Shirokauer Arno. Lassalle: The Power of Illusion and The Illusion of Power

Transl. by Eden and Cedar Paul. — New York: The Century Company, 1932.— 344 p.It is of minor importance how much in Lassalle's theory and in his method of agitation may have been sound or unsound, how much he may have borrowed from Buchez, taken over from Malthus, understood in Ricardo, or misunderstood in Marx. The decisive thing was that he succeeded in marshalling the proletariat in a politically independent formation upon the battlefield of history. Mehring rightly points out that at a later date, when the proletarian movement began to develop in the United States, Engels, writing to Sorgc anent the criterion of achievement in a particular historical situation, said : 'The first great step when, in any country, the movement makes its appearance, is the constitution of the workers as an independent political party, no matter how, so long only as it is a separate labour party". That was the sense in which Lassalle acted; and, in that sense, Lassalle's
achievement was a historical deed of supreme importance.