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From the Bourgeois to the Proletarian Revolution by Ottle Ruhle (1924) Part 3 of 3 7 FACTORY ORGANISATION AND WORKERS' UNION (Betriebsorganisation & Arbeiterunion) When in the November Revolution of 1918 the bourgeois and counter-revolutionary character of the parties and trade unions revealed itself in all its glory for the second time, a section of the proletarians, who were serious about the revolution, reached consciousness. They recognised that the proletarian struggle which plays itself out on the given basis always exhausts itself in shifts of power; that bourgeois organisations with bourgeois tactics of struggle, even when they have proletarians as members, necessarily end up with a compromise with the bourgeois economic and state power; that in view of the displacement of the main emphasis of all struggles towards the economic side, remaining in political organisations and fighting out political struggles from here on must lead to defeat. Thus a section of the proletariat began to orientate itself towards new viewpoints and finally also to organise. It was recognised that: The proletarian revolution is completely different in character from the bourgeois revolution. The proletarian revolution is first and foremost an economic affair. The proletarian revolution can be fought out not in bourgeois but only in proletarian organisations. The proletarian revolution must develop its own tactics of struggle. The consequence of this recognition was the decisive withdrawing from party, parliament, trade union and everything connected with them. At first the positive outcome hovered in the air, not too clearly, and only gained form and shape in time, in the course of many struggles and discussions. The revolutionary trade union of the American workers, IWW, emerged as the model, although known only to few. In addition to this, precisely in the revolutionary period, the idea of the councils system which had played a great part in Russia, was being eagerly discussed, and stood at the centre of all practical suggestions for and attempts at socialisation. 'Wildcat' strikes which broke out everywhere and were carried on against the will of the trade unions gave rise to the election of revolutionary action committees, from which revolutionary works councils soon followed. Finally, the movement grew, first in the Ruhr region among the miners, into the struggle for revolutionary factory organisations (BOs). These BOs, combined in local groups and further united in economic areas, their construction and completion in a united council organisation extending over the whole state, soon became the main idea and prime aim of a movement which flowed into the Union as the new organisational vessel of the will of the revolutionary workers' struggle. Not reasoned out in the official quarters of the leaders, not transmitted by propaganda to the workers as a subtle invention, but grown in quite an elemental fashion from the soil of the most vigorous and serious struggles, it soon stood independently as the object of the most heated conflicts of opinion and debates, in the centre of the revolutionary movement. The Union movement stems from the basic knowledge that the proletarian revolution, because it wants to see the basis of society overturned, is in the first place an economic revolution, and that capital's work force, whose power is anchored in the factories and works itself out in the first place economically, must advance from the factories as determined power. Only in the factory is the worker of today a real proletarian, and as such a revolutionary within the meaning of the proletarian-socialist revolution. Outside the factory he is a petty-bourgeois, involved in a petty-bourgeois milieu and middle-class habits of life, dominated by petty-bourgeois ideology. He has grown up in bourgeois families, been educated in a bourgeois school, nourished on the bourgeois spirit. Marriage is a bourgeois penal institution. Dwelling in rented barracks is a bourgeois arrangement. The private household of every family with its own kitchen leads to a completely egoistic economic mode. There the husband looks after his wife, the wife looks after her children; everyone thinks only about his interests. Even the child in bourgeois schools is directed to knowledge influenced by the bourgeoisie, which is tailored in accordance with bourgeois tendencies. Everything is dealt with from the standpoint of the bourgeois-ideological interpretation of history. Then in apprenticeship, in business, in the workshop: again in bourgeois surroundings. What someone reads, what he has picked up in the theatre, in the cinema and so on everywhere, in the street, in the guest-house, bourgeois existence comes to meet him. And all that gives rise to a bourgeois way of thinking and feeling. Many become, as soon as they have taken off their working clothes, bourgeois too in their behaviour. They treat wives and children as they are treated by their bosses, demand subjection, service, authority. When the proletariat is liberated from the bourgeoisie, women and children will still have to be liberated from the men. This has nothing to do with evil intent, but emerges from our bourgeois attitude, through the environment, through the bourgeois atmosphere. Whenever the worker is seen outside the factory, he is a petty bourgeois. In clothing, habits, life-style he apes the bourgeois and is happy when he can not be distinguished from the bourgeoisie. If we group the worker according to living areas and streets, with the party and trade union membership, then we only find him as a petty bourgeois. At best we get him along to distribute a leaflet, to a peaceful demonstration, hardly anything more. He prefers to avoid fighting or retreats quickly. 'The leaders ought to fight,' he says in his cowardice, 'that's what they're paid for.' In the factory the worker is another person. There he confronts the capitalist face to face, feels the fist on his neck, is irritated, embittered, hostile. If a conflict breaks out here, he cannot shirk so easily. He is under the control of others, subject to the general influence, is carried away the rest and holds his own. Revolutionary disposition and revolutionary determination coincide here. Parties and trade unions, because they always include only the petty bourgeois, never the conscious, real proletarians, can never on the sole grounds of the composition of their human resources bring about a revolutionary action. At best, a riot or a putsch. But then, when these infuriated petty bourgeois, their anger bursting out, rush on to the streets to fight, they are rounded up, crippled or stabbed by the bourgeois organism (bosses, police, military). And the movement is lost. Not so in the factory. In every factory there is a core of revolutionary elements. They come from all camps and parties. Only gross delusion can maintain that there are revolutionaries exclusively in one party or that adherence to this party constituted the revolutionary quality. All the revolutionaries in the factory, unencumbered by previous adherence to party of trade union, get together and form the revolutionary factory organisation. Are you revolutionary? Do you want to struggle? Are you abandoning party and union? That is enough. Whoever wants that can become a member of the revolutionary factory organisation. The proletarian revolution has to destroy a powerful system from the bottom and to create something quite new on the largest scale. For this task the forces of parties and trade unions are not adequate. Even the strongest associations are too weak for it. The proletarian revolution can only be the work of the whole proletarian class. All energies must be included for this. Every individual must stand in the proper place and do his best there. This proper place is the factory, where everyone does his duty. Here, in the factory, all proletarian forces find their expression. The factory organisation is, basically, absolutely nothing new. That it grew quite naturally from the struggle is explained by the fact that, in the development of the struggle and of labour, everything was prepared for it to arise. It was, so to speak, at hand for a long time; capitalism itself created it. For the sake of profit it constructed a wonderful system of organising work: the factory, the mine, the works, the economic complex, the business district. The workers only need to acquire revolutionary consciousness of this organisation in order to seize it, surround it and use it to organise the district. It has to create afresh no party-substitute, no trade union competitor. It only has to take possession of the existing organisation of labour, which serves capitalist profit goals, and place it in the service of revolutionary aims of struggle. This happens as the workers in the factories themselves recognise what power they have in their hands; as they take greater pains to seize for themselves the existing organisational apparatus; and as they finally take possession of the factories, to eradicate the bourgeois system and put socialism in its place. The means to that is the factory organisation. The BO is a federative form without centralism. All members are independent; no-one outside the factory has a say in their factory business. In their BO the members are autonomous. No boss from the office or a central HQ, no intellectual or professional leader can interfere in their affairs. The BOs construct themselves from their own resources and settle their affairs with their own energies and their own means. This is federalist independence. Autonomy. The BO is neither party not trade union. It has nothing to do with agitation and participation in the unions. It is not a labour association, not a relief institution; it signs no labour contracts and has no interest in Hapag steamers christened 'Karl Legien'. It is, then, simply a place for the preparation and stirring up of the revolution. If one BO exists near the others, then they must form links with each other. Let us assume that in a large factory BOs exist in the different section (casting, moulding, turning, carpentry and book-keeping). These sections together comprise the works. On questions which concern not the individual sections but the whole, the BOs must work together. This happens through the factory delegates or shop stewards who are elected on an ad hoc basis. For a discussion, a certain resolution, the delegate receives a binding mandate from his BO. The delegate has only to carry out the instruction of his BO, and disposes of no kind of independent rights on that account. Thus the leader is not independent of his electors like the party secretary or MP. He cannot decide one way or another and subsequently refer back and take a vote of confidence. He has only to carry out the will of the masses. The membership has the right of recall at any time if the delegate is unreliable. He can then be replaced by a better one. He is permanently in the control and power of the masses through him the working mass speaks. But there can be questions which go even beyond the sphere of a factory, perhaps affect a whole economic region. Then the delegates of the factories of the whole economic region meet together. They too have a binding mandate and are always recallable. Thus the structure is completed, from the factory, through the works, the economic district, out to the entire state. This is not a new centralism, but only the councils system constructed from below upwards. Centralism also has, superficially, this form of organisation. But there the command goes from above downwards. In the structure of the factory organisation the decision goes from below upwards; it does not rest on a leader's judgment but on the foundation of the expression of will of the masses. The leaders do not command while the masses have to obey; rather, the masses decide and the leaders have become executors of the masses' will. Policy is made in the name and after the initiative of the masses. This is the fundamentally new thing, the proletarian element. The old parties and trade unions established their structure as follows: a few people who considered themselves as leaders from the beginning, drew up a programme, composed a founding resolution and gave themselves a name then members were recruited. First the officers were there, then the soldiers the influencing and conferring of blessings on the people followed from above according to the authoritarian principle. In the structure of the factory organisation it is exactly the other way round. First of all the masses are there, getting together, organising and deliberating their affairs. If people are needed to carry out the decisions taken, then delegates are chosen to whom the decision is conveyed as a binding mandate. If the delegates meet at a conference with the delegates of other BOs, the conference does not have to deliberate and conclude, it has only to establish the will of the BOs represented. The assertion of this will is the decision. Now, it is the task of the conference to deliberate how it will carry out the decision with greatest expediency. Thus the delegates become executive organs discharging the will of the BOs. They stand last in line, not first. For the movement goes from below upwards. The main emphasis lies in the masses, not with the leaders. The combining of the factory organisation in a larger and stronger unity is called Workers' Union (AU). The leadership of the Workers' Union is formed by those at the top of the regional organisations. In its organisational structure the Workers' Union is neither federalist nor centralist, but both and also neither. It lets freedom and independence go on existing in the substructure, as guaranteed by the federalism of the BOs, but adds in the superstructure the unifying factor of concentration, deriving from centralism. But as federalism is present without its weakness of fragmentation and lack of unity, so the centralism is without the disadvantage of paralysing and smothering individual initiative and mass will. In the Workers' Union, then, federalism and centralism appear in a higher unity, in a synthesis. Therein lies the great superiority of the Workers' Union over every other organisation. It is more complete than every merely federalist or merely centralist association; it is both without the disadvantages of one form or the other. In the pre-revolutionary phase the splitting of organisations into political and trade-union had a meaning. At that time there were indeed pure political struggles which were to be fought out with political means, and pure economic struggles which demanded exclusively economic means of struggle. Since the war and the great transformation it brought about, this has altered. Today every economic struggle, however small at first, grows in the twinkling of an eye into a political conflict: every wage movement ends with the recognition that the proletariat is no longer to be helped by wage increases, that rather the setting aside of the whole wages system alone assures it rescue from downfall. But that too is a political matter. And vice versa: every serious political conflict immediately sets in motion the weapons of economic struggles. Ebert and Noske, sworn enemies of the general strike when they saw their political system endangered by the Kapp Putsch, summoned the masses to the general strike. The KPD, in its famous 21 points of the Heidelberg Party Conference quite decisively rejected sabotage and passive resistance as 'syndicalist and anarchist methods of struggle.' But in the Ruhr struggle, government, SPD and KPD together summoned the workers to sabotage and passive resistance. In the revolution the actual situation demands that now this, now that method be employed in the struggle, that methods be changed swiftly, a combination of methods often be undertaken, etc. The revolution itself changes its aspect continually, is now more an economic, now more a political process. It has the highest interest in an economic-political integrated organisation, with which it has measured up to every situation and phase of the struggle. The Workers' Union is such an integrated organisation. The first Workers' Union as an integrated organisation originated in October 1921 following the lead of East Saxony which had already withdrawn from the KAPD in 1920. A national conference adopted on the suggestion of East Saxony the following founding principles of the AAU (Integrated Organisation): "1 The AAU is the political and economic integrated organisation of the revolutionary proletariat. 2 The AAU fights for communism, the socialisation of production, raw materials, means and energies and of the necessary goods produced from them. The AAu wants to set planned production and distribution in the place of the capitalist methods of today. 3 The ultimate aim of the AAU is society without domination; the way to this goal is the dictatorship of the proletariat as a class. The dictatorship of the proletariat is the exclusive exercise of the workers' will over the political and economic establishment of communist society by means of the councils' organisation. 4 The immediate tasks of the AAU are: (a) the smashing of the trade unions and of the political parties, these main hindrances to the unification of the proletarian class and the further development of the social revolution, which can be no business of parties and trade unions. (b) the combining of the revolutionary proletariat in the factories, the embryos of production, the basis of the coming society. The form of all combination is the factory organisation (BO). (c) the development of the workers' self-consciousness and sense of solidarity. (d) to prepare all the measures that will be necessary for the political and economic construction. 5 The AAU rejects all reformist, opportunist methods of struggle; it turns its back on all participation in parliamentarism and in the legalised works' councils, for these signify sabotage of the idea of the councils. 6 The AAU fundamentally renounces professional leadership. So-called leaders can only be considered as traitors. 7 All functions in the AAU are honorary. 8 The AAU regards the liberation struggle of the proletariat not as national but as an international matter. The AAU therefore works for the combining of the revolutionary proletariat of the world in a Councils' International." With this programme of guiding principles, the AAU in 1921 constituted itself as an integrated organisation. After two years' development, the Dresden local group took occasion to set down in the following programmatic and organisational principles its insights and experiences, which it had gained from uninterrupted struggles waged with the most extreme consistency: 1 The Origins of the Unionist Movement "The World War with its national and international effects in political, economic and cultural spheres brought in the age of revolution at accelerated speed. The mounting collapse of the capitalist economy engenders as its consequence an ever increasing impoverishment of the working class. This mounting impoverishment, as experience shows, no longer can be compensated through struggles for better conditions of pay or through legislative (parliamentary) reforms. It can only be eliminated through the elimination of the capitalist economic system itself and its replacement by the socialist-communist economy of need. As the winning of this goal through struggle can only be the business of the proletarian class itself, the demand hence arises quite naturally for the proletariat to give up all reformist methods of struggle and replace them with a resolute, revolutionary form of struggle, also organised differently. The victory of the revolution has as its pre-requisite the unification of the working class. Parties and trade unions, inclined by their whole nature to reformism, have proved themselves an obstacle to the necessary revolutionary unity. Centralist in their organisational structure, with the particular characteristic of professional leadership, these forms of organisation especially hinder the development of the proletariat's self-consciousness. Therefore the problem of unity became at once a problem about the revolutionary form of organisation. The AAUE arose out of this knowledge and in accordance with the materialist concept of history by which changing economic and social relations necessarily imply consequent changes in organisational form. 2 Nature and Goal of the AAUE Proceeding from the understanding that economic questions and political questions cannot be artificially separated, the AAUE is neither trade union nor party but the integrated organisation of the proletariat. In order to bring about the unified front of the proletarian class, the Union organises all the workers who profess its goal at the places of production, the factories. All the factory organisations combine in the Union on the basis of the councils' system. The original transformation of the capitalist economy into the socialist-communist economy has as its pre-requisite the revolutionary expropriation of the means of production by the proletariat. The process of transformation can only be completed through the dictatorship, that is the exclusive expression of the will of the proletarian class. The instrument of the transformation is the revolutionary councils' system. The councils' system, according to which the Union is structured, ought to anticipate in the present the basic traits of the future councils' system. 3 Structure of the BO (Factory Organisation) The factory organisation elects from itself a number of shop delegates judged necessary according to its size and type of factory. They embody the particular works council, which has to regulate all matters in agreement with the members. The leaders (workers' council) are to stand at a new election every quarter. Re-election is permissible. Every member is eligible. If several Union members are employed in one factory, they have a duty to found a factory organisation. Individual members organise first of all according to groups of industries or living areas, as also with relations between small factories. Autonomous small-scale firms, as likewise do intellectuals, organise themselves by dwelling areas. The area groups bear the character of interim organisations insofar as every member in one has to withdraw as soon as the conditions cited above are present for the founding of a BO of its own in his factory. 4 Structure of the Union (Councils' Organisation) Every factory organisation, or dwelling area or industry group has to send at least one shop delegate to the local Heads-of-Councils body of the Union. Larger factory organisations, and regional and industry groups send several shop delegates. Their number can be regulated from time to time according to a uniform schedule adapted to practical considerations. All three of the above organisations together form a local councils' group in a given place. All the local groups in a certain economic area form together an economic district. The local groups elect from among themselves a district economic council; for the most part it acts as an information post for the district and is in addition executive organ for the tasks assigned to it by the district conference. Conferences arising from necessity are to be called by it whenever the situation at the time makes impossible a previously customary understanding among local groups. National conferences are to be dealt with likewise. Every local district group has the duty of being represented at the district conference. At least once a year a national conference has to take place at which all the economic districts, as far as possible, must be represented. The national conference elects a national economic council. Its character and its duties correspond to those of the district economic council, only with the difference that its activity extends over the whole area of the state. If necessary measures extra to its deliberations arise in the time between national conferences and they concern the Union as a whole, it must first submit them to the general decision process. National and district conferences only have their own right of decision insofar as general national or district questions respectively are concerned. In particular, such decisions must not transgress against generally acknowledged principles. By and large these conferences should serve to exchange experiences. All the shop stewards of the individual BO, as of the Union as a whole, are recallable at any time. 5 Tactics The AAUE fundamentally rejecting all participation in the elections to the legal works councils' committee as a consequence also rejects the delegation of Union members to this body, proceeding from the viewpoint that activity in the legal works councils effects an artificial masking of class oppositions. >From the recognition adduced under point 1, the AAUE likewise rejects on principle propaganda and agitation for partial strikes. Since the Union, however, is at present not yet in the position to influence the development of the situation in its direction, the circumstance automatically arises that Union comrades will be drawn into economic strikes with the trade union orientated workers. In such cases Union comrades in work have to raise the necessary solidarity money by means of arranged contributions. The level of the necessary contribution for the time being is discussed and fixed in the meeting of council leaders and is in the form of a lump sum, equal for everyone, to be collected from every comrade and paid over to the local work committee through the head of BO. It is left up to each BO whether it collects a fund for such purposes or raises the contribution amongst itself from case to case. The decisive principle must be: 'Whoever gives fast gives double!' If the necessity for solidarity to be applied arises for the whole region, the level of the necessary regional contribution is to be calculated by the appropriate regional body. If the application of solidarity becomes necessary throughout the country, the corresponding national body has to undertake its regulating in the same way. All moneys collected are to be immediately handed over from the local labour committee to the regional or local group involved in the strike. The method of calculation follows from the plan that 25 comrades should support one comrade. The support rate should amount to 60% of a general average wage, taking into account of the fall in real wages. Moderate or other comrades fallen into need in the struggle for our goal have an equal right to solidarity; the level of the support rate at the time is determined by the nearest competent body, to which the contribution is sent. 6 Nature of Administration All the money required for administration by the local, district and national committees is to be collected by way of contributions. All functions in the Union as a whole are to be performed on an honorary basis; reimbursements are only accorded in cases involving loss of pay, or for fares and additional expenses necessarily arising for travelling speakers. 7 Membership Membership is open to every man or woman who subscribes to the foregoing rules and principles. The right of exclusion only belongs to the BO; the eventual exclusion of the BO, to the local Union. A whole local or economic district can only be excluded by the national conference. Exclusions can only result when transgressions against generally acknowledged principles are in question. Against all exclusions appeal can be lodged within four weeks with the next highest body, whose decision can be contested no further. Until the rejection of his appeal, the appellant is still a full member of the whole Union and the appropriate documents for elucidating the circumstances may not be withheld from him. Every comrade always has the duty to take the liveliest interest in the question of principle, tactics and organisation of the AAUE; the structural completion of the organisation and our power are thereby assured." 8 THE COUNCILS' SYSTEM Factory organisation and Workers' Union are sustained and dominated by the principle of the councils' system. The councils' system is the organisation of the proletariat corresponding to the nature of the class struggle, as to the later communist society. If Marx said that the working class could not simply take over the government machine of the capitalist state, but must find its own form for carrying out its revolutionary task, this problem is solved in the councils' organisation. The idea of councils was born in the Paris Commune. The fighters in the Commune recognised that it was necessary to destroy resolutely the bureaucratic military machine instead of transferring it from one hand to the other if they wanted to reach a 'real people's revolution'. They replaced the smashed state machinery with an institution of fundamentally different character: the Commune. 'The Commune,' wrote Marx, 'was to be not a parliamentary but a working body, executive and legislative at the same time. Instead of deciding once in 3 or 6 years which member of the dominant class is to represent or trample on the people in parliament, the general right to vote was to serve the people constituted in communes as the individual right to vote serves every other employer, to locate workers, foremen and book-keepers in his business.' The first decree of the Commune was the suppression of the standing army and its replacement by the armed people. Then the police, the tool of the state government, was at once stripped of its political attributes and converted into the responsible tool, removable at any time, of the Commune. Likewise, the officials of all other departments of administration. From the members of the Commune downwards, public service had to be performed for workers' pay. The acquired entitlements and upkeep allowance of the high state dignitaries disappeared with these dignitaries themselves. The judicial officials lost that apparent independence; they were to be henceforth elected, responsible and removable. The effecting of complete eligibility and removability of all official persons, without exception, at any suitable time, the reduction of their wages to the level of the usual workers' pay, these simplest and most obvious democratic measures, bound up the interests of the workers with those of the majority of the peasants and served at the same time as a bridge linking capitalism and socialism. The measures taken by the fighters of the Commune could not be more than such a linking bridge because their political reorganisation of the state lacked the appropriate economic basis. In the Russian Revolution the link bridge became a proper coherent structure. As early as 1905 in Petersburg, Moscow, etc., the institution of the workers' councils existed, although it soon had to give way to the reaction. But their image had impressed itself on the workers, and in the March revolution of 1917 the mass of Russian workers immediately seized on the formation of councils again, not from lack of other forms of organisation but because the revolution had awakened in them the active need for an amalgamation as a class. Radek wrote at that time in observing this phenomenon: 'The party can always call only upon the most skilled, lucid worker. It shows a broad path, wide horizons, presupposes a certain level of proletarian consciousness. The trade union appeals to the most direct needs of the mass, but it organises by occupations, at best by branches of industry, but not as a class. In the period of peaceful development only the front ranks of the proletariat are class conscious. The revolution however consists in the broadest layers of the proletariat, even those which have hitherto met politics with hostility, being drummed out of their rest and seized by deep ferment. They wake up, want to act; various bourgeois and socialist parties, different in the aims of their efforts and in the path they want to take, turn to them. The working class feels instinctively that it can triumph as a class. It seeks to organise as a class. And this feeling, that it can only conquer as a class, that the efforts of its opponents who group themselves around a single party cannot be victorious, is so great that with every continuation of freedom of agitation for the party slogans, even the most advanced sections of the proletariat, whose endeavours go farther than the momentary wishes of their class, submit to class organisation in the decisive days. They do it from clearer insight into the nature of the proletarian revolution. In the peaceful epoch of the movement, the proletarian vanguard sets itself narrowly limited political goals, to attain which the strength of the whole class was not at all necessary. The revolution places the question of the conquest of power on the order of the day. For that the energies of the avant-garde are not adequate. The workers' councils thus become the ground on which the working class unites itself.' The Russian revolutionaries, the workers and small peasants, conquered economic and political power with the help of the councils. They took power for themselves only, no longer shared it with any remnant of the bourgeoisie. They divided up Russia into Districts, in which the Soviets were elected by workers and poor peasants, first for the local areas then for the districts; the District Soviets elected the Central Soviet for the whole state, and the Executive Committee issued from the Congress of these Soviets. All the members of the municipal, district and Central Soviets, just like all officials and employees, were only elected on a short-term basis; they always remained dependent on their electorate and were accountable to them. In the workers' councils the workers had found their organisation, their amalgamation on a class scale and expression of will, their form and their essence. For the revolution as for socialist society. Through the setting up of workers' councils, even if it could not itself maintain them in their revolutionary form and make them effective for the tasks of socialism, the Russian Revolution has given to the workers of the world the example of how the revolution as a proletarian phenomenon will be carried through. With this example before it, the proletariat can prepare the world revolution. The proletariat of the world, in order to transport themselves and themselves alone to economic and political power everywhere the proletarian revolution is starting to unroll, before, during and after the struggles, will have to create workers' councils in municipalities, districts, provinces, areas of country, and nations. When the German November Rising broke out, suddenly at the centre of all the revolutionary demands and slogans stood the watchword: All power to the Councils! And all at once, workers' and soldiers' councils arose. They were certainly incomplete and often unsuitable the German worker confirmed here too the old lesson that the German has no great aptitude for revolution but they were not so bad, miscarried and disunited as the criticism of the parties and the hostility of the counter-revolutionaries has made out. However gross their mistakes might be, they represented a new principle the principle of the proletarian revolution, the principle of socialist construction. Therein lies their significance, their world-historical value. And on that the respect owed to them should have been based. But the SPD, accomplices of reaction and allies of the bourgeoisie (which latter it had already rescued with its policy of collaboration through the dangers of the war), fell raging upon the workers' councils. It insulted and slandered them, never tired of discrediting them by false and exaggerated insinuations and accusations, and sabotaged them by making the existence of the workers' councils dependent on parliamentary elections. When these, as the result of the participation of bourgeois elements quite unreliable or directly opposed to the revolution, turned out in a more or less reactionary way, it let the power of the councils won in the revolution be bestowed by majority decisions and the bureaucratic authorities on the National Assembly. Where the revolutionary workers resisted this treacherous and malicious procedure, the Noske guards stepped in, suppressed the workers with armed power in sometimes embittered struggles (Bremen, Braunschweig, Leipzig, Thuringen, the Ruhr) and violently made an end of the councils. If these councils had not been quickly opened blooms of revolution which fell unexpectedly into the lap of the German workers but were basically alien to their political ideology and remained alien, if rather they ripened organically in the consciousness generated through proletarian struggle and had been firmly rooted forms in the places of employment, with whose function and mode of operation the mass would have familiarised itself they could never have been so quickly erased and obliterated again from the image of the German Revolution. So the German proletarian let the only gain .... 9 THE PROLETARIAN REVOLUTION The November Revolution of 1918 was the last off shoot of the bourgeois revolution of 1848. It brought to completion the liberal-democratic republic which the determination and power of the German bourgeois of that time in the struggle against feudal ownership and princely power had not been able to achieve. In order to save its sinking ship (in extreme danger because of the World War), the bourgeoisie unceremoniously threw overboard the last feudal, monarchical, absolutist ballast which it had dragged round with it for seventy years and which now seriously threatened to become fatal to it. With that was created a basis for understanding and negotiation with the west-European capitalist powers, in particular with the victorious democratic-republican states of France and America. By giving itself a bourgeois liberal constitution and taking the government into its own hands, the bourgeoisie made possible and attained its new structure. Its rescue, admittedly, as regards the concept of a capitalist nation state, came too late. The German bourgeoisie, while it was adding the finishing touches to its bourgeois-capitalist state and at last seeing the work of making an independent democratic republic crowned with success, had at this very moment to give up its economic independence and let the victorious states dictate the degree of its political freedom. That is the tragedy of missed opportunity and belated courage. The German proletariat tried, to an extent, to drive the revolution farther. From Liebknecht to Holz it strained every nerve in numerous, vigorous, indeed heroic risings to make a social revolution out of the bourgeois revolution, to overthrow the bourgeoisie and to establish socialism. The crowd of fighters did not lack determination and dedication. Tens of thousands have been slain, others tens of thousands thrown into prisons and penitentiaries, still more have gone into exile, pursued, persecuted, driven underground and ruined. But all the struggles, all the heroism, all the sacrifices have not led to the goal. For the German proletariat the revolution is, for the present, lost. It was defeated because, under the leadership of its party and trade union apparatus, the major part of the German proletariat kept their fighting class-brothers back in fact stabbed them in the back. Deceived by their petty-bourgeois ideology, prisoners of their counter-revolutionary organisations, confused by their opportunist tactics, betrayed by their self-seeking and demagogic leadership, they themselves had to become traitors, saboteurs and enemies to the liberation and rising up of their class. That the bourgeoisie looked after itself, and had recourse to cunning and violence to save its skin, is obvious, for it was a matter of necessity in the struggle between classes. But that the German proletariat, which was in possession of the strongest organisations, which prided itself on being the most advanced in the world, and which had already for a space of four years just experienced physically the terrible consequences of bourgeois-capitalist politics, wading through a sea of blood and tears that this proletariat in the hour of revolution knew nothing else to do and was able to do nothing better than to rescue once again the bourgeoisie of its country, this bourgeoisie unparalleled in brutality, audacity, incorrigibility and lack of culture that is a deeply shaming and sad indictment. An indictment which, even if not completely justified, would make it seem quite understandable if thousands, demoralized and despairing, throw in their hands: This nation of serfs cannot be helped! And yet this people deserve not our contempt but our help, in its lack of courage as in its lack of understanding. After all it is itself the victim of a centuries-long serfdom, from which everything free and independent was beaten and broken out of it, and of a unique gross deception which the leaders committed against it again and again. It must now go throw the terrible school of hunger and slavery, and if under the pressure of world capital's multiplied power of exploitation, it will have the last drops of blood squeezed from its veins, all the bad instincts and vices of the martyred creature will be squeezed out too; in this way the school of misery will also yet become the school of inspiration and political awakening. The German proletariat must finally realise that the proletarian revolution has nothing to do with parties and trade unions, but is the work of the whole proletarian class. The German proletariat must finally set about gathering this proletarian class in the places of its servitude for the task of revolution, schooling it, organising it, setting it on the march and leading it in the struggle. The German proletariat must finally resolve upon slipping the halter of its leadership and taking into its own hands the work of its liberation, in order to complete it with its own energies and methods, on its own initiative and under its own leadership. World history allows us time until all forces are ripe for the task which is set us. Parliaments are becoming increasingly empty trappings: the parties are collapsing, destroying one another, and losing their political credibility: the trade unions are changing into ruins. The breakdown of this organisational and political system all along the line is inevitable. Proletarian and petty bourgeois strata are recognising in growing numbers that they have become victims of the decrepit party economy, if not victims of party-political and trade union confidence tricks and, as they still believe deep down in the rightness and future of the socialist idea, are turning to movements which lead them up the garden path of a liberation without struggle, a paradise for which they need do nothing: to the anthroposophy of Rudolf Steiner, the Free-country Free-money movement of Silvio Osell, the work co-operatives which bowdlerize the ideas of councils, to the National Socialism of Adolf Hitler, the band of rebels who deny every organisation, or the Serious Bible-Searchers who hope for pie in the sky. They are all going astray: their way is full of disappointment; it ends in nothing. There remains solely and only the class struggle, developing on the broadest economic basis, unleashing all proletarian energies and advancing to the social revolution, that leads to the socialist goals. The class struggle, in which the proletariat is at the same time leader and mass, general-staff and army, brain and arm, idea and movement, impulse and fulfilment. The road of the class struggle is a moment of world history. It binds feudal past through and beyond capitalist present to the socialist future. It leaves behind it all exploitation and domination. It leads to freedom. Follow us on this road, comrades! We have a world to win!