Marx’s Critique of the Gotha Program takes the form of a Talmudic line-by-line commentary on the

German Social Democratic Workers' Party 1875 program. Marx’s polemical brio is invigorating, but
there’s serious conceptual work at stake, which can be understood in three points: (1) a clarification of
the misperception that labor is the source of all wealth, (2) a critique of Lassalle and (3) a demarcation
between formal and substantive equality.

Marxists are often accused of clinging to a naive labor theory of value. Marx quickly and definitively
clears up this confusion: “Labor is not the source of all wealth. Nature is just as much the source of use
values (and it is surely of such that material wealth consists!) as labor, which itself is only the
manifestation of a force of nature, human labor power.” Marx thus rejects any idea that labor is
supernatural, affirming that the distinction between nature and its transformation through labor is a
distinction within nature.

The core of the pamphlet concerns the Lassallean character of the Gotha Program. Marx bluntly rejects
“the Lassallean sect’s servile belief in the state, or, what is no better, by a democratic belief in miracles;
or rather it is a compromise between these two kinds of belief in miracles, both equally remote from
socialism.” It is noteworthy that on both counts, Marx extends and fleshes out Spinoza’s ideas
(voluntary servitude and the exception-less character of the laws of nature, respectively). Lassalle’s
idea of work certificates represent an amount of labor performed, entitling the bearer to draw “from the
social stock of means of consumption as much as the same amount of labor cost.” Stripping labor of its
distinctive properties, labor is depersonalized so that the same amount of labor which a worker has
given to society in one form is received “back in another.” This system obeys the cybernetic principle:
garbage in, garbage out. Marx points out that while Lassalle replaces its administrator, “the same
principle prevails as that which regulates the exchange of commodities, as far as this is exchange of
equal values.” Lassalleanism, for Marx, is ultimately a cosmetic operation that leaves the irrational and
unjust nexus of exchange untouched.

Contra the conservative caricature of Marxists as agents of levelling, Marx takes aim at the concept of
right as such:

“equal right is an unequal right for unequal labor. It recognizes no class differences, because everyone
is only a worker like everyone else; but it tacitly recognizes unequal individual endowment, and thus
productive capacity, as a natural privilege. It is, therefore, a right of inequality, in its content, like every
right.”

This critique of a socialism based on natural privilege remains radical today, when inequality is
increasingly naturalized in racist pseudo-biological terms.