Witness to the German Revolution

by Victor Serge

  By unemployment and by repression

  The attack on the starvation wages of the German worker must in fact be pursued on the economic and political levels at the same time.

  A large number of firms are closing down, either because they really are forced to by the crisis—which must be the case with small firms—or because it is in their interest to suspend work until the end of the war in the Ruhr and to subdue workers by unemployment. Nearly a thousand firms in Saxony are in process of being wound up. In Hamburg, the stopping of work in numerous factories is going to make over a 100,000 wage earners unemployed; the management of the textile factories in Neumünster has stopped production following a disagreement about wages. In Dresden, there are 17,000 jobless. In Bavaria and Silesia, the publishers of periodicals have ceased publication. German book publishers and booksellers say they are unable to publish any new books this year. In Berlin, only 30 tram routes will continue running, and the majority of the staff have been sacked. Workers are sacked and laid off, firms are wound up, closed down… For his part, the exploiter is quite sure of not going short of bread and butter; as for the workers, they must make do as best they can. That will teach them to be more conciliatory.

  There is an obvious parallel here with the Russian Revolution. Our Russian comrades know that the sabotage of production by the employers (the closing of numerous firms, the lockouts disguised under the appearance of winding up, etc.) often, in 1917, obliged Russian workers to take over factories and workshops. On more than one occasion factory committees decided to resume work in firms where the bosses, who had not been expropriated, had deliberately stopped production. The German bosses should watch out: they think that by increasing unemployment, they are preparing a reserve army of labor which will be degraded and defeated: but it might, on the contrary, provide an army for the revolution.

  Arrests will achieve nothing. Arresting the Russian Bolsheviks in July 1917102 did not prevent October. In parallel to the verbal offensive of ministers and bourgeois hack writers, and to the very clear economic offensive being waged by the employers, it is perhaps hoped that the police offensive against the factory committees and the KPD will stave off the danger. During the recent general strike, there were more than 200 random arrests in Berlin. The following day, more than 10,000 workers were sacked by way of reprisal, and the SPD minister Severing dissolved the Berlin organization of Betriebsräte (factory councils). The banned organization transferred to Jena (Thuringia), that is to say, it went underground. Searches and arrests followed. Almost the whole of the Berlin committee of the KPD is behind bars, as are almost all the Communist municipal councillors in Berlin. Die Rote Fahne has been confiscated several times this week, and has now been suspended for a week. The Communist newspapers in Wroclaw, Magdeburg and Hamburg have been confiscated or temporarily suspended; the conference of the KPD in Württemburg has been banned. It is said that the appropriate ministers are considering prosecuting the arrested militants for high treason. Providing the ministers in question aren’t themselves locked up before the preliminary investigations are completed!

  Hail the fifteenth zero!

  The police are certainly very useful to a bankrupt bourgeoisie; but the eminent financial expert and socialist Hilferding, even with the assistance of all the republican and monarchist jailers in Germany, will have a hard job to get his masters out of the difficulties they have got themselves into…

  On August 15, the money issued by the Reichsbank alone—for cities, large credit establishments, railway companies and states of the Reich are also issuing paper money for absolutely incalculable sums—came to 116,402,548,057,000 marks. Please note that this number has 15 figures. But since then it has been exceeded to some tune. From August 8 to 15, only 54,000 billion marks were issued; today, the floating debt of the Reich is more than a trillion, that is—imagine it if you can—a thousand million million… On August 15, on the other hand, the entire gold reserve of the Reichsbank did not exceed 516 million, whereas it was more than a billion on January 1 this year. Yet nobody is proposing to charge Herr Cuno with squandering state funds. And inflation continues, with all its consequences.

  We’ll remain with these consequences, since there has just been mention of excessively high wages. Wholesale prices of butcher’s meat increased between tenfold and twentyfold during August; in many places, a comrade from Die Rote Fahne notes, in a whole month no more cattle have been sold for slaughter than on a single market day in 1913. As there are at least two markets per week, consumption of meat has fallen about sixteenfold.103 In fact, meat has become a rare dish, reserved for the rich. Prices continue to rise madly. Since the advent of the Great Coalition, the shopkeepers who fought against Cuno have set all their prices in gold, according to the exchange rate for the dollar. A tram ticket costs 150,000 marks. A newspaper costs between 200,000 and 400,000 marks. A loaf of bread sold for ration coupons has risen to 520,000 marks, and bread coupons, a tiny but significant benefit for working class households, are going to be abolished. A pound of butter costs between three and four million, an egg has risen to 380,000 marks. All prices change from one hour to the next, making amazing leaps in the course of a single day, according to stock exchange rumors and the whim of traders. Postal rates and railway tickets are now calculated in gold, which for the first fortnight of September means a letter within Germany costs 75,000 marks. A meal in a cheap restaurant costs two to three million. And an employed comrade, a skilled worker, who has two children to feed, has just told me that in August she earned about 90 million. Doubtless citizen Hilferding thinks that is too much.

  All the public baths in Berlin have closed; they were losing money. The phenomenal prices of food, electricity, gas, etc., are threatening to cause the closure of all the private hospitals and sanatoriums in the capital. Too bad for people who don’t have a bath in their home and who can’t go to the Black Forest to be cared for when they are ill!

  The bourgeoisie won’t let a halfpenny go

  “The propertied classes must agree to make sacrifices.” That is how the Stresemann-Hilferding government puts it, and we know that it is demanding the payment of various new taxes in foreign currency. An unavoidable necessity. According to the official budget report of August 20, state expenditure has increased 3,500,000 times—taking the pre-war level as one—and income 77,250 times. With a deficit of that size, the functioning of the machine will soon come to a halt. And then, if they want to make starving people work harder, they really must tell them that the rich are chipping in something…

  Only there’s a problem: the rich are idiots, the rich are stubborn, the rich don’t want to pay. The Nation, the Republic, the Vaterland 104 can rot, I’m keeping my money! The association of Saxon industrialists has written to citizen Hilferding to state that the new taxes are too high; they can’t pay. The landowning deputies in the Reichstag, appropriately harangued by Herr Helfferich—one of those morally responsible for Rathenau’s murder—are demanding “dictatorship against the parties and against the mobs on the streets” and…lowering of taxes. Traders in Berlin are preparing to sack their staff and close their shops on October 1, if taxes remain at their present level. After all, they are fleecing the consumers as best they can, and they still can’t make a living! A strike in the markets is being organized for the same reasons; the proprietors of cafés and restaurants are getting excited, protesting, talking of closing down… The Chambers of Commerce have declared that certain taxation measures cannot be applied. Small traders and manufacturers have ceased activity, killing two birds with one stone, hitting the proletariat and the tax collectors.

  This spontaneous resistance by obstinate capitalists who won’t yield a halfpenny, at a time when the very existence of bourgeois society is at stake, shows just how deep and insoluble are the internal contradictions which mark the doom of the capitalist system. As it is, they seem to be condemning the efforts of Stresemann and Hilferding to failure: these belated saviours of the bourgeoisie may make it s
cream, but will not succeed in making it pay even the maintenance expenses of the state; it will pay only when the working class has it by the throat. And they won’t succeed in making the proletarians, who want to see things resolved, work harder than they can or will.

  Phynances and stupidity

  The day before yesterday, September 5, at Berlin, the dollar was quoted at 19,500,000 marks. The intervention by the Reichsbank on the stock exchange had no effect except to transfer a certain number of millions of gold marks into the pockets of the speculators. And yesterday, the dollar was worth 46,000,000; today it’s worth 60,000,000. What will it be worth tomorrow? A hundred million? Now it is quite simply to be feared that in a few days the printed paper of the German state will no longer be accepted by foreign financiers. The most recent effort by the Reichsbank to stabilize the mark was of such an imbecile nature that the whole bourgeois press has made it public. The Berliner Tageblatt has told how the Reichsbank intervention lowered the price of the dollar and the pound sterling, for a few moments. The stock exchange pirates had merely to buy the foreign currency sold by the government agents cheap—so as to sell it again half an hour later at a higher price…

  Herr Helfferich proposes

  Alarmed by the fresh collapse of the mark, the Stresemann-Helfferich government is proposing to create a new German paper money for which the standard of value would be not gold but corn. Helfferich, the agent of the big landowners who want to restore the monarchy, the man involved in the Rathenau assassination, has clearly learned from the experience of Soviet Russia with its corn loans. The paper money he proposes to issue will be guaranteed by the private sector, in particular by agriculture, that is, by the big landowners. Henceforward all German finances will be in the hands of a landowning oligarchy. A fine plan that is! The only outcome of the present crisis would be to allow the landowners to rob the Reichsbank in a respectable fashion and to establish a sort of economic dictatorship.

  Helfferich, a pompous scoundrel, is enough to make you laugh. Does he really imagine that, in the present stage of the class struggle, it is possible to capture power by a device appropriate to starvers and usurers?

  The Great Coalition plots against the working class.

  It is said that the government is preparing dictatorial measures. This is stated and reiterated every evening. But the financial and the overall situation have got so much worse in the last few days that there must be some truth in these rumors which are getting more and more detailed. A decree on the compulsory surrender of foreign currency is due to appear any day now. A strong man “commissar” will, it is said, have the responsibility for applying it. There is talk of establishing a sort of financial dictatorship of which citizen Helfferich will be the man in charge. There is talk of withdrawing the regulations which are an obstacle to exports. There is talk, finally, of government decrees on the intensification of labor, which in practice means extending the working day… All these measures will be enacted without consulting the Reichstag. Thanks to the support of the SPD, Herr Stresemann thinks he can quite openly disregard democratic and parliamentary practices. For action is necessary, and nothing can be asked of the masses without taking something from the propertied classes—or at least pretending to take it. The requisition of foreign currency will obviously run up against so many obstacles that it will inevitably fail to a very large extent. But its consequence will be to legitimize the legal, or rather the dictatorial, intensification of the exploitation of labor.

  Note that the Great Coalition of bourgeois parties and the SPD is preparing this attack on the basic rights of the working class at the very moment when unemployment is spreading in all industrial centers and in all industries…

  The continuing inflation was putting increasing strains on German national unity. The Ruhr occupation continued, and the right wing government in Bavaria was increasingly in conflict with the policies of Stresemann’s “Great Coalition.” Meanwhile in Thuringia the possibility emerged of a KPD-SPD coalition government.

  The Ruhr profiteers

  Correspondance internationale, September 15, 1923

  “The inhabitants of the Ruhr themselves want to be rid of this abscess…” The abscess in question—the German expression can also be translated as “seat of gangrene”—is the Reich’s financial assistance to the Ruhr. And the newspaper which is using these vigorous terms is none other than the bourgeois and very patriotic Germania. Recently, the German press has been almost unanimous in claiming that the expenses caused by passive resistance in the Ruhr are the main cause of the financial collapse of the Reich. Under the pretext, as fallacious as it was patriotic, of financing passive resistance, all the resources of the nation have been drained off and the coffers of the state have been emptied. Since the start of the occupation, 500 million gold marks have thus passed from the Reichsbank into the safes and pockets of rich speculators, hundreds of millions have been swallowed up by the safes of the big Ruhr industrialists—while the working population, whose passive resistance is the only genuine one, and which is bearing the whole burden of it, because it is consciously defending the future of the German proletariat, has been dying of hunger. Now the scandal is becoming public. It’s a bit late, for now there is nothing left to give to the insatiable profiteers of the Ruhr. These, as the Russian paper in Berlin, Nakanunie, puts it very well, have won a battle, not against M. Poincaré, but against their own nation.

  Here we have grasped in action one of the features of dying capitalism. The dominant class, pushing the logic of its instincts to the logical conclusion, becomes the enemy of the nations whose industrial and financial power it has helped to create. As soon as a leak is discovered that will sink the massive ship, all those on board think of nothing but looting. During the Russian Revolution, the émigrés looted, sold and resold the “homeland.” The disaster of capitalist Germany has several comparable causes:1. The flight of capital. The German capitalists moved thousands of millions of gold marks abroad.

  2. Stock exchange gambling on a falling market; the enrichment of the bandits of commerce and industry by the fall in value of the mark (the process is well known: low wages, cheap goods, victorious competition abroad—and the ultimate ruin of the country).

  3. The enormous swindle that was the economic war in the Ruhr.

  The capitalist is the enemy of the nation; from now on the true interests of the nations are those of the workers’ International.

  The victims of the Ruhr

  Will they be forgotten because Mussolini has opened fire on Corfu,105 because there is an earthquake in Japan, because Degoutte’s soldiers have been trampling on them for too long and because the popular press needs some fresh, up-to-date dramas?

  A hundred thousand people have been brutally driven out of their homes. The whole working-class press has been gagged. Dozens of working-class militants have been sentenced by court-martials or are waiting to be sentenced. There is killing almost every evening, at random, of those who pass along the dark streets, a gaunt worker returning home without having found tomorrow’s bread… Towns are isolated as they were in medieval sieges. All postal communications in various major districts have just been suspended for three days.

  In the hospitals of Frankfurt there is an old woman of 86, eight pregnant women, a mother suffering from pleurisy accompanied by her sick child, the mother of newborn twins; all these women have been expelled from the “peacefully occupied” region by the French authorities.

  There have been expulsions, and there still are expulsions, sometimes at a day’s notice, sometimes at one hour’s, of numerous workers’ families, including old people, invalids and newborn children. Up to September 4, there had been 1,600 hundred expulsions in the Palatinate alone. Obviously the great majority of these were poor people.

  And these impoverished people are at one and the same time making the fortune of the German profiteers in the Ruhr and the careers of General Degoutte’s zealous underlings.

  As far as we know, not a s
ingle voice has been raised in the advanced French press to stigmatize these disgraceful facts. The press of the French bourgeoisie in 1923 is as servile towards imperialism as the German press was in 1914. In 1914, 93 German intellectuals, the cream of the universities and the literary salons, spoke out in support of the invasion of Belgium. In 1923 the mandarins of the Sorbonne, the Collège de France and the Académie,106 of all the professorial chairs and all the institutions of higher learning, are silent at the occupation of the Ruhr. All bourgeoisies, all imperialisms, all literary lackeys are the same…

  A bluff: the confiscation of foreign currency

  While notes for a 100 million marks are being hurriedly printed, Herr Stresemann, after a speech on the “age of revolutions” (to Berlin journalists on September 7), has again put on his dictator’s mask. On September 8, an extraordinary decree appeared on the confiscation of foreign currency and securities. Its terms temporar-ily suspend articles 115, 117 and 153 of the constitution (inviolability of goods, residences and the mail). A high commissioner has been given the most extensive powers to confiscate foreign currency that has been held without permission. The confiscation of all property and long prison sentences will be imposed on those who resist the law. The rich must put the interests of the homeland first! Are you satisfied, proletarian? Just to please you, we have even struck a great knife-blow at the constitution…

  Immune from confiscation are foreign currency and banknotes held for commercial and industrial purposes, those necessary for companies operating in Germany, those belonging to people normally resident abroad or to people who receive them “by virtue of moral obligations.” Very good. But then which currency can be confiscated? What speculator is such an imbecile that he cannot invoke—with documents to back him up—commercial and industrial necessities in addition to the highest moral obligations?