Programma rabotnikov is the Russian title of Ferdinand Lassalle’s text known in German as the Arbeiterprogramm (“Workers’ Programme”). It is less a practical party manifesto with numbered demands than a lecture-style argument about history, the state, and the historical role of the working class.
Lassalle presents history as a progressive movement toward freedom, in which each epoch is carried by a leading idea and a rising social estate. The French Revolution had brought the third estate—the bourgeoisie—to political power and had proclaimed legal and political equality. But in Lassalle’s account that emancipation remained incomplete because it was largely formal: it left intact the social dependence rooted in property and wage labour. The task of the present period is therefore the emancipation of the fourth estate, the workers. The working class is presented not as a narrow sectional interest but as the social group whose cause coincides with the universal interest in freedom and human development.
A central target of the text is the liberal, Manchester-school conception of the state. Lassalle rejects the idea that the state exists merely to protect property and enforce contracts—the “night-watchman” state. He argues instead that the state is a moral and ethical community whose purpose is to help realize freedom and develop the capacities of its members. From this follows his critique of liberals who demand political liberty while opposing a positive social role for the state. For Lassalle, political freedom and the social question are connected: workers need political power in order to use the state for the emancipation of their estate.
The text accordingly calls for the political mobilization of workers and for universal, equal, and direct suffrage as the means by which the working class can become a decisive force in the state. It urges workers to understand their historical mission and to act as an independent political estate rather than as a subordinate wing of liberal progressivism. Its tone is hortatory and philosophical rather than technical; it offers a broad historical justification for working-class politics, not a detailed economic blueprint. The central claim is that the coming historical period belongs to the idea of the working class, and that the workers’ cause is the universal cause of freedom.
Within that historical scheme, the text sharpens a distinction between the formal universality proclaimed by the bourgeoisie and the substantive universality it assigns to the workers. The bourgeoisie’s achievement is treated as real but one-sided: it universalized citizenship in law while preserving a social order in which property and wage dependence still determine freedom. The workers’ cause is therefore presented as the completion of the same emancipatory logic, not as a rejection of it. The state accordingly appears as the central terrain of struggle: if it is merely an instrument for securing property, political equality remains hollow; if it is oriented toward the development of all, it becomes an agent of emancipation. The text’s significance lies in this fusion of a philosophy of history with a practical call to independent working-class politics. It gives workers a universal language in which their particular grievances can be understood as a historical mission, and it treats political action as the means by which that mission can be carried into the state. Its argument is normative and mobilizing rather than economic-technical: it seeks to persuade workers that their emancipation is the next stage of freedom and that they must act as its conscious bearer.
