Witness to the German Revolution

by Victor Serge

  Between July 20 and 26, the cost of living rose by 50 percent. From July 25 to 27, in two days, the price of foodstuffs leaped by…107.7 percent (butter, from 70,000 a pound to 180,000; margarine from 50,000 to 80,000; pork from 60,000 to 120,000, etc.). The Reich statistical department is deliberately falsifying the cost of living index. On July 23, it registered an increase of 36.1 percent for the previous week. Die Rote Fahne checked and found it was 50 percent. Housewives check even better.

  And what they find is worse… The shopkeepers simply refuse to sell to them. They are waiting for next week’s increase so as to make better profits or to run less risk. So potatoes—the basic food of the German worker—butter, margarine and milk have no longer been on sale in Berlin for the last four days. The days before revolution are always the same! The monopolist is one of the last products of an exploiting society in disintegration.

  But all our figures mean nothing unless they are compared to wages. I know a well paid skilled worker who last March was earning around 500,000 marks; at the time the dollar was “stabilized” at 20,000, which gave him around 25 dollars a month. In July his wage rose to around four million, or, if we accept an average rate per dollar of 300,000, between 13 and 14 dollars (in other words a net reduction of 11 out of 25). At the end of 1922, he tells me, he was earning 3,000 marks a month, which was worth over thirty dollars. In two years his real wages have fallen by half. He’s a social democrat, but he’s started reading Die Rote Fahne. When he sees there that wages are rising in Russia, he frowns and looks thoughtful.

  The Bourgeoisie are afraid

  The Kreuz-Zeitung, the very moderate paper of the Catholic Center Party, recently wrote that “we see in the population the same mood as just before November 9, 1918,” that is, at the time of the fall of the Kaiser. Agreed, but what could fall today? Herr Cuno? That wouldn’t be much. Why are the bourgeoisie so worried?

  In fact it is quite likely that Herr Cuno will fall, but that isn’t what matters. His brilliant operation to stabilize the mark cost the Reichsbank some 200 million gold marks; it brought fabulous wealth to certain financial sharks and swindlers. On July 25, shares in the Siemens-Rheinelbe-Schuckert Union (Stinnes) rose by 60 percent in a single day. Some bonds reached two million percent of their face value. But they can’t go on fleecing the poor like this indefinitely. The mayor of Berlin went, on the instructions of his municipal council, to make a bitter protest to Herr Cuno. “There is a storm cloud hanging over the capital. If the events in Frankfurt and Wroclaw were to be repeated in Berlin, they would take on the shape of a revolution. The fate of our country is being played out in our streets.”79 These points were repeated at the municipal council on June 27. The councillors nonetheless decided to increase charges for water, gas and electricity…

  All this explains the alarm caused by the announcement of anti-fascist demonstrations on July 29. Herr Severing banned them. The KPD insisted they would go ahead, thus revealing the state of disarray of the enemy, and obliging minister Severing to show his hand. It worked. We are in possession of a secret circular addressed by the minister to all police units, both in the criminal police and the Reichswehr. They are instructed to be prepared for all eventualities, and not to permit any unlawful assemblies. They must act energetically, resort to armed force and, if the police cannot handle the situation, the troops must be sent into action. In other words, the socialist minister for plutocrats, troublemakers, monopolists and speculators, realizing the enormous danger, and fearing the great popular demonstration which would have united on the streets the starving and the enemies of reaction—in short, the whole poverty-stricken population—took the desperate decision that he would unite the armed forces and the fascist gangs in order to drown the whole movement in blood immediately. The party has thwarted this provocation. It can congratulate itself on having made the rulers of the republic tremble. And it could not call off its demonstration; the open-air march in Potsdam has been replaced by 23 mass meetings in Berlin and the suburbs.

  The SPD—to which Severing belongs—is profoundly embarrassed. It has clumsily absolved itself of all responsibility for the Frankfurt events. Contrary to its normal practice, it has kept almost complete silence with regard to the preparations for the anti-fascist demonstration. Breitscheid has spoken up to demand an end to benevolent neutrality towards Herr Cuno and the adoption by the party of a policy of outright opposition. For the moment one thing stands out a mile, even to the most retarded social democrats: the KPD is the only party to speak out against everything that has gone wrong, to call everything by its proper name, and to show the solutions: seizure of real values, workers’ government,80 rapprochement with Soviet Russia.

  Herr Cuno leaves…

  Herr Cuno has not yet resigned at the time of writing, but he has got himself into such an impossible position that people are talking of nothing but his departure. Who will replace him? Today, Monday, July 30, the food shortage has got worse. Many stalls in the open-air and covered markets are closed: there is no food. A bourgeois newspaper Neue Berliner Zeitung, writes, “We are facing a catastrophe much more serious than a cabinet crisis.” Herr Cuno, the skillful businessman from the Hamburg-America Line, has squandered a large amount of public funds, brought the Reich close to bankruptcy, destroyed the mark he aimed to “stabilize,” left the country facing famine and massively discredited the bourgeois government. A wonderful achievement for democratic institutions! This minister—”responsible to parliament,” as they all are—having created this pretty mess, makes his bow and departs. But who will replace him? Nobody wants to pick up the terrible inheritance. People are talking of a “Great Coalition,” to include right wing bourgeois elements, Herr Stresemann, and the SPD. The reality is that in order to carry on imposing on the German people a policy of ruin and starvation—to the advantage of a few plutocrats and a rabble of speculators—they absolutely must have the cooperation of the SPD. And one way or another that cooperation is guaranteed. We shall assuredly soon see the official social democracy attempt one last supreme effort to save this wretched bourgeois state as it crumbles…

  Comparing Germany and Russia

  There are some curious controversies taking place here and there between Communists and nationalists, fascists or National Socialists. The proletarianized intellectuals, young people from the middle classes who have fallen into poverty and who are haunted by nostalgia for the great prosperous Germany of the Hohenzollern,81 are not completely blind and deaf. They remember that, together with the social democrat Noske, they have put down three attempts at revolution. 82 And what is the result after five years of order, democratic perhaps, but certainly bourgeois? The Ruhr, hunger, bankruptcy, and the fear of worse to come. Germany is no longer a great power, nor even a small one: a French soldier can trample it underfoot. It is easy for our Communist comrades to show their opponents the example of red Russia, which has indisputably become one of the great powers of Europe and Asia, holding the diplomats of all bourgeois nations at bay, strengthening its Red Army, developing air transport, organizing trade fairs and great exhibitions, reorganizing its transport services, preparing, less than two years after the famine, to export corn, creating new banknotes (chervonets)83 which are perfectly stable and are quoted on the exchanges at London, Stockholm and Copenhagen like the pound sterling, increasing workers’ wages and paying them—as has just been done in various Petrograd factories—in chervonets! The evidence is powerful. It is true that Russia has suffered enormously. But what tribulations are still ahead for Germany? It is a proven fact that peoples who have been slaughtered, ruined and thrown into chaos by imperialist wars can be saved only by revolution. It is a proven fact that from now on the bourgeoisie is unworthy to rule nations. The Russian bourgeoisie allied itself with foreign intervention against the revolutionary nation, looted public funds (Kolchak), sold off the fleet (Wrangel, Merkulov), mortgaged the national wealth and ended up by collapsing ignominiously. While Germany has been in a state of collapse, th
e German bourgeoisie has invested funds abroad, speculated, sold to the French the secrets of its chemical industry (Badische Anilin), plotted in Bavaria with Poincaré’s agents and squandered the Reich’s gold reserves… Since the world war the internationalist proletariat is the only true representative of the vital interests of the nations.

  In early August the Cuno government was clearly on its last legs. It was unable to deal with the inflation which was reaching catastrophic proportions and there was growing working-class discontent. The SPD leadership, however, was more interested in a return to governmental office than sticking the knife in.

  Phynances,84 the gold loan, etc.

  Correspondance internationale, August 15, 1923

  Morally bankrupt, resigned, driven out—take your pick how you describe it—the Cuno cabinet is still in power because nobody has been found to take over. It’s not a happy inheritance to pick up—and bourgeois democracies have a horror of taking responsibilities. So, while it is in process of being buried, the Cuno government is concerning itself with phynances. Through what alchemy can it transmute into gold the worthless paper money of the Reichsbank? It has just invented a gold loan, payable in paper money on the basis of the value of the dollar on the day of the subscription, guaranteed with all the assets of the nation: banks, industry, commerce, agriculture, in short everything which can be taxed. To pay the interest, the government will have the right to deduct 500 million in gold marks from income tax, which will be increased if necessary. The notes will be for one, two, five, ten dollars, etc. The loan will be exempted from the taxes on stock exchange dealings and on inheritances, and therefore will be a profitable investment: it will pay 6 percent. The small denomination notes will have to be reimbursed in 1935 at 50 percent above their face value. Until then, they will pay nothing. The aim of the loan is to provide the German public with a stable German value85: an official admission that the mark is dead. But…1935 is a long way away! I should be very surprised if the possessing classes in this country, who are very skillful at thwarting all measures of taxation—which in fact are only instituted for demagogic reasons—will subscribe enthusiastically. They will certainly find it less risky to continue purchasing real dollars…

  As for the Reichsbank, it has just decided (August 3) to give credit only on stable values. Don’t ask it for credit on the basis of the marks which it itself issues! At the same time it has raised the bank rate to 30 per cent, a completely derisory measure. In wholesale trade, transactions are now only carried out in foreign currency. The mark is used only for paying wages; it is the counterfeit coin which every Saturday is slipped into the workers’ hands, and which, for them alone, is the obligatory currency.

  But let’s come back to the bizarre “finances” of the Reich. All the measures taken by the Cuno government against speculation have had the sole consequence of scandalously encouraging speculation. The regulation of currency dealing—which in fact cannot be verified by a bourgeois government that is both weak and indulgent towards the big banks of which it is in fact the tool—led on July 19 to a complete and irreversible fiasco. The Reichsbank, claiming that it was checking the receipt of foreign currency by German exporters, took on the job of providing currency for importers. That day, on the Berlin stock exchange, they asked it for 20 billion marks in foreign currency. The Reichsbank could provide only 14 percent of that sum. The demand was massively increased by those true patriots which we know all businessmen to be. There was a huge conflict between the banks and the Reichsbank. The regulation collapsed.

  The establishment of an official exchange rate for the dollar on the Berlin stock exchange had a no less colorful outcome. At Gdansk,86 Cologne and London, a dollar bought in marks was worth noticeably more than in Berlin. As a result, businessmen bought dollars cheap in Germany and exported them to…Gdansk, thus making fortunes at the expense of the state and of the holders of small sums in foreign currency. The good bourgeois always shows such patriotism, such a feeling for the national interest!

  A bourgeois government, that is, one that represents the interests of high finance, of the large employers, of large landed property, in other words of those who, amid the shipwreck of the nation, are still enriching themselves and who think, with the blindness of doomed classes, that they can go on enriching themselves indefinitely from the collective poverty—those who, belonging to international capitalist organizations, actually believe they can grab a large part of their wealth even from the hands of a revolution, and who are, after all, those directly responsible for the catastrophe which has been caused exclusively by their selfishness as a rich class determined to yield nothing of its property (sooner let the universe perish!): such a government is obviously condemned, in a crisis of this sort, to the most ludicrous impotence…

  The evaporation of wages continues

  From July 23 to 30, the cost of living officially rose by 31.7 percent. From July 27 to August 2 beef went from 58 and 109,000 marks a pound to 130 and 180,000; an egg went from 6 and 17,000 marks to 12 and 25,00087; a 1,200 gram loaf on the free market from 31,000 to 58,000, 100 bricks of compressed coal which, on July 27, were worth 60,000 had risen to 98,000 on August 2 and to 218,000 on August 4. As for wages…

  In the social democratic union bureaucracy they are talking, they are demanding, or rather preparing to demand, wages calculated in stable values. At present wages are revised—not without difficulties, struggles, hard work and repeated failures—every week or every ten days or every fortnight, according to what trade one works in. And automatically they go down every day… From July 27 to August 2, the weekly cost of living index for a working-class family with two young children rose by 93 percent and reached the minimum figure of 5,158,912 marks, just about the monthly wage of many households.

  To make it worse, wages are not always paid at all! In Munich, for the last ten days, there has been a shortage of paper money, and the banks are not issuing more than 500,000 marks (2.5 French francs at pre-war value) per person, per week. Workers get vouchers which will be cashed later—if it’s even three days later they will already have lost half their value. There’s a similar crisis in Cologne. In Mecklenburg, metalworkers are having to wait for their wages…

  There are disturbances at Oberhausen, in the Ruhr: the police opened fire on workers who took to the streets to shout that they were without bread: two killed, eight wounded. Disturbances at Wiesbaden. Disturbances at Munich. Disturbances at Dresden. Disturbances in the Erzgebirge. The basic question is as follows: for how long can the lead bullets of bourgeois order continue to take the place of bread in a country of 60 million inhabitants, of whom nine-tenths are in a situation of wretchedness?

  The last defender of the German bourgeoisie

  At last social democracy has noticed that things are not going very well. The big bourgeois parties have dropped Herr Cuno in as far as it’s possible for them to drop him; the SPD hesitates, deliberates and…gives him a vote of confidence. On July 30 thirty oppositional SPD deputies met at Weimar; Kurt Rosenfeld, the former member of the USPD,88 and Paul Levi, the former Communist, are airing their views. Opposition to the Cuno government (it’s about time…), rejection of a great ministerial coalition from Stinnes to the SPD, in preparation (you don’t say!) for collaboration with the Communists…(nothing more, nothing less). It is touching to see Paul Levi wanting collaboration with the Communist Party that he betrayed, abandoned, tried to infiltrate, abused and insulted 89… So this abominable Muscovite party has some good features in his eyes, when the hungry, despairing proletariat is beginning to abandon the likes of Paul Levi and Rosenfeld just as it is abandoning the likes of Stampfer and Wels.90 All these former USPD members are still above all the party of hesitation and empty protest; their present attitude simply shows that they are aware of the growing disaffection of the masses with regard to social democracy. If they really had any revolutionary dynamism there could only be one consequence: an immediate break with the wretched reformist SPD, the party that is gui
lty of every betrayal and despicable action, the party which tomorrow will try again, with Stinnes, to save German capitalism. On August 4, according to reports, the SPD fraction in the Reichstag decided by 120 votes to 60 to effectively maintain its previous attitude and prepare a great cabinet coalition, for which citizen Stampfer in Vorwärts has taken on the job of enthusiastic advocate… The social democrats in Hesse have already come out clearly for ministerial collaboration. In Germany the reformist SPD is the last, most tenacious, and most influential of defenders of bourgeois society in total bankruptcy…

  In early August strikes—including one by printers producing the new banknotes made necessary by the galloping inflation—spread into a general strike. On August 12 Cuno resigned and the following day Gustav Stresemann announced the formation of a “Great Coalition,” representing everything except the KPD and the extreme right. His government contained four SPD ministers, three from the Center Party, and two each from the DDP and the DVP.

  The General Strike in Germany

  The Great Coalition: Stinnes-Stresemann-Noske-Hilferding Correspondance internationale, August 18, 1923