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 the town of 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 with a covering note asking that they be passed round the Eisenach leaders. Liebknecht, who thought the merger too far advanced to reopen, showed the manuscript to almost nobody; Bebel, who was in prison, never saw it. The congress adopted the programme, in the words of the Institute's note printed at the back of this volume, "with 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, the party's theoretical monthly, in January 1891, over the resistance of its publisher Dietz and its editor Karl Kautsky, who — as the Institute's note frankly records — "insisted on certain changes and omissions, to which he had to agree." Engels made further cuts himself: "I have omitted a few sharp personal expressions and judgements where these were immaterial, and replaced them by dots." The Social-Democratic deputies in the Reichstag were furious, and the letter to Kautsky that closes this volume's Gotha file is Engels standing his ground in the row that followed. So the most famous statement Marx ever made about what comes after capitalism reached the public as a private letter, censored twice, published sixteen years late by his executor against the wishes of the party it was written for.
The edition in your hands is Moscow's: Progress Publishers' Selected Works in three volumes, Volume Three, first printed in 1970 and reprinted in 1973, following a Russian edition prepared by the Institute of Marxism-Leninism attached to the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. It assembles the whole Gotha file as a single unit: Engels's Foreword of 1891, Marx's covering letter to Bracke, the Marginal Notes in four parts, and two letters of Engels's — to Bebel in March 1875, written before the congress and making the same case independently, and to Kautsky in February 1891, written after the storm broke. The Marginal Notes are given, the edition states, "according to the manuscript" — that is, not from Engels's censored printing but from what Marx actually wrote. That is a real editorial service, and it should be said plainly before anything critical is said at all.
Begin with what the work does supremely well. Marx does not argue that the Gotha programme asks for too little. He asks what its words could possibly mean. Confronted with a demand for "a fair distribution of the proceeds of labour", he takes the phrase apart: "What are 'proceeds of labour'? The product of labour or its value?" And then: "What is 'a fair distribution'? Do not the bourgeois assert that the present-day distribution is 'fair'? And is it not, in fact, the only 'fair' distribution on the basis of the present-day mode of production?" The decisive question follows: "Are economic relations regulated by legal conceptions or do not, on the contrary, legal relations arise from economic ones?" This is the whole method in three sentences. Fairness is not a standard that floats above production and can be applied to it; every mode of production generates its own idea of what is fair, and a socialist party that campaigns for fairness without touching production has borrowed its opponents' yardstick.
From there comes the most concrete passage Marx ever wrote about a socialist economy — and it is concrete precisely because he is being sarcastic about the word "undiminished". If the producers are to receive the undiminished proceeds of their labour, then nothing may be taken out; so let us see what must be taken out. From the total social product must come, first, replacement of the means of production used up; second, an additional portion for expanding production; third, "reserve or insurance funds to provide against accidents, dislocations caused by natural calamities, etc." Only then is there a fund for consumption, and from that must come again the general costs of administration — which "will, from the outset, be very considerably restricted in comparison with present-day society" — then "that which is intended for the common satisfaction of needs, such as schools, health services, etc.", which on the contrary "grows considerably", and then funds for those unable to work. These deductions, Marx says, "are an economic necessity" and "in no way calculable by equity". Anyone who has ever had to answer the question of who pays for the hospitals under socialism has been handed the answer here, and it is a good deal more sober than most of what is written on the subject now.
The analysis of "equal right" that follows is the finest thing in the work. In the first phase of the new society the individual producer gets back, after those deductions, what he has given: labour in one form exchanged for an equal amount in another. That looks like the end of exploitation, and in one sense it is. But, Marx insists, "equal right here is still in principle—bourgeois right". It measures everyone by one standard, labour, and therefore treats unequal people as though they were equal — one worker is stronger, another has more children — so that "with an equal performance of labour, and hence an equal share in the social consumption fund, one will in fact receive more than another, one will be richer than another". Formal equality generates real inequality. "To avoid all these defects, right instead of being equal would have to be unequal." Marx does not conclude that the defect can be legislated away; he concludes that "these defects are inevitable in the first phase of communist society", because "right can never be higher than the economic structure of society". Only when labour has become "not only a means of life but life's prime want" and the springs of co-operative wealth flow more abundantly 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 weaknesses are as real, and they follow from what the document is. It is marginalia: private, elliptical, written at speed and in anger by a sick man who expected perhaps a dozen readers. Sentences that later carried the weight of state doctrine are asides. The most consequential of them — "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" — contains no institutional content whatever. Not a word here about how that state is composed, how its officers are chosen or removed, what limits it, or how it is wound up. Marx had answered those questions four years earlier, in detail, in The Civil War in France: officials elected and subject to recall at any time, paid workmen's wages, no standing army, no separate bureaucracy. Engels remembers it in his letter to Bebel — "The whole talk about the state should be dropped, especially since the Commune, which was no longer a state in the proper sense of the word" — but Marx, writing in the margin, does not repeat himself. The sentence went out into the world alone, and it was as a lone sentence that it made its career.
The account of the two phases has a comparable weakness. The higher phase is defined by conditions — the end of the division of labour, the end of the split between mental and physical work, abundance — with no timetable attached and no mechanism specified for getting there. Marx, who ridiculed the utopians for describing the future, was right to refuse a blueprint. But a threshold that nobody can date is available to anyone who would rather not cross it. And on the political question at issue in 1875 Marx was, in the plainest sense, wrong: the merger he thought a betrayal produced within fifteen years the largest workers' party in the world, and Engels lived to concede in practice what he had denied in March. Marx's own maxim to Bracke — "Every step of real movement is more important than a dozen programmes" — cuts against the document it introduces, and one suspects he knew it.
Which brings us to the question this edition cannot ask about itself. Here is a text about distribution and about the state, reprinted in 1970 and 1973 by a state that had rewritten both of Marx's answers into their opposites.
Take distribution first. For Marx, measuring reward by labour performed is "bourgeois right": a survival, a defect, "still constantly stigmatised by a bourgeois limitation", tolerable only because the young society cannot yet do better. For the Soviet Union it was not a defect but the constitutional definition of socialism. As Progress's own textbook Political Economy (A. M. Rumyantsev and others, 1983) records, quoting Article 14 of the Constitution: "The state exercises control over the measure of labour and of consumption in accordance with the principle of socialism: 'From each according to his ability, to each according to his work.'" Marx's transitional embarrassment had become an official principle — and the principle was doing work. It licensed piece rates, Stakhanovite bonuses and a spread of incomes wider than in most capitalist countries. Trotsky had drawn the conclusion in 1936, using exactly Marx's category: the workers' state "assumes directly and from the very beginning a dual character: socialistic, insofar as it defends social property in the means of production; bourgeois, insofar as the distribution of life's goods is carried out with a capitalistic measure of value and all the consequences ensuing therefrom." His arithmetic in The Revolution Betrayed is Marx's argument extended: since wage differences in the USSR were greater, not smaller, than in capitalist countries, the differences were "determined, in other words, not only by differences of individual productiveness, but also by a masked appropriation of the products of the labour of others."
Then the state. Marx's formula for the transition is the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat, and his test of freedom is severe: "It is by no means the aim of the workers, who have got rid of the narrow mentality of humble subjects, to set the state free… Freedom consists in converting the state from an organ superimposed upon society into one completely subordinate to it." Engels, in the letter printed here, goes further: "the state is only a transitional institution which is used in the struggle, in the revolution, to hold down one's adversaries by force, it is pure nonsense to talk of a free people's state", and he proposes dropping the word altogether in favour of Gemeinwesen — "a good old German word which can very well convey the meaning of the French word 'commune'". Now set beside that what the publisher of this volume officially taught. The Party Programme of 1961 had retired the dictatorship of the proletariat and replaced it with the "state of the whole people". V. M. Chkhikvadze's The Soviet Form of Popular Government (Progress, 1972) explains the innovation and, in doing so, gives the game away: among the new tenets was "the idea of the proletarian dictatorship state growing into the state of the whole people", and this was needed because the founders "made no mention of the nature of the state during the transitional period from socialism to the higher phase of communist society." The founders had made no mention of it — so the gap could be filled with a state that was above society rather than subordinate to it, and that was not withering but growing. Progress's ABC of Dialectical and Historical Materialism (1978) even supplies the calendar: dictatorship of the proletariat to 1934, transition from 1934 to 1960, the state of the whole people thereafter, "developing, as the building of communism advances, into communist public self-government."
The apparatus of this volume does not conceal any of this; it simply does not connect it. The Institute's notes are careful and often generous — they date the congresses, identify the newspapers, explain the Kulturkampf (Bismarck's campaign against the Catholic Church, presented as a fight for secular culture), record Engels's own censorship and the Institute's publication of the complete text in 1932. What they never do is put a question. Note 1 introduces the work through Lenin, quoting his praise of Marx's "analysis of what might be called the stages of the economic maturity of communism", and identifies the "revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat" as an "important proposition about the historical inevitability of a special stage of transition". Both statements are true. Both stop precisely where the reader's question begins: is the state that printed this book the one Marx described, and if the first phase has lasted half a century, who decides when it ends? On bourgeois right, on the deductions, on the subordination of the state to society, the notes are silent.
Why it turned out so is a question about circumstances before it is a question about doctrine. A revolution in a poor, largely peasant country, isolated when the German rising failed, its working class dispersed and killed in a civil war fought under foreign intervention, had no material basis for crossing any horizon at all; the emergency lasted long enough to become a structure, and the administering caste that rose out of the scarcity made its position permanent and then had to make the founders agree with it. The evidence that they never did is that the passages above went on being printed, in millions of copies, in the language of international circulation. A regime that had genuinely superseded Marx would have had no need of him. The canonised text is the measure of the betrayal, not its cause.
So what is this Marxism worth now? The critique of "fair distribution" is worth more than ever, in a politics that promises to redistribute what it will not touch the production of, and that keeps discovering that the redistribution does not stick. The analysis of "equal right" remains the sharpest short account anywhere of why equality before the law and equal pay for equal work reproduce inequality rather than ending it — an argument about any society organised on one measure, not only about 1875 or 1936. The deductions passage is a serious, unromantic answer to who pays for the schools and the hospitals, and it has the merit of being arithmetic rather than sentiment. And the test of the state is still the right test to apply, to Moscow in 1973 and to every state since: is it an organ superimposed upon society, or one subordinate to it? Marx supplied the yardstick, the Soviet Union printed it, and it has not yet been taken down.