MIA > Archive > Lassalle > Voices of Revolt
At the beginning of the modern German labor movement stands Lassalle!
He was the sword, he was the flame. Gerhart Hauptmann’s[a] words concerning Florian Geyer[b] are just as appropriate to the first leader of the industrial proletariat: an ardent sense of right coursed through his veins! His burning sense of justice dragged him by way of Fichte[c] and Hegel[d] into the domain of Karl Marx,[e] made him the awakener of the German workers, and the most fiery sounder of the tocsin in the struggle for liberation by the proletariat.
Lassalle was not a “Prussian” and not a “Bavarian.” He was a German, and a Jew and a revolutionary into the bargain. To this day each of these three attributes is a curse for those that have been born between the Moselle[f] and the Memel,[g] and are condemned to live and work in this territory. This is perhaps not the least of the reasons for that portion of the politics and tactics of Lassalle that has always remained foreign and inaccessible to us. Let us not dwell here on time-honored disputed questions. We know how Marx and Engels judged Lassalle, but we also know that the writers of the Communist Manifesto[h] in this relation frequently overshot the mark. Franz Mehring[i] has given an exhaustive treatment of this subject,[1.] and even Karl Marx in a letter to the Countess Hatzfeld,[j] written by Marx after Lassalle’s death, makes the following admission:
“You are quite right in your suggestion that no one was better equipped than I to appreciate the great and significant qualities in Lassalle. . . . But, altogether apart from this equipment of mine, I loved him personally. The unfortunate thing always was that we continually concealed our affection for each other, as if we were destined to live forever.”
In another letter, written by Marx to J. B. von Schweitzer,[k] Marx eulogizes Lassalle for having reawakened the German workers’ movement to life after a slumber of fifteen years, in spite of any tactical errors he might have made in the course of his propaganda work.
But the most adequate estimate of Lassalle, of his “mistakes and errors,” is that afforded by Franz Mehring, in his Geschichte der deutschen Sozialdemokratie (vol. ii, p. 247):
“Lassalle was a convinced communist in the sense of the Communist Manifesto, and his many errors and miscalculations were due only to the fact that he translated the economic conceptions of the Manifesto into legal and philosophical terms before putting them to his own uses. Owing to the fact that he understood the proletarian class struggle, the worship of the State carried on by our classical philosophy could not possibly attain the formalistic rigidity which it developed under the hands of Rodbertus,[l] but since Lassalle never completely abandoned the idealistic modes of thought, he was never able to relinquish the cult of the State. There is no doubt that he felt far more secure on legal and philosophical ground than in the economic field, though it would be an exaggeration to declare — as do some — that he had made no real, independent study of this subject. His studies in this field were so real and so effective that a whole university full of academic big-wigs might find adequate material for investigation in his work. But he did not dominate the field with the sure mastery of a Marx or an Engels, since his idealistic formulas of thought too frequently impeded his path. In the press of battle he would then resort to whatever weapons were at hand, following the theory of Lessing’s[m] old dictum: ‘It is not he that made the ladder, but he that ascends it, who will scale the wall; and even an unsafe ladder will support a bold and agile man.’ No doubt the bourgeois economists are right in maintaining that Lassalle was not an epoch-making Socialist theorist. If only these moles, who feel so much at home in the dark, had also an eye for what is to be seen in the light of day!
“Though Lassalle’s idealism was his weakness, it also constituted his strength. It was this idealism which imparted to him his rock-bound confidence in the power of the ideal, a confidence that enabled Lassalle to produce such great results. It may be necessary to state in advance that Lassalle did not appreciate so keenly and profoundly the laws of motion and evolution of modern bourgeois society as did Marx and Engels; yet it would be an error to attempt to estimate Lassalle’s historical importance exclusively by this criterion in any other field than in the case of the defect which is mentioned. Such a procedure would be equivalent to regarding historical problems as class room exercises, for such exercises need only be gone through to discover their errors. Every historical character finds his historical justification only by reason of his historical environment.
“If we compare Lassalle with Marx and Engels, who grew up under quite different historical conditions, he may in a certain sense be overshadowed by these two men, if only for the reason that the path of his life was beset with darker shadows than theirs. But if we compare him with his contemporaries living in about the same or even more favorable circumstances, let us say, for instance, with the Young Hegelians[n] in the philosophical field, with Rodbertus in the economic field, with Johann Jacobi[o] in the political field, he gains immensely in breadth and in height. In spite of the idealistic Weltanschauung which he had in common with these men, he was able to penetrate to the core of scientific communism — and none of these men did that — thanks to his great mental gifts, thanks to his revolutionary instincts, and also — more particularly — thanks to his honest and untiring wish for the truth.”
Lassalle’s errors were therefore not only inherent in the character of the great agitator; they were in part the product of the political and economic circumstances prevailing at the time in Prussia and Germany, where it was the agitator’s most prominent duty to engage in practical work and struggle.
The French bourgeoisie succeeded in putting through its claims in the Great Revolution of 1789. The German bourgeoisie arose after the defeat of 1806 and after the so called “Wars of Liberation,” which smoothed a way simultaneously for an economic revival, as well as for a hale and hearty infantile reaction. Accordingly, the year 1848 in Germany was but a faint echo of the French Revolutions. When Lassalle entered the lists, the dream of German unity, of 1848, which had been swiftly dissipated, lay behind him.
The Hellpachs[p] were cavorting about on their wooden horses and spurring them on against Bismarck,[q] and everywhere the Men of Progress (Fortschrittsmänner),[r] were bustling and busying about, “the June bugs of the springtime of the nations,” as Heinrich Heine[s] once called them. The bourgeoisie was incapable of recognizing its own historical mission, to say nothing of carrying it out. It permitted its princes and diplomats, after the wars they had forced upon it (the wars of 1864, 1866 and 1871), to confer upon it through the “revolution from above” what it should have acquired for itself, in its own class interest, from below, in 1848, against the opposition of the Prussian Junkers[t] and the German Princes. The immediate consequence was the black, red, and white[u] Empire of the Hohenzollerns: the ultimate disaster, a defeat in the World War.
The German workers at that time stood in the ranks of the so-called Progressives. It was Lassalle’s accomplishment to have cut them off from this connection and made them independent by the forming of the Allgemeiner Deutscher Arbeiterverein (The General German Workers’ Union)[v]. It was the tragedy of his position to have suffered from the delusion — in spite of this great task, and in spite of all his theoretical knowledge — that he might make use of the working class to force the bourgeoisie also to discharge its historical mission. How can any one oblige John Quince, the carpenter, to be a true lion, for all the lion’s skin he may drape about him? How can any one force a democratic Secretary of War to be a republican in spite of his black, red and gold[w] cockade?
It is the cruel irony of our period, in which falls the one hundredth anniversary (1925) of the birth of Lassalle, that it repeats on a more disastrous, on a more all-embracing scale, the same political events, the same political relations, and the same political parties as prevailed in the days of Lassalle’s fiery activity. His speeches are, therefore, as if they had been pronounced yesterday. One need only to change a few figures and names; the rest remains the same. The parties and their leaders have merely moved up a few seats, and the Progressives of Lassalle are the Social-Democrats of to-day. The general suffrage right is no longer a battle-slogan. The reactionary forces are perfectly well able to live with and by the aid of the bourgeois democracy. Lassalle is no longer proscribed; on the contrary, he has been elevated to the position of an economic theorist, with the assistance of whose alleged doctrines the German worker is fed the saccharine pap of human kindness.
In reproducing in the following pages a few thoughts taken from those of Lassalle’s speeches which are valid even to-day, we are pursuing the object of calling to account all those unclean elements who, like the Social-Democrats on the occasion of their hundredth anniversary of his birth, make use of his name for impure ends, as a means of cloaking their policy and their hostility to the cause. Lassalle was different from his present-day inheritors; his expressions were different from theirs. “He died young, in battle, as Achilles!” was Karl Marx’s lament on Lassalle, from London. His successors are accumulating adipose tissue and rotting on the unclean couch of bourgeois coalitions. It is as if Lassalle had never lived and had never shouted to the workers: “The proletariat alone is the rock on which the church of the future shall be founded.” Now, as then, the question of a proletarian revolution is the truly national question. And no duty is, therefore, more imperative than that of freeing the working class from all bourgeois illusions, and leading them into the class struggle, into the revolution. To serve the purpose of bringing about an understanding of the true Lassalle, these pages have been compiled. For it was Lassalle who once said to one of his adherents after the delivery of a speech at Frankfort: “Whenever I say ‘general suffrage right’ you must understand me as meaning ‘revolution’ and ‘revolution’ and again ‘revolution’!”
It is this Lassalle whom the Progressives hated like sin. It is this Lassalle whom they denounced as an agent of the reaction, as a catspaw of Bismarck. The Progressives, Realpolitikers,[x] compromisers and the dupes of conciliation, who were his contemporaries, may be found again in this volume. We see rising before us the complete political slough of despond of that period, the same miserable subterfuges and follies, the same clowns and millennial prophets as we find to-day. There is not much difference between 1848 and 1918; the counterrevolution of the former year is remarkably similar to that of the latter year. Furthermore, we find the proletariat faced with the same tasks and duties, and, therefore, we again find the Lassalle whom we love. For he beat the drum on the march of revolution.
He was the sword, he was the flame!
Jakob Altmaier.
[1.] In his Geschichte der deutschen Sozialdemokratie; see his Social Forces in German History, and D. Riazanov’s Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels.
[a] Hauptmann, Gerhart (born 1862 [and died 1946]): Living German dramatist; the author of a number of social dramas in prose and verse, including the prose drama Die Weber (“The Weavers”), 1892.
[b] Florian Geyer (1490-1525): A German knight who, despite his aristocratic class background, led a revolutionary armed uprising of peasants against both Catholic and Protestant armies. In addition to the 1896 stage drama by Hauptmann mentioned above, Geyer was also memorialized by Frederick Engels in his 1850 pamphlet The Peasant War in Germany. —New note by Bill Wright, transcriber.
[c] Fichte, Johann Gottlieb (1762-1814): German philosopher; see Franz Mehring: Social Forces in German History, 1927.
[d] Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich (1770-1831): German philosopher. His philosophy is characterized by the so-called Hegelian dialectic, or principle which enables reflective thinking to arrange all the categories, or necessary conceptions of reason, in an order of development that corresponds to the actual order, in development, of all reality.
[e] Marx, Karl (1818-1883): For a study of his life and work, see D. Riazanov: Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, 1927.
[f] Moselle (Ger. Mosel): A river in eastern France and western Germany, joining the Rhine at Coblenz.
[g] Memel: A river formerly marking the eastern boundary of Germany (up to 1919). Its mouth, which empties into the Baltic Sea, is now in Lithuania.
[h] Communist Manifesto: The first popular declaration of the principles and program of Scientific Socialism, written by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels and printed in 1847.
[i] Mehring, Franz (1846-1919): German revolutionary socialist, publicist and historian; author of Social Forces in German History, 1927, and of a history of the German Social-Democracy, and a life of Karl Marx (in German).
[j] Hatzfeld, Sophie, Countess of (1805-1881): Married Count Hatzfeld in 1822, divorced in 1851; Lassalle’s friendship for her was the cause of his devoting to her service many years which might otherwise have gone to the revolutionary movement.
[k] Schweitzer, J. B. von (1833-1875): German socialist, publicist, editor of the periodical Der Sozialdemokrat beginning January 1, 1865.
[l] Rodbertus, Karl (1805-1875): German economic writer; author of a book, Das Kapital, with the same title as Karl Marx’s great work; see Bukharin: The Economic Theory of the Leisure Class, 1927.
[m] Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim (1728-1781): German critic, dramatist and philosopher; author of Nathan der Weise, Emilia Gallotti, Minna von Barnhelm, etc.
[n] Young Hegelians: A trend within German Idealist philosophy in the 1830s and 40s that drew atheist and politically radical conclusions from Hegel’s works. Originally counting Marx and Engels as adherents, they later broke with the philosophical outlook of the Young Hegelians in works such as The German Ideology (1845). —New note by Bill Wright, transcriber.
[o] Jacobi, Johann (1805-1877): German democratic leader, participated in the Revolution of 1848 in Germany, imprisoned many times. A few years before his death, he joined the socialist movement.
[p] Hellpach, Willy (living Badensian statesman, born 1877): One of the founders of the German “Democratic Party” in 1918.
[q] Bismarck, Prince Otto von (1815-1898): German statesman; founder of the German Empire; famous for his “Exception Laws” directed against the socialist movement in Germany.
[r] Fortschrittspartei (“Progressive Party,” also called Fortschrittsmänner, “Men of Progress”): A liberal party founded in Prussia in 1861 and predominant in the Prussian Diet until 1866, when the National Liberal Party was formed from it.
[s] Heine, Heinrich (1797-1856): German lyricist, also the most fluent prose writer of Germany. While not a member of any revolutionary movement, Heine was impelled by his ardent hatred of tyranny to favor many indications of political discontent.
[t] Junker (A German word, from the Middle High German junc herre, “young sir”): A member of the landed gentry; a country gentleman of the nobility; the German equivalent to the landed nobility of England.
[u] Black, White and Red: The colors of the German national ensign since 1871; symbolically, therefore, an imperialistic and nationalistic attitude.
[v] Allgemeiner Deutscher Arbeiterverein (“General German Workers’ Union”): An organization founded by Ferdinand Lassalle in 1863.
[w] Black, Red and Gold: The colors proposed for the national German Flag by the Frankfort Assembly of 1848; symbolically, therefore, a liberal or progressive attitude in politics.
[x] Realpolitiker (A German compound noun): A statesman who is proud that, though he may be governed by ideals in part, he nevertheless faces the real situation as it is. A realist in politics.
Last updated on 13 October 2023