KARL MARX

THE LAST DECADE 4II
4ii
'is such that it moves to a general European war. We must go through
this war before we can think of any decisive external effectiveness of the
Kuropean working class.' 65 The only country in which there existed a
proletarian party was Germany, to which, as Marx had foreseen, the
centre of gravity of the workers' movement shifted after the Franco-
Prussian War. It was Germany that occupied most of Marx's attention
during the 1870s. More accurately, there were two proletarian parties in
Germany, the Eisenach party and the followers of Lassalle, and the early
1870s saw attempts to bring about a union between them. This was aided
by the unification of Germany under Prussian leadership, the resignation
of Schweitzer from the presidency of the Lassallean party, and the increasing
pressure which Bismarck applied to both parties in the aftermath of
the Paris Commune. When their first big electoral success showed that the
two parties polled an almost identical number of votes, negotiations were
opened and agreement reached in principle at the end of 1874. A united
programme was to be adopted at Gotha, a small town in central Germany,
in May 1875.
Marx and Engels were somewhat out of touch with the situation inside
Germany, 66 and were enraged both with the content of the programme
and with the fact that they had not been consulted. Engels composed a
long letter to Bebel in March 1875 in which he recapitulated the unacceptable
Lassallean propositions incorporated in the programme: the rejection
of all non-proletarian parties as a 'reactionary mass', the lack of international
spirit, the talk of the 'iron laws' of wages and the lack of consideration
given to trade unions. And he predicted that they would have to
break with Liebknecht if the programme were adopted. 67 Marx himself
wrote to Bracke in May that 'every step of real movement is more
important than a dozen programmes'. 68 In Marx's view the Eisenach party
should have confined itself to concluding some sort of practical agreement
for combined action. As it was, he and Engels would dissociate themselves
from the programme immediately after the Congress. The letter
accompanied a manuscript entitled 'Marginal Notes on the Programme
of the German Workers' Party' which he asked Bracke to circulate among
the Eisenach leaders. Liebknecht, who considered that the negotiations
were too far advanced to be suspended, only allowed a few Eisenach
leaders to see the document - and not, for example, Bebel. It was published
only in 1891 and became known as the Critique of the Gotha
Programme, one of the most important of Marx's theoretical writings.
The Critique of the Gotha Programme took the form of marginal notes
ind contained two main points: one being a criticism of the programme's
proposals for distributing the national product, the other being a criticism
ol its views on the state. On the first point, Marx objected to the attempt