Open Letter to the Central Committee

Lassalle argued that universal suffrage was the indispensable political demand upon which all working-class forces should concentrate. He believed that once workers had the vote, they would win a parliamentary majority—he naively estimated ninety percent of seats—and use legislative power to transform the state into an instrument of social reform . This elevation of universal suffrage to a miracle-working panacea distinguished his strategy from Marx, who saw the franchise as a means of class education, not an end in itself.

Lassalle adopted the Ricardian theory that wages tend toward the minimum necessary for subsistence, coining the phrase 'iron law of wages.' He concluded that trade union action could not permanently improve workers' conditions because competition among workers would always drive wages back down to bare survival . Since unions were powerless against this law, Lassalle argued that workers could only escape it through state-financed producer associations, where they would receive the full proceeds of their labor rather than a wage set by capitalist competition.

Marx rejected the 'iron law' as a bourgeois economic error, writing that only the word 'iron' belonged to Lassalle, who 'mistook appearance for reality' . He dismissed Lassalle's state-financed cooperatives as an 'optical illusion' about socialist intervention by a Prussian government, insisting that 'the working class is revolutionary or nothing' . Engels and Marx also criticized Lassalle's sectarian refusal to acknowledge any connection with the earlier communist movement, which they saw as a deliberate tactic to claim sole authorship of German socialism .

The Open Letter was written as a deliberate stratagem to denounce the Progressive Party's failure to defend workers' interests against Bismarck's government . Lassalle accused the liberals of abandoning the working class and argued that workers had nothing to gain from continued subordination to bourgeois parties. By advocating a fully independent workers' party, he broke decisively with the liberal-radical alliance that had dominated German democratic politics since 1848, positioning the working class as its own political force with its own distinct interests and demands.

The Leipzig committee invited Lassalle to state his views, and his Open Letter, dated March 1, 1863, became the founding manifesto of the new organization . When the General German Workers' Association (ADAV) was formally established on May 23, 1863, it adopted no separate program—Lassalle's Open Letter was simply treated as the program of the Association . Lassalle was elected president, and the ADAV became the first independent workers' political party in Germany, the organizational predecessor of the SPD.

Lassalle, influenced by Hegel, conceived of the state as a neutral and autonomous moral entity capable of acting in the workers' interests—a structure that could implement progressive reform and even serve as a 'State of Socialism' . Marx rejected this entirely, viewing the state as an instrument of class rule that could not be used for workers' emancipation without first being transformed through revolution. This disagreement about the state's nature was the deepest theoretical rift between the two men and explains why Marx found Lassalle's proposal to build socialism with state loans as absurd as building a new railroad .