Ferdinand Lassalle
Lassalle (1825-1864) was an active participant in the revolution of 1848. He came in intensive contact with Marx and Engels through his contributions to the Neue Rheinische Zeitung.
As one of only a few revolutionaries, Lassalle remained in Prussia after having served a prison sentence for subversive activities. He died after a duel in 1864, at the age of 39.As with Marx, Lassalle started from the writings of Hegel and the Hegelian school. He devoted his main theoretical interest to the study of the philosophy of law and the evolution of the legal system. In his main theoretical work, Das System der erworbenen Rechte (1861), he tried to present a philosophical-empirical history of law which - similar to the development of the economy - displayed a tendency towards socialism as a final state. Lassalle was convinced that the progress in the history of law essentially consisted in “imposing ever more restrictions on the sphere of property of the private individual, in moving an increasing number of objects outside of the sphere of private property” (Lassalle 1919-20, vol. 9: 390).
In economics, Lassalle considered himself a follower of Marx. However, in the preface to the first edition of Das Kapital, Marx criticized Lassalle for having misunderstood essential elements of his economic doctrine (Marx 1867 [1969]: 11). As has been shown (Grigorovici 1910), Lassalle had only superficially adopted Marx’s theory of value. Even if Lassalle generally accepted that all prices and values are determined by the “socially necessary labour” expended in the production of a commodity, implicitly he attributed to “social demand” the role of an additional determinant of value under certain circumstances.
More importantly, Lassalle’s theory of the state was different from that of Marx. For Marx, the state was essentially an executive committee of the ruling class - “nothing more than the form of organization which the bourgeois necessarily adopt both for internal and external purposes, for the mutual guarantee of their property and interest” (Marx and Engels 1939: 59).
This view precluded any expectation of using the state as an instrument for transforming the capitalist system into a socialist one. Lassalle thought quite differently. In a speech to workers in Berlin, Lassalle said that it was the state that has to assume the function to unite the powers of individuals in order to enable each individual to achieve a level of existence which the individual can never achieve by acting on its own (Lassalle 1862 [1919]: 32). He advocated a political strategy in which the state played a central role in improving the conditions of the working class. Following Ricardo and Marx, Lassalle postulated an “iron law of wages” (“ehernes Lohngesetz”) which would keep the wage at the low level of a socially determined minimum of subsistence as long as workers were separated from the ownership of the means of production. The central idea of Lassalle’s economic programme was to break this iron law by using the institution of co-operatives to enable workers to participate in the ownership of capital. The state had to play an essential role by providing money capital necessary for financing the co-operatives. In Lassalle’s view, the state-supported co-operative economy was an important step towards the new social order which remained the distant goal of the movement. With respect to trade unions and consumer co-operatives Lassalle took a sceptical attitude.In Germany, the co-operative movement had been pioneered by Hermann Schulze- Delitzsch and gained momentum after the failed revolution of 1848. Lassalle parted with this movement in 1863 when he founded the Allgemeiner deutscher Arbeiterverein (General German Workers’ Association) which propagated the formation of producer co-operatives, an idea which Lassalle had borrowed from Louis Blanc. He tried to convince Bismarck, who was at that time struggling for survival as chancellor of the Prussian state, to grant financial state support for the formation of worker co-operatives in exchange for political support from workers against the liberal-bourgeois Progressive Party.
With respect to taxation Lassalle dissented from the Marxian position that indirect taxes do not reduce real wages. Lassalle argued that the increase or the introduction of special excises have a diminishing effect on workers’ incomes and cannot be shifted forward to the employers (Gerloff 1922: 16 ff.).
The German Social Democratic Party, and its Austrian sister organization, always held Lassalle in high esteem as one of its founders. If, nonetheless, its majority remained distinctly Marxist until 1914, after World War I, when the Social Democrats shared responsibility for the government, it became obvious that Lassalle’s approach to the function of the state was a better foundation of their political program than Marx’s negative position.
On the surface, Lassalle’s concern with German unification makes his state socialism appear as “German socialism”. Yet his concern with the unity of Germany is fundamentally different from that of other German state socialists. Lassalle does not advocate this unity for its own sake, that is, for nationalistic aims, but to form an organizational unit within which the socialist society can be established.