Marx's Critique of the Gotha Program (1875)

Critique of the Gotha Program (1875) is Karl Marx's sharp analysis of the draft program of the German Social Democratic Workers' Party, in which he critiques its concessions to bourgeois ideology and its lack of revolutionary clarity.

Marx argues for a scientific understanding of socialism, emphasizing that it must emerge from the contradictions of capitalism and transition through a dictatorship of the proletariat before achieving a stateless, classless society.

He also introduces the famous principle "from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs" for the higher phase of communism, distinguishing it from the transitional socialist phase where distribution is based on labor contribution.