MIA > Archive > Lassalle > Voices of Revolt
Written: As a speech in German, delivered April 12th, 1862.
Published in English: 1927.
Translated by: Jakob Altmeier (presumed).
Source: Voices of Revolt: Speeches of Ferdinand Lassalle. International Publishers, first edition, 1927, New York, USA. 94 pages.
Transcription and Markup: Bill Wright for marxists.org, February, 2023
All periods of history unite in affording frequent repetitions of the spectacle of unclear thinkers — whose class, gentlemen, may also include ostensibly highly cultured persons, such as professors and others, as the St. Paul’s Church of lamentable memory has shown — who contract the unhappy delusion of mistaking a comparatively consistent and clear expression of the thought of a declining epoch or institution for a new revolutionary principle.
It is against such persons and tendencies which are revolutionary only in their own conceit that I should like to warn you, gentlemen, for we shall have as little lack of them in the future as we have had in the past.
But we may console ourselves simultaneously with the thought that the numerous movements which collapse immediately or but a short time after their momentary success, which we find in history and which might fill the well-meaning but superficial heart of many a friend of the people with real concern, were revolutionary movements that were revolutionary only in their own fantasies.
A truly revolutionary movement, a movement resting on a truly new principle of thought, has — as the profound thinker may learn to his solace from history — never been destroyed, at least, never permanently.
—From the Arbeiter-Programm (“Workers’ Program”), a speech delivered in Berlin, April 12, 1862.
Last updated on 14 February 2023