Ferdinand Lassalle

“ We have seen in France two bad elections following one another, in 1848 and 1849. But universal and direct suffrage is the only means which in the long run of itself corrects the mistakes to which its momentary wrong use may lead. It is that spear which heals the wounds itself has made. It is impossible in the long run with universal and direct suffrage that the elected body should be any other than the exact and true likeness of the people which has elected it. ”

“ It is this opposition of the personal interest of the higher classes to the development of the nation in culture which evokes the great and necessary immorality of the higher classes. It is a life, whose daily conditions you need only represent to yourselves, in order to perceive the deep inward deterioration to which it must lead. To be compelled daily to oppose all that is great and good, to be obliged to grieve at its successes, to rejoice at its failures, to restrain its further progress, to be obliged to undo or to execrate the advantages it has already attained. ”

“ You are therefore in this happy position, gentlemen, that instead of its being possible for you to be dead to the idea, you are on the contrary urged to the deepest sympathy for it by your own personal interests. You are in the happy position that the idea which constitutes your true personal interest, is one with the throbbing pulse of history, and with the living principle of moral development. ”

“ On the contrary, the object of the State is precisely this, to place the individuals through this union in a position to attain to such objects, and reach such a stage of existence as they never could have reached as individuals; to make them capable of acquiring an amount of education, power, and freedom which would have been wholly unattainable by them as individuals.
Accordingly the object of the State is to bring man to positive expansion, and progressive development, in other words, to bring the destiny of man—that is the culture of which the human race is capable—into actual existence ”

“ If a nobleman seated in his room, finds pleasure in the contemplation of his ancestors, and of his landed property, no citizen has any thing to say against it. But if this nobleman desires to make his ancestry or his landed property the condition of a special rank and privilege in the State, the condition of the power of directing the will of the State,—then the indignation of the citizen is roused against the noble, and he calls him a feudalist. ”

“ This life, gentlemen, leads therefore necessarily to a thorough depreciation and contempt of all striving to realise an ideal, to a compassionate smile at the bare mention of the great name of the Idea, to a deeply seated want of sympathy and even antipathy to all that is beautiful and great, to a complete swallowing up of every moral element in us, by the one passion of selfish seeking for our own advantage, and of immoderate desire for pleasure. ”

“ Now fix your eyes, gentlemen, with me for a moment on the fact that the Guilds were inseparably connected with the whole of the social arrangements of the Middle Ages, and you will see at once how the first machine, the spinning jenny which Arkwright invented, contained already in itself a complete revolutionising of those social conditions.
For how could production by means of machinery be possible under the system of Guilds, by which the number of men and apprentices which a master might keep was fixed by law in every locality? ”

“ Indirect taxation is therefore, gentlemen, the institution by which the Bourgeoisie creates the privilege of freedom from taxation for great capitalists, and lays the cost of maintaining the existence of the State on the poorer classes of the community. ”

“ Thirdly, I have dwelt upon it because this spectacle is constantly repeating itself in all ages, that men who do not think clearly—and to this class, gentlemen, those who are apparently most learned, and even professors may belong, and, as the Church of St. Paul with its sad memorials has shewn us, do extremely often belong—fall into the extraordinary illusion of holding that which is only a more consistent and complete expression of a period of history and an organisation of society even then passing away, to be a new revolutionary principle. ”

“ It is the moral earnestness of this thought which must never leave you, but must be present to your heart in your workshops during the hours of labour, in your leisure hours, during your walks, at your meetings, and even when you stretch your limbs to rest upon your hard couches, it is this thought which must fill and occupy your minds till they lose themselves in dreams. ”

“ The rights of man were proclaimed, and it appeared as if with the freedom and the rule of the third Estate, all legal privileges had disappeared from the community, and all differences founded upon them had been swallowed up and absorbed in the one idea of the freedom of man. ”

“ The revolution had therefore already entered into the vitals of the community, into their actual relations, long before it broke out in France, and it was only requisite to bring the change thus wrought to external recognition, in order to give it a moral sanction.
This, gentlemen, is always the case in all revolutions. A revolution can never be made; all that can ever be done is to add external moral recognition to a revolution which has already entered into the actual relations of a community, aud to carry it out accordingly. ”

“ To the same hands all those products owe their existence, without which the whole community would perish in a single day; it is, therefore the duty of the State to help these to a more ample and assured wage, and so again to the possibility of a rational education, and through this to an existence truly worthy of man. Fully as the working classes are justified in demanding this from the State, and in pointing out this as its true aim, so on the other hand, the working man must and will never forget that the right to all property once lawfully earned is thoroughly legitimate and unassailable. ”

“ Now you are aware, gentlemen, that one man who is twenty, fifty, or a hundred times as rich as another, by no means requires on that account, twenty, fifty, or a hundred times as much salt, bread or meat, nor drinks fifty or a hundred times as much beer or wine, nor requires fifty or a hundred times as much warmth, and therefore fuel, as a workman or poor citizen.
Hence it follows that all indirect taxes, instead of being adapted to individuals according to the proportion of their capital and income, are paid, in far the greater part, by the poorest and most destitute classes of the nation. ”

“ It is true they cannot openly declare that they intend to be free of taxation. The principle that they express is on the contrary that every one should pay taxes according to his income. But they attain to the same result in a disguised form, at least as far as it goes, by the distinction between direct and indirect taxes.
Direct taxes, gentlemen, are those which like the classified income tax, or the class taxes, are raised from income, and are therefore fixed according to the amount of the income and capital. ”

“ Cheapness is the weapon of production, with which on the one hand it conquers the purchaser, and on the other hand drives all other goods of the same kind out of the market, which may be likewise pressed upon the purchaser, so that in fact under the system of free competition, every producer may hope, however great the quantity of goods he produces, to find a market for all these if he is only able by the better arming of his wares with cheapness to make the wares of his competitors unable to maintain the contest. ”

“ Moreover, I told you, gentlemen, while speaking of the nobles of the Middle Ages, that they held in social contempt all the activity and industry of the burgher class.
Precisely the same thing occurs to day. It is true that every kind of labour is now held in high honour, and if a rag picker or a nightman became a millionaire, he might be certain of being received with high honour into society. ”

“ You see, gentlemen, that if the Revolution of 1789 was the Revolution of the Tiers état, the Third class, it is now the Fourth class, which in 1789 was still enfolded within the third class and appeared to be identical with it, which will now raise its principle to be the dominating principle of the community, and cause all its arrangements to be permeated by it. ”

“ The introduction of two degrees in the electoral act, namely, original electors and electors simply, is nothing but an ingenious method purposely introduced with the object of falsifying as far as possible the will of the people by means of the electoral act.
It is true that even universal and direct suffrage is no magic wand, gentlemen, which is able to protect you from temporary mistakes. ”

“ And now if we take as our basis the fact, that in the year 1848 universal suffrage was decreed by the law of the 8th April, so that at that time 153,800 working men or small citizens were of equal weight at the elections with 153,800 rich men, and consequently one man without property was of equal weight with one rich man, it is clear that now, when it takes seventeen poor men to counterbalance the vote of one rich man, sixteen working men and small citizens out of seventeen have had their legal right of voting wrested from them. ”

“ We have now seen, gentlemen, two periods of the world, each of which is dominated by the ruling idea of a particular class of the community which impresses its own principle on all the social arrangements of its time. ”

“ But conversely, you will at once see that it is the production of an article in large quantities which causes and increases cheapness. A manufacturer for instance who sells two hundred thousand pieces of cotton in the year, is enabled by purchasing his raw materials cheaper on so large a scale, and also because the profits on his capital and the expense of his plant and machinery are divided between so large a number of pieces, he is enabled, I say, within certain limits, to sell each piece much cheaper than a manufacturer who only produces five thousand such pieces every year. ”

“ A truly revolutionary movement, one which is founded on a really new principle of thought, has never failed, at least in the long run, as any one who thinks deeply may, to his comfort, prove to himself from history. ”

“ The whole burgher or not noble class, when the French Revolution occurred, divided itself, and still remains divided, speaking generally, into two subdivisions, namely in the first place, the class whose members either entirely or mainly derive their income from their labour, and who have either no capital, or a very modest one to assist them in exercising a productive industry for the support of themselves and their families. ”

“ Nay further, thirteen years before the Revolution, in the year 1776, a reforming minister in France, the famous Turgot, did abolish Guilds. But the feudal privileged world of the Middle Ages regarded itself, and it was perfectly right, in danger of death, if privilege, its principle of life, ceased to penetrate every class of society ”

“ That the rich citizen seated in his chamber should find pleasure in contemplating the great convenience and advantage which a large private property brings to its possessor, nothing is more simple, nothing more natural and legitimate than this. ”

“ The more exclusively you immerse yourselves in the moral earnestness of this thought, the more undividedly you give yourselves up to its glowing fervour, by so much the more, be assured, will you hasten the time within which our present period of history will have to fulfil its task, so much the sooner will you bring about the accomplishment of this task. ”

“ In Germany happily it is strongly opposed by the ancient learning which has once for all become the indestructible foundation of German thought. From this proceeds the view "that it is necessary to enlarge the notion of the State to the fullest extent to which in my opinion it is possible to enlarge it, that the State should be the organisation, in which the whole virtue of man should realise itself." ”

“ To this class belong therefore the working men, the lower grade of citizens, handicraftsmen, and generally speaking the peasants. The second class consists of those who dispose of large private property, of a large capital, and by reason of such a basis of capital, engage in production, or draw an income in the shape of rents. These may be called the rich citizens. But a rich citizen, gentlemen, is for that reason essentially no Bourgeois at all. ”

“ By this law, according to the circumstances of different localities, three, ten, or thirty or more electors of the third class who have no property, exercise only the same voting power as a single large capitalist, a rich burgher who belongs to the first electoral class. Consequently, in point of fact, if the proportional numbers were on an average, for instance, as one to ten, nine men in every ten of those who in the year 1848 possessed the franchise, have lost it through this electoral law which formed part of the charter of the year 1849, and now exercise it only in appearance. ”

“ In the gigantic development which has now been attained this character may be thus indicated in opposition to the earlier one which has been described: whereas formerly the demand preceded the offer of the merchandise, and the production of it, and drew this latter in its train, and determined it, formed its guide and its well known measure, now on the contrary the production, the offer of the goods precedes the demand, and seeks to force it into existence. Goods are no longer produced for the locality, for the ascertained needs of neighbouring markets, but for the markets of the world. ”