Ferdinand Lassalle’s The Working Man’s Programme is a political address from the 1860s, translated into English by Edward Peters and published in London in 1884. Lassalle sets out to prove, with what he calls strict scientific clarity, that the working class is the class whose interests coincide with the whole of human progress, and that the State exists to serve that progress rather than merely to guard property. The result is less a party pamphlet than a sweeping philosophy of history, moving from medieval land law to the factory system, from the French Revolution’s property qualifications to the Prussian three-class franchise, before arriving at a moral case for universal suffrage and state-backed workers’ associations.
“The answer must be sought in the great facts of history, and this answer is distinctly in the affirmative.”
The Science of History and the Rule of Land
Lassalle opens by promising his audience a treatment “most thoroughly scientific,” by which he means complete clarity and no unproven assumptions. That promise forces a detour: before anyone can talk about the working class, the terms must be fixed, and before the terms, history itself must be consulted, since history rightly understood explains the present and foreshadows the future. His retrospect begins in the Middle Ages, where the same grades and classes existed in less developed form but one element dominated everything: the landed interest. The reason is economic. Trade was slight, industry slighter, and wealth consisted overwhelmingly of agricultural produce. Medieval law proves the point—family estates in land could not be alienated without the consent of the heirs, while movable goods could be sold freely. Chattels were treated not as independent capital but as the annual produce of the land, on a par with harvested crops. Landed property alone counted as productive property, and so the nobles and clergy who held it stamped their character on every institution of the age.
How Industry Quietly Remade the World
Lassalle declines to give a complete account of how the bourgeoisie rose, pleading the limits of time, and instead lists the essential causes: the discovery of America; the sea route to the East Indies around the Cape of Good Hope, which broke the old overland trade through Suez; the magnetic needle and compass, which made sea trade safer, faster, and cheaper to insure; canals and paved roads, which cut transport costs enough to make distant sales worthwhile; greater security of property and a regular course of justice; and gunpowder, which let kings shatter the feudal power of the nobles and left their dismissed men-at-arms with nowhere to go but the workshops. All of these, he says, dragged the triumphal car of the bourgeoisie.
Their common consequence was the opening of great outlets and the fall of production and transport costs, which made production for the world market possible. That in turn demanded cheapness, and cheapness demanded an ever-advancing division of labour, which demanded production on an ever larger scale. Lassalle insists his readers have entered the domain of reciprocal cause and effect: each fact calls the other into existence and is enlarged by it in return. Large production lowers costs; lower costs widen the market; the wider market permits still larger production and finer subdivision of work. The whole revolution in the community’s work can be reduced to a single contrast. In the early Middle Ages, demand came first: the tailor waited for the order, the tinman made only as many lamps as the town was known to need. Production was local, its market was the neighbourhood, and its measure was known in advance. The community was poor but stable. Under the new system the order is reversed—production precedes demand and must force demand into existence, armed with the single weapon of cheapness, which conquers the purchaser and drives every rival out of the market.
The Bourgeois State and the Property Franchise
From history Lassalle turns to the State’s duty: to help workers obtain a more ample and assured wage, making possible a rational education and an existence worthy of a human being. Workers may demand this, but they must never forget that property lawfully earned is legitimate and unassailable. The trouble begins when the rich citizen is not content with the advantages of large possessions and makes property the condition of power over the State. Then he becomes a bourgeois in the precise sense—he constitutes himself a new privileged class, stamping his privilege on society as the noble once stamped landed property.
Did the third class that came to power in the French Revolution do exactly this? Lassalle answers with the great facts. The decree of 3 September 1791 divided citizens into active and passive, granting the franchise only to those paying direct taxes to a fixed amount—three days’ labour, roughly a thaler—and expressly excluding everyone who worked for wages. The principle, not the amount, is what matters: private property became the condition of sovereignty over the State. The census then grew, as such principles do. Louis XVIII’s charter of 1814 set the qualification at 300 francs; the law of 19 April 1831, passed after the Revolution of 1830, set it at 200 francs. Under Louis Philippe and Guizot the “pays legal” numbered 200,000 electors ruling thirty million inhabitants. Lassalle notes that the exclusion can be open or covert with identical effect: the second Republic, unable to revoke universal suffrage outright, passed the law of 31 May 1850 requiring three years’ continuous domicile in one place, a census in disguise aimed at workmen forced to move in search of employment.
Prussia, he says, is worse. The three-class electoral law gives three, ten, or thirty or more propertyless electors of the third class the same voting power as a single large capitalist of the first. Official figures show the arithmetic: of 3,661,993 electors under universal suffrage in 1848, the law of 30 May 1849 first stripped 406,000 of the vote, then divided the remainder into 153,808 in the first class, 409,945 in the second, and 2,691,950 in the third. One rich man thus voted with the weight of seventeen without property.
The Morality of the Fourth Estate
The address closes with its most ambitious claim. Public opinion, Lassalle says, is minted by capital and takes its impressions from the privileged bourgeoisie, so the idea of working-class rule is feared as a prejudice of a privileged age. He contrasts the opposite prejudice of 1793, when the convention’s declaration held that any institution not assuming the people good and the magistracy corruptible is vicious—the era of sansculottism, when a whole coat made a man suspect. That view, he argues, rests on a truth in perverted form, and nothing is more dangerous than a perverted truth: adopt it and you get destructive folly; reject it wholly and you lose a truth no sound politics can do without.
The true ground is this. History advances by abolishing privileges, and the higher classes, whose position rests on privilege, are driven by personal interest to oppose the people’s development—except for the rare characters lifted by a wide range of vision. Daily opposition to everything great and good breeds a necessary immorality: contempt for ideals, a compassionate smile at the name of the Idea, the pursuit of advantage and pleasure swallowing every moral element. The lower classes, by happy contrast, have no such inevitable conflict between self-interest and national development. A reasonable instinct tells them that each man thinking only of himself can hope for no important improvement; the more earnestly they strive as a class, the more their interest coincides with the development of freedom, which is the interest of the entire human race. Hence the dominion of the fourth class must produce an unprecedented efflorescence of morality, culture, and science.
The keystone is the fourth estate’s different conception of the State. For the bourgeoisie, the State’s object is solely to guarantee each individual the unhindered exercise of his faculties—sufficient only if all were equally strong, clever, educated, and rich; since they are not, it amounts to the stronger fleecing the weaker. Lassalle calls this “a policeman’s idea”: the State as a constable preventing robbery and burglary, superfluous if there were no robbers. The working class, by contrast, knows that individual free activity is not enough and that solidarity of interests must be added. History is a struggle with nature—misery, ignorance, poverty, weakness, and the slavery that follows—and no step forward is ever made by each one for himself. The State is the unity of individuals into a moral whole, multiplying a million-fold the strength of each, and its function is to carry the development of freedom to its attainment.
What the Address Left Behind
Peters’s biographical sketch, printed with the translation, fills in the author’s trajectory: born at Breslau in 1825, educated at Breslau and Berlin, moving in Humboldt’s circle and praised by Heine for scholarship and energy of will, tried and acquitted for armed resistance to the reactionary government in 1848, author of a book on Heraclitus, a tragedy on Franz von Sickingen, and works on Fichte and Lessing. His most important socialist writing, Capital and Labour, proposed national workshops with the State as a sleeping partner supplying capital and inspecting the books, so that working men might become their own employers. The Arbeiter-Programm itself, delivered in Berlin in 1862, earned him a short imprisonment; the following year the General Union of Working Men of Germany was formed at his instance with him as president. Bismarck sought him out for three interviews, hoping for the party’s help against the Party of Progress, and studied his writings—Peters credits Lassalle’s influence, in part, for the Chancellor’s later socialistic schemes. His career ended in a duel in 1864. The address remains the classic statement of state socialism from the workers’ side: a case that the free market flees the weak, that the franchise had been quietly rigged for property in every constitution since 1791, and that the moral future belonged to the class with nothing to lose but its exclusion.
