The Erfurt Program was adopted by the

Social Democratic Party of Germany The Social Democratic Party of Germany ( , SPD ) is a social democratic political party in Germany. It is one of the major parties of contemporary Germany. Saskia Esken has been the party's leader since the 2019 leadership election together w ...

during the SPD Congress at

Erfurt Erfurt () is the capital (political), capital and largest city of the Central Germany (cultural area), Central German state of Thuringia, with a population of around 216,000. It lies in the wide valley of the Gera (river), River Gera, in the so ...

in 1891. Drafted by theorists Karl Kautsky and

Eduard Bernstein Eduard Bernstein (; 6 January 1850 – 18 December 1932) was a German Marxist theorist and politician. A prominent member of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD), he has been both condemned and praised as a "Revisionism (Marxism), revisi ...

, the program set out a

Marxist Marxism is a political philosophy and method of socioeconomic analysis. It uses a dialectical and materialist interpretation of historical development, better known as historical materialism, to analyse class relations, social conflic ...

view and superseded the party's Gotha Program of 1875. The Erfurt Program identified private ownership of the

means of production In political philosophy, the means of production refers to the generally necessary assets and resources that enable a society to engage in production. While the exact resources encompassed in the term may vary, it is widely agreed to include the ...

as the source of social ailments, and advocated a political struggle with the goal of achieving a social revolution and an equal society without class divisions. Before this could be achieved, the program advocated reforms including

universal suffrage Universal suffrage or universal franchise ensures the right to vote for as many people bound by a government's laws as possible, as supported by the " one person, one vote" principle. For many, the term universal suffrage assumes the exclusion ...

, freedoms of speech and association,

gender equality Gender equality, also known as sexual equality, gender egalitarianism, or equality of the sexes, is the state of equal ease of access to resources and opportunities regardless of gender, including economic participation and decision-making, an ...

separation of church and state The separation of church and state is a philosophical and Jurisprudence, jurisprudential concept for defining political distance in the relationship between religious organizations and the State (polity), state. Conceptually, the term refers to ...

free education Free education is education funded through government spending or charitable organizations rather than tuition funding. Primary school and other comprehensive or compulsory education is free in most countries (often not including primary textboo ...

and

medicine Medicine is the science and Praxis (process), practice of caring for patients, managing the Medical diagnosis, diagnosis, prognosis, Preventive medicine, prevention, therapy, treatment, Palliative care, palliation of their injury or disease, ...

, and a progressive income tax. It also demanded labor protections including an eight-hour working day and the prohibition of

child labor Child labour is the exploitation of children through any form of work that interferes with their ability to attend regular school, or is mentally, physically, socially and morally harmful. Such exploitation is prohibited by legislation w ...

. The Erfurt Program was SPD's official program until 1921, when it was replaced by the .

The program

The program declared the imminent death of

capitalism Capitalism is an economic system based on the private ownership of the means of production and their use for the purpose of obtaining profit. This socioeconomic system has developed historically through several stages and is defined by ...

and the necessity of

socialist Socialism is an economic ideology, economic and political philosophy encompassing diverse Economic system, economic and social systems characterised by social ownership of the means of production, as opposed to private ownership. It describes ...

ownership of the

. The Party intended to pursue these goals through legal political participation rather than by revolutionary activity. Kautsky argued that because capitalism, by its very nature, must collapse, the immediate task for

s was to work for the improvement of workers' lives rather than for the

revolution In political science, a revolution (, 'a turn around') is a rapid, fundamental transformation of a society's class, state, ethnic or religious structures. According to sociologist Jack Goldstone, all revolutions contain "a common set of elements ...

, which was inevitable.

Reception and response

The draft program was praised by

Friedrich Engels Friedrich Engels ( ;"Engels"
''Random House Webster's Unabridged Dictionary''.

Official commentary

Kautsky wrote the official SPD commentary on the program in 1892, which was called ''The Class Struggle''. The Marxism exemplified by ''The Class Struggle'' was referred to, in particular by later critics, as "the Marxism of the

Second International The Second International, also called the Socialist International, was a political international of Labour movement, socialist and labour parties and Trade union, trade unions which existed from 1889 to 1916. It included representatives from mo ...

," in distinction to Marx's own. Marxist historian Isaac Deutscher has referred to it as " vulgar Marxism." The popular renderings of Marxism found in the works of Kautsky and Bebel were read and distributed more widely in Europe between the late 19th century and 1914 than Marx's own works. ''The Class Struggle'' was translated into 16 languages before 1914 and became the accepted popular summation of Marxist theory. This document came to represent one of the core documents of what is called orthodox Marxist theory before the split between self-declared ‘Marxist’ parties and organisations during WWI, especially after 1917.

References

* Kautsky, Karl ''Das Erfurter Programm'' Dietz Nachf. Verlag, Stuttgart, 1920 * Sassoon, Donald ''One Hundred Years of Socialism''. The New Press, New York, 1996.

External links

The Erfurt Program
{{Authority control 1891 in politics Marxism Party platforms Social Democratic Party of Germany Program 1891 documents

The program

Reception and response

See also

References

External links