THE NEW LABOUR MOVEMENT (3)
 The Work Groups The task of the work groups, viewed exteriorly, is very modest. The revolutionary phrase, brilliant speeches of great party leaders, tom-tom propaganda and party advertising have here lost all meaning. And yet their importance is much greater than that of the most powerful party propaganda could ever be. So long as only isolated groups sporadically here and there set about, through serious study, making themselves acquainted with the movement of the social forces, so long the importance of this work does not directly strike the view. But as soon as they become more general, when they form a consciously widespread movement, when work groups arise everywhere for the purpose of imparting to the workers the true (scientific) insight into the social process of life; then the picture is altered. Their task is then no longer small and modest, but gigantic and all mastering. In the work groups the working class has then shaped for itself the instrument with which it masters the science of the social forces. The time for it is due, and over-due; unless all signs fail, the development presses in these directions. What remains in Germany, for example, of the old labor movement are small illegal discussion groups in which the workers seek to find their way under the newly formed conditions. It is only in these discussion groups, in fact, that an independent labor movement there under the present conditions is at all possible. And what even today has become reality in Germany will in the near future have its entry also in the other capitalist countries. Then, there too, the time will have arrived when, with the visible collapse of the old labor movement, the new forms of illegal discussion and propaganda groups or, as we prefer to name them, of work groups, will become necessary. As yet such groups arise through the circumstance that various workers come together in order to converse regarding their class situation. They are still weak and uncertain and not yet in a position to come out independently. There is still too little knowledge and skill in order to function as a unit, from which the new principles may pass to the outside. All that must be made up for in painstaking, serious work upon oneself and upon the group. To this end, however, it is first necessary that the groups realize the great importance of their work for the emancipation struggle of the proletariat. When it once becomes clear to the workers that they can here practically and actively work at the maturing of the whole class, each in his locality and each group as the little wheel whose absence is not allowable in the great structure of the working class if the class is to become fit for action, -- then they will devote themselves whole-heartedly to this task. Then, however, what still today appears to many as impossible will become a matter of course. Then the work groups which have gone on in advance along this path and which, basing themselves upon the marxian social doctrine, have recognized the whole breadth and depth of the problem, -- the emancipation of the proletariat -- must call on their class comrades to follow everywhere their example. They must point out the necessity that each group form an independent unit capable of thinking for itself and putting out its own propaganda material. Each new work group must become a radiating center for the idea of independence and the impulsion to the forming of more and more groups. Here a field of labor lies fallow, of such enormous extent that there will not be forces enough for tilling it. But this labor, once begun on a major scale, sets free so many new forces that it will finally arouse the enthusiasm and the allegiance of the whole class. In the work groups of the new labor movement the soil is being prepared on which arises our knowledge of and insight into the movement of the social forces. What the individual, left to himself, can not do is quite possible in collective exchange of ideas, first in the work group and then in the connection of the groups among each other, which finally create the spiritual bond throughout the class. The analysis of the constantly changing social phenomena -- in the old movement the monopoly of the intellectuals and leaders -- is here accomplished by the workers themselves. The very widespread opinion to the effect that such a thing is beyond the capacities of the workers is quite wrong-headed. Inversely : The intellectuals and leaders of the old labor movement are incapable of giving an analysis of the social developments for the revolutionary proletariat. They see the phenomena otherwise than do the revolutionary workers because their goal is different : they today play the part of leaders and want to retain that part in the future also. Their thinking can not be other than required by the function which they perform in this society. They form a special privileged stratum whose function is built on wage labor, economic expropriation and deprivation of rights for the working class; they fight for the maintenance of this function, and to them accordingly also the abolition of wage labor and the dominance of the working class itself must appear a utopia. To the workers themselves, however, nothing stands in the way of taking up into themselves that knowledge which, through scientific investigation on the social field, is present in great fullness. This knowledge, which in the great works of scientific socialism is formulated into social laws of motion and the correctness of which is proved a thousand times over through the process of development of our present society, and at this very time is being more and more confirmed, this knowledge can be understood only by the workers. For this knowledge tells us that the capitalist order of our society with its ever mightier forces of production comes into ever sharper conflicts which it is finally incapable of overcoming. It tells us that only the working class is capable of putting an end to that, in that it rises out of wage slavery. It is only scientific investigation which teaches us to know the whole of society. The method of social investigation, the historical-materialistic one, which has developed in the course of the 19th and 20th centuries and which has been established in the works of Marx, Engels, Dietzgen and others, must now be applied and put into practice by the workers. This task, however, can only be accomplished by the entire class. It begins wherever groups arise which take as their task the analysis of the social events; groups which develop finally into the common brain with which the class thinks, and when everywhere groups have arisen whose bond of union is a similar manner of thought. The task is enormously great, but it will yet finally be mastered by the inexhaustible energy of the working masses, for only thus is the way prepared which leads to the emancipation of the working class. |