Critique of the Gotha Program

In their penetrating account of Marx’s famous hatchet job on the nineteenth-century left, Hudis and Anderson go to the heart of issues haunting the left in the twenty-first century: what would a society look like without work, wages, GDP growth and human self-oppression.

—Paul Mason, writer for New Statesman and author of Postcapitalism: A Guide to Our Future

"This is a compelling moment for a return to Marx’s most visionary writings. Among those is his often-neglected Critique of the Gotha Program. In this exciting new translation, we can hear Marx urging socialists of his day to remain committed to a truly radical break with capitalism. And in Peter Hudis’s illuminating introductory essay we are reminded that Marx’s vision of a society beyond capitalism was democratic and emancipatory to its very core. This book is a major addition to the anticapitalist library."

—David McNally, Cullen Distinguished Professor of History, University of Houston, and author of Monsters of the Market

"Critique of the Gotha Program is a key text for understanding Marx’s vision of an emancipated society beyond capitalism. With an excellent introduction by Peter Hudis, this new translation is both timely and important. Returning to Marx’s pathbreaking essay can give new direction to the political struggles of our time."

—Martin Hägglund, Birgit Baldwin Professor of Comparative Literature and Humanities, Yale University, author of This Life

"This new edition of Marx’s Critique of the Gotha Program, with an illuminating introduction by Peter Hudis, confirms that to re-translate is not only to re-animate old questions in the body of new words, but is also to propel writing towards contemporary exigencies. Arcing across times, the then of a first articulation connects to the now of hindsight and to the unwritten terms of an open future. While the delusions of real existing state socialism have dispelled, confusions around the role of the state in an emancipating society persist. In this short metatext, Marx’s snappish commentaries and his forensic dissections of weasel words and hollow phrases reveal how language matters, because it conveys and betrays ideology, policy, and underlying standpoints. Translation works with this malleability of language. Meaning turns on a dime: political orientation can be realigned, if the slogan evinces exactitude, acknowledging history and horizons of possibility. We should learn, through this book, to read closer, better, and in dialogue."

—Esther Leslie, professor of political aesthetics, Birkbeck College, University of London, and author of Walter Benjamin

"This new translation of Marx’s Critique of the Gotha Program includes an introductory essay by Peter Hudis, which points to Marx’s distinction between value, that is, the socially necessary time required to produce a commodity, and labor itself, that is, the actual number of hours a worker engages in. He provides a provocative and useful critique of Lenin’s conception of the transition to socialism, and of subsequent Marxist-Leninist and social democratic conceptions of a socialist society. This raises questions about the nature of both labor and value in a society in which both have been transformed by technology. Nevertheless Hudis’s analysis provides a clarifying and useful critique of both social democratic and Marxist-Leninist conceptions of socialism/communism."

—Barbara Epstein, professor in the History of Consciousness Department, University of California, Santa Cruz, and author of Political Power and Cultural Revolution

"Critique of the Gotha Program is one of Marx’s great strategic texts, often cited but little read. At a time when the questions of transition and of the forms of organization to exit capitalism are so urgent, this new edition should be saluted. Elaborated by the Marxist-Humanist tendency, it makes a valuable contribution, thanks to the way it situates Marx’s Critique in historical perspective."

—Isabelle Garo, editing committee, Grande Édition des Oeuvres de Marx et Engels, Paris

Editor: Sasha Lilley

Spectre is a series of penetrating and indispensable works of, and about, radical political economy. Spectre lays bare the dark underbelly of politics and economics, publishing outstanding and contrarian perspectives on the maelstrom of capital—and emancipatory alternatives—in crisis. The companion Spectre Classics imprint unearths essential works of radical history, political economy, theory and practice, to illuminate the present with brilliant, yet unjustly neglected, ideas from the past.

Spectre

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David McNally, Global Slump: The Economics and Politics of Crisis and Resistance

Sasha Lilley, Capital and Its Discontents: Conversations with Radical Thinkers in a Time of Tumult

Sasha Lilley, David McNally, Eddie Yuen, and James Davis, Catastrophism: The Apocalyptic Politics of Collapse and Rebirth

Peter Linebaugh, Stop, Thief! The Commons, Enclosures, and Resistance

Peter Linebaugh, The Incomplete, True, Authentic, and Wonderful History of May Day

Richard A. Walker, Pictures of a Gone City: Tech and the Dark Side of Prosperity in the San Francisco Bay Area

Silvia Federici, Patriarchy of the Wage: Notes on Marx, Gender, and Feminism

Raymond B. Craib, Adventure Capitalism: A History of Libertarian Exit, from the Era of Decolonization to the Digital Age

Spectre Classics

E.P. Thompson, William Morris: Romantic to Revolutionary

Victor Serge, Men in Prison

Victor Serge, Birth of Our Power

Karl Marx, Critique of the Gotha Program

Critique of the

Gotha Program

Karl Marx

With a new introduction by Peter Hudis

Translated and annotated by

Kevin B. Anderson and Karel Ludenhoff

Critique of the Gotha Program

Karl Marx

With a new introduction by Peter Hudis

Translated and annotated by Kevin B. Anderson and Karel Ludenhoff

This edition © PM Press 2023

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be transmitted by any means without permission in writing from the publisher.

ISBN: 978–1–62963–926–0

Library of Congress Control Number: 2021936594

Cover by John Yates / www.stealworks.com

Interior design by briandesign

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

PM Press

PO Box 23912

Oakland, CA 94623

www.pmpress.org

Printed in the USA

In memory of James Obst aka Jim Mills, J. Turk (1953–2020), friend, comrade, revolutionary

Contents

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

INTRODUCTION The Alternative to Capitalism in Marx’s

Critique of the Gotha Program by Peter Hudis

Program of the Socialist Workers’ Party of Germany

[Gotha Program]

Letter by Karl Marx to Wilhelm Bracke

Critique of the Gotha Program

Afterword by Peter Linebaugh

INDEX

ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS

Acknowledgments

The final versions of Peter Hudis’s introduction, the new translation of Marx’s Critique of the Gotha Program, and that of the Gotha Program itself are the result of several years of discussion, in which numerous members and friends of the International Marxist-Humanist Organization participated. We are grateful for all their comments and suggestions.

The Alternative to Capitalism in Marx’s Critique of the Gotha Program

By Peter Hudis

I

Today, we face a serious crisis.¹ By we I mean those seeking to challenge and overcome capitalism. By crisis I mean not only today’s severe political and economic retrogression but also the lack of an adequate conception of our goal—a noncapitalist society—that can give action its direction.

We need theoretical as well as practical sources to confront and deal with this crisis. An especially vital one is Karl Marx’s 1875 Critique of the Gotha Program. It was written with a crisis very much in mind—one not that much different from our own.

In 1875, for the first time, the two main wings of German socialism—the followers of Marx (known as Eisenachers) and of Ferdinand Lassalle (founder of the first independent working-class party in Germany)—became a single organization at a unity congress in the city of Gotha. It was supposed to herald a new beginning in the struggle against capitalism. Indeed, the new organization rapidly grew after 1875; by 1905 its successor, the German Social-Democratic Party (SPD) was the most powerful socialist organization on earth, with over a million members. But the new beginning was not to be. Marx saw the unity congress as a tragic error, because it was bought at too high a price: a capitulation to the doctrines of Lassalle, whom Marx had denounced years earlier as a future workers’ dictator. At first he threatened to cut off all relations with the new party; though he decided not to, within a few years he concluded it would be better if the united organization (now widely heralded as Marxist) ceased to exist.² The reason for Marx’s dissatisfaction becomes clear from the Critique of the Gotha Program. It was unpublished in his lifetime and first reached the light of day in 1891—only to then be dutifully ignored. His own followers, he realized, suffered from an extremely defective conception of the alternative to capitalism.

The past one hundred years is the history of a series of defective conceptions of an alternative to capitalism put into practice. The result has been one failure and halfway house after another. Neither the reformist social democratic version of socialism nor its revolutionary variant that was taken over by various forms of Stalinism and Marxist-Leninism succeeded in posing a viable alternative; instead, each morphed into some version of capitalism. Nor did the anarchists fill this void in developing an alternative, since their correct emphasis on democratic and nonstatist forms of decision-making largely failed to consider that the capitalist law of value can exist even under conditions of cooperative or collective production. History, of course, does not come to an end because of the limitations of radical currents. New passions and forces for liberation continuously arise, posing new questions and challenges of their own. This is especially seen in the array of new social movements and freedom struggles in recent years, by women, Blacks, Latinx, and other oppressed peoples, and of LGBTQ movements. Many in these struggles are reaching for a vision of a new society that transcends the limits of both existing capitalism and the so-called socialist and communist regimes of the past. Yet too few theorists and activists are working to provide such a vision. Herein lies our crisis: just when we need an alternative that can speak to masses of people the most, we possess it the least.

We clearly need a new beginning. But a beginning needs a proper foundation. Where is it to be found? For several years, those associated with the Marxist-Humanist current founded in the US by Raya Dunayevskaya have sought to respond to this question. This publication is part of an invitation to rethink the nature of capitalism and the alternative to it, by encountering anew the work in which Marx most fully discussed the nature of socialist or communist society: his Critique of the Gotha Program.

We are aware that we can’t live by the truths of a different era. We face problems that Marx didn’t envision or face. But we are also aware that no thinker developed a more far-reaching and dialectical critique of capitalism. This is because a positive vision of the future was immanent in his negative critique.

We are