The work is an open reply in letter form addressed to the Central Committee set up to convene a General German Workers’ Congress in Leipzig. It is not a narrative or a personal memoir but a programmatic political pamphlet: Lassalle responds publicly to the committee’s request for his views and uses the occasion to lay out a case for an independent workers’ movement and for a particular strategy of legal political agitation.
The text begins from the premise that the workers’ cause must be treated as a political question, not as a matter of charity, education alone, or piecemeal self-help. Lassalle argues that the working class has become a distinct social force whose interests cannot be represented by the liberal bourgeoisie. He therefore urges the committee to work toward a general German workers’ congress and toward the creation of a workers’ association that would act as an independent political party. The point of the congress is not merely to discuss grievances but to organize the working class for sustained public action.
A central part of the reply is Lassalle’s economic argument about wages. He sets out the idea commonly called the “iron law of wages”: under free competition, the average wage tends toward the subsistence level, so that workers cannot permanently improve their condition through isolated wage struggles. Trade unions and strikes may have a defensive value, but in Lassalle’s account they cannot abolish the underlying tendency of the wage system. This argument is used to show why workers cannot rely on the existing market order or on voluntary associations alone.
From this follows his critique of liberal “self-help.” Lassalle attacks the model associated with Schulze-Delitzsch and the liberal bourgeoisie, which relied on credit associations, savings institutions, and small cooperative societies. He argues that such schemes presuppose capital and credit that workers do not possess, and that they leave the fundamental dependence of labor on capital intact. The remedy he proposes is state-supported producers’ cooperatives: associations of workers financed with state credit so that workers can become their own employers and receive the full product of their labor. Lassalle presents this not as state socialism in the authoritarian sense but as a democratic use of the state’s resources for the emancipation of labor.
Because state aid could easily become state control, Lassalle insists that the state itself must be democratized. The decisive political demand is universal, equal, and direct suffrage. Through suffrage, workers could make the state responsive to their interests and turn it from a guardian of property into an instrument of social reform. Lassalle describes the state not as a mere night-watchman protecting contracts and property but as a moral and cultural community with a responsibility for the development of its members. The workers’ movement should therefore agitate peacefully and legally for suffrage and for state-supported cooperatives.
The reply also addresses the practical question of organization. Lassalle calls on the committee to convoke the congress and to establish a general German workers’ association that would carry the agitation forward. He emphasizes legal and peaceful methods, public education, and disciplined organization rather than revolutionary conspiracy. The tone is didactic and polemical: Lassalle is trying to persuade the committee and the wider public that the workers must act as an independent political force, that liberal self-help is insufficient, and that universal suffrage plus state-funded producers’ cooperatives is the peaceful road to improving the condition of the working class.
The open-letter form is integral to the text’s polemical purpose: Lassalle is not submitting a private memorandum but making his answer to the committee public, so that the question of how to call the congress becomes a debate over the principles the workers’ movement should adopt. The reply accordingly reads as a programmatic intervention, using the committee’s invitation to define the terms on which workers should enter independent political action.
Its theoretical contribution lies in the way it joins the wage argument to a theory of the state. The existing state is treated as historically bound to propertied interests, yet the “state” as an ethical and cultural unity is presented as the only body capable of extending the credit that producers’ cooperatives need. Universal suffrage is therefore the pivot of the whole program: it is the mechanism by which workers could make the state’s legislative and fiscal power serve cooperative production. The reply does not treat economic demands and constitutional demands as separate items; it presents them as two sides of one strategy.
The book also sharpens the organizational alternative. Against a dispersed model of local self-help and philanthropic societies, it argues for a single national workers’ association with a common program and public agitation. The projected congress is meant to give that association its founding expression, and the party’s task is to educate workers as a political class while using the suffrage and pressing for cooperative legislation. The significance of the text within its own terms is that it fuses a critique of wage competition, a rejection of liberal self-help, and a legal-constitutional strategy into a founding platform for independent working-class politics.
