The Critique of the Gotha Programnme ranks with the Manifesto of theCommunist Party as the most important of Marx's programmaticworks. It provided in condensed form the main theoretical basisfor the programme of the party of the prolctariat in a number ofcountries.

In this work Marx devotes a very great deal of attention to thequestions of the transition period，Socialism and Communism,and it has special iportance for us at the present time. Just atthis moment, when this transition is bcing realised in actual factunder the dictatorship of the proletariat in the U.S.S.R.,Marx'sscientific forecasts assume special significance; they acquire thecharacter of practical directives which are being applied directlyto life.Now that in the struggle against the desperate resistanceof the bourgeoisie and its agents—the opportunists—the founda-tions of socialist economy have already been laid in the U.S.S.R.;when our Party, at its Seventeenth Conference, has laid down asthe chief political task of the Second Five-Year Plan:

the final liquidation of capitalist elements and of classesin general; the cormplete annihilation of the causes which giverise to class diferences and exploitation,and the overcomingof capitalist survivals in the econornic life and thought of thepeople，the transformation of the whole working populationof the country into conscious and active builders of a classlesssocicty ; "