From the Bourgeois to the Proletarian Revolution by Ottle Ruhle (1924)

Part 3 of 3

7 FACTORY ORGANISATION AND WORKERS' UNION

(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 (BOs). These BOs, 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 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 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 egoistic 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 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 of 
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 district. 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 BO is a federative form without centralism. All members are 
independent; no-one outside the factory has a say in their factory 
business. In their BO the members are autonomous. No boss from the 
office or a central HQ, no intellectual or professional leader 
can interfere in their affairs. The BOs construct themselves 
from their own resources and settle their affairs with their own 
energies and their own means. This is federalist independence. 
Autonomy. The BO is neither party not 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'. It is, then, simply 
a place for the preparation and stirring up of the 
revolution.

If one BO exists near the others, then they must form links 
with each other. Let us assume that in a large factory BOs 
exist in the different section (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 BOs 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 
BO. The delegate has only to carry out the instruction of
his BO, 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 judgment 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, 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 BOs, the conference does not have to 
deliberate and conclude, it has only to establish the will 
of the BOs 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 BOs. 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 Workers' Union (AU). The leadership 
of the Workers' Union is formed by those at the top of the 
regional organisations. In its organisational structure the 
Workers' Union 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 BOs, 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, 
then, federalism and centralism appear in a higher unity, 
in a synthesis. Therein lies the great superiority of the 
Workers' Union 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 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 is such an 
integrated organisation.

The first Workers' Union as an integrated organisation 
originated in October 1921 following the lead of East 
Saxony which had already withdrawn from the KAPD in 1920. 
A national conference adopted on the suggestion of East 
Saxony the following founding principles of the AAU 
(Integrated Organisation):

"1 The AAU is the political and economic integrated 
organisation of the revolutionary proletariat.

 2 The AAU fights for communism, the socialisation of 
production, raw materials, means and energies and of 
the necessary goods produced from them. The AAu wants 
to set planned production and distribution in the 
place of the capitalist methods of today.

 3 The ultimate aim of the AAU is society without 
domination; the way to this goal is the dictatorship 
of the proletariat as a class. The dictatorship of 
the proletariat is the exclusive exercise of the workers' 
will over the political and economic establishment of 
communist society by means of the councils' organisation.

 4 The immediate tasks of the AAU are: (a) the smashing of 
the trade unions and of the political parties, these main 
hindrances to the unification of the proletarian class and 
the further development of the social revolution, which can 
be no business of parties and trade unions. (b) the combining 
of the revolutionary proletariat in the factories, the embryos 
of production, the basis of the coming society. The form of 
all combination is the factory organisation (BO). (c) the 
development of the workers' self-consciousness and sense of 
solidarity. (d) to prepare all the measures that will be 
necessary for the political and economic construction.

 5 The AAU rejects all reformist, opportunist methods of 
struggle; it turns its back on all participation in 
parliamentarism and in the legalised works' councils, 
for these signify sabotage of the idea of the councils.

 6 The AAU fundamentally renounces professional leadership. 
So-called leaders can only be considered as traitors.

 7 All functions in the AAU are honorary.

 8 The AAU regards the liberation struggle of the proletariat 
not as national but as an international matter. The AAU 
therefore works for the combining of the revolutionary 
proletariat of the world in a Councils' International."

With this programme of guiding principles, the AAU in 1921 
constituted itself as an integrated organisation. After two 
years' development, the Dresden local group took occasion 
to set down in the following programmatic and organisational 
principles its insights and experiences, which it had gained 
from uninterrupted struggles waged with the most extreme 
consistency:

1 The Origins of the Unionist Movement

"The World War with its national and international 
effects in political, economic and cultural spheres 
brought in the age of revolution at accelerated 
speed.

The mounting collapse of the capitalist economy engenders 
as its consequence an ever increasing impoverishment of 
the working class.

This mounting impoverishment, as experience shows, no longer 
can be compensated through struggles for better conditions of 
pay or through legislative (parliamentary) reforms. It can 
only be eliminated through the elimination of the capitalist
economic system itself and its replacement by the socialist-communist 
economy of need. As the winning of this goal through struggle can 
only be the business of the proletarian class itself, the demand 
hence arises quite naturally for the proletariat to give up all 
reformist methods of struggle and replace them with a resolute, 
revolutionary form of struggle, also organised differently. The 
victory of the revolution has as its pre-requisite the unification 
of the working class. Parties and trade unions, inclined by their 
whole nature to reformism, have proved themselves an obstacle to 
the necessary revolutionary unity. Centralist in their organisational 
structure, with the particular characteristic of professional 
leadership, these forms of organisation especially hinder the 
development of the proletariat's self-consciousness. Therefore 
the problem of unity became at once a problem about the 
revolutionary form of organisation.

The AAUE arose out of this knowledge and in accordance with 
the materialist concept of history by which changing economic 
and social relations necessarily imply consequent changes in 
organisational form.

2 Nature and Goal of the AAUE

Proceeding from the understanding that economic questions 
and political questions cannot be artificially separated, 
the AAUE is neither trade union nor party but the integrated 
organisation of the proletariat. In order to bring about the 
unified front of the proletarian class, the Union organises 
all the workers who profess its goal at the places of production, 
the factories. All the factory organisations combine in the 
Union on the basis of the councils' system.

The original transformation of the capitalist economy into 
the socialist-communist economy has as its pre-requisite the
revolutionary expropriation of the means of production by the 
proletariat. The process of transformation can only be 
completed through the dictatorship, that is the exclusive 
expression of the will of the proletarian class. The 
instrument of the transformation is the revolutionary 
councils' system. The councils' system, according to which 
the Union is structured, ought to anticipate in the present 
the basic traits of the future councils' system.

3 Structure of the BO (Factory Organisation)

The factory organisation elects from itself a number of shop 
delegates judged necessary according to its size and type of 
factory. They embody the particular works council, which has 
to regulate all matters in agreement with the members. The 
leaders (workers' council) are to stand at a new election 
every quarter. Re-election is permissible. Every member is 
eligible. If several Union members are employed in one 
factory, they have a duty to found a factory organisation. 
Individual members organise first of all according to groups 
of industries or living areas, as also with relations between 
small factories. Autonomous small-scale firms, as likewise 
do intellectuals, organise themselves by dwelling areas. 
The area groups bear the character of interim organisations 
insofar as every member in one has to withdraw as soon as 
the conditions cited above are present for the founding of 
a BO of its own in his factory.

4 Structure of the Union (Councils' Organisation)

Every factory organisation, or dwelling area or industry 
group has to send at least one shop delegate to the local
Heads-of-Councils body of the Union. Larger factory organisations, 
and regional and industry groups send several shop delegates. Their 
number can be regulated from time to time according to a uniform 
schedule adapted to practical considerations. All three of the 
above organisations together form a local councils' group in a 
given place. All the local groups in a certain economic area form 
together an economic district. The local groups elect from among 
themselves a district economic council; for the most part it 
acts as an information post for the district and is in addition 
executive organ for the tasks assigned to it by the district 
conference. Conferences arising from necessity are to be called 
by it whenever the situation at the time makes impossible a 
previously customary understanding among local groups. National 
conferences are to be dealt with likewise. Every local district
group has the duty of being represented at the district conference. 
At least once a year a national conference has to take place at 
which all the economic districts, as far as possible, must be 
represented. The national conference elects a national economic 
council. Its character and its duties correspond to those of the 
district economic council, only with the difference that its 
activity extends over the whole area of the state. If necessary 
measures extra to its deliberations arise in the time between 
national conferences and they concern the Union as a whole, it 
must first submit them to the general decision process. National 
and district conferences only have their own right of decision 
insofar as general national or district questions respectively are 
concerned. In particular, such decisions must not transgress against 
generally acknowledged principles. By and large these conferences 
should serve to exchange experiences. All the shop stewards of the 
individual BO, as of the Union as a whole, are recallable at any 
time.

5 Tactics

The AAUE fundamentally rejecting all participation in the 
elections to the legal works councils' committee as a consequence 
also rejects the delegation of Union members to this body, 
proceeding from the viewpoint that activity in the legal works 
councils effects an artificial masking of class oppositions.

>From the recognition adduced under point 1, the AAUE likewise 
rejects on principle propaganda and agitation for partial strikes. 
Since the Union, however, is at present not yet in the position 
to influence the development of the situation in its direction, 
the circumstance automatically arises that Union comrades will be 
drawn into economic strikes with the trade union orientated workers. 
In such cases Union comrades in work have to raise the necessary 
solidarity money by means of arranged contributions. The level of 
the necessary contribution for the time being is discussed and 
fixed in the meeting of council leaders and is in the form of a 
lump sum, equal for everyone, to be collected from every comrade 
and paid over to the local work committee through the head of BO. 
It is left up to each BO whether it collects a fund for such 
purposes or raises the contribution amongst itself from case to 
case. The decisive principle must be: 'Whoever gives fast gives 
double!' If the necessity for solidarity to be applied arises for 
the whole region, the level of the necessary regional contribution 
is to be calculated by the appropriate regional body. If the 
application of solidarity becomes necessary throughout the country, 
the corresponding national body has to undertake its regulating in 
the same way.

All moneys collected are to be immediately handed over from the 
local labour committee to the regional or local group involved 
in the strike. The method of calculation follows from the plan 
that 25 comrades should support one comrade. The support rate 
should amount to 60% of a general average wage, taking into 
account of the fall in real wages.

Moderate or other comrades fallen into need in the struggle 
for our goal have an equal right to solidarity; the level of 
the support rate at the time is determined by the nearest 
competent body, to which the contribution is sent.

6 Nature of Administration

All the money required for administration by the local, 
district and national committees is to be collected by 
way of contributions. All functions in the Union as a 
whole are to be performed on an honorary basis; 
reimbursements are only accorded in cases involving 
loss of pay, or for fares and additional expenses 
necessarily arising for travelling speakers.

7 Membership

Membership is open to every man or woman who subscribes 
to the foregoing rules and principles.

The right of exclusion only belongs to the BO; the eventual 
exclusion of the BO, to the local Union. A whole local or 
economic district can only be excluded by the national 
conference. Exclusions can only result when transgressions 
against generally acknowledged principles are in question.

Against all exclusions appeal can be lodged within four 
weeks with the next highest body, whose decision can be 
contested no further. Until the rejection of his appeal, 
the appellant is still a full member of the whole Union 
and the appropriate documents for elucidating the 
circumstances may not be withheld from him.

Every comrade always has the duty to take the liveliest 
interest in the question of principle, tactics and organisation 
of the AAUE; the structural completion of the organisation and 
our power are thereby assured."

8 THE COUNCILS' SYSTEM

Factory organisation and Workers' Union are sustained and dominated 
by the principle of the councils' system.

The councils' system is the organisation of the proletariat 
corresponding to the nature of the class struggle, as to the 
later communist society. If Marx said that the working class 
could not simply take over the government machine of the 
capitalist state, but must find its own form for carrying 
out its revolutionary task, this problem is solved in the 
councils' organisation.

The idea of councils was born in the Paris Commune. The 
fighters in the Commune recognised that it was necessary 
to destroy resolutely the bureaucratic military machine 
instead of transferring it from one hand to the other if 
they wanted to reach a 'real people's revolution'. They 
replaced the smashed state machinery with an institution 
of fundamentally different character: the Commune. 'The 
Commune,' wrote Marx, 'was to be not a parliamentary but 
a working body, executive and legislative at the same time. 
Instead of deciding once in 3 or 6 years which member of 
the dominant class is to represent or trample on the 
people in parliament, the general right to vote was to 
serve the people constituted in communes as the individual 
right to vote serves every other employer, to locate workers, 
foremen and book-keepers in his business.' The first decree 
of the Commune was the suppression of the standing army and 
its replacement by the armed people. Then the police, the 
tool of the state government, was at once stripped of its 
political attributes and converted into the responsible tool, 
removable at any time, of the Commune. Likewise, the officials 
of all other departments of administration. From the members 
of the Commune downwards, public service had to be performed 
for workers' pay. The acquired entitlements and upkeep 
allowance of the high state dignitaries disappeared with 
these dignitaries themselves. The judicial officials lost 
that apparent independence; they were to be henceforth 
elected, responsible and removable. The effecting of 
complete eligibility and removability of all official 
persons, without exception, at any suitable time, the 
reduction of their wages to the level of the usual workers' 
pay, these simplest and most obvious democratic measures, 
bound up the interests of the workers with those of the 
majority of the peasants and served at the same time as 
a bridge linking capitalism and socialism.

The measures taken by the fighters of the Commune could not 
be more than such a linking bridge because their political 
reorganisation of the state lacked the appropriate economic 
basis.

In the Russian Revolution the link bridge became a proper 
coherent structure. As early as 1905 in Petersburg, Moscow, 
etc., the institution of the workers' councils existed, 
although it soon had to give way to the reaction. But their 
image had impressed itself on the workers, and in the March 
revolution of 1917 the mass of Russian workers immediately 
seized on the formation of councils again, not from lack 
of other forms of organisation but because the revolution 
had awakened in them the active need for an amalgamation 
as a class. Radek wrote at that time in observing this 
phenomenon: 'The party can always call only upon the most 
skilled, lucid worker. It shows a broad path, wide horizons, 
presupposes a certain level of proletarian consciousness. 
The trade union appeals to the most direct needs of the mass, 
but it organises by occupations, at best by branches of 
industry, but not as a class. In the period of peaceful 
development only the front ranks of the proletariat are 
class conscious. The revolution however consists in the 
broadest layers of the proletariat, even those which have 
hitherto met politics with hostility, being drummed out of 
their rest and seized by deep ferment. They wake up, want 
to act; various bourgeois and socialist parties, different 
in the aims of their efforts and in the path they want to 
take, turn to them. The working class feels instinctively 
that it can triumph as a class. It seeks to organise as a 
class. And this feeling, that it can only conquer as a 
class, that the efforts of its opponents who group 
themselves around a single party cannot be victorious, 
is so great that with every continuation of freedom of 
agitation for the party slogans, even the most advanced 
sections of the proletariat, whose endeavours go farther 
than the momentary wishes of their class, submit to class
organisation in the decisive days. They do it from clearer
insight into the nature of the proletarian revolution. In
the peaceful epoch of the movement, the proletarian vanguard
sets itself narrowly limited political goals, to attain 
which the strength of the whole class was not at all 
necessary. The revolution places the question of the 
conquest of power on the order of the day. For that the
energies of the avant-garde are not adequate. The workers' 
councils thus become the ground on which the working 
class unites itself.'

The Russian revolutionaries, the workers and small peasants, 
conquered economic and political power with the help of the 
councils. They took power for themselves only, no longer 
shared it with any remnant of the bourgeoisie. They divided 
up Russia into Districts, in which the Soviets were elected 
by workers and poor peasants, first for the local areas then 
for the districts; the District Soviets elected the Central 
Soviet for the whole state, and the Executive Committee 
issued from the Congress of these Soviets. All the members 
of the municipal, district and Central Soviets, just like 
all officials and employees, were only elected on a short-term 
basis; they always remained dependent on their electorate and 
were accountable to them.

In the workers' councils the workers had found their organisation, 
their amalgamation on a class scale and expression of will, their 
form and their essence. For the revolution as for socialist 
society.

Through the setting up of workers' councils, even if it could 
not itself maintain them in their revolutionary form and make 
them effective for the tasks of socialism, the Russian 
Revolution has given to the workers of the world the example 
of how the revolution  as a proletarian phenomenon  
will be carried through.

With this example before it, the proletariat can prepare 
the world revolution. The proletariat of the world, in 
order to transport themselves  and themselves alone  
to economic and political power everywhere the proletarian 
revolution is starting to unroll, before, during and after 
the struggles, will have to create workers' councils in 
municipalities, districts, provinces, areas of country, 
and nations.

When the German November Rising broke out, suddenly at 
the centre of all the revolutionary demands and slogans 
stood the watchword: All power to the Councils!

And all at once, workers' and soldiers' councils arose.

They were certainly incomplete and often unsuitable  
the German worker confirmed here too the old lesson that 
the German has no great aptitude for revolution  but 
they were not so bad, miscarried and disunited as the 
criticism of the parties and the hostility of the 
counter-revolutionaries has made out. However gross 
their mistakes might be, they represented a new principle  
the principle of the proletarian revolution, the principle 
of socialist construction. Therein lies their significance, 
their world-historical value. And on that the respect owed 
to them should have been based.

But the SPD, accomplices of reaction and allies of the 
bourgeoisie (which latter it had already rescued with 
its policy of collaboration through the dangers of the 
war), fell raging upon the workers' councils. It insulted 
and slandered them, never tired of discrediting them by 
false and exaggerated insinuations and accusations, and 
sabotaged them by making the existence of the workers' 
councils dependent on parliamentary elections. When these, 
as the result of the participation of bourgeois elements 
quite unreliable or directly opposed to the revolution, 
turned out in a more or less reactionary way, it let the 
power of the councils won in the revolution be bestowed 
by majority decisions and the bureaucratic authorities 
on the National Assembly. Where the revolutionary workers 
resisted this treacherous and malicious procedure, the 
Noske guards stepped in, suppressed the workers with 
armed power in sometimes embittered struggles (Bremen, 
Braunschweig, Leipzig, Thuringen, the Ruhr) and 
violently made an end of the councils.

If these councils had not been quickly opened blooms of 
revolution which fell unexpectedly into the lap of the 
German workers but were basically alien to their political 
ideology and remained alien, if rather they ripened 
organically in the consciousness generated through proletarian 
struggle and had been firmly rooted forms in the places of 
employment, with whose function and mode of operation the 
mass would have familiarised itself  they could never have 
been so quickly erased and obliterated again from the image 
of the German Revolution. So the German proletarian let the 
only gain ....

9 THE PROLETARIAN REVOLUTION

The November Revolution of 1918 was the last off
shoot 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 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, 
demoralized 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 throw 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 bowdlerize 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!

