Witness to the German Revolution (32 page)

No less extensive in its consequences, the German tragedy has proved and confirmed this first verdict of history. Capitalist Germany is not simply dying of the disastrous consequences of the Treaty of Versailles. One of the great
internal
causes of its collapse lies in the inner contradictions which are inherent to states dominated by capitalist oligarchies. It has been killed by the effect of the very same laws which, today, are producing the prosperity of such capitalist nations as the United States and France.

While the war revealed to us what insoluble international contradictions exist between the vital interests of groups of imperialist powers (and, on another level, between the imperialist powers and the interests of civilization), the collapse of Germany has revealed to us the incompatibility of the interests of the big bourgeoisie and other social classes in the framework of a single nation (and, on another level, the incompatibility of the bourgeois regime with the interests of the nation considered as an aggregate of labor and culture).

These thoughts, inspired by the situation of Germany, seem to me all the more correct because a strict parallel can be drawn between the present role of the German bourgeoisie and that of the Russian bourgeoisie between 1915 and 1922. In both cases, the former dominant class appears as a cause of national disintegration. The bourgeois “nation” has had its day, at least in these two European countries. I have just read in a report from the Reichstag that during the session of October 9—during the separate negotiations between the Ruhr industrialists and General Degoutte—the DNVP deputy
Wulle declared that the industrialists of Borkum Island (Westphalia)
¹⁹²
were determined to ask for
protection from the Netherlands
against “Communist terror.” And I remembered a date: on September 20, 1792, at Valmy, the soldiers of the French Revolution—of the revolution of the third estate—defeated the Duke of Brunswick with the thundering cry, heard for the first time on a battlefield, of
“Long live the nation!”
Until then, people had fought only for kings. There had not been national armies; the relatively small royal armies were made up of professional soldiers who were recruited, hired or forced. The French revolution replaced dynastic, feudal and noble interests with an invincible living reality: the interests of the bourgeois masses who had come to power, and who had just expropriated the court, the nobility and the clergy. The bourgeoisie became the cement of the nations that it was going to establish as states, then as predatory states… Now the Russian bourgeoisie have sold the Black Sea fleet to France and the arsenals of Vladivistok to Japan; German plutocrats, having subjected their country to unrestrained looting, are now working on dividing it up. A historical epoch has come to an end.

For anyone observing events in Germany, the fact is obvious. In Germany today there is no longer any linen, any shoes, any guaranteed bread for the great mass of the population. The consumption of meat has fallen by three-quarters in comparison to pre-war figures, the death rate has gone up, and the birth rate has fallen. The majority of children from the common people are tubercular, the middle classes are dying of hunger.—Production is declining
rapidly or has stopped. Goods produced are much inferior to those from abroad and are more expensive. There are 160,000 unemployed in Berlin, more in Saxony, a few less in Hamburg; there are food riots everywhere. State revenue is virtually non-existent; it must be no more than one hundredth of its real expenditure. The monetary inflation which has automated the plundering and starvation of the masses of the population has reached such proportions that a billion marks has become the basic unit; you need several to buy a pound of margarine.

It would be wrong to put the blame for all this on M. Poincaré, whose policies have only precipitated the situation. They are the results, basically quite natural results, of five to six years of bourgeois power in a militarily defeated country.

Back in 1918, the flight of German capital began. How many billions in gold were taken out of the country in every imaginable fashion? We can mention the sale, pure and simple, to foreigners, of industrial establishments, goods or shares, in order not to have to pay the proportion due for reparations and not to run the risk of impending social struggles. My friend Höllein assured me, long ago, that six to eight billion gold marks were expatriated in this way…

As early as 1921, the whole industrial, commercial and financial bourgeoisie of Germany had made a system of speculating on the fall in value of the mark. The constant fall in value of paper money issued by the Reichsbank enabled “imperceptible” cuts in wages, making German competition unbeatable on almost all the world's markets. In the long run, the inevitable result was a reduction of the energy of labor, through undernourishment and overexertion of the workforce, wearing out of the plant and a lack of technological improvement. But after all, they were doing excellent business. Profits from Germany were converted into dollars, pounds sterling, yen and pesetas, and invested profitably and securely in South America—or elsewhere.

The passive resistance in the Ruhr was another source of scandalous profits. The most bourgeois German press
(Kölnische Zeitung, Berliner Tageblatt, Germania)
has not been able to remain silent about the enormous extent of the scandal. Half the remaining gold reserves of the Reich, about half a billion marks, is thought to have been used to finance the passive resistance; in fact, in some cases the Ruhr industrialists were able, thanks to this unhoped for source of wealth, to renew their plant, buy stocks of foreign currency (thus contributing to the fall in value of the mark), and greatly increase their political power. The state has emerged ruined from the Ruhr war. The plutocrats of heavy industry have emerged enriched, arrogant and all-powerful.

The attempts to stabilize the mark made by Messrs. Cuno and Hilferding were profitable only to them. The Reichsbank put foreign currency on the market to make up the difference between supply and demand; the plutocrats bought it all. On the Berlin Stock Exchange you could see cunning financiers at 4:15pm taking advantage of the—fictitious—fall of the dollar brought about by the intervention of the Reichsbank and buying up cheaply currency which two hours later they sold again at a higher price…

Thus for some years any weakening of the state, any increase in national poverty, have been necessarily accompanied by an enrichment and increase in the power of the industrial and financial oligarchy.

Now the drama has reached the final act. The program for reconstruction, put forward by the class of plunderers who have put the country in this situation, is known under the name of the Stinnes program. In the recent political struggles—fall of the first Stresemann government, obstruction of parliamentary government by the industrialists, Stinnes' campaign for dictatorship and martial law—what was at stake was merely its application. It can be summed up in the following four points:

The logic of this program is to replace the rational organization of labor by intensive exploitation. Without dictatorship, it obviously cannot be applied.

This chapter of the contemporary history of Germany can be entitled: “the Rich against the Nation
.”
And the whole present problem is posed, more or less, in these terms:

Will the class of bandits who are responsible for the terrible poverty of the German people—and for the ruin of German culture—succeed in imposing on the proletariat by force, if necessary with the aid of French or Senegalese bayonets, its law of all-out exploitation? This problem will probably not be solved except by civil war which at this moment seems imminent. In this case the dialectic of events will impose on the proletariat, as a basic condition for defending its vital interests, the seizure of power; and, fighting for its class power, the German proletariat will appear by the necessary course of events as the ultimate defender of a great nation of producers, of a wonderful culture—which has been more or less put to death—and of European socialism.