Gotha Program

the program of the German Social Democrats adopted at the Gotha Congress of May 22–27, 1875, at which the Eisenachers (the Social Democratic Workers’ Party, founded in 1869) and the Lassallean-oriented General Association of German Workers united to form the Socialist Labor Party of Germany.

The creation of a united party of the working class was a major event in the history of the German workers’ movement. The proposition that the emancipation of the working class requires the transformation of the means of production into socialized property was formulated in the party program. The party’s aim was declared to be the emancipation of the working class and the creation of a socialist society. The party adopted the slogan of proletarian internationalism. At the same time, seeking to achieve unity at any price, the Eisenachers made a number of concessions to the Lassal-leans. The comments of K. Marx and F. Engels, criticizing the draft program in very sharp and profound terms, were hardly considered.

The Gotha Program contained crude distortions of the programmatical and tactical bases of the proletarian movement. The idea of the socialist revolution and the conquest of political power by the proletariat was left out of the program. Lasalle’s concept of the “iron law of wages,” corresponding to the Malthusian “theory” of the poverty of the toiling masses as a natural law, and Lassalle’s thesis that, in relation to the proletariat, all other classes including the peasantry supposedly constitute a single reactionary mass were essentially reproduced in the program. Marx especially sharply criticized the draft program for asserting that the working class can achieve its aims only through universal suffrage and the establishment of producer’s cooperative societies with state aid (the state in question being the bourgeois-Junker empire of Bismarck). Criticizing the draft program for obscuring the class nature of the state, Marx emphasized that the dictatorship of the proletariat was necessary to assure the rule of the proletariat and to build a socialist society.

The Gotha Program was a step backward by comparison with the program of the Eisenachers. Several passages from the Gotha Program were subsequently used by the revisionists.

Marx and Engels refrained from publicly condemning the Gotha Program because the rank-and-file members of the party placed a revolutionary interpretation upon it in spite of its real content. Nevertheless, when the question of revising the Social Democratic program came up on the eve of the Erfurt Congress of German Social Democracy in 1891, En-gels published Marx’ Critique of the Gotha Program, which had been written in early May 1875. Engels did this in spite of the opposition of several Social Democratic leaders.

The new program adopted at the Erfurt Congress was politically more mature than the Gotha Program had been.