Lassalle’s 1862 Berlin lecture on the working class as the coming “Fourth Estate”
A Lecture Delivered in Berlin
The Workers’ Programme (German: Arbeiterprogramm) is the published form of a lecture Ferdinand Lassalle delivered in Berlin in April 1862, originally titled “The Working Class and its Significance in the Present Age.” It was one of two lectures he gave in Berlin that spring, and it was delivered at the invitation of a group of workers. The text subsequently circulated under the title by which it is now known.
The Working Class as the “Fourth Estate”
The lecture’s central argument is that the working class — which Lassalle designates the “Fourth Estate” — is destined to become the dominant social force. Its claim to that role rests on what he characterizes as a “profound instinct” for the true destiny of the State. For Lassalle the State is not merely an administrative machine but an ethical institution devoted to human development, and the working class is the social force whose historical mission is to realize that purpose. On this basis he urged the workers to form their own independent political party rather than relying on the existing middle-class parties.
A Break with Liberal Progressivism
The lecture was addressed to workers who had grown doubtful of the liberal Progressives and their programme of “liberty” — liberty of trade, contract, association, education, and self-help. These workers suspected that such freedoms would not remedy long hours, low wages, and poor factory and housing conditions, and Lassalle confirmed their suspicions and strengthened their doubts. From that point, the historical record notes, the issue was squarely joined between the middle-class Progressives and Lassalle’s socialist followers. The Workers’ Programme thus functions as a polemic: it rejects the liberal vision of social improvement through individual freedom and voluntary association, and insists instead on independent working-class political organization.
Hegelianism and the “Cult of the State”
Eduard Bernstein described The Workers’ Programme as a paraphrase of the Communist Manifesto adapted to the time and circumstances. But Bernstein also observed that Lassalle’s Hegelianism and juridical outlook led him to a veritable cult of the state, which he identified as the vulnerable point of Lassalle’s ideology. That Hegelian framework — the state as the embodiment of an ethical idea, and the working class as the agent of a rational historical destiny — gives the lecture its distinctive character and sets it apart from a straightforwardly Marxist account of class politics.
Suppression and Consequences
The lecture caused a stir. Police confiscated The Workers’ Programme and brought charges against Lassalle, who was convicted, though the sentence was commuted to a fine. The work stands as one of the key statements of Lassalle’s early-1860s agitation, marking the moment at which the German workers’ movement began to separate itself from liberalism and to assert an independent political voice.
The Progressives, in their sympathetic study of English institutions and precedents, had hit upon a peacefully liberal way of solving the social and economic problems of the day. By consecrating Prussia to “liberty,” they hoped to wean workingmen from socialistic Utopias and win them to a proper respect for law and order and individual rights, not least the right of private property. They were not “simon-pure democrats”: as well-to-do middle-class people entrenched in the three-class electoral system, they could see no good reason for introducing universal manhood suffrage, which might imperil their majority in the House of Representatives and endanger “liberty,” especially since the workingmen, to enjoy its blessings, had no need of the ballot. The workers had no need of direct parliamentary representation; the Progressives were their benevolent if self-constituted champions. When a group of workers humbly petitioned for full membership in the party, the reply was that “all workers might consider honorary membership as their birthright.”
From the Open Letter to the ADAV
In late 1862, a committee of Leipzig workers, disillusioned with the liberal Progressives’ refusal to grant them full membership in the Nationalverein or support universal suffrage, approached Lassalle and asked him to lead a new workers’ movement. Lassalle responded in March 1863 with his Open Letter to the Central Committee for the Convening of a General German Workers’ Congress in Leipzig (Offnes Antwortschreiben). In it he reiterated the impotence of the Progressives and outlined a program for an independent workers’ party advocating universal, equal, and direct suffrage. He attacked Schulze-Delitzsch’s self-help co-operatives as inadequate and proposed state-financed producers’ co-operatives instead. He also expounded his “iron law of wages,” arguing that under capitalism average wages are always driven down to the bare minimum of subsistence, and that only through state aid and universal suffrage could the working class achieve emancipation.
The Open Letter became the founding document of the General German Workers’ Association (ADAV), established in Leipzig on 23 May 1863, with Lassalle as its president for a five-year term. The ADAV was the first organized German workers’ party. Its statutes gave the president dictatorial powers, a feature that Lassalle’s successors inherited as part of his “enduring legacy.” His leadership style was that of a demagogue rather than a democratic leader, and his conception of democracy was based on a vague, Jacobin notion of the collective will rather than on representative institutions. Lacking patience for detailed organizational work, he was an effective speaker and agitator but relied on his pre-existing audience. His following was never numerous; although he was a brilliant speaker and writer, fired with ardent enthusiasm, tireless in travel and propaganda, and possessed of no small degree of organizing ability, he was unable to awaken the bulk of the German working class to the role it might play in national, political, and social life. Recruitment was slow; by the time of his death, the ADAV had only about 4,600 members.
Bismarck, Treason Trial, and Later Agitation
During this period, Lassalle’s hostility to liberalism brought him into a series of confidential meetings and correspondence with Otto von Bismarck, the Prussian Minister President. The first meeting, at Bismarck’s invitation, took place in May 1863. Bismarck sought to use the new workers’ movement to crush liberal opposition. Lassalle hoped to persuade Bismarck to introduce universal suffrage, believing it would benefit both the Crown and the workers against the bourgeoisie. He even suggested that the working class might support a “social dictatorship” by the Crown against bourgeois society. The exact nature of their discussions remained secret, but Lassalle’s overtures to the conservative state and his nationalist sentiments were viewed with deep suspicion by Marx and other socialists. His relationship with Marx finally broke down completely in November 1862 over a misunderstanding about a loan.
Lassalle continued his agitation throughout 1863 and 1864, delivering powerful speeches, notably at Frankfurt and Ronsdorf. His pamphlet Herr Bastiat-Schulze von Delitzsch, the Economic Julian, Or Capital and Labour (1864) was a polemical attack on Schulze-Delitzsch that also, paradoxically, did much to popularise Marxian concepts of capital and labour and prepare the German movement for the reception of Marxism. He faced ongoing legal battles; he was later sentenced to imprisonment, pending appeal, for his Ronsdorf speech. At his trial for high treason in March 1864, Lassalle publicly predicted that Bismarck would “play the part of Robert Peel” and grant universal suffrage within a year.
Death and the ADAV’s Later Course
Lassalle’s political career was cut short at the age of 39 in 1864 when he was killed in a duel following a dispute over a young woman he wished to marry. The ADAV later grew to become a major political force in the German Empire. In 1875, it merged with the Marxist Social Democratic Workers’ Party of Germany to form the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD).
