Could the Prussian monarchy have been the unlikely champion of the German working class?

Wars & Conflicts · Published 15 October 2026 Swipe more like this →

In short: Ferdinand Lassalle believed the state was a neutral, ethical force that workers could capture to achieve socialism. By allying with the Prussian monarchy against the liberal bourgeoisie, he hoped to secure state funding for worker cooperatives. Critics, including Karl Marx, dismissed this as a dangerous illusion of state-worship.

Lassalleanism emerged in mid-19th century Prussia as a political strategy built on a unique, Hegelian view of the state. Unlike Marxists, who saw the state as an instrument of class oppression, Ferdinand Lassalle viewed it as an eternal, neutral institution with an ethical mission to guide humanity toward freedom. Because the working class constituted over 96 percent of the population, Lassalle argued that the state logically belonged to them, serving as their 'great association' if only they could seize control through universal suffrage.

The movement's central practical demand was for state-funded producer cooperatives, which Lassalle called the 'organic germ' of a future socialist economy. To justify this, he promoted the 'iron law of wages,' a theory suggesting that under capitalism, wages were doomed to stay at subsistence levels, rendering independent trade unions and self-help efforts futile. This doctrine necessitated state intervention, leading Lassalle to seek a 'three-cornered confrontation' where workers would align with the absolutist monarchy against the liberal bourgeoisie. He even engaged in secret discussions with Otto von Bismarck, offering his General German Workers' Association as a loyal base for a 'People’s Kingdom.'

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels were fierce opponents of this ideology, labeling it 'Royal Prussian government socialism' and 'social Bonapartism.' They argued that Lassalleanism was a sectarian, opportunistic tendency that abandoned independent class action in favor of a 'panacea' of state aid. The conflict culminated in 1875 during the formation of the Social Democratic Party of Germany, where Marx's Critique of the Gotha Programme attacked the party's draft for being 'tainted' by Lassallean state-worship. Despite this, the influence of Lassalleanism persisted, shaping the reformist tendencies of German social democracy for decades.

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