Ferdinand Lassalle (1825–1864)

Representative of opportunism in the German workers’ movement; one of the founders of the General German Workers’ Association.

Lassalle was born on April 11, 1825, in Breslau, Prussia (present-day Wrocław, Poland), into a wealthy Jewish merchant’s family. In August 1841, he enrolled in the Faculty of Philosophy at the University of Breslau and soon moved to the University of Berlin to study philosophy, languages and history. In 1844, After receiving his doctorate in philosophy in 1844, he practiced as a lawyer. During the 1848 Revolutions in Europe, he took part in the revolutionary activities of the Düsseldorf democrats, where he became acquainted with Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Arrested in November 1848 for staging an armed insurrection in Düsseldorf, Lassalle was released from prison the following July and continued to work as a lawyer before joining the Communist League in 1850 and writing for the Neue Rheinische Zeitung. Lassalle’s The Philosophy of Heraclitus the Dark Philosopher of Ephesus, published in 1857, and The System of Acquired Rights, published in 1861, and his other works were replete with the colors of Hegelian idealism. In April 1862, Lassalle delivered a speech entitled Über den besonderen Zusammenhang der gegenwärtigen Geschichtsperiode mit der Idee des Arbeiterstandes (Concerning the Particular Connection between the Present Period of History and the Idea of the Working Class), which was later published under the title Das Arbeiter-Programm (The Working Man’s Programme). In Das Arbeiter-Programm, Lassalle dealt with the particular class position occupied and the historical part played by the working class and advocated the emancipation of the working class through universal and direct suffrage. In December 1862, the Executive Committee of the Preparatory Committee of the General German Workers’ Congress entrusted Lassalle with drafting a programme for the Congress. In March 1863, Lassalle published the Open Reply Letter to the Central Committee for the Summoning of a General German Workers’ Congress in Leipzig (abbreviated as Open Reply Letter), advocated that under the capitalist system, the poverty of the working class was caused by a so-called “iron law of wages”, and that the only correct way to abolish the “iron law of wages” was to rely on state aid to develop workers’ co-operatives so that the workers could obtain the full rewards of their labor, which can only be achieved through universal and direct suffrage. Lassalle’s fallacies had a bad influence on the German workers’ movement, and in the Critique of the Gotha Programme, Marx thoroughly criticized Lassalle’s opportunistic viewpoints. On May 23, 1863, the General German Workers’ Association was founded in Leipzig, and Lassalle was elected president of the Association which adopted the opportunistic programme drafted by Lassalle. Lassalle died in Switzerland in August 1864.