Critique of the Gotha Programme

The Critique of the Gotha Programme (German: Kritik des Gothaer Programms) is a document written by Karl Marx in 1875 as a private communication to the leadership of the German Social Democratic Workers' Party (the "Eisenachers"). The critique was directed at the draft programme of the unified party that was to be created through a merger with the General German Workers' Association (the "Lassalleans") at a congress in the city of Gotha. Marx argued that the programme made significant and damaging concessions to the state-oriented socialism of Ferdinand Lassalle, whose ideas he considered opportunistic and insufficiently revolutionary.

The work is celebrated among Marxists for being one of Marx's most detailed pronouncements on programmatic matters. It offers his most extensive statements on the nature of a hypothetical future communist society, the strategy for achieving it, and the principles that would govern it. The Critique outlines the "two phases of communist society" as predicted by Marx: a lower phase where individuals receive goods equivalent to their labour contribution, and a higher phase in which society operates on the principle, "from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs". It also contains Marx's only sustained discussion of the "dictatorship of the proletariat" as the posited form of governance during the projected transition period between capitalism and communism.

The document was originally suppressed by the party leadership, who feared it would disrupt the unity congress, and was not published during Marx's lifetime. Friedrich Engels, who shared Marx's objections to the programme, published the Critique in 1891, as the newly formed Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) was drafting a new programme. Its publication was controversial within the party but helped to solidify its theoretical basis. The text became a foundational work for later Marxist thinkers, particularly Vladimir Lenin, whose book The State and Revolution is in large part an elaboration of the ideas in the Critique of the Gotha Programme.