Ferdinand Lassalle
(Breslau, present-day Poland, 1825-Geneva, Switzerland, 1864) German politician and thinker.Born into a family of Jewish merchants, he studied in Breslau and Berlin.After a brief stay in Paris, which allowed him to learn about the French socialist movement, in 1845 he joined the League of the Just.During his participation in the German revolution of 1848, for which he was imprisoned, he befriended Karl Marx.
Ferdinand Lassalle
That same year, he became one of the Maximum exponents of German socialism, he founded the General Association of German Workers, the first socialist movement of any significance in the country.He enjoyed high regard among the workers, but his ideology, although influenced by Marx, developed positions opposed to Marxism on revolutionary strategy and did not make great theoretical contributions to socialist thought.
Lassalle, who did not understand the principles of historical materialism, defended German unification and Otto von Bismarck as its necessary architect, which placed him on the side of the State and against the bourgeoisie.This stance, which he exposed in The Italian War and the Prussian Mission (1859), where he was also opposed to the Franco-Prussian War, directly confronted him with Marx, who supported the bourgeoisie against the Prussian state.Lassalle hoped that Bismarck would see the workers as pillars in the formation of the Prussian state and, consequently, that socialism would prevail.
He also disagreed with Marx in defending universal suffrage as an instrument of democratization of the state.The Lassalle idea of direct universal suffrage exerted an undeniable attraction among German workers, who mobilized through their association to believe that with the vote they could control the state in accordance with their class interests.Other works of his are System of acquired rights (1861) and a study on the Greek philosopher Heraclitus of Ephesus entitled Heraclitus the dark (1857).
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