The work is the printed text of a single public speech delivered before a Leipzig workers’ assembly on 16 April 1863. It is not a treatise with chapters or a narrative account; it preserves an oral address whose purpose is agitation and persuasion. The speaker addresses the assembled workers directly, setting out why they should form an independent political movement rather than rely on existing parties or on charitable self-help.
The speech’s central political argument is that the working class must act as its own political force. Lassalle rejects the claim that the liberal or progressive bourgeoisie can adequately represent workers’ interests. Those parties, in his account, are tied to property and to the interests of the possessing classes; their notion of freedom leaves the social dependence of wage laborers intact. Workers therefore need their own organization and their own political voice. The demand for universal, equal, and direct suffrage is presented as the practical means by which the working class can enter political life and use the state for its emancipation. The speech anticipates objections that workers are too uneducated or too weak for political rights and answers them by arguing that political participation itself is educative and that legal, peaceful agitation can transform the workers’ condition.
Alongside this political demand, the speech sets out the economic argument associated with Lassalle’s agitation. It insists that mere individual self-help, savings, or bourgeois philanthropy cannot lift the working class out of dependence. Under free competition, wages tend to remain at the subsistence level, and workers cannot escape the pressure of wage labor by isolated effort. The remedy proposed is the creation of productive cooperative associations supported by state credit, through which workers could become their own employers and receive the full product of their labor. Such a measure, the speech argues, requires political power; hence the demand for universal suffrage and an independent workers’ party are linked to the social question. The address is polemical and programmatic rather than a detailed legislative or organizational blueprint. It seeks to define the workers’ stand against the bourgeoisie, to vindicate the dignity and historical role of labor, and to call the audience to organized, lawful political action. Its tone is that of a speaker pressing a public case: it combines legal-constitutional argument, economic explanation, and direct appeal to the workers’ sense of collective interest. The printed text remains within the horizon of the Leipzig meeting and the programmatic case Lassalle is making there; it does not extend into later organizational history or subsequent events.
The speech’s framework is historical and ethical as much as economic. It presents the workers’ cause not as a narrow sectional interest but as the universal interest in abolishing privilege: the working class is cast as the estate whose emancipation coincides with the emancipation of society as a whole. Against the liberal reduction of freedom to protection from state interference, the address argues for a conception of freedom that includes participation in the state and the collective shaping of social conditions. The state is accordingly treated not as a night-watchman or a private insurance company but as a moral and cultural institution with responsibility for the development of the whole people. This is why the speech can move from a critique of bourgeois liberalism to a positive program without abandoning constitutional and legal language: political rights are both the precondition and the instrument of social reform.
The address also has a programmatic significance internal to its argument: it fuses diagnosis, remedy, and agency. The diagnosis is the structural dependence of wage labor under competition; the remedy is collective economic organization through state-supported productive associations; the agency is an independent, lawfully agitating workers’ party armed with the franchise. The speech insists that these elements cannot be separated—political enfranchisement without social reconstruction would leave dependence intact, while social reform without political power would be impossible. Its rhetorical force lies in translating these claims into a public appeal: it addresses workers as a historical subject capable of acting for itself, answers the charge of immaturity by treating political struggle as educative, and presents legal agitation as the practical path. The printed text is thus a compact statement of programmatic politics: a moral-historical vindication of labor, a critique of liberal self-help and laissez-faire, and a call to organized political action.
