As harmonious as the memorial shell suggests with the portraits of the participants, the Gotha unification congress of 1875 was not at least for Karl Marx.
Photo: Imago/Emmanuele Contini
On May 5, 1875, almost 150 years ago, Karl Marx wrote a letter to Wilhelm Bracke. Bracke was one of the leading personalities of the German workers’ movement and was considered a followers of Marx and Engels. So Marx put on a confidential tone and put a text on the letter – for internal use – that is one of his most famous today: The “Rand Glossen to the program of the German Workers’ Party”. Under this title, most readers will probably not know the text at all. Sometimes he operates as a “program letter”, but he started his world career under the name “Criticism of the Gotha program”. Marx never wrote one; Rands are different from an analysis of the rank of “criticism of political economy” or the “criticism of the Hegelian legal philosophy”.
The process that the title was postponed in the 1930s away from the “marginal glins” towards “criticism” is a political one. Anyone who, as a first reader, or new reader, reaches for the common GDR editions-they are still antiquarian for very small money-will not be badly astonished: the “edge gross” and the Bracke letter only take up a small part. These documents are literally overgrown with letters from Engels to August Bebel, Engels ‘criticism of the Erfurt program of social democracy (1891), Engels’ introduction to the first publication of the “edge gashes” (also 1891) – and above all Lenin’s evaluation of the “marginal fins” on the eve of the October Revolution 1917.
Polemical interference
From May 25th to 27th, 1875, the unification congress of the two German workers ‘parties took place in Gotha: the social democratic workers’ party (“Die Eisenacher”), which is allegedly close to the life and the writings of Ferdinand Lassalle (1825–1864), merged together. In London, the two old people, as Marx and Engels were called in awe, had given wind from the program draft and were horrified, to say the least. Bracke and Wilhelm Liebknecht saw themselves as Marx students-and yet had stumbled together with the Lassalleans in a stupid and imprecise formulated program items.
“Every step of real movement is more important than a dozen programs,” thundered Marx in his letter to Bracke.
–
“Every step of real movement is more important than a dozen programs,” thundered Marx in his letter to Bracke. The sentence has been cited a lot, but the passage goes even further: “So you couldn’t … go beyond the Eisenach program, so you should simply have an agreement for action against the common enemy. However, if you do principal programs (instead of postponing this until the time, where the same was prepared by longer joint activity), you build market stones in front of all the world. ”Marx turns out to be surprisingly pragmatic here – and at the same time in principle. In the first place is the movement, which is quite heterogeneous, which initially – to learn and grow together – does not need much more than an action program “against the common enemy”. The actual program work only begins. It is absolutely necessary, but you have to be able to take time for them.
The Gotha program draft turned this order upside down and so Marx saw himself forced to attach corrections in consultation with angels, the “edge gross”. What makes this short text so spectacular is the fact that it is one of Marx’s rare efforts – and not from Engels – to summarize teaching and apply it directly to politicize it again. The “marginal glins” bring value criticism – in delimitation to a naive labor value theory, as expressed by the Gotha program – and state criticism and the explicitly, without wague, phrase so to speak.
If the Gotha program says: “Work is the source of all wealth and all culture,” countered Marx: “The work is not the source All wealth. Nature is just as much the source of the uses (and such the factual wealth is probably!) As the work, which is only the statement of a natural power, human work. «Today this idea appears to be more ecological. Marx aimed that the sentence “The work is the source of all wealth and all culture” cannot be a proud statement on which socialism can be justified, but is an indication of the wrong life. A society to work too the Source of all wealth is actually one of the ruthless exploitation and use of nature and work. Engels saw the same when he in his letter on October 12, 1875 to the party leader Bebel about »the talk of› liberation of the Work‹Instead of the working class« etching: »The work itself is right nowadays much too free! ” – with nice regards to our present!
From politics to the canon
Her criticism remained without a response and had little effect on the Gotha Congress: a devastating result. This was a little awaited for “the old” by the fact that the United Socialist Workers’ Party in the German Reich was hostile and persecuted as if it were a Marxist-revolutionary party. The opponents of the party also did not understand the state believers and reformist implications of the stubborn program.
It was not until 1891 – now in preparation for the Erfurt party congress – Engels was able to push through the paper known in the leadership circles for publication. Even now, the “marginal fins” had a greater effect. 26 years later it was Lenin who fully recognized her critical meaning, her character as a synthesis of economic and state criticism and evaluated systematically. And there were three communists who, in the 1920s, added the “marginal fins” and further material, namely letters from Marx and Engels, to them: the Czech Kurt Kreibich (1920) and the Germans Karl Korsch (1922) and Hermann Duncker (1928). The historian Götz Langkau, who wrote a fine study on edition history, called this publication policy. In particular, Korsch managed to show that the reformist spirit of Lassalleans in state socialism and parliamentarianism of Weimar’s social democracy recurred.
It was the Moscow Marx editors who were able to assert with the power of the state publisher in the back that from 1933 the marginal glins became familiar as “criticism of the Gotha program”. They added Lenin’s notes and even texts by Stalin in the 1940s. As a result, the activist thrusts of Marx became the best examples of the “criticism in the handmade” – who is still much conjured up today – a canonical text with a factory character, in whose continuity or as its full Lenin and Stalin. Et voilà – this is how you do politics.
Indestructible error
This power of canonization has been broken for a long time, but the sometimes oversized awe of Marx texts and the mania to expect definitive answers in them and to explain all of them to large works is not. However, the “marginal fins” are a great work, but precisely because they are an intervening script, sketched in a hurry and rely on intensification and shortage. So you should read them too and so you can still work with them. What Marx spoils: the thinking of work and state belief on the one hand, a shortened concept of socialism and a merely utopian idea of communism on the other – trials that seem indestructible within the left.
But that shouldn’t be overlooked either: Marx ends the “edge gross” with a sigh: “Dixi et Salvavi Animan Meam.” – “I spoke and saved my soul.” To have nothing to do with all the nonsense, that appears at the end as his main concern. Here a vanity and bodies flash, which is also indestructible in Marxist circles.