Ferdinand Lassalle in the context of "Gotha Program"

The Critique of the Gotha Programme (German: Kritik des Gothaer Programms) is a document written by Karl Marx in 1875 as a private communication to the leadership of the German Social Democratic Workers' Party (the "Eisenachers"). The critique was directed at the draft programme of the unified party that was to be created through a merger with the General German Workers' Association (the "Lassalleans") at a congress in the city of Gotha. Marx argued that the programme made significant and damaging concessions to the state-oriented socialism of Ferdinand Lassalle, whose ideas he considered opportunistic and insufficiently revolutionary.

The work is celebrated among Marxists for being one of Marx's most detailed pronouncements on programmatic matters. It offers his most extensive statements on the nature of a future communist society, the strategy for achieving it, and the principles that would govern it. The Critique outlines the "two phases of communist society": a lower phase where individuals receive goods equivalent to their labour contribution, and a higher phase in which society operates on the principle, "from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs". It also contains Marx's only sustained discussion of the "dictatorship of the proletariat" as the state form during the political transition period between capitalism and communism.

The General German Workers' Association (German: Allgemeiner Deutscher Arbeiter-Verein, ADAV) was a German political party founded on 23 May 1863 in Leipzig, Kingdom of Saxony by Ferdinand Lassalle. It was the first organized mass working-class party in history.

The organization existed by this name until 1875, when it combined with the Social Democratic Workers' Party of Germany (SDAP) to form the Socialist Workers' Party of Germany. This unified organization was renamed soon thereafter the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD), which presently remains in existence and dates its origins to the founding of the ADAV. Its Austrian part would become the SPÖ.

State socialism is a political and economic ideology within the socialist movement that advocates state ownership of the means of production. This is intended either as a temporary measure, or as a characteristic of socialism in the transition from the capitalist to the socialist mode of production or to a communist society. State socialism was first theorised by Ferdinand Lassalle. It advocates a planned economy controlled by the state in which all industries and natural resources are state-owned.

Aside from anarchists and other libertarian socialists, there was, in the past, confidence amongst socialists in the concept of state socialism as being the most effective form of socialism. Some early social democrats in the late 19th century and early 20th century, such as the Fabians, claimed that British society was already mostly socialist and that the economy was significantly socialist through government-run enterprises created by conservative and liberal governments which could be run for the interests of the people through their representatives' influence, an argument reinvoked by some socialists in post-war Britain. State socialism declined starting in the 1970s, with stagflation during the 1970s energy crisis, the rise of neoliberalism and later with the fall of state socialist nations in the Eastern Bloc during the Revolutions of 1989 and the fall of the Soviet Union.

The Erfurt Program (German: Erfurter Programm) was the party platform adopted by the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) at its party congress in Erfurt in 1891. Drafted under the political leadership of August Bebel and Wilhelm Liebknecht, and with theorist Karl Kautsky as its principal author, the program officially committed the SPD to Marxism. It was the first and most prominent in a series of similar Marxist-inspired platforms adopted by socialist parties across Europe.

The program represented a stark break from its predecessor, the Gotha Program of 1875, by rejecting the Lassallean idea of achieving socialism through state aid. Instead, it declared the impending death of capitalism and the necessity of class struggle. The program was divided into two parts. The first, the "maximalist" section, outlined the unalterable principles of a socialist transformation based on Marxist theory. The second, "minimalist" section, detailed a series of practical legislative goals to be pursued within the existing framework of the German Empire.

The iron law of wages is a proposed law of economics that asserts that real wages always tend, in the long run, toward the minimum wage necessary to sustain the life of the worker. The theory was first named by Ferdinand Lassalle in the mid-nineteenth century. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels attribute the doctrine to Lassalle (notably in Marx's 1875 Critique of the Gotha Program), the idea to Thomas Malthus's (1798) An Essay on the Principle of Population, and the terminology to Goethe's "great, eternal iron laws" in Das Göttliche.

It was coined in reference to the views of classical economists such as David Ricardo's law of rent, and the competing population theory of Thomas Malthus. It held that the market price of labor (which tends toward the minimum required for the subsistence of the laborers) would always, or almost always, reduce as the working population increased and vice versa. Ricardo believed that this happened only under particular conditions.

Sophie Gräfin von Hatzfeldt, born Gräfin von Hatzfeldt-Schönstein zu Trachenberg (10 August 1805 in Trachenberg (Lower Silesia) – 25 January 1881 in Wiesbaden) was active in the German working-class movement and partner and confidante of Ferdinand Lassalle.

Die Philosophie Herakleitos des Dunklen von Ephesos (lit. 'The Philosophy of Heraclitus the Obscure of Ephesus') is an 1857–1858 book by Ferdinand Lassalle, which presents a Hegelian analysis of the pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus.

Ferdinand August Bebel (22 February 1840 – 13 August 1913) was a German social democratic politician. He is best known as one of the founders of the Social Democratic Workers' Party of Germany (SDAP) in 1869, which in 1875 merged with the General German Workers' Association to form what would become the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD). As a leader of the German workers' movement for over four decades, Bebel served as a member of parliament in both the North German Confederation and the German Empire, becoming the movement's leading parliamentary voice.

Born into poverty in Prussia, Bebel was orphaned at a young age and apprenticed as a woodturner. His experiences as a traveling journeyman exposed him to the hardships of the working class and led him to socialist politics in the 1860s. Alongside Wilhelm Liebknecht, he became a central figure in the German socialist movement, opposing the nationalist and state-oriented socialism of Ferdinand Lassalle in favor of a more orthodox Marxist, internationalist position. During the Franco-Prussian War, he gained notoriety for his opposition to the annexation of Alsace-Lorraine, which led to his conviction for high treason in 1872.