Ferdinand Lassalle

Ferdinand Lassalle (11 April 1825 – 31 August 1864) was a German socialist activist and politician who founded the first German workers' party, the General German Workers' Association (ADAV), in 1863. He is best remembered as the initiator of the country's social-democratic movement, which after his death led to the formation of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) in 1875.

Lassalle studied philosophy at the Universities of Breslau and Berlin, and was involved as an agitator in the German Revolutions of 1848. Lassalle's socialism viewed the state as the expression of the people, not as a construct of social class, and he argued that industry should be placed in the hands of the workers by the existing government, pressured by the labor movement. This was a form of state socialism opposed to the revolutionary socialism of Karl Marx, one of his greatest rivals. Lassalle based his politics on his "iron law of wages", which posited that wages could never rise above the subsistence level in the capitalist system. He died in a duel related to a love affair in 1864; ADAV remained the largest German socialist party until 1875.

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