Witness to the German Revolution (13 page)

I get into conversation with another old gentleman. After a moment he declares: “It's clear. That's the way we'll have to go!”

“Which way?”

“The same way as the Russians, of course!”

It really is clear. Very clear indeed, if this reasonable gentleman, this worthy gawper on the Wilhelmstrasse can see it too.

The two little sentences he spoke to me are in the air. With minor variations, I heard them three times in the same morning.

Newspapers cost a million, a tram ticket two million. The trams—although the number of lines running has been cut to thirty—are more or less empty. In the third-class carriages of the suburban trains you hardly see anybody reading a newspaper. A newspaper is a luxury. You read it over the shoulder of a more fortunate neighbor. To pass the time on the journey you bring some old novel on paper yellowed by age…

Yes, sir, very probably that is “the way we'll have to go.”

From one end of this hungry country to the other, there is a wave of disturbances. Strikes, looting of shops, uproar in the streets, volleys of shots fired… In Upper Silesia, the landowners are refusing food supplies to the mining districts. They aren't happy with the new taxes. On Thursday (September 13),
when the workers get their wages, all the shops are shut.
At Beuthen, the poor people break down the grocers' doors. The police of Stresemann and the SPD opens fire: seven dead, 30 wounded.

Two days later, on September 15, brawls and volleys of shots at the Sorau marketplace: 12 killed, 46 injured.

In the Grand Duchy of Baden the strike which began at Lorrach has spread. The authorities have responded by martial law. Thus far there have been three dead, several dozen wounded and 200 arrests. Because it stated that “the government is shooting down hungry workers” the Mannheim
Arbeiterzeitung
has been suspended for three months, at the request of the Interallied Commission.

From Upper Silesia to the Rhine, this is a land of hunger, anger and despair. This is the land where they murder the starving.

The inadequacy of wages is too blatant, the automatic theft from these derisory wages too flagrant, the impotence of the government too obvious. As obvious as its bad faith.

The great governmental coalition has been formed, let us remember, thanks to the acceptance by the bourgeois parties of a series of demands, one of which was the stabilization of wages.

As yet it has done nothing to achieve this, although the dollar has gone from eight million to around 230 million. But the head of the government, Herr Stresemann, supported by all the right wing press, has launched a massive campaign against high wages. He has finally got a categorical repudiation from the ADGB, even though it is led by old social democratic reformists. In their official reply to the chancellor, they compare the purchasing power of wages today to that of 1914; they conclude that a worker today has to work
seven hours
to buy what
one hour's
labor enabled him to buy before the war. According to these bureaucrats, who are counter-revolutionary but competent, German wages are now reduced to one seventh of what they used to be.

The trade union bosses of the ADGB have finally been forced to admit it publicly. For they are beginning to realize that
a final limit has been reached.

A comrade from South America asks me: “What role do you think the libertarians will play in the coming German revolution?”

What role? As far as I can see, none at all. None. They hardly exist. Only very rarely do you see a libertarian placard. Never, on any demonstration or in any circumstances, have I seen, in Berlin or elsewhere, a libertarian paper being sold or distributed…

However, two or three small libertarian publications (
Freie Arbeiter, Der Syndikalist
) do appear in Germany, very hard for anyone interested to find, completely unknown to the masses. The leaders of various “syndicalist” unions, scattered here and there, claim to have a 100,000 members who must be subdivided into half a dozen tendencies that are more or less vegetarian, nudist or attached to the ideas of Tolstoy… Germany has more than 20 million proletarians of whom about 13 million are organized.

Workers' Germany is on the verge of revolution. For those revolutionaries who have something more than superfluous old formulas to offer to the masses on the march towards decisive struggles, the time has come to confront their doctrines with life itself, that is, with the reality of class struggle. It is time for libertarians in Germany—if they exist as revolutionaries—to put forward their program for achieving results, their tactics, their teachings, to show the way. How can we make the revolution? How can we crush fascism? How can we provide bread for the industrial cities? How can we do otherwise than found tomorrow a proletarian state, than establish a red army already today?

They are silent. Or if they mutter, it is so low, so lamely that nobody can hear them. They do not exist.

Correspondance internationale
, September 29, 1923

“The fascist cross and the Soviet star are joined together… Count Reventlow
¹¹⁷
and Radek are getting on together wonderfully well… The corrupters of Moscow, the Machiavellis of the Third International and the adventurers of German reaction have made a monstrous pact against democracy… Tartar Bolshevism, transformed into Germanic nationalism, is sharpening its knife—you know, the one they carry between their teeth!—to cut the throats of the innocent republics of Léon Blum and Ebert, of General Degoutte and citizen Noske…”

Communism is the living, flexible and logical thought of the vanguards of the working class, everywhere committed to the hilt to
the revolutionary struggle. Principles of safety first, the wondrous professions of faith of inactive socialism, prestigious phrases—soft pillows for idle minds!—are not its style. Communism springs from the Russian Revolution, whose thought was always essentially action, the habit of plunging into the very heart of reality, of adapting to it, of ceaselessly forging there new weapons, tactics and strategies…

(Weapons, tactics, strategies…What horrible military vocabulary! —I agree, comrade. But it isn't my fault, or Moscow's. Should we, or should we not, in the class struggle today, have weapons, should we know, predict and calculate what we're doing, that is, should we have a tactic and a strategy?)

German social democrats and the French minority
¹¹⁸
think they can rest on the laurels of Versailles. The former think of nothing but rescuing the capitalist order which is under heavy threat to the east of the Rhine; the latter have nothing to fill their heads but the clever contrivances of the left wing bloc
¹¹⁹
and the next election campaign. The German Communists, however, are facing up to famine, fascist counter-revolution and Allied imperialism.—Every day, the pressing cries of the hungry rise up towards them; every week, striding over the bodies of poor wretches shot down by the municipal police in the marketplaces, people coming from all parties make their way towards them. Each week they are hit by repression. They have thousands of comrades in prison. They make up a party of revolution. In the face of fascism, they had to act.

“Our tactic towards fascism,” I was told recently by a Berlin militant, “has already been crowned by success. Six months ago, fascism was making inroads into the working class here and
there. It was rising rapidly when the occupation of the Ruhr gave it the powerful additional boost of a legitimate awakening of national feeling. Now, though it is far from being defeated, its progress has been blocked. It is no longer the demagogy of anti-Semitic National Socialism, which has a grip on certain proletarian elements who have been demoralized by the squalid maneuvers of social democracy; instead our revolutionary arguments are beginning to bite on the middle classes who have been proletarianized and disoriented. Moreover, since German fascism is split internally into two tendencies, the Pan-Germanists and the separatists,
¹²⁰
while working-class unity is being established more and more around the KPD—as is shown once again by the events in Thuringia—for the moment the Soviet star has the advantage over the swastika. And that's quite important, for things are no joke at present.”

The fact is that “Sedan Day” (September 2) was a fiasco for fascism; that after two or three debates with Communist speakers, the National Socialist Workers Party published in its paper, the
Völkischer Beobachter
(
Popular Observer
) on August 14, a formal ban on its members debating with Communists; that the three public debates held between fascist speakers and our comrade Hermann Remmele—at Stuttgart on August 2 and 10 and at Göppingen on August 16—have, like Radek's articles,
¹²¹
made their way throughout the Germany of reaction, ready armed for civil war…

Let us look together through the little pamphlet which contains Remmele's speeches to the south German fascists, and we
shall be able to clarify our ideas on what imbeciles—or dishonest politicians—have called “National Bolshevism.” “You are fighting Jewish finance,” said Remmele to the fascists. “Good, but also fight the other finance, that of the likes of Thyssen, Krupp, Stinnes and Klöckner!” He thus got these anti-Semites to applaud the class struggle. “You are fighting against the workers because your masters, the big capitalists, want to divide and rule, to set members of the middle classes like you, who have been ruined and will be proletarianized tomorrow, against us workers!” Thus he got these reactionaries to applaud the united front of all the exploited. “Are you patriots?” he asked, and described how big German industry was associated in many profitable affairs with French capital, selling its manufacturing secrets, like the Baden Aniline trust,
¹²²
preparing for Germany to be colonized and getting rich from the devaluation of the mark. “Which of you wants to get killed for this capitalist Germany?” And he had the whole hall shouting: “Nobody!”

The positive part of his argument is simple: “Hungry Germany can only liberate itself by first of all shaking the yoke of its national capitalism.” “The Treaty of Versailles can only be canceled when there is no longer a capitalist Germany.” “One people has already shown you how to liberate yourselves: look at the example of the internationalist Soviets!” “Together, we are 16 to 18 million proletarians whose wages have fallen by at least four fifths; and nine to 11 million people in humble circumstances who have been ruined. They used to tell you that communism would take everything away from you; now it's capitalism that has taken everything from you. The proletariat will liberate you as it liberates itself.” “The national unity of Germany can have no other support than the international workers' movement.”

This Communist orator, speaking to fascists in Württemberg, made them cheer André Marty
¹²³
and working-class France which would “produce thousands of mutineers like Marty, if the French armies marched against the German Revolution.” By thus reminding Germans, deceived by the chauvinist incitement of Stinnes's press, filled with hate at the acts of Degoutte in the Ruhr, embittered by poverty, that there is a red France, the France of the Commune, a France which has made or attempted four revolutions in a century, and which will never be the executioner of a great movement of liberation, he is perhaps, for the people of
Le Populaire
,
¹²⁴
engaging in base demagogic agitation.

The German Communists want to engage the fascists in discussion, with their full program, with all the powerful intransigence of revolutionary ideology. Examine Remmele's speeches in detail; you won't find a single concession, a single tactical omission. To arouse the virtuous indignation of the social democrats of France and Germany against this remarkable propaganda campaign, it was necessary to tear quotations out of context, to do violence to the facts, to deliberately ignore other facts—such as the huge labor of organizing armed resistance to fascism carried out by Communists throughout Germany—and to employ the most vulgar agitational devices. “Radek has shaken hands with Count Reventlow,” wrote
Vorwärts.
(And Remmele replied: “We're offering you a united front, you who murdered Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, you whose Noske has the blood of 15,000 revolutionaries on his conscience!”)

The fascist movement is born of the wretched condition of middle classes pauperized by the struggles of the imperialist epoch
and disappointed by democracy, by pacifism, by reformism, by the milk and water socialism on which they were fed at a time when prosperity seemed to be their guaranteed destiny. It has raised up against the proletariat millions of men who are determined to risk everything because they have lost nearly everything, enemies of socialism which has deceived them, and for the same reason inclined to adopt the opposite of their beliefs of yesterday. In Germany, it constitutes the last resort of the capitalist order; and as it could count on social layers consisting of more than ten million people, it would be, when the time came, supported by high finance and heavy industry, officered by the police and the Reichswehr, led by the best strategists from among the Kaiser's officers, and hence a terrible instrument in the hands of reaction.