Minimum programme

In Marxist theory, a minimum programme consists of a series of demands for immediate reforms and, in far fewer and less orthodox cases, also consists of a series of political demands which, taken as a whole, realise key democratic-republican measures enacted by the Paris Commune and thus culminate in the strictly political dictatorship of the proletariat.

The orthodox concept of a minimum programme from the Erfurt Programme of the SPD, later mirrored by much of the Socialist International. The minimum is contrasted with a maximum programme, which will achieve socialism. In the short term, parties were to pursue only the minimum programme of achievable demands, which would improve workers' lives until the inevitable collapse of capitalism. Other groups believed that the achievement of a minimum programme enabling them to become mass parties and pursue their maximum programme.

Within the orthodox framework, the Communist International developed the alternative idea of a transitional programme, seeing the minimum/maximum division as leaving democratic socialist parties always campaigning only for their minimum programme and not clearly planning a route to achieve their maximum programme.

The less orthodox concept of the minimum programme comes straight from Marx himself, in the form of the political demands found in the Programme of the French Workers' Party.