Marx’s most explicit statement on communist society — the two phases of communism, the dictatorship of the proletariat, and the struggle against opportunism (1875)
The Critique of the Gotha Programme is one of the most important texts in the entire Marxist canon. Written by Karl Marx in April–May 1875 as a series of marginal notes on the draft programme of the unified German workers’ party, it was never intended for publication. Marx sent it privately to the Eisenach leadership — Wilhelm Bracke, August Bebel, and Wilhelm Liebknecht — as a devastating theoretical demolition of the programme’s concessions to Lassallean opportunism. The text was suppressed for sixteen years and only published by Friedrich Engels in 1891, over the protests of the SPD leadership, who understood that Marx’s withering critique struck at the very foundations of their comfortable reformism.
No other text by Marx addresses with such precision the concrete questions of what communist society actually looks like, how it develops out of capitalism, and what political form the transition period must take. It is here that Marx draws the famous distinction between the lower and higher phases of communist society. It is here that he formulates the principle “From each according to their ability, to each according to their needs.” And it is here that he states, in terms that admit of no misinterpretation, that between capitalist and communist society lies a period of revolutionary transformation whose corresponding political form can only be the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat.
Lenin recognised the centrality of this text. His State and Revolution (1917) devotes an entire chapter to the Critique of the Gotha Programme, drawing out its implications for the theory of the state and the nature of the transition to communism. Every serious Marxist-Leninist must study this work.
In the early 1870s, the German workers’ movement was split between two organisations. The Social Democratic Workers’ Party (SDAP), founded at Eisenach in 1869 under the influence of Marx and Engels, was led by August Bebel and Wilhelm Liebknecht. The General German Workers’ Association (ADAV), founded by Ferdinand Lassalle in 1863, clung to Lassalle’s peculiar blend of state socialism, collaboration with Bismarck, and hostility to trade union struggle. By 1875, pressures toward unity were strong: Bismarck’s anti-socialist laws loomed, and the rank and file of both organisations saw no reason for division.
The unity congress took place at Gotha in May 1875. The resulting programme was, in Marx’s view, a catastrophe. The Eisenachers, who nominally accepted Marxist theory, had capitulated almost entirely to the Lassalleans on every significant theoretical point. The programme was riddled with vague phraseology, petty-bourgeois illusions about the state, Lassallean dogmas about the “iron law of wages,” and a complete absence of revolutionary content.
Marx was furious. In a letter to Bracke dated 5 May 1875, he wrote that the programme was “thoroughly objectionable and demoralising for the party.” Engels was equally scathing. Both understood that theoretical concessions to opportunism were not harmless compromises — they were the thin end of the wedge that would, if left unchallenged, corrupt the entire movement. History vindicated their fears: the trajectory from the Gotha Programme to the revisionism of Eduard Bernstein to the betrayal of 4 August 1914 was a straight line.
The Gotha Programme opened with the declaration: “Labour is the source of all wealth and all culture.” Marx immediately pounced on this formulation. Labour is not the sole source of wealth. Nature is equally a source of use-values — and it is use-values that constitute material wealth. As Marx put it:
“Labour is not the source of all wealth. Nature is just as much the source of use values (and it is surely of such that material wealth consists!) as labour, which itself is only the manifestation of a force of nature, human labour power.”
This was no pedantic correction. The Lassallean formulation served a reactionary function: by attributing all wealth to labour in the abstract, divorced from the conditions of production, it obscured the fact that the workers create wealth only insofar as they work with the means of production — means of production that are monopolised by the capitalist class. The correct formulation, as developed in Marx’s labour theory of value and his analysis of surplus value, is that labour creates value only under definite social relations of production, and that the exploitation of labour consists precisely in the appropriation of surplus value by the owners of capital.
The programme further demanded that the workers receive the “undiminished proceeds of labour.” Marx demonstrated that this phrase was either meaningless or reactionary. Even in a communist society, the total social product cannot be distributed in its entirety to individual producers. Before any individual distribution can take place, deductions must be made:
Only after all these deductions does individual distribution begin. The demand for “undiminished proceeds” was therefore a hollow slogan that, taken literally, would make social reproduction impossible. Marx’s analysis here laid the groundwork for the Marxist-Leninist understanding of socialist planning and the necessity of centrally directed accumulation.
Having stripped away the Lassallean phraseology, Marx proceeded to analyse what distribution actually looks like in communist society — not as a utopian wish, but as a society that has just emerged from capitalist society and therefore bears its birthmarks in every respect, economically, morally, and intellectually.
In this lower phase, the means of production are held in common. There is no commodity production and no exchange of commodities. Each individual producer receives back from society — after the necessary deductions — exactly as much as they contribute. They receive a certificate recording their labour time and withdraw from the social stock of means of consumption a corresponding amount. The principle is: to each according to their contribution.
“The right of the producers is proportional to the labour they supply; the equality consists in the fact that measurement is made with an equal standard, labour.”
But Marx immediately exposed the limitation of this apparently fair principle. Equal right is in fact unequal right, because it applies an equal standard to unequal individuals. One worker is stronger than another, one is married with children while another is single, one is more skilled, one is less healthy. To give each according to their contribution is to perpetuate real inequality behind the facade of formal equality. This is what Marx called the persistence of bourgeois right in the lower phase of communism:
“Right can never be higher than the economic structure of society and its cultural development conditioned thereby.”
Marx then turned to the higher phase of communist society — the stage in which the limitations of the lower phase are finally overcome. This passage is among the most celebrated in all of Marx’s writings:
“In a higher phase of communist society, after the enslaving subordination of the individual to the division of labour, and therewith also the antithesis between mental and physical labour, has vanished; after labour has become not only a means of life but life’s prime want; after the productive forces have also increased with the all-round development of the individual, and all the springs of co-operative wealth flow more abundantly — only then 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!”
This passage deserves careful study. Marx identified several preconditions for the higher phase:
Only when all of these conditions are met can society move beyond distribution according to contribution and realise the principle: “From each according to their ability, to each according to their needs.” This is not a moral imperative imposed from above — it is the natural outcome of the material development of communist society itself. The withering away of the state proceeds in parallel with this development, as the coercive apparatus becomes increasingly superfluous in a society of freely associated producers.
The Gotha Programme incorporated Lassalle’s so-called “iron law of wages” — the claim that under capitalism, wages inevitably tend toward the bare minimum necessary for subsistence. Marx showed that this was not a Marxist idea at all, but a borrowing from Malthus via the bourgeois economist David Ricardo. Lassalle had dressed up a reactionary bourgeois doctrine in socialist clothing.
The “iron law” was theoretically false and politically disastrous. Theoretically, it ignored the role of the class struggle in determining wages. If wages were truly fixed at subsistence by an immutable natural law, then trade union struggles for higher wages would be pointless — and Lassalle indeed disparaged trade unions. Practically, the doctrine paralysed the workers’ movement by telling workers that nothing could improve their condition short of the total abolition of the wages system.
Marx had already demonstrated in Capital and in Wage Labour and Capital that wages are determined not by any iron law but by the balance of class forces, the state of the labour market, the degree of organisation of the working class, and the historical and moral element in the value of labour power. The struggle for higher wages, shorter hours, and better conditions is not futile — it is the school of class struggle in which the proletariat develops the organisation and consciousness necessary for revolution.
The Gotha Programme demanded a “free state.” Marx subjected this phrase to merciless criticism. What does it mean to make the state “free”? The whole point of the revolutionary programme is not to free the state but to transform it from an organ standing above society into one completely subordinate to society — and ultimately to abolish it altogether.
“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.”
This is the passage that Lenin, in State and Revolution, called “one of the most remarkable and most important statements of Marxism on the question of the state.” Marx left no room for ambiguity: the dictatorship of the proletariat is not optional, not one possible form among many, but the necessary political form of the transition from capitalism to communism.
The Lassallean demand for a “free state” revealed the essence of Lassallean politics: state worship. Lassalle had sought to achieve socialism not through the revolutionary overthrow of the bourgeois state, but through an alliance with the Bismarckian state — a monarchical, Junker-dominated, police state. He imagined that the Prussian state could be persuaded to grant state aid for workers’ cooperatives, gradually introducing socialism from above. This was not socialism but class collaboration dressed in radical phrases.
The Gotha Programme called for “the establishment of producers’ cooperative societies with state aid under the democratic control of the working people.” This was Lassalle’s pet scheme: the idea that the existing state could be induced to fund workers’ cooperatives, which would then gradually displace capitalist enterprise. Marx pointed out the absurdity of expecting the bourgeois state — or in this case, the Bismarckian state — to finance its own gravediggers.
Marx did not oppose cooperatives as such. He recognised their value as evidence that capitalist relations of production are not eternal — that workers can organise production without capitalists. But cooperatives within the framework of capitalism remain subordinate to the laws of capitalist competition. They cannot, by themselves, transform the mode of production. Only the revolutionary seizure of political power by the proletariat, followed by the socialisation of the means of production, can accomplish this. To substitute “state aid for cooperatives” for the revolutionary programme was to replace class struggle with class collaboration.
This critique carries direct relevance today. Every scheme of “stakeholder capitalism,” every proposal for worker-owned enterprises within the capitalist framework, every illusion that the bourgeois state can be gradually reformed into socialism — all of these reproduce the Lassallean error that Marx demolished in 1875.
The Critique of the Gotha Programme was suppressed by the SPD leadership for good reason: it struck at the theoretical foundations of their increasingly opportunist politics. When Engels finally published it in 1891, it was over the objections of the party executive, who correctly understood that Marx’s uncompromising positions — on the state, on the dictatorship of the proletariat, on distribution — were incompatible with the reformist course they had already embarked upon.
Lenin’s State and Revolution rescued the Critique of the Gotha Programme from the obscurity to which the opportunists had consigned it. Lenin demonstrated that Marx’s distinction between the lower and higher phases of communism, and his insistence on the dictatorship of the proletariat, were not marginal observations but the very core of Marxist political theory. The Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 was the practical realisation of the principles Marx had laid down in 1875.
The text remains devastatingly relevant. Every tendency in the modern workers’ movement that substitutes “fair distribution” for the abolition of private ownership, that speaks of reforming the state rather than smashing it, that imagines socialism can be built gradually within the framework of bourgeois democracy — every such tendency reproduces the errors of the Gotha Programme. Modern social democracy, with its management of capitalism and its abandonment of even the pretence of socialist transformation, is the logical endpoint of the Lassallean deviation that Marx excoriated.
The Critique of the Gotha Programme provides the theoretical foundation for understanding the transition from capitalism to communism. Deepen your study of Marx’s analysis of the state, distribution, and the two phases of communist society.