The Workingmen’s Programme attracted less immediate attention from the workingmen themselves.  But among the few whose attention was attracted was a group of Leipzig labor leaders who invited Lassalle to advise them more fully concerning his plans for the formation of an independent labor party.  Lassalle’s reply to this invitation was the Open Letter to the Committee for the Calling of a General Convention of German Workingmen at Leipzig, dated March 1, 1863.  This letter sets forth the platform upon which Lassalle proposed to make his appeal for the support of the working classes.  The two main planks of the platform were the demands for manhood suffrage and for the establishment of cooeperative factories and workshops with the aid of subventions from the State.  Through manhood suffrage Lassalle expected that the working classes would immediately become the dominant power in the State, and through State-aided producers’ associations he expected that the cooeperative commonwealth would eventually come into being.  Manhood suffrage was thus the fundamental political condition of Social Democracy.  State-aided producers’ associations were but a temporary economic expedient.  Upon this basis, May 23, 1863, the General Association of German Workingmen (Allgemeiner Deutscher Arbeiterverein) was founded.

The immediate results of the foundation of the General Association of German Workingmen were much less than Lassalle had anticipated.  He had hoped that it would quickly surpass the Liberal National Association, founded by the leaders of the Progressive party in 1859, which at this time counted about 25,000 members.  In fact, during Lassalle’s life the Workingmen’s Association never reached one-fifth of that number.  The workingmen generally were slow to recognize either the character of Lassalle’s purposes or the character of the man himself.  Despite the power and brilliancy of the speech-making campaign upon which Lassalle promptly entered he made little headway.  The progress of the movement among the rank and file, however, was more satisfactory than in any other quarter.  Marx had been lost to the movement before it was inaugurated and the rigid Marxians among the German socialists continued to hold aloof.  Lassalle’s close personal friend, Lothar Bucher, could see no prospect of early success and withdrew while there was still time.  The independent socialist, Rodbertus, to whom Lassalle next turned for assistance, had little faith in manhood suffrage and none at all in State-aided producers’ associations.  To confirm his unbelief in manhood suffrage he pointed to the ease with which a popular plebiscite could be manipulated by a Louis Napoleon.  State-aided producers’ associations, he declared to be incompatible with scientific socialism, a dangerous compromise between the national workshops advocated by the utopian socialist, Louis Blanc, and the cooeperative corporations, advocated by the anarchist, Prudhomme.  So Lassalle found himself alone at the head of his new independent labor party.