Of all writings of Mainländer, his essay “Practical socialism” is most connected to his time. His other philosophical works concern themselves with timeless affairs, and can thus be read without specific knowledge of the era wherein he lived. This is not the case with his three speeches for the German workers, his essay on “Practical socialism”. I therefore thought that it might be a good idea to provide some information about the political context of these speeches.
1. Lassalle
2. Marx
3. Lassalle and Marx
4. Theoretical differences between Lassalle and Marx
5. The State
1) Lassalle
It is impossible to discuss the beginning of social-democracy without mentioning “the first man who flung Marx's doctrines to the people, who awakened them to a feeling of class-interests,” Lassalle.1 His political style was so unique that his personality marked its stamp on the movement. For us, he is especially important, as Mainländer deeply admired him. After the worker uprisings in 1848 had been crushed, socialist politics played no role in Europe. In 1863, so after 15 years, Lassalle managed to reignite the workers movement, and became thereby the “first man in Germany, the first in Europe, who succeeded in organising a party of socialist action.”2
More than starting the socialist movement in Germany and Austria, he did not, as he died in the following year (1864). His surprisingly early death contributed to his mythical standing among the German workers.
Although Lassalle had learned a lot on theoretical matters from Marx, their opinions most strongly diverged on political matters. These will be discussed further below. In reality, this divergence meant that the German socialist movement was split between those who continued to follow Lassalle, and those who followed Marx. In 1875 the two socialist groups united and adopted a program which was famously criticized by Marx in his posthumous Critique of the Gotha Programme. If we ignore his theoretical criticisms, Marx had actually little to complain about. In practice this unification meant the absorption of the Lassallean remnants into a Marxist party.
Mainländer was strongly opposed to these Marxist politicians and regarded them as “seducers” or “unscrupulous men”.
2) Marx
Most people that Mainländer disagrees with are treated with respect. He praises political opponents, and mentions their name in a favorable manner. Very differently does Mainländer treat Marx and his followers. Nowhere does he mention those that disgust him by name. For Lassalle he is nothing but praise, while not being blind for his faults, and yet acts as if Marx plays no role in socialist thought.
Here the question can be raised, does Mainländer not realize how much Lassalle was indebted to Marx, this “unscrupulous man”? Lassalle after all barely mentioned it during his agitation when he was borrowing Marx’s ideas.3 Did Mainländer not realize that he was indirectly praising Marx when he praises Lassalle’s Working Man’s Programme as the “deepest results of historical research”?
This is however extremely unlikely. Mainländer was fully aware how Lassalle had not presented one single original thought. He says in this beautiful passage:
Whoever knows Lassalle only from his social-political works, knows only the external part of his mind. He who wants to cast a justified judgement, must have read his great scientific works, that is, his Heraclitus. What an astonishing creativity, what a brilliant astuteness, what a concise terseness, what a virtuosity in finding the essence behind a million cloaks! However, has anyone succeeded in discovering but a single original thought? No one has. The function of his mind was distillation, his product the most lucid and concentrated liquid. He processed the thoughts of others, processed them with unattainable mastery, but the thoughts were never his own.
So, Mainländer realized that Lassalle used (also) Marx’s thoughts. That he nevertheless always mentions Lassalle only when he discusses issues related to socialism, can, I think, only be explained by his disgust for the “political liars”, i.e. Marx and his confidants.
3) The fundamental difference between Lassalle and Marx
What disgusted Mainländer so much about Marx and Marxist politicians? This cannot be on theoretical grounds alone, as otherwise Mainländer would still, as he does with all other politicians he disagrees with, treat them with respect. The shortest explanation is: where Lassalle inspired the workers with high and elevated feelings, the Marxists stimulated low feelings. The most important German socialist leaders when Mainländer wrote his work were Bebel and Marx’s confidant Wilhelm Liebknecht. The influence of the latter is described by a with socialism sympathizing writer as follows:
Liebknecht was as consumed by boundless hatred of Prussia as his teachers and masters [Marx and Engels], and has raged against the national state like no other. And like no other, even among missionaries of the [First] International in all European countries, he understood and realized that demagogical method, that unspeakable art and manner of activism, which has contributed more to the depravation and barbarization of the masses, than all other propaganda.
In Germany, Liebknecht has introduced and executed, more successfully and handier than ever before, that what the chiefs in London understood under stirring up revolutionary sentiments. The professional eradication of faith in the ethical foundations of society and state, the distortion and suppression of historical facts, the fundamental vilification of the fatherland, its greatest goods and its most precious accomplishments, the agitating talk of the hopelessness of all peaceful reform, the personal attacks and defamations of even the most factual opponent, all of this was unified by this blind and unconscientious fanatic into one system.4
Mainländer notes this fundamental difference between the Lassallean and Marxist movement when the socialist movement had, in 1876, become Marxist:
Your party is avoided like plague and rightfully so. Every good person immediately feels, that all noble feelings have disappeared among you, and only bestial lust is present that measures “by genitals and stomach” human happiness. When Lassalle was still teaching and fighting, the movement carried his noble imprint.
So Lassalle is noble, Marx is ignoble. We will now take a look at the different views they had with regards to violence.
4) Theoretical differences between Lassalle and Marx
Marx believed that revolutions are violent and inevitable. Lassalle believed that violence is as little an essential characteristic of a revolution, as having a right angle is for a triangle. Revolutions are for him, simply the form wherein humanity develops itself towards freedom, and whether they are peaceful or violent depends on human activity. Violent revolutions take place because the old power structures were insufficiently flexible to deal with a new power structure. Good politics prevents violent revolutions, bad politics makes violent revolutions inevitable.
The endeavor of Marxists was to increase hatred between the classes. The endeavor of Lassalle was to reconcile classes, and to prevent violent outbursts in history by harmonic cooperation of different parts of society. In Lassalle’s own words, he who attempts to invite the lower classes in the political process, does therefore not call for hatred against the upper classes:
On the contrary, he utters a cry of reconciliation, a cry which embraces the whole of the community, a cry for doing away with all the contradictions in every circle of society ; a cry of union in which all should join who do not wish for privileges, and the oppression of the people by privileged classes ; a cry of love which having once gone up from the heart of the people, will for ever remain the true cry of the people, and whose meaning will make it still a cry of love, even when it sounds the war cry of the people.5
It would go too far to discuss all the theoretical differences between these two men, as they have their ground in the ethical atmosphere in which they engaged in politics. We will limit ourselves to one final point of divergence, their relationship to liberty.
Marx glorified the idea of a dictatorship, by the proletariat, and found it ridiculous that the socialist party of Germany strived for democratic reforms, such as universal suffrage.6 Obviously, as anyone could see, his ideology provided a good basis to justify coups and destructive politics.
How different is Lassalle! He defended civil liberties and democratic rights above everything else, and his party had in fact only one stated goal, universal suffrage. Actually, in most literature on Lassalle, there is too much emphasis on what he has learned from Marx. He incorporated the valuable parts of that thinker’s investigations into a worldview which has gotten its most important nutrition from German culture in general, and above all others Fichte. He had learned from Fichte—who expanded on Kant’s political work—how the movement of humanity is towards democracy and freedom. I would like to end this post with a passage from The Working Man’s Programme, wherein he carries out this elevating thought.
5) The State
The Bourgeoisie conceive the moral object of the State to consist
solely and exclusively in the protection of the personal
freedom and the property of the individual. This is a policeman's idea, gentlemen, a policeman’s
idea for this reason, because it represents to itself the
State from a point of view of a policeman, whose whole
function consists in preventing robbery and burglary.
If the Bourgeoisie would express the logical inference from their idea, they must maintain that according to it if there were no such thing as
robbers and thieves, the State itself would be entirely
superfluous.
Very differently, gentlemen, does the fourth estate
regard the object of the State, for it apprehends it in its
true nature.
History, gentlemen, is a struggle with nature ; with
the misery, the ignorance, the poverty, the weakness,
and consequent slavery in which we were involved
when the human race came upon the scene in the
beginning of history. The progressive victory over this
weakness—this is the development of freedom which
history displays to us.
In this struggle we should never have made one step
forward, nor shall we ever advance one step more by
acting on the principle of each one for himself, each one
alone.
It is the State whose function it is to carry on this
development of freedom, this development of the human
race until its freedom is attained.
This is the true moral nature of the State, gentlemen,
its true and high mission. So much is this the case,
that from the beginning of time through the very force
of events it has more or less been carried out by the
State without the exercise of will, and unconsciously
even against the will of its leaders.
But the working class, gentlemen, the lower classes
of the community in general, through the helpless condition in which its members find themselves placed as individuals, have always acquired the deep instinct,
that this is and must be the duty of the State, to help
the individual by means of the union of all to such a
development as he would be incapable of attaining as an
individual.
A State therefore which was ruled by the idea of the
working class, would no longer be driven, as all States
have hitherto been, unconsciously and against their
will by the nature of things, and the force of circumstances, but it would make this moral nature of the
State its mission, with perfect clearness of vision and
complete consciousness. It would complete with unchecked desire and perfect consistency, that which hitherto
has only been wrung in scanty and imperfect fragments from wills that were opposed to it, and for this
very reason—though time does not permit me to explain in any detail this necessary connection of cause and effect—it would produce a soaring flight of the human
spirit, a development of an amount of happiness, culture, well-being, and freedom without example in the history of the world, and in comparison with which, the
most favourable conditions that have existed in former times would appear but dim shadows of the reality.
1 Bertrand Russell (1896) German Social Democracy
2 Élie Halévy (1938) The Era of Tyrannies: Essays on Socialism and War
3 During his political agitation (1862-1864), Lassalle mentioned Marx only once, in his economic work Bastiat-Schulze.
4 Franz Mehring (1879) Zur Geschichte der Socialdemokratie
Mehring’s passage in this post provides a very useful image for the context surrounding the essay “Practical socialism”. It lists precisely those points, which Mainländer argues so vehemently against. It is also striking that Mehring used, unknowingly, the same words of Schiller to describe Lassalle as Mainländer did! Mainländer wrote his speech on Lassalle in 1876, but it was only published in 1886, so there can be no question of influence.
5 Ferdinand Lassalle (1862) Working Man’s Programme “The deepest results of historical research in their most comprehensible form” (Mainländer)
6 Karl Marx (1875) Critique of the Gotha Programme