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Friedrich Engels on the Socialists’ Gotha Program (October 12, 1875)

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The entire thing is extremely untidy, confused, incoherent, illogical, and shameful. If the bourgeois press possessed even a single critical mind, he would have gone through this program sentence by sentence, examined each statement as to its actual content, laid out the nonsense for all to see, elaborated on the contradictions and economic blunders (e.g. that today the means of production are the “monopoly of the capitalist class,” as if there weren't any landowners; the empty talk about the “liberation of labor” instead of the liberation of the working class, when today labor itself is in reality much too free!), and ridiculed our entire party in the most dreadful way. Instead, the asses from the bourgeois newspapers have taken this program entirely seriously, reading into it what is not there and interpreting it along communist lines. The workers seem to be doing the same. It is this circumstance alone that has permitted Marx and me not to renounce such a program publicly. As long as our adversaries and the workers, too, falsely attribute our intentions to the program, we can remain silent about it. [ . . . ] You are quite right that the entire matter is a pedagogical experiment that may promise a very favorable result even under these conditions. The party unification as such is a great success if it can last for just two years. Undoubtedly, however, this would have been possible at a far cheaper price.



Source: Elementarbücher des Kommunismus [Communism Primer] 12, 2nd ed. (1930), pp. 51ff.

Original German text reprinted in Felix Salomon, Die Deutschen Parteiprogramme [German Party Programs, Issue 2, Im Deutschen Kaiserreich 1871-1918 [In the German Kaiserreich 1871-1918], ed. Wilhelm Mommsen and Günther Franz, 4th ed. Leipzig and Berlin: B.G. Teubner, 1932, pp. 42-43.

Translation: Erwin Fink

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