Founder of the ADAV, Germany's first workers' party
"Das eiserne und grausame Gesetz" — the iron and cruel law Lassalle said held wages down to bare subsistence (1863)
A lawyer and agitator from a Jewish merchant family in Breslau. In May 1863 he founded the General German Workers' Association (ADAV) at Leipzig and was elected its president for five years, arguing that universal suffrage would turn the state toward funding producers' co-operatives and so toward socialism. That same year he met Bismarck in secret to sound out an alliance between the workers and the Prussian monarchy, which drew Marx's deep suspicion. In 1864 he was shot in a duel over a marriage and died three days later outside Geneva. Eleven years afterwards his programme supplied the frame of the Gotha unity programme.
Career Timeline
- 1848–1849Agitated in the Rhineland during the revolution; jailed six months for inciting armed resistance
- 1862The Workers' Programme lecture, addressing the working class as an independent political force
- 1863.5Founded the ADAV at Leipzig and became its president for a five-year term
- 1863Secret meetings and correspondence with Bismarck on a workers–monarchy alliance
- 1864.8Shot in a duel outside Geneva; died three days later
Lassalle and Marx
The relationship between Lassalle and Marx was one of the most complex tensions in the early history of German social democracy. The two first met in Cologne during the revolution of 1848. Marx was editor of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, and Lassalle was a revolutionary agitator in the Rhineland. Engels disliked Lassalle from the start, disapproving of his "glibness, ostentation and self-importance," but Marx was more tolerant, appreciating his drive and intellectual capacity. Lassalle maintained a warm correspondence with Marx and his wife Jenny during their impoverished years in London, and in 1850 Marx proposed him for membership in the Communist League, though the Cologne committee rejected the proposal "in view of Lassalle's reputation."
The theoretical divergence became clear in the late 1850s. Marx privately dismissed Lassalle's study of Heraclitus (1857) as a "feeble composition" displaying erudition but lacking originality, a diluted version of Hegel. The deeper divide turned on the nature of the state. Lassalle, a Hegelian, viewed the state as an ethical institution for human development rather than an instrument of class rule. He believed universal suffrage would enable the working class to capture the state and fund producers' co-operatives as the path to socialism. Marx, by contrast, insisted on the class character of the state and argued for proletarian revolution and the state's eventual withering away.
Lassalle's secret meetings with Bismarck in 1863, probing a workers–monarchy alliance, struck Marx as betrayal. Marx and Engels believed Lassalle was compromising working-class autonomy by accommodating the Prussian state. Eleven years after Lassalle's death, the Lassalleans (ADAV) and the Marxists (Eisenachers) united at Gotha in 1875, forming the Socialist Workers' Party of Germany (SAPD, later SPD). But the unity programme retained much Lassallean content (the "iron law of wages" and statist slogans) and Marx responded with his Critique of the Gotha Programme (1875), a systematic refutation of Lassalle's theories. The text was not published in Marx's lifetime, but after Engels released it in 1891 it became a foundational document of Marxist state theory.