SUMMARY
 When we bring together a few general aspects of the new labor movement, it is seen that the aims which it sets for itself are very different from these of the old movement. This latter wants, by way of action through the trade unions and through social legislation, to bring about amelioration's on the basis of capitalism. The new labor movement, on the other hand, directs its activities to the attainment of a state of society which has as its presupposition the abolition of the capitalist order. In the mass movement, it wants to bring the mass to self-organization in the workers' councils, so that through these the mass can perform all functions of the legislative and executive power and itself carry out all tasks in relation to production and distribution. The revolutionary workers who take as their task the propaganda for the self-movement of the working masses want to combine them in organizations under their own leadership, in work groups which in all that they do remain completely independent. These work groups have not only the task of propaganda toward the outside; essential at the same time is their own schooling; knowledge is necessary. All the bourgeois professors on earth, even when they are combined into a "brain trust", can not do away with the all-mastering opposition between Capital and Labor. They can not discover the essential cause of the constantly increasing social catastrophes, for that cause -- wage labor -- is at the same time the basis on which arises their privileged function in society. Only the working class alone is in a position to do that, because it must if it is not content to be pressed ever farther down in the scale. The central problem, which ever more pressingly cries for its solution, consists in the mighty development of the productive forces and the impossibility of applying them. Capitalism continues to maintain itself only by ever anew destroying productive forces or throwing them out of action. This problem stands today in the center of all thoughts; it begins to pursue each individual as well as the mass; it can not be evaded. We must therefore make this problem the central axis of our self-schooling and propaganda. Until theory seizes the masses : then theory becomes a material power. And it is only then that we learn to know the full significance of the words : THE EMANCIPATION OF THE WORKING CLASS CAN ONLY BE THE WORK OF THE WORKERS THEMSELVES |