Ferdinand Lassalle

The turmoil and battle for the political and economic systems instigated by that instability is already underway, and we see it everywhere.

19th century socialist thinker Ferdinand Lassalle once wrote that the French Revolution in which the bourgeois led the peasants in rising up against the aristocracy was only possible because of the economic revolution that preceded it, in which the bourgeois had grown wealthy and powerful on the back of land enclosure and wage labor.

The actual overthrow of the aristocracy then was just the external recognition of a transition of power that had already materially taken place.

Even things like the Bolshevik Revolution came on the back of a loss of material power by the aristocracy and the growth of power of workers councils or Soviets that had been building since the failed revolution of 1905.

Once again, the honest men have been cruelly done in the eye by the dishonest.

To begin with, they adopt the high-sounding but historically false Thessalian dictum, in relation to the working class, all other classes are only one reactionary mass.

This proposition is true only in certain exceptional instances, for example in the case of a revolution by the proletariat, e.g. the commune, or in a country in which not only has the bourgeoisie constructed state and society after its own image, but the democratic petty bourgeoisie, in its wake, has already carried that reconstruction to its logical conclusion.

If, for instance, in Germany, the democratic Petit Bourgeoisie were part of this reactionary mass, then how could the Social Democratic Workers' Party have gone hand-in-hand with it, with the People's Party, for years on end? How could the Volksstaat derive virtually all its political content from the Petit Bourgeois Democratic Frankfurter Zeitung? And how can one explain the adoption, in this same programme, of no less than seven demands that coincide exactly and word for word with the programme of the People's Party and of petty bourgeois democracy? I mean the seven political demands, one to five and one to two, of which there is not one that is not bourgeois democratic.

And this, after Bracca has so ably demonstrated the sheer futility of that demand, after almost all, if not all, of our party's speakers have, in their struggle against the Lasallians, been compelled to make a stand against this state aid, our party could hardly demean itself further.

Internationalism sunk to the level of Mangurg, socialism to that of the bourgeois Republican Bouquez, who confronted the socialists with this demand in order to supplant them.

But state aid in the Thessalian sense of the word is, after all, at most only one measure, among many others, for the attainment of an end here lamely described as, quote, paving the way for the solution of the social question, end quote, as though in our case there was still a social question that remained unsolved in theory.

Thus, if you were to say, the German Workers' Party strives to abolish wage labour, and hence class distinctions, by introducing cooperative production into industry and agriculture, and on a national scale, it is in favour of any measure calculated to attain that end, then no Lasallian could possibly object.

The deists, Voltaire and Tom Paine, were to the divines of their day predestined devils, tempting mankind hellward.

To deists and divines alike, Ferdinand Lassalle, the godless self-worshipper and man-worshipper, would have been a monster.

Yet many who today echo Lassalle's demand that economic and political institutions should be adapted to the poor man's will to eat and drink his fill out of the product of his own labor are revolted by Ibsen's acceptance of the impulse towards greater freedom as sufficient ground for the repudiation of any customary duty, however sacred, that conflicts with it.

Society, were it even as free as Lassalle's social democratic republic, must, it seems to them, go to pieces when conduct is no longer regulated by inviolable covenants.