Overview
Arbeiterlesebuch is the title under which the text of Ferdinand Lassalle’s speeches delivered in Frankfurt am Main on 17 and 19 May 1863 was printed; the volume’s own subtitle identifies it as the stenographic report of those addresses. The title — “Workers’ Reading Book” — signals its purpose: it is not a detached treatise but an address to working people, set down as delivered and offered to a broader working readership as a kind of handbook or reader. The two days’ proceedings belong together as a single occasion: Lassalle’s public appearance before a workers’ gathering at the moment when the movement that would become the General German Workers’ Association was taking shape, and the printed text preserves the spoken argument of that occasion.
The central thread of the address is the historical and political claim of the working class. Lassalle presents the workers as the rising force of the age, the “fourth estate,” whose emancipation is the logical continuation of the earlier emancipations of the estates that preceded it. Against the tendency of liberal opinion to treat the working class as a mere object of charity or of gradual moral improvement, he insists that the workers are a class with a distinct historical mission and a legitimate claim to political power. This is the framing idea from which the rest of the speech unfolds.
From this follows the economic argument. Lassalle dwells on the condition of the working classes — on wages and their determinants, on capital and credit, on competition and the free market, and on the gulf between the propertied and the propertyless. He argues that under the free play of competition the position of the worker cannot be durably improved, and that the ordinary operation of the market tends to hold wages down rather than raise the worker out of dependence. The terms thrown up by the text — Arbeitslohn, Capital, Concurrenz, Credit, Besitz, Bourgeoisie — reflect the range of this economic discussion, which is aimed at showing that the workers’ poverty is not accidental or personal but structural.
Against this diagnosis Lassalle sets the remedy of association. He calls on the workers to organize, and the address is bound up with the practical question of founding a general association of German workers. He holds out the model of productive associations — cooperatives of workers supported by state credit — through which the workers might become their own employers and escape dependence on capitalist owners. In Lassalle’s argument the state is assigned an active role: it is not to be a mere night-watchman but an agency capable of promoting the emancipation of labor, and the workers must therefore win influence over it.
That leads to the political demand that runs through the Frankfurt speeches: the general, direct, and secret franchise. Universal suffrage is presented not as a piece of abstract constitutional doctrine but as the indispensable instrument by which the working class can obtain legislative power, and thus the means to secure the economic and social measures the address advocates. The demand for allgemeines und direktes Wahlrecht recurs in the text and is one of its practical rallying points. Alongside it the speech engages with workers’ educational associations (Arbeiterbildungsvereine), which are treated in relation to the wider political task rather than as an end in themselves.
A strong polemical element runs through the address. Lassalle directs sharp criticism at the German Progressive Party and at the liberal bourgeoisie, whom he accuses of representing propertied interests while claiming to speak for the nation and of abandoning or resisting the franchise. In making the case he draws on statistical material, including the income statistics associated with Dieterici, in order to illustrate the distribution of income and the actual position of the working population — an appeal to figures that serves his broader contention that the workers’ cause is a matter of demonstrable material fact rather than sentiment.
The tone throughout is that of an orator addressing a live audience: assertive, exhortatory, and aimed at persuading the workers of their collective strength and of the necessity of independent political organization. The stenographic form preserves this rhetorical character. Read as a whole, Arbeiterlesebuch sets out, in popular and combative form, the core of Lassalle’s program for the working class in 1863: the historical mission of the workers, the structural causes of their dependence under competition, the remedy of state-supported association, and the demand for universal, direct, and secret suffrage as the instrument of their emancipation.
