Before this could be achieved, the program advocated reforms including universal suffrage, freedoms of speech and association, gender equality, separation of church and state, free education and medicine, and a progressive income tax.

The program declared the imminent death of capitalism and the necessity of socialist ownership of the means of production.

Kautsky argued that because capitalism, by its very nature, must collapse, the immediate task for socialists was to work for the improvement of workers' lives rather than for the revolution, which was inevitable.

[citation needed] The draft program was criticised by Friedrich Engels for its opportunist, non-Marxist views on the state in a criticism he sent to Kautsky on 29 June 1891.

The Class Struggle was translated into 16 languages before 1914 and became the accepted popular summation of Marxist theory.