THE SELF-MOVEMENT OF THE MASSES !
 a) Meaning of the mass-movement Through direct action in the form of the mass-movement the owning class is directly menaced. At present, not yet by reason of the strength or scope of that movement; for the masses are still struggling with tradition, they liberate themselves but slowly from the party and trade-union policy. For that reason the owning class will find it fairly easy for a time to suppress these movements. The danger to this class, for that matter, is not that the power of the owners is directly menaced, but in the fact that no independent movement of the workers is possible without overstepping the legal limits. The independent movement of the workers develops its own laws by which it is guided and acts, and the express tendency of these laws is that the workers shall themselves take charge of the social forces of production. Because the mass movement shows that the mass, when it consciously applies its class power, does so in order to take control of the social forces of production, because the mastery of the class forces includes the administration of the productive forces, for this reason there remains to the owning class no choice. It must suppress these movements instantaneously with the sharpest means at command. As soon as an independent strike movement arises here or there, the bourgeoisie answers at once with martial law; newspapers, organizations, meetings are forbidden, if they are not in fact suppressed in advance. But when a movement develops, it takes action against such suppression. Meetings are simply held regardless, and newspapers are put out. That, however, means taking up the struggle against the state power. If the workers draw back before this struggle, the ruling class is then enabled to suppress the movement. But once resistance is offered, the movement then becomes subject to its own inner law. In the strike area, where the workers have something to say, a different law prevails than outside that area. This other law reveals itself, among other things, in the fact that in the strike area the laws for the protection of private property must go by the board. And not because the fighting workers are conscious communists who let themselves be guided by the thought of putting the social forces of production into the service of the working class, but because nothing else is in order, because the struggle itself makes it necessary (....) The mass movements show in the germ what later on will become reality in the whole of society. It is revealed in them that the masses can do nothing with their class force unless at the same time they make the productive forces serviceable to them. Both belong together. So long as the mass movements are still small and still remain a surface affair, the tendency toward the mastery of all social forces does not come so clearly to light. But if these movements become large, then more and more functions are drawn into the province of the struggling masses, - their sphere of action becomes extended. And in this struggling mass there then comes about a completely new grouping of the relations between human beings and the productive process. A new "order" develops. Those are the essential distinguishing marks of the independent class movements, which are accordingly the horror of the bourgeoisie. The development of the mass movement is therefore a development which has as its content the progressive mastery of the class forces and hence also of the social life. But this gradual process, this step-by-step development, takes place in the sense that what has once been attained remains as a class heritage, to be built upon further. Such direct successes as are attained are continually vanishing in thin air. What remains is the experience. Each mass movement develops anew on the experience of the previous movements. Thus there arise various measures with reference to the extension of the movements, to the provision of necessary material with which to organize the defense, to the distribution of foodstuffs, etc. These measures then come to be looked upon as a matter of course; they are things which are then no longer discussed, because they have become, through experience, through repeated employment, a part of the thought of the masses. Just as today no great arguments are engaged in any more when the question is one of setting up posts for the purpose of capturing strike breakers, because it "goes without saying", so the masses draw to themselves all functions of the social life, without advising long on the matter. The suppression of a mass movement is accordingly also only a partial defeat of the working class. For such a defeat reveals by the side of the momentary impotence also the growing power; it is only the defeat of the young giant, of the strength which has not yet fully matured. |