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7. FACTORY ORGANISATION AND WORKERS' UNION (1) (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 (Betriebsorganisationen). These Betriebsorganisationen, 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 (Arbeiterunion) 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 (Arbeiterunion) 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 egotistic 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 with 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 or 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 struggle. 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 factory organisation (Betriebsorganisation) is a federative form without centralism. All members are independent ; no-one outside the factory has a say in their factory business. In their factory organisations (Betriebsorganisationen) the members are autonomous. No boss from the office or a central HQ, no intellectual or professional leader can interfere in their affairs. The factory organisations (Betriebsorganisationen) construct themselves from their own resources and settle their affairs with their own energies and their own means. This is federalist independence. Autonomy. The factory organisation (Betriebsorganisation) is neither party nor 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' [23] . It is, then, simply a place for the preparation and stirring up of the revolution. If one factory organisation (Betriebsorganisation) exists near the others, then they must form links with each other. Let us assume that in a large factory organisations (Betriebsorganisationen) exist in the different sections (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 factory organisations (Betriebsorganisationen) 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 factory organisation (Betriebsorganisation). The delegate has only to carry out the instruction of his factory organisation (Betriebsorganisation), 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 judgement 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, arranged a congress, 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 factory organisations (Betriebsorganisationen), the conference does not have to deliberate and conclude, it has only to establish the will of the factory organisations (Betriebsorganisationen) 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 factory organisations (Betriebsorganisationen). 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 a Workers' Union (Arbeiterunion). The leadership of the Workers' Union (Arbeiterunion) is formed by those at the top of the regional organisations. In its organisational structure the Workers' Union (Arbeiterunion) 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 factory organisations (Betriebsorganisationen), 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 (Arbeiterunion), then, federalism and centralism appear in a higher unity, in a synthesis. Therein lies the great superiority of the Workers' Union (Arbeiterunion) 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 [24] 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 (Arbeiterunion) is such an integrated organisation. Footnotes [23] Hamburg-Amerikanische Paketfahrt-Aktiengesellschaft was the largest German steamship company; Karl Legien was head of the German trades unions during and after the war; arch class-collaborator. [24] This was in October 1919 when the bulk of the KPD membership were expelled for their opposition to parliamentarism and the trade union. |