Ferdinand Lassalle

Lassalle founded the first German workers' party in 1863 and argued the opposite of Proudhon: workers should win universal suffrage and use the state to fund producer cooperatives. His "iron law of wages" claimed wages would always sink to subsistence under capitalism. Marx disliked both his statism and his secret talks with Bismarck, and the tension between Lassallean and Marxist currents shaped the early SPD.