 The first edition of the Arbeiterfrage was created in response to heated debates about political strategy in the developing labor movement. It was followed by a second and third edition that took up more theoretical questions. The Arbeiterfrage was, like the works of Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels and others of the period, shaped by a direct experience of rapid industrialization. A crucial consequence of this industrialization was the generation of an impoverished urban working  class.[6]  The heart of this process in Germany was in the Ruhrgebiet and in the Rhineland, where Lange lived. Lange concluded that the solution to the problem of what to do about the working class, the “Arbeiterfrage”—literally the “worker question”—as it was called, must come from the workers themselves. This required politically organizing the workers and their organizations to form a front against the bourgeoisie (Irmer 1975, 2).