9. THE PROLETARIAN REVOLUTION The November Revolution of 1918 was the last offshoot 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 [27] 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, demoralised 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 through 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 bowdlerise 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 ! Footnotes [27] German revolutionary; organised workers' militias in the Ruhr in 1920 and in central Germany in 1921. Member of KAPD. |