The
Classics, Mature Struggles, Part 5b
Critique of the Gotha Programme
Today’s main text download, linked below, is Marx’s Critique of the Gotha Programme. It is a great classic. Among our twelve Communist
University courses, it is used in four of them.
In this case, our introduction can largely come from Great
Lenin himself, in the fifth chapter of “The State and Revolution”. That chapter
is dedicated to “The Critique of the Gotha Programme”. Writing of the
“withering away of the state”, Lenin begins by making a distinction between the
“polemical” and the “positive” parts of this text of Marx’s:
“Marx explains this
question most thoroughly in his Critique of the Gotha Programme. The polemical
part of this remarkable work, which contains a criticism of Lassalleanism, has,
so to speak, overshadowed its positive part, namely, the analysis of the
connection between the development of communism and the withering away of the
state.”
Lenin takes the “theory of development” as a given, fixed
and firm. Lenin writes:
“The whole theory of
Marx is the application of the theory of development - in its most consistent,
complete, considered and pithy form - to modern capitalism. Naturally, Marx was
faced with the problem of applying this theory both to the forthcoming collapse
of capitalism and to the future development of future communism.”
In “The State and Revolution”, Lenin quotes the following
directly from “The Critique of the Gotha Programme”:
"Between
capitalist and communist society lies the period of the revolutionary
transformation of the one into the other. Corresponding to this is also a
political transition period in which the state can be nothing but the
revolutionary dictatorship of the
proletariat."
In the same chapter, Lenin notes in his own words, as
follows:
“In the Critique of
the Gotha Programme, Marx goes into detail to disprove Lassalle's idea that
under socialism the worker will receive the "undiminished" or
"full product of his labor". Marx shows that from the whole of the
social labor of society there must be deducted a reserve fund, a fund for the
expansion of production, a fund for the replacement of the "wear and
tear" of machinery, and so on. Then, from the means of consumption must be
deducted a fund for administrative expenses, for schools, hospitals, old
people's homes, and so on. Instead of Lassalle's hazy, obscure, general phrase
("the full product of his labor to the worker"), Marx makes a sober
estimate of exactly how socialist society will have to manage its affairs.”
The following, from Marx, is a point for the advocates of nationalisation to ponder. In the Critique of the Gotha Programme, the best that Marx can manage to say for co-ops is:
“That the workers desire to establish the
conditions for co-operative production on a social scale, and first of all on a
national scale, in their own country, only means that they are working to
revolutionize the present conditions of production, and it has nothing in
common with the foundation of co-operative societies with state aid. But as far
as the present co-operative societies are concerned, they are of value only
insofar as they are the independent creations of the workers and not protégés
either of the governments or of the bourgeois.”
Lenin
remarks (about the Gotha Programme):
“Vulgar socialism (and from it in turn a
section of the democrats) has taken over from the bourgeois economists the consideration
and treatment of distribution as independent of the mode of production and
hence the presentation of socialism as turning principally on distribution.”
Socialism
is not all about “delivery”.
The
Critique of the Gotha Programme is a very relevant document for today, and it
is short. It is a classic. It is worth studying.
Please download and read the text via the following
link:
Critique of the Gotha
Programme, Marx, 1875 (8317 words)
Further
reading:
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