Page:Ferdinand Lassalle - The Working Man's Programme - tr. Edward Peters (1884).djvu/48

 of the community, which sets up and can set up no further exclusive condition, either legal or actual, neither nobility nor landed possessions nor the possession of capital, which it could make into a new privilege and force upon the arrangements of society.

We are all working men in so far as we have even the will to make ourselves useful in any way to the community.

This Fourth class in whose heart therefore no germ of a new privilege is contained, is for this very reason synonomous with the whole human race. Its interest is in truth the interest of the whole of humanity, its freedom is the freedom of humanity itself, and its domination is the domination of all.

Whoever therefore invokes the idea of the working class as the ruling principle of society, in the sense in which I have explained it to you, does not put forth a cry that divides and separates the classes of society. On the contrary, he utters a cry of reconciliation, a cry which embraces the whole of the community, a cry for doing away with all the contradictions in every circle of society; a cry of union in which all should join who do not wish for privileges, and the oppression of the people by privileged classes; a cry of love which having once gone up from the heart of the people, will for ever remain the true cry of the people, and whose meaning will make it still a cry of love, even when it sounds the war cry of the people.

We will now consider the principle of the working class as the ruling principle of the community only in three of its relations:—