Critique of the Gotha Programme

Marx never wrote a book called Critique of the Gotha Programme. In the spring of 1875 the two wings of German socialism - the Eisenachers, who looked to Marx, and the followers of Ferdinand Lassalle, who did not - agreed to merge at a congress in Gotha. A draft programme was circulated. Marx, ill in London and not consulted, read it with fury, wrote his objections in the margins as he went, and posted them to Wilhelm Bracke on 5 May. Liebknecht showed the manuscript to almost nobody; Bebel was in prison and never saw it. The congress adopted the programme with, in the Institute's phrase, "only insignificant corrections". Marx's marginal notes went into a drawer for sixteen years.

They came out because Engels wanted them out. In 1890 the party had resolved to write a new programme and Engels judged the moment had come: "I think I would be guilty of suppression if I any longer withheld from publicity this important - perhaps the most important - document relevant to this discussion." He got it into Die Neue Zeit in January 1891 over the resistance of its publisher and of Karl Kautsky, who insisted on changes and omissions, and Engels made further cuts himself, replacing "a few sharp personal expressions" with dots.

What survived is the most concentrated statement Marx ever made about what comes after capitalism. The critique of "fair distribution" - that you cannot redistribute what you refuse to touch the production of. The analysis of "equal right" in the first phase of communism, still the sharpest short account anywhere of why equality before the law and equal pay for equal work reproduce inequality rather than ending it. The unromantic arithmetic of the deductions that must come off the social product before anything is distributed at all. And the test of the state: is it an organ superimposed upon society, or one subordinate to it?

With the letters and notes that make up the Gotha file, including Engels's stand in the row that followed publication.

New critical introduction by Dmitry Chasovennikov.