In Praise of the Gotha Program

I was thinking yesterday about Karl Marx’s “Critique of the Gotha Program.” Or, at a minimum, I was thinking about “from each according to his means, to each according to his needs” and that’s in the “Critique of the Gotha Program.” It inspired me to look the Gotha Program up. Turns out to be a mixed bag as far as programs go. Points one through seven seem a bit airy, rhetorical, and overblown but the final point, point eight, seems reasonably solid to me:

In addition to the demand for universal suffrage for all above twenty years of age, secret ballot, freedom of the press, free and compulsory education, etc., the socialist labor party of Germany demands the following reforms in the present social organization:

(1) the greatest possible extension of political rights and freedom in the sense of the above-mentioned demands;

(2) a single progressive income tax, both state and local, instead of all the existing taxes, especially the indirect ones, which weigh heavily upon the people;

(3) unlimited right of association;

(4) a (619) normal working day corresponding with the needs of society, and the prohibition of work on Sunday;

(5) prohibition of child labor and all forms of labor by women which are dangerous to health or morality;

(6) laws for the protection of the life and health of workmen, sanitary control of workmen’s houses, inspection of mines, factories, workshops, and domestic industries by officials chosen by the workmen themselves, and an effective system of enforcement of the same;

(7) regulation of prison labor.

This program was, at the time, known as “socialism” and deemed by many to be unduly radical. Nowadays, of course, I take it that universal suffrage, free education, a ban on child labor, a progressive tax code, and a (two day!) weekend seem a lot like conventional wisdom. I’ll leave the implications for today’s political controversies as an exercise for the reader.