I wanted to talk about the Critique of the Gotha Programme because I feel it has relevance to our current situation where the left is in the political wilderness. The Gotha Programme’s aims, in the eyes of Marx, were to sand down the edges of the socialist movement such that it would not seem so abrasive when put against other political ideas. In criticizing it, Marx is not advocating for simply being abrasive. I think he has two basic lines of attack. Firstly, he is strongly critical of the spirit of the Gotha Programme which seems to be focused on making compromises with powerful elements rather than on advancing the socialist agenda. Secondly, he criticizes the letter of the Gotha Programme by pointing out its inadequacies. I think reading his critique as being primarily procedural would be missing the point. He highlights the inadequacies of rhetoric to demonstrate that the Programme can have little actual connection with the actual people it is meant to be representing.
One of the major questions I wanted to discuss was the relationship between theory and policy, and more than that, the relationship between theory and the movement at large. What would the Gotha Programme have meant to a regular member of the new socialist party? Marx’s assertion, in my view, is that a regular member would have seen the Gotha Programme as a set of empty platitudes. There is something to be said for ideas of broadcasting vs narrowcasting, for how simpler messages are able to travel further, but this needs to be balanced with actually saying meaningful things. We can’t take the knowledge that a complex message is difficult to communicate and conclude that we should make something up that will be simpler. We have to intelligently distill messages so that if we feel that we need to “simplify” a communication, we are still saying what we mean to say and we are still saying something meaningful to people.
Why is this important? What does theory have to say to the regular member? How much stock does the regular member put in theory and policy? To what extent are political movements “movements of feeling” or “movements of thought”, and to what extent does thought influence feeling and vice versa? These are all further questions to explore.
I would have liked to get more insight on was the process of negotiation involved in coming up with the Gotha Programme. At the time that the Programme was written up, the socialist parties in Germany were uniting, and the Programme was meant to signal the final merger. What, if anything, was given up during those negotiations, and by whom? Marx is highly critical of the influence of LaSalle on these documents. Where was that influence coming from exactly and why did it seem to win out? Why were Marx and Engels seemingly shut out of the final decision? These questions could be important for understanding party and movement cohesion as well as how to navigate issues of break-up and unification.
Marx criticizes the Gotha Programme, and “Lasalleism” in general, of running away from the idea of the dictatorship of the proletariat. Lasalle (wrongly, in Marx’s view) extols the proletariat as the only revolutionary class but at the same time says that everything will happen through coordination with the state, which Marx takes to mean the state as-it-existed-then. This is essentially a critique of reformism from the perspective of revolutionism. I’ve written before about why the dictatorship of the proletariat is an important idea and the Critique was one of my inspirations. Marx doesn’t spend a lot of time with this idea, though, so I won’t inject a screed here.
An infamous section of the Critique is in the Appendix, where Marx gives some support to the idea of children in the workforce. This is a troubling idea, for sure, but we should note that Marx is at least thoughtful enough to provide certain guardrails such as certified inspectors for workplaces, measures to mitigate harms. His larger point seems to be that such regulations will always fall short in certain areas, so a “blanket ban” would only further push these practices upon the marginalized rather than actually eliminating them. A good discussion of this aspect of the Critique happens in episode 161 of the podcast Swampside Chats, part 6 of their series on the Critique, where they especially touch on its connections with women’s rights to work. This is not to condone Marx’s position — the speakers on Swampside Chats don’t condone it and a major part of my study of Marx is rejecting the quasi-deification that means Marx must always be right — only to point out that the position isn’t as simple as saying that children should go straight to the mines.
This does highlight a central tension in the Critique, however: what is a stateless society? Marx frequently decries any reliance upon the state in the Critique and it is well-known that his vision of communism was one without states. At the same time, when we look at his prescriptions for education, they lean significantly on the existence of public inspectors who could be taken to court, elements that feel like they must imply a state. Would the existence of the inspectors etc. fall in the period before the stateless society is achieved? If so, what does the ultimate stateless society look like? If not, if the inspectors and courts are indeed part of the stateless society, what does it mean to be “stateless”?
I think it’s long been recognized that the Critique of the Gotha Programme is an important document for examining the progression of socialism. I don’t know that it has been studied enough for what it can illuminate about the current political situation, however. We should examine the place of rhetoric, theory, and policy in movements and parties, rather than taking it for granted that they are either of innate importance or that they are trivial. While individual research can be fruitful here, discussion is the best way to understand how ideas affect different people and, in the context of this Critique especially, is the most relevant way to investigate the ideas it puts forward.