The Gotha Program

Marx Attacks! (Lays egg.)

Happy New Year, y’all as we say in The South. What better time and place to talk about the pre-World War I Social Democratic Party (SPD) of Germany.

There are hints of political vulnerabilities in the Gotha Program, the 1875 platform of the Social Democratic Party of Germany, I would say in its political need to acknowledge the authority of Marx and Engels. I’ve written about this before. As you can see from the link, the document is mercifully short. So is Marx’s critique.

Gotha pays lip service to nationalizing the means of production, a difficult accomplishment that history has shown does not necessarily get you out of the woods, as far as material deprivation is concerned. It denounces the tendency of wages to converge to that minimum needed for biological survival, sometimes referred to as the “Iron Law of Wages” (vigorously rejected by Marx, by the way), a tendency that does not exist. It presumes that “the laboring class” will mobilize itself for power, in the name of socialism. Did not happen.

In turn, Marx exploits the literary authority of his Communist Manifesto, to which apparently the SPD was under some pressure to adhere, as well as his elaborate philosophical frameworks. In Part I of Marx’s Critique of the Gotha Program, the criticism seems to rest on the failure of Gotha to provide a high-level philosophical tract, rather than an instrument of political agitation. Its intention was clearly the latter, since it was a party platform, not a theoretical treatise.

Marx was prophetic in his aspersions of the SPD’s internationalism, but I’m going to avoid any deeper dive into what it might have otherwise done in the face of the crunch of the first world war. In any case, I suspect this weakness helped Lenin embrace the Critique and attack any socialist formation that fell short of Bolshevism. Who knows how the 20th Century would have unfolded if the SPD had not joined in the war effort of the German state. I might be a rabbi in Łódź.

Here is a bit from Part II that exemplifies the pattern I see in the Critique of literary nit-picking:

“. . . the nonsense is perpetrated of speaking of the "abolition of the wage system" (it should read: system of wage labor) . . . “

Or:

“Instead of the indefinite concluding phrase of the paragraph, "the elimination of all social and political inequality", it ought to have been said that with the abolition of class distinctions all social and political inequality arising from them would disappear of itself.”

There are other examples of criticism directed more at rhetoric or phraseology than at substance, though there is no lack of acrimony. Actually, the acrimony is one of the things I like most in Marx. Perhaps in this jeremiad he was worried that the SPD, his baby in a sense, was getting away from him. He had no lack of anarchists to contend with, led or inspired by Mikhail Bakunin, on what you might call his left.

Part III begins with a denunciation of reformism, including the laudable interest in setting up independent cooperative projects, in what has become common leftier-than-thou demagogy, demagogy because its sources either provide no rational alternative or are not very different in basic orientation themselves. The phrase “pretty little gewgaws” is brought to bear with regard to progressive reforms.

It is reasonable for Marx to exalt communism vs. socialism, or the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat (‘DoP’) vs. whatever Gotha implied, which was certainly not that. Incidentally, the DoP has been bruited about by anti-communists as a leading indicator of the tyranny proposed, but this was always a canard. The DoP is less offensive when it is realized that Marx views existing society as a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. So the DoP is no more anti-democratic, and arguably quite a bit less, than a DoB. Naturally, confusion on this point did little to deter the growth of authoritarianism in Soviet Russia or pollute the inner life of Marxist-oriented organizations.

The bigger rub is the delusion of a communist revolutionary alternative. What is hinted at is an insurrectionist detour around legal political tactics in a (semi-)democratic system. This is a current problem in Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), presently controlled by factions that would like to lose the ‘D’ component of the name but rarely spell out their red-hot alternative. Sometimes they act like to go into that runs risks analogous to the French Resistance under Nazi occupation. Kids, lemmee tell you, if The State wants to know what you’re up to, it’s gonna find out. If you have something that needs hiding, you’re doing it wrong.

What people are motivated by is the Leninist fantasy of armed insurrection, taking after the Bolshevik revolution of 1917. I could note that prior to 1917, leading Marxists (Lenin included) tended to regard Russia as unsuitable for any such revolution, since it lacked the industrial development and urban proletariat of nations such as Germany or England.

So now when leftists channel Lenin, they harken back to an utterly distinct economic and social environment, in the very different setting of a world war raging close to home. Even though it suggests historical parallels, it is ahistorical in the extreme.

Why do I keep ragging on about them? Your psycho-analysis is welcome. The militants wrapped up thusly are a tiny fraction of what I take to be the U.S. Left hell-bent on marginalizing themselves and anyone foolish to associate with them. (I plead guilty.) I would wager they are far from a majority in DSA itself, though I can’t prove it because DSA will not conduct polls of its entire membership. It could easily do so, since it is adept at online operations.

Marx ends the Critique with no alternative political theory of change. There are other lapses of logic therein not worth untangling. All things considered, it is not a contribution that does him much credit. Perhaps that is why it was not published for another fifteen years.