Critique of the Gotha Programme
The State
● Free state? The workers do not aim to set the state free; rather, forms of state are free
insofar as they restrict the ‘freedom of the state’
● The Gotha Programme, rather than treating existing society as the basis of the existing
state, mistakenly treats the state as an independent entity possessing its own intellectual, ethical
and libertarian bases
● Present day society is capitalist society; broadly universal. There is no universal ‘present
day state’; rather there are different states that begin from the same base - present day society;
bourgeois society
● Between capitalist society and communist society there exists a transition from one to the
other. Corresponding to this is a political transition period ‘in which the state can be nothing but
the dictatorship of the proletariat’
● Instead of being a programme for this transition, the Gotha programme talks in terms of
rights, universal suffrage, direct legislation, a people’s militia. These have already been achieved
in other present day states - namely, USA and Switzerland.
○ GP demands a democratic republic, but not explicitly. Having ducked
this, it shouldn’t simply make demands that would require a democratic republic and
assure the people that such demands could be forced through by legal means despite the
military despotism
Further discussion of way in which distribution is a derivative of the relations of production, and the
transition from income tax, which presupposes capitalism, to ‘from each according to his ability, to each
according to need’ under communism.
The State
● Free state? The workers do not aim to set the state free; rather, forms of state are free
insofar as they restrict the ‘freedom of the state’
● The Gotha Programme, rather than treating existing society as the basis of the existing
state, mistakenly treats the state as an independent entity possessing its own intellectual, ethical
and libertarian bases
● Present day society is capitalist society; broadly universal. There is no universal ‘present
day state’; rather there are different states that begin from the same base - present day society;
bourgeois society
● Between capitalist society and communist society there exists a transition from one to the
other. Corresponding to this is a political transition period ‘in which the state can be nothing but
the dictatorship of the proletariat’
● Instead of being a programme for this transition, the Gotha programme talks in terms of
rights, universal suffrage, direct legislation, a people’s militia. These have already been achieved
in other present day states - namely, USA and Switzerland.
○ GP demands a democratic republic, but not explicitly. Having ducked
this, it shouldn’t simply make demands that would require a democratic republic and
assure the people that such demands could be forced through by legal means despite the
military despotism
Further discussion of way in which distribution is a derivative of the relations of production, and the
transition from income tax, which presupposes capitalism, to ‘from each according to his ability, to each
according to need’ under communism.
