so of its existence before Lassalle died in a duel, and somewhat under Lassalle's successor (1867-71) Jean-Baptiste von Schweitzer. Mostly after 1864 it was more diffuse (nine presidents over the years 1864-75), and that was one of the reasons for the Gotha merger in 1875.
Meanwhile Liebknecht had been working with Bebel in the workers' associations and in the People's Party, a left-liberal splinter from the Progressives. They won support for their socialist ideas as against the bourgeois ideas of the liberal philanthropists, and in 1869 founded a socialist party, the SPAD, called "the Eisenachers". The "Eisenachers" supported the First International, which the Lassallean ADAV did not.
The "Eisenachers", however, offered a liberal-tinged version of socialism: the term "free people's state", found in the Gotha Programme, comes from them rather than from the Lassalleans.
Some talking points
• What is wrong with the idea that "labour is the source of all wealth" and workers should therefore receive the "undiminished proceeds of labour"?
• What is wrong with the "iron law of wages", the idea that wages under capitalism can never rise above physical subsistence level? (The reference to "Malthusian" is to the idea of Thomas Malthus that the geometric rise of population will always outstrip the arithmetic rise of food supply).
• What will be the difference between a society in transition after the overthrow of capitalism ("the dictatorship of the proletariat") and full socialism?
• Why does Marx criticise what he sees as excessive stress on distribution?
• What is the argument about nationalism and internationalism?
• What is Marx's conclusion about cooperative production?
• What is wrong with the idea of the "free people's state"?
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