Page:James Ramsay MacDonald - The Socialist Movement.pdf/219

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THE SOCIALIST MOVEMENT
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more; and he advocated the establishment by state capital of self-governing productive associations in which every workman was to get the full product of his labour. The Congress adopted his proposals, and he addressed a few great meetings. The Universal German Working Men's Association was formed at Leipzig on May 28rd, 1863. It made one demand—universal suffrage. A working class social programme was so much decorative effort unless the working classes had the vote. The German movement was begun. The melodramatic ending of its leader and hero in 1864, struck it like a storm, and when the blast was over it was found that the organisation was left in a bad way. It had no leaders, no money, and no coherence.

Immediately after the founding of Lassalle's organisation another event happened, paralleled also in our later British experience. Liberal-Labour associations were formed, partly in opposition to Socialism, but partly also in opposition to the growing dominance of Prussia, and they were therefore strongest outside Prussia. As a member of one of these, August Bebel first won his spurs. But the organisations speedily drifted away from Liberalism where, from the very nature of the case, they could have no abiding place. The union of these associations declared first of all for universal suffrage; in 1868 it gave in its adhesion to Marx's organisation, the International, and in the following year at Eisenach it formed itself into the Social Democratic Working Men's Party. The two