FERDINAND LASSALLE: IN SEARCH OF TOOLS TO TRANSFORM SOCIETY

Abstract

The article shows the search by F. Lassalle, one of the predecessors of German social democracy, for effective tools for transforming bourgeois society in the interests of the working class of Germany in the second half of the 19th century. Lassalle considered the most important of these tools to be universal equal suffrage for all inhabitants of the country and the creation of production associations of workers with the help of the state. Despite his disagreements with the ideas of the classics of Marxism and palliative proposals for reforming society, which denied the radical methods of the class struggle, as a result of which he was for a long time ranked among the opportunists, and his ideas were undeservedly forgotten, the ambiguous contribution of F. Lassalle to the creation and further development of the Universal of the German Workers’ Union, its role in the ideological break with the bourgeoisie and the desire to create an independent workers’ party, the temporary coincidence of its interests with the opportunistic reactionary ideas of Chancellor O. von Bismarck, an assessment is made of the rejection of F. Lassalle and his supporters of other democratic forms of stru ggle for the interests of the working class, contributed in the conditions of bourgeois society to its education, upbringing and further development.