Marx's Critique of the Gotha Programme
Channel: A New Conversation
Date: 07/01/2021

Political education on the left is a crucial component to our struggle for socialism. At this channel we have done a number of reading groups, some have been published, others not. We are half way through Marx's Capital, have undertaken Laclau and Mouffe's Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, neither of which will be made public, but also More of Laclau and Mouffe's work, as well as Mark Fisher's Capitalist Realism, which informed our first podcast series Hegemony and Populism. A main goal of the channel is to log that political education and create interesting content for people who have just read, or are thinking about reading, the subject of a given video. 

From here on, we will be producing podcasts covering shorter reads. This one covers Marx's Critique of the Gotha Programme, in which Marx writes a response to the unity programme between the worker's party he belonged to and the one begun by Ferdinand Lassalle. Marx is critical of much of the wording of the manifesto as it de-specifies many of the principles of the First International, leaving the direction of the workers movement in Germany open to, prophetically, events such as support for imperial wars and the assassination of radical socialists.