The Critique of the Gotha Programme is a document written by Karl Marx in 1875 as a private communication to the leadership of the German Social Democratic Workers' Party. The critique was directed at the draft programme of the unified party that was to be created through a merger with the General German Workers' Association at a congress in the city of Gotha. Marx argued that the programme made significant and damaging concessions to the state-oriented socialism of Ferdinand Lassalle, whose ideas he considered opportunistic and insufficiently revolutionary.