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

Part 2 of 3

4 PARLIAMENT AND PARTIES

The character, content and results of laws always correspond to 
the dominant economic interests of a given time, more specifically 
to the definitive economic interests of the ruling class. In the 
bourgeois epoch this class is the bourgeoisie. Parliament therefore 
had the task of revising old laws according to the needs of the 
bourgeoisie or abrogating them in favour of new laws suited to 
the problems of the time.

As early as the last period of the feudal epoch, a kind of parliament 
had already existed: the convocation of Estates. In the struggle with 
the estates first the nobility, later especially the world of finance 
and trade, to whose material aid he had to turn the prince had drawn 
or selected representatives of the different orders and occupations 
and convened them in a corporate body. But this body was only to 
express wishes, make suggestions, furnish opinions: this meeting 
of estates was not competent to enact and promulgate laws itself.
Eventually a second body partly joined the assembly of estates, 
coming more from the people and even sometimes elected, so that 
a distinction was drawn between a first and second chamber (Lords 
and Commons). But the competences of both chambers were still very 
limited by the power of the princes. Real parliaments with full 
legislative power, proceeding from open election, everywhere 
formed one of the achievements of the bourgeois revolution.

As we know, the bourgeois class stood for the principle of 
liberalism in its state-political ideology and the principle 
of democracy in its state-political organisation. It was, 
then, for freedom and equality. But only for freedom as it 
saw it, namely as far as it regarded the interests of its 
economy of profit, and for equality only insofar as it could 
be expressed in paragraphs on paper, not to be confirmed and 
realised through equality of social conditions. Not even in 
dreams did it occur to them to respect and practice freedom 
and equality in relation to the proletariat, still less did 
they let the principle of brotherhood carry any weight for it.

At the same time, bourgeois society is by no means a monolithic class. 
Rather it contains many layers, groups and professional categories, 
and therefore a lot of different economic interests. The wholesaler 
has different interests from the retailer, the houseowner from the 
tenant, the tradesman from the farmer, the buyer from the seller. 
But all the different groups and categories want to and ought to 
be taken into account in the legislature. Each has more prospect 
of consideration the larger the total of representatives of its 
interests in parliament. On this account every layer or group tried 
to collect as many votes as possible for its candidates in parliamentary 
elections. To make their agitation vigorous and lasting, they combined 
in election associations from which the parties emerged with firmer 
organisations and more definite programmes. Whatever these parties 
called themselves, whichever programmes they put forward, whatever 
high and holy virtues they stood up for, whatever fine phrases and 
slogans they used  their struggle, to the extent that it strove 
for political influence, was always concerned with quite definite 
economic interests. Thus the conservative party, which wanted the 
preservation (i.e. conservation) of the old traditional state form, 
distribution of power, and ideology, formed the rallying point for 
the feudal caste of big landowners. The big industrialists with an 
interest in the national state, who embraced the liberalism of the 
capitalist era, formed the party of the national liberals. The 
petty bourgeois, to whom freedom of opinion and equality before 
the law seemed achievements worth striving and being thankful 
for, were found in the democratic and radical parties.

At first the workers had no party of their own, for they had not 
yet grasped that they were a class on their own with their own 
interests and political aims. So they let themselves be taken 
in by the democrats and liberals, or even the conservatives, and 
formed the faithful herd of voters for the bourgeois parties. 
In proportion, however, as the workers' class consciousness was 
jolted awake and strengthened, they went over to forming their 
own parties and sending their own representatives to parliament, 
with the mission of securing for the working class as many and 
as large advantages as possible during the construction and 
completion of the bourgeois state. Thus, in the Erfurt Programme 
of the Social-Democratic Party, the many practical demands of 
the movement are laid down alongside the great, revolutionary 
final goal, reflecting its parliamentary life and orientation 
towards the immediate present. These demands had nothing to do
with socialism, but derived mainly from bourgeois programmes; 
only they were never carried out by bourgeois parties, in fact 
had never been seriously wanted. It is not to be denied that 
the representatives of social democracy did hard and sincere 
work in parliament. But their effectiveness and success remained 
limited. For parliament is an instrument of bourgeois politics, 
tied to the bourgeois method of making politics, and bourgeois 
too in its effect. In the last analysis, the real advantage of 
parliamentarism accrues to the bourgeoisie.

The bourgeois, i.e. parliamentary method of carrying on politics 
is closely related to the bourgeois method of carrying on economics. 
The method is: trade and negotiate. As the bourgeois trades and 
negotiates goods and values in his life and office, at market and 
fair, in bank and stock exchange, so in parliament too he trades 
and negotiated the legislative sanctions and legal means for the 
money and material values negotiated. In parliament the representatives 
of each party try to extract as much as possible from the legislature 
for their customers, their interest group, their 'firm'. They are also 
in constant communication with their producers' combines, 
employers' associations cartels, special interest associations or 
trade unions, receiving from them directions, information, rules 
of behaviour or mandates. They are the agents, the delegates, and 
the business is done through speeches, bargains, haggling, dealing, 
deception, voting manoeuvres, compromises. The main work of 
parliament, then, is not even done in the large parliamentary
negotiations, which are only a sort of spectacle, but in the 
committees which meet privately and without the mask of the 
conventional lie.

In the pre-revolutionary period, parliament also had its 
justification for the working class in that it was the 
means of securing for it such political and economic 
advantages as the power relations of any given moment 
allowed. But this justification was null and void the 
instant that the proletariat arose as a revolutionary 
class and advanced its claims to take over the entire 
state and economic power. Now there was no more negotiation, 
no putting up with greater or lesser advantages, no 
compromises  now it was all or nothing. The first 
revolutionary achievement of the proletariat would 
logically have had to be the abolition of parliament. 
But it could not fulfil this achievement because it 
was itself still organised in parties, and so bound up 
with organisations of a basically bourgeois character 
and consequently incapable of transcending bourgeois 
nature, i.e. bourgeois politics, economy, state order 
and ideology. A party needs parliamentarism, as 
parliament needs parties. One conditions the other, 
in mutual sustenance and support. The maintenance of 
the party means maintenance of parliament and with it 
the maintenance of bourgeois power.

After the model of the bourgeois state and its 
institutions, the party too is organised on authoritarian 
centralist principles. All movement in it goes in the form 
of commands from the top of the central committee down to 
the broad base of the membership. Below, the mass of the 
members; above, the ranks of party officials at local, 
regional, country and national level. The party secretaries 
are the NCOs, the MPs, the officers. They give the 
orders, issue the watchwords, make policy, are the 
higher dignitaries. The party apparatus, in the form 
of offices, newspapers, funds, mandates, gives them 
power to prescribe for the mass of members, which none 
of the latter can avoid. The officials of the central 
committee are, so to speak, the party Ministers; they 
issue decrees and instructions, interpret the decisions 
of party congresses and conferences, determine the use 
of money, distribute posts and offices according to 
their personal policy. Certainly the party conference 
is supposed to be the supreme court, but its composition, 
sitting, decision-taking and interpretation of its decisions 
are thoroughly in the hands of the highest holders of power 
in the party, and the zombie-like obedience typical of 
centralism takes care of the necessary echoes of subordination.

The concept of a party with a revolutionary character 
in the proletarian sense is nonsense. It can only have 
a revolutionary character in the bourgeois sense, and 
then only during the transition between feudalism and 
capitalism. In other words, in the interest of the 
bourgeoisie. During the transition between capitalism 
and socialism, it must fail, the more so in proportion 
to how revolutionary had been its expression in theory 
and phraseology. When the world war broke out in 1914, 
i.e. when the bourgeoisie of the whole world declared 
war on the proletariat of the whole world, the Social 
Democratic Party should have replied with the revolution 
of the proletariat of the whole world against the 
bourgeoisie of the whole world. But it failed, threw 
away the mask of world revolution, and followed bourgeois 
policy all along the line. The USP should have issued 
the call to revolution when the peace treaty of Versailles 
was concluded. Its bourgeois nature, however, forced it 
to a western instead of eastern orientation; it agitated 
for signing and submitting. Even the KPD, hyper-radical 
as its pose is, on every critical question is constrained 
by its bourgeois-centralist authoritarian character to 
serve the bourgeois politicians as soon as it comes to 
the crunch. It sits in parliament and carried on 
bourgeois politics; in the Ruhr in 1920 it negotiated 
with the bourgeois military; it fought on the side of 
Stinnes in the Ruhr action against France by means of 
passive resistance; it falls victim to the cult of 
bourgeois nationalism and fraternizes with fascists; 
it pushes itself into bourgeois governments in order 
to help further Russia's policy of capitalist 
construction from there. Everywhere  bourgeois 
politics carried out with typically bourgeois means. 
When the SPD says it does not want a revolution, there 
is a certain logic in this because it, as a party, can 
never carry out a proletarian revolution. But when the 
KPD says it wants the revolution, then it takes into 
its programme far more than it is capable of performing, 
whether in ignorance of its bourgeois character or out 
of fraudulent demagogy.

Every bourgeois organisation is basically an administrative 
organisation which requires a bureaucracy in order to 
function. So is the party, dependent of the administrative 
machine served by a paid professional leadership. The leaders 
are administrative officials and as such belong to a bourgeois 
category. Leaders, i.e. officials, are petty bourgeois, not 
proletarians.

Most party and trade union leaders were once workers, perhaps 
the most sound and revolutionary. But as they became 
officials, i.e. leaders, agents and makers of business, 
they learned to trade and negotiate, to handle documents 
and cash; they undertook mandates, began to operate within 
the great bourgeois organism with the aid of their 
organisational apparatus. To whom God gives office, 
he also gives understanding. Anyone who is leader in 
a bourgeois organisation, including parties and trade 
unions, does so not on the strength of his intellectual 
qualifications, his insight and excellence, his courage 
and character, but he is leader on the strength of the 
organisational apparatus, which is in his hands, at his 
disposal, endowing him with competence. He owes his 
leadership role to the authority arising from the position 
he occupies in the organisational mechanism. Thus the party 
secretary obtains his power from the office in which all 
the threads of the administration converge, from the paper 
work of which he alone has exact knowledge; the editor 
obtains his from the newspaper which he has in his 
intellectual power and uses as his instrument; the 
treasurer from the funds he manages; the MP from the 
mandate which gives him an inside view of the apparatus 
of government denied to ordinary mortals. An official 
of the central leadership may be much more limited and 
mediocre than an under-official, and yet his influence 
and power are greater, exactly as an NCO can be smarter 
than a Colonel or General without having the great 
authority of these officers. Ebert is certainly not 
the ablest mind in his party, yet it has installed him
in the highest office it has to give; he is certainly 
not the ablest mind in the government either but why 
does he occupy that position? Not on the basis of his 
personal qualifications but as the random representative 
of his party, a centralist, authoritarian organisation, 
in which he has climbed to the highest rung of the ladder. 
And why does the bourgeoisie put up with this Ebert? Because 
the bourgeois method of his politics has brought him to 
this position and because he conducts himself politically 
throughout as the advocate and counsel of these bourgeois 
politics. A bourgeois leader in this position would be 
neither better nor worse than he.

Here a word must be said about leadership in general.

There will no doubt always be people who in their knowledge, 
their experiences, their ability, their character are superior 
to others whom they will influence, advise, stimulate in 
struggle, carry away with them, lead. And so there will 
always be leaders in  this sense. A good thing too, for 
cleverness, integrity of character and ability should 
dominate, not stupidity, coarseness and weakness. Anyone 
who, in his rejection of the paid professional leadership 
that gets its authority from the organisational apparatus, 
goes so far as to repudiate all and every leadership 
without considering that superiority of mind and character 
is a quality of leadership not to be repudiated but worthy 
of welcome, oversteps the mark and becomes a demagogue. 
That goes too for those who inveigh and rage against the 
intellectuals in the movement, or as has occurred  even 
against knowledge. Naturally bourgeois knowledge is always 
suspect and usually questionable, bourgeois intellectuals 
are always an abomination in the workers' movement, which 
they misuse, lead astray, and often enough betray to the 
bourgeoisie. But the achievements of bourgeois learning can 
be re-cast for the working class and forged into weapons, 
exactly as the capitalist machines will one day perform 
useful services for the working class. And when intellectuals 
in the interest of the proletariat attend to the important 
process of the scientific assimilation and reworking of 
intellectual works, they deserve recognition and thanks for 
it, not abuse and inculpation. In conclusion, Marx, Bakunin, 
Rosa Luxemburg and others were intellectuals, whose scientific 
labours have rendered the most valuable services to the 
liberation struggle of the proletariat.

The paid professional leaders of the bourgeois organisations 
deserve mistrust and are to be rejected as agents of a 
bourgeois administrative apparatus. Their bourgeois activity 
generates in them bourgeois living habits and a bourgeois 
style of thinking and feeling. Inevitably they take on the 
typical petty-bourgeois leadership ideology of the party 
and trade union apparatchniks. The secure appointment, the 
heightened social position, the punctually paid salary, the 
well-heated office, the quickly learnt routine in the 
carrying out of formal administrative business, engender a 
mentality which makes the labour official in no way 
distinguishable from the petty post, tax, community or 
state official as much in his work as in his domestic 
milieu. The official is for correct management of business, 
painstaking orderliness, smooth discharging of obligations; 
he hates disturbances, friction, conflicts. Nothing is so 
repugnant to him as chaos, therefore he opposes any sort 
of disorder; he combats the initiative and independence 
of the masses; he fears the revolution.

But the revolution comes. Suddenly it is there, rearing up. 
Everything is convulsed, everything turned upside down. The 
workers are in the streets, pressing for action. They set 
themselves to casting down the bourgeoisie, destroying the 
state, taking possession of the economy. Then a monstrous 
fear seizes the officials. For God's sake, is order to be 
transformed into disorder, peace into unrest, the correct 
management of business into chaos? Not that! Thus 'Vorwarts' 
on 8 November 1918 warned of 'agitators with no conscience' 
who 'had fantasies of revolution'; thus the newsletter of 
the trade unions combatted the 'irresponsible adventurers' 
and 'putschists'; thus the parliamentary party sent 
Scheidemann even at the last minute into the Wilhelmite 
Cabinet, so that 'the greatest misfortune  the revolution 
might be avoided.' And during the revolution, wherever 
workers wanted to go into action they were eagerly countered 
every time by party and trade union officials with the 
call: 'Not too violent! No bloodshed! Be reasonable! Let 
us negotiate!'

As negotiations were resorted to, instead of grabbing the 
enemy and throwing him to the ground, the bourgeoisie was 
saved. Negotiation is after all their method of carrying 
on politics, and on their fighting terrain they are at 
their most secure. Wanting to carry on proletarian politics 
in the home of the bourgeoisie and with their methods means 
sitting down at the capitalists' table, eating and drinking 
with them, and betraying the interests of the proletariat. 
Treachery to the masses  from the SPD to the most extreme of 
the KPD  need not arise from base intention; it is simply the 
consequence of the bourgeois nature of every party and trade 
union organisation. The leaders of these parties and trade 
unions are in fact spiritually part of the bourgeois class, 
physically part of bourgeois society.

But bourgeois society is collapsing. It is more and 
more falling victim to ruin and decay. Its legislature 
is ridiculed and despised by the bourgeoisie itself. 
Laws on interest rates and currency are promulgated, 
and no-one gives a damn. Everything that not long ago 
was regarded as sacred church, morality, marriage, school,
public opinion  is exposed, soiled, made mock of, distorted 
into caricature. In such a time the party, too, cannot go on 
existing any longer; as a limb of bourgeois society it will 
go down with it. Only a quack would try to preserve the hand 
from death when the body lies dying. Hence the unending 
chain of party splits, disturbances, dissolutions  of the 
collapse of the party which no executive committee, no party 
congress, no Second or Third International, no Kautsky and 
no Lenin can now stop. The hour of the parties has now come, 
as the hour of bourgeois society has come. They will still 
hold out, as guilds and companies from the middle ages have 
held out until today: as outlived institutions with no power 
to form history. A party like the SPD, which gave up all the 
achievements of the November uprising without a struggle, 
in part even wilfully played into the hands of the 
counter-revolution, with which it is tied up and sits 
in governments, has lost every justification for
existence. And a party like the KPD, which is only a 
West European branch of Turkestan and could not maintain 
itself for a couple of weeks by its own strength without 
the rich subsidies from Moscow, has never had this 
justification for existence. The proletariat will transcend 
them both, untroubled by party discipline and the screeches 
of the apparatchniks, by resolutions and congress decisions. 
In the hour of downfall it will rescue itself from asphyxiation 
by strangling bourgeois power of organisation.

It will take its cause into its own hands.

5 THE TRADE UNIONS

What has been said about parties, party leaders and party tactics goes 
even more for the trade unions. In fact, they show us the typical petty-bourgeois tactics of compromise between capital and labour. The 
trade unions have never proclaimed the elimination of capitalism to 
be their goal and mission. Never have they engaged themselves in any 
practical way to this end. From the beginning the trade unions 
reckoned with the existence of capitalism as a given fact. Accepting 
this fact, they have engaged themselves within the framework of the 
capitalist economic order to fight for better wages and working 
conditions for the proletariat. Not, then, for abolition of the 
wage system, not for a fundamental rejection of the capitalist 
economy, not a struggle against the whole. That, said the trade 
unions with bourgeois logic, is the business of the political party. 
Therefore they declared themselves non-political; made a big thing 
of their neutrality, and rejected any party obligation. Their role 
was that of compromise, mediation, curing symptoms, prescribing 
palliatives. From the start their whole basic attitude was not 
only non-political but also non-revolutionary. They were reformist,
opportunist, compromising auxiliary organs between bourgeoisie and 
proletariat.

The trade unions grew out of the journeyman's associations of the 
old artisan guilds. They were filled with the spirit of the modern 
workers' movement when capitalism, through the great crisis of the 
1860s, impressed with particular harshness on the consciousness of 
the proletariat the pitfalls and horrors of its system. Under this 
economic pressure, which greatly swelled the workers' movement 
throughout Europe, the first trade union congress was convened by 
Schweitzer and Fritzche in 1868. Fritzche characterised very aptly 
the trade union organisations and their duties when he explained: 'Strikes 
are not a means of changing the foundations of the capitalist mode 
of production; they are, however, a means of furthering the class 
consciousness of the workers, breaking through police domination 
and removing from today's society individual social abuses of an 
oppressive nature, like excessively long working time and Sunday 
work.' In the following period the activity of the trade unions 
consisted in agitating the proletariat, moving it towards co-ordination, 
winning it to the idea of class struggle, protecting it against the 
worst rigours of capitalist exploitation, and constantly grabbing 
momentary advantages whenever possible from the ever-changing 
situation between labour and capital. The entrepreneur, formerly 
all-powerful master of the house, soon had the strongly centralised 
power of the organisation against him. And the working class, 
heightened in consciousness of its value in the process of production 
by co-ordinated action, and schooled from strike to strike and 
conflict to conflict in the development of its fighting energy, 
soon constituted a factor with which capitalism had seriously to 
reckon in all calculations of profit.

We can never seriously think of denying the great value the trade 
unions have had for the proletariat as a means of struggle in the 
defence of workers' interests; no-one will dare to belittle or 
dispute the extraordinary services the trade unions have performed 
in advocating these interests. But all this is today, unfortunately, 
testimonials and claims to fame which belong to the past.

In the struggle between capital and labour the entrepreneurs, too, 
very soon recognised the value of organisation. To be able to 
confront the workers' combinations, they combined themselves into 
powerful associations, at first by trade categories or branches 
of industry. And as they had greater financial resources, had the 
protection and favour of public officials on their side, knew how 
to influence legislation and jurisdiction, and could apply the most 
rigorous methods of terror, harassment and contempt to any boss 
who did not grasp their class interests quickly enough and so did 
not take the required interest in the association  their organisations 
were soon stronger, more effective and more powerful than those of 
the workers. The trade unions saw themselves pushed from the offensive 
to the defensive by the employers' associations. Struggles became 
more violent and bitter, were successful increasingly seldom, usually 
resulted in exhausting the central funds, and so needed more and 
more lengthy pauses for rest and recovery between the struggles. 
Finally it was recognised that the questionable half-successes were 
usually bought too dear, that the compromises (at best) resulting 
from the rounds of struggle could be won more cheaply if a readiness 
to negotiate was shown right from the start. So they approached 
further struggles with reduced demands, with readiness to negotiate, 
with the intention of making a deal. Instead of struggling openly, 
each side tried to out-manoeuvre the other. Offering to negotiate 
was no longer considered as a fault or as weakness. They were 
adjusted to compromise. As a rule, agreement not victory formed 
the conclusion of wage movements or conflicts over hours. Thus, 
in time, an alteration in tactics, in the method of struggle, 
came about all along the line.

The policy of signing labour contracts arose. On the basis of 
agreements and conciliation, contracts were signed in which 
the conditions of work were regulated in paragraphs. The contracts 
were binding for the whole organisation of both sides in the branch 
of industry for a longer or shorter period of time. In the form of 
a compromise, they represented a kind of truce until further notice. 
The boss gained significant advantages through the conclusion of 
labour contracts: he could make more accurate business calculations 
for the duration of the contract; he could sue in a bourgeois court 
for compliance with the terms of contract; could reckon with a 
certain stability in his management and rate of profit; and, above 
all, he could concentrate his strength in greater peace for years 
in order to put that much more pressure on the work-force when 
the next contract was being concluded. In contrast to the boss, 
the worker only got disadvantages from the labour contract: bound 
by the contract for long periods, he was unable to make the most 
of favourable opportunities as they arose to improve his position; 
his class consciousness and will to struggle were lulled with time, 
and he was conditioned to inactivity; so fell more and more into 
the atmosphere, fatal for the class struggle, of 'harmony between 
capital and labour' and 'community of interests between work-giver 
and work-taker'; thus succumbed completely to petty-bourgeois 
hopeless opportunism, which lives from hand to mouth and makes 
even the most practical reforms and 'positive achievements' more 
dubious and worthless the longer it goes on; and in the end becomes 
entirely the duped victim of a narrow-minded, circumscribed, and 
often unscrupulous clique of officials and leaders whose main 
interest has long since been not the good of the worker but the 
securing of their administrative positions. In fact, as the policy 
of labour contracts became predominant, the worker's participation 
in the life of the unions grew more dormant; meetings were sparsely 
attended, participation in elections fell off sharply, dues had to 
be collected almost by force, terror in the factories got the upper
hand along with the bureaucratisation of the administrative 
apparatus both means to maintain the existence of the organisation, 
which had become an end in itself. The introduction of national 
contracts for large categories of workers effected an even greater 
increase in centralism and the power of officials and at the same 
time, too, an ever-growing split between leaders and masses, 
greater alienation of the organisation from its original character 
as a means of struggle, and from the objective of struggle, and 
deeper degradation of the workers into insignificant, will-less 
puppets, only paying dues and carrying out instructions, in the 
hands of the association's bureaucracy.

Another factor was added. In order to chain the worker to the 
organisation through all his interests, which derive from his 
permanent situation next to the bread line, the unions developed 
an extensive and complicated system of insurance, carrying out a 
sort of practical social policy. Apparently for the benefit of 
the worker, certainly as his expense. There is insurance against 
sickness, death, unemployment, moving and travelling to a new job; 
a whole social welfare apparatus with little plasters and powders 
and all sorts of palliatives for proletarian misery. The worker 
collects insurance policy after insurance policy, pays premium 
after premium, develops an interest in the liquidity of the union 
treasury, and waits for the opportunity to call on its help. 
Instead of thinking about the great struggle, he gets lost in 
calculations over pennies. He is strengthened and maintained 
in his petty-bourgeois way of thinking; he gets bogged down, to 
the disadvantage of his proletarian emancipation, in the 
constraints and narrow-mindedness of the petty-bourgeois 
concept of life, which cannot give anything without asking 
what is to be had in exchange; gets used to seeing the value 
of organisation in the random and paltry material advantages 
of the moment, instead of holding his sights on the great goal, 
freely willed and selflessly fought for  the liberation of his 
class. In this way the class struggle character of the organisation 
is systematically undermined and the class consciousness of the 
proletarian irretrievably destroyed or devastated. Into the 
bargain the poor devil carries on his back the costs of a system 
of social benefits and welfare which basically the state should 
pay out of the wealth of society as a whole, lightening the 
burden on the financially weak.

Thus the trade unions have become, over time, organs of petty-bourgeois 
social quackery, whose value to the worker has shrunk to nothing 
anyway, since under pressure of the devaluation of money and the 
economic misery the solvency of all welfare funds has sunk to nil. 
But more than this: in logical consistency with their tendency 
toward community of interests between capital and labour, the 
trade unions have developed into auxiliary organs of bourgeois-capitalist 
economic interests, and so of exploitation and profitmaking. They have
become the most loyal shield-bearers of the bourgeois class, the most 
reliable protective troops for the capitalist money-bag. At the 
outbreak of war they came out in favour of the duty of national 
defence without a moment's hesitation, made bourgeois war policy 
their own, recognised the civil peace, subscribed to the war loan, 
preached the imperative of endurance, helped to enact the law on 
auxiliary service, and frenziedly suppressed every movement of 
sabotage or revolt in the weapons and munitions industry. At the 
outbreak of the November Revolution they protected the Kaiser's 
government, flung themselves against the revolutionary masses, 
allied themselves with big business in a working association, 
let themselves be bribed with offices, honours and incomes in 
industry and in the state, clubbed down all strikes and uprisings 
in unity with police and military, and thus shamelessly and 
brutally betrayed the vital interests of the proletariat to its 
sworn enemy. In the building up of capitalism after the war, in 
the re-enslavement of the masses through capital organised in 
trusts and connected internationally, in the Stinnes-isation 
of the German economy, in the struggles over Upper Silesia and 
the Ruhr, in the retrenchment of the 8-hour day, the demobilization 
orders, the forced economy, in the elimination of the workers' 
councils, the factory committees, control commissions, etc., 
during the terror against syndicalists, unionists, anarchists  
always and everywhere they stood ready to help at the side of 
capital, as a praetorian guard ready for the lowest and most 
shameful deed. Always against the interests of the proletariat, 
against the progress of the revolution, the liberation and 
autonomy of the working class, they used and use the far greater 
part of all accretions to funds to secure and materially provide 
for their existence as boss-men and parasites, which  as they 
well know stands and falls with the existence of the trade union 
organisation that they have falsified from a weapon for the 
workers into a weapon against the workers.

Wanting to revolutionise these trade unions is a ludicrous 
undertaking, because quite impossible to carry out and 
hopeless. This 'revolutionising' amounts to either a simple 
change of personnel, changing absolutely nothing in the 
system but maximally extending the centre of infection, 
or else it must consist in removing from the trade unions 
centralism, contract-signing, the professional leadership, 
the insurance funds, the spirit of compromise. . . .What is 
left then? A hollow nothing!

As long as the trade unions still exist, they will remain what 
they are: the most genuine and efficient of all the White 
Guards of the bosses, to whom German capital in particular 
owes a greater debt of gratitude than to all the guards of 
Noske and Hitler put together.

Such generally harmful, counter-revolutionary institutions, 
inimical to the workers, can only be destroyed, annihilated, 
exterminated.

6 THE LAST PHASE OF EUROPEAN CAPITALISM

The German working class, caught in the chains of its counter-revolutionary 
organisations and blinded by the phraseology of the petty-bourgeois way 
of thinking, has once again rescued the bourgeoisie of its country in 
situations where its existence was at stake; it has brought it to safety 
on its strong shoulders, out of the dangers of the World War and the 
November Revolution.

Then the bourgeoisie installed itself in the saddle again, to ride more 
boldly and brutally than ever over the bodies and heads of its rescuers. 
Although laden with unheard-of wealth, which it looted meanwhile, it is 
still gripped by anxiety and terror: it has looked death in the face and 
stood close to the abyss of its destruction.

Thus the German bourgeoisie in 1924 is no longer the one it was in 1914. 
For even German capitalism has become another. It has left the national 
phase of its development and has entered the international phase. This 
change and progression is connected with the outcome of the World War.

If the World War originated in the drive to expansion of all the 
capitalist states and had the aim of placing the whole world under 
the dictatorship of one of these capitalist states or combination 
of states, so the result of the World War was, for the power of 
German capital, the miscarrying of this plan and the painful price 
of renouncing for the future its independent existence and letting 
itself be incorporated into the association of interests of the 
conquering combine.

The forces of German capital are represented in the first place
by heavy industry. Germany is rich in coal but lacking in ore. On 
this account, the daily morning and evening prayer of the Stinnes 
and their like was already, decades ago: Dear God, give us a victorious 
war with France so that we can gain possession of the rich ore deposits 
of Briey and Longuy. As, on the other side, the French capitalists 
implore their Lord God, in view of the scarcity of coal in their 
country, for the rich coal treasures of the Ruhr region. Ore and 
coal, then, also acted in the determining role in the World War, 
especially in the struggle between France and Germany after world 
domination had showed itself to both as an illusion.

The treaty of Versailles brought the French capitalists the Saar 
region; but they remained discontented, for they claim the Ruhr 
region as before. The mining industry, massively strengthened in 
the ComitQ de Forges, asserts that it cannot fulfil its economic 
task without the Ruhr, especially as many of its plants and 
factories in Northern France had been destroyed by the German 
warfare and rendered useless for years to come. Since 1918 it 
has pressed the French government into the military invasion 
of the Ruhr and finally achieved its occupation. German heavy 
industry was desperate. Indeed their slogan also ran: Ore and 
coal belong together. But they wanted the fulfilling of the 
slogan in their favour. Now that it was happening in favour 
of the Comit de Forges, they summoned the German government, 
the German nation, the whole seething spirit of the German 
people to resistance. It was useless; German heavy industry 
had to surrender to French capital through treaties, for coal 
will gravitate to iron, and the greater right is with the 
stronger.

But still another economic power stands in the wings of the world 
political theatre: petroleum.

The victory of the Entente in the World War was in the last analysis 
a victory of the superior war technology of America. For the first 
time oil triumphed over coal for the heating of the submarines and 
ships, of the aircraft, motors, tanks, etc., was accomplished with 
oil and by a technology which had undergone especially high 
development in America and opposite which the German technology 
was backward. After the ending of the World War, the most pressing 
imperative for America, if it did not want to lose again the 
hegemony won over world economic domains, was to bring the oil 
production of the world into its hands in order to thus 
monopolise the guarantees of its ascendancy.

The richest oil field lie in Asia Minor (Mossul) and belong to 
the zone of the English protectorate; the way to them leads over 
Europe. American oil capital began very quickly to secure this 
path for itself. Starting from France it pressed on by courtesy 
of the gesture of the French statesman or the bayonet of the 
French military towards Czechoslovakia, Poland, Yugoslavia, 
Bulgaria, as far as Turkey. The war between Greece and Turkey, 
the revolution in Bulgaria, the Lausanne talks, the Balkan 
incidents, the military convention between France and the little 
Entente, etc., are more or less connected to the perpetual 
striving of American oil capital to procure for itself a large 
base of operations for the confrontation which must follow 
sooner or later in the interest of world monopoly over oil 
with the competitors, England and Russia. Just as the oil 
trust has been at work for decades in Mexico to obtain 
dominion over the Mexican oil fields through a chain of 
political shocks, putsches, revolts and revolutions, so 
it also leaves no stone unturned in Europe in order to take 
possession of the approaches to the oil districts of Asia 
Minor, against every competitor and every opposition.

Germany represented the only gap in the path. As the endeavours 
to detach South Germany from North Germany and bring it under 
French overlordship did not lead to the goal  in spite of the 
enormous sums made ready for the financing of the Bavarian 
fascist movement and anti-state conspiracy and because the 
interests of New York clashed here with the interests of Rome, 
oil capital applied other tactics. Supported by the depreciation 
of money consequent on inflation and certain stock-exchange 
manoeuvres, it bought up one economic combine after another 
and thus gradually brought the entire power of German capital 
under its control. When the Stinnes combine, for which the 
proffered quota of shared profits was not high enough, offered 
resistance and opposed its conversion into the mere appendage 
of an international community of exploitative interests, force 
was resorted to. The military occupation of the Ruhr meant the 
fulfilment of long-cherished wishes of oil capital just as much 
as it was a deed after the heart of the French mining 
industrialists.

Meanwhile the German capitalist class has recognised that it too 
was able to benefit considerably from its dependence on Entente 
and world capital. Certainly it was pledged by treaties to high 
payments which would severely curtail its rate of profit, but in 
return the German proletariat was handed over to it, completely 
defenceless, for unrestrained exploitation. It enjoys the advantages 
of tax concessions under the favour of a plutocratic fiscal 
legislature; has thrown away all the burdens and fetters which, 
however insignificant they might be, had been put into practice 
in recent years to lessen social conflict in the interest of the 
proletariat; above all it is again in full possession of the 
reactionary power, as in its best times under the Wilhelmite 
regime. It has secured its position with the 10-hour day, 
starvation wages, the gold standard swindle, martial law, 
and military dictatorship.

Germany has become a colony of the Entente. The German workers are 
the enslaved natives. The German entrepreneurs represent the 
privileged caste of slave-owners, who take so great a part in 
the extorted and ill-gotten gains which they have to pay over 
to foreign high finance that a sumptuous life-style is possible 
for them. As the economic, so also the political power has gone 
over completely into the hands of big capital. The 'shop stewards'
and delegates of the leading industry sit in the government, manage 
high public office or hold in their hands the strings on which the 
current party and government puppets hang. When in November 1923 the 
establishing of a Directory was planned, Herr Minoux, the right hand
of Stinnes, was considered quite generally and as a matter of course 
(as already mentioned) as the coming man. Whether in the end Minoux 
or Stresemann or Schlacht, a representative of big capital, of the 
industrial and banking world, will always stand at the head and 
have the reins of government in his hands. The parliament is 
barred from co-determination by Enabling Acts or is faced with 
accomplished facts; its only remaining value is as a decorative 
exhibition which is necessary to the appearance of a republic. 
The preponderance of all the big decisions lies not with it, not 
with the government, but with the banks and employers' combines, 
the state economic council, the small circle of influential pillars 
of the economy. It becomes increasingly obvious in society as a 
whole that as the economic factor stands in the foreground, the 
political moves more and more into the second line.

This phenomenon can perhaps be designated as an Americanisation 
of politics, because it first arose in the country of the greatest 
lords of capital and is typical of the way in which the trust 
magnates and bank potentates are accustomed to making their politics. 
The undisguised domination of the money-bag, veiled with no romance, 
excused by no ethic, sanctioned by no diplomacy, justified by no 
parliamentary phrase the whole direct, brutal power-politics of 
the economic dictators, the Stinnes-isation of politics that is 
the characteristic sign of the last phase into which German 
capitalism of the post-war period has been hurled, the phase of
inter-nationality.


