Gotha Program

The Gotha party program was agreed with the Association of Social Democratic Labour Party ( SDAP ) under August Bebel and Wilhelm Liebknecht with the General German Workers' Association ( ADAV ) under whose last President Wilhelm Hasenclever at the Gotha Congress from May 22 to May 27, 1875.

The resulting party of six-day union congress was the Socialist Workers Party of Germany ( SAPD ), which renamed itself in 1890 in Social Democratic Party of Germany ( SPD). In programmatic center of the SAP was " the free state and the socialist society, the destruction of the iron law of wages by abolishing the system of wage labor, the abolition of exploitation in any society, the elimination of all social and political inequality ." With one of the main initiators of the party merger was next to Liebknecht and Bebel (both previously members of the Reichstag of the SDAP ) Wilhelm Hasenclever ( Reichstag deputy and past president of the ADAV ).

The Gotha Program of SAP was criticized by Karl Marx, the leading theorist of socialism, from its exile in London, because it is in his compromise formation in Marx's eyes, too much the more reform-oriented positions of the ADAV adapting (see Critique of the Gotha Programme ). Although Especially Liebknecht shared Marx's critique, however, was for pragmatic reasons, including the priority of a unified German Workers' Party, but after the program. He later continued, especially in 1876 the newly founded party organ, the forward, Marxist for the resumption, and therefore revolutionary content in the SAP one.

Occasionally, the constitutional- monarchist final declaration of the Gotha Nachparlaments of 1849 is called the " Gotha Program ".