by Victor Serge
The great governmental coalition has been formed, let us remember, thanks to the acceptance by the bourgeois parties of a series of demands, one of which was the stabilization of wages.
As yet it has done nothing to achieve this, although the dollar has gone from eight million to around 230 million. But the head of the government, Herr Stresemann, supported by all the right wing press, has launched a massive campaign against high wages. He has finally got a categorical repudiation from the ADGB, even though it is led by old social democratic reformists. In their official reply to the chancellor, they compare the purchasing power of wages today to that of 1914; they conclude that a worker today has to work seven hours to buy what one hour’s labor enabled him to buy before the war. According to these bureaucrats, who are counter-revolutionary but competent, German wages are now reduced to one seventh of what they used to be.
The trade union bosses of the ADGB have finally been forced to admit it publicly. For they are beginning to realize that a final limit has been reached.
And the libertarians?116
A comrade from South America asks me: “What role do you think the libertarians will play in the coming German revolution?”
What role? As far as I can see, none at all. None. They hardly exist. Only very rarely do you see a libertarian placard. Never, on any demonstration or in any circumstances, have I seen, in Berlin or elsewhere, a libertarian paper being sold or distributed…
However, two or three small libertarian publications (Freie Arbeiter, Der Syndikalist) do appear in Germany, very hard for anyone interested to find, completely unknown to the masses. The leaders of various “syndicalist” unions, scattered here and there, claim to have a 100,000 members who must be subdivided into half a dozen tendencies that are more or less vegetarian, nudist or attached to the ideas of Tolstoy… Germany has more than 20 million proletarians of whom about 13 million are organized.
Workers’ Germany is on the verge of revolution. For those revolutionaries who have something more than superfluous old formulas to offer to the masses on the march towards decisive struggles, the time has come to confront their doctrines with life itself, that is, with the reality of class struggle. It is time for libertarians in Germany—if they exist as revolutionaries—to put forward their program for achieving results, their tactics, their teachings, to show the way. How can we make the revolution? How can we crush fascism? How can we provide bread for the industrial cities? How can we do otherwise than found tomorrow a proletarian state, than establish a red army already today?
They are silent. Or if they mutter, it is so low, so lamely that nobody can hear them. They do not exist.
Faced with the growing influence of the extreme right, the KPD adopted the tactic of holding public debates. These debates have sometimes been seized on by critics of the KPD as evidence of collaboration with the extreme right. The fact that Serge’s articles appeared at the time in the open Communist press makes clear that the debates were conceived as a short term tactic with no further implications. As Serge shows in other articles, the debate was in any case taking place on the streets, as workers under Communist and fascist influence argued about the best way out of the crisis. It should also be remembered that at the time fascism was a very new phenomenon, and that the revolutionary left was still struggling to analyze it and to devise the best ways of fighting it. In late September, Stresemann called off the “passive resistance” in the Ruhr. The establishment of martial law by the Bavarian government led Stresemann and President Ebert to declare martial law throughout the Republic on September 26.
Fascists and Communists
Correspondance internationale, September 29, 1923
“The fascist cross and the Soviet star are joined together… Count Reventlow117 and Radek are getting on together wonderfully well… The corrupters of Moscow, the Machiavellis of the Third International and the adventurers of German reaction have made a monstrous pact against democracy… Tartar Bolshevism, transformed into Germanic nationalism, is sharpening its knife—you know, the one they carry between their teeth!—to cut the throats of the innocent republics of Léon Blum and Ebert, of General Degoutte and citizen Noske…”
Communism is the living, flexible and logical thought of the vanguards of the working class, everywhere committed to the hilt to the revolutionary struggle. Principles of safety first, the wondrous professions of faith of inactive socialism, prestigious phrases—soft pillows for idle minds!—are not its style. Communism springs from the Russian Revolution, whose thought was always essentially action, the habit of plunging into the very heart of reality, of adapting to it, of ceaselessly forging there new weapons, tactics and strategies…
(Weapons, tactics, strategies…What horrible military vocabulary! —I agree, comrade. But it isn’t my fault, or Moscow’s. Should we, or should we not, in the class struggle today, have weapons, should we know, predict and calculate what we’re doing, that is, should we have a tactic and a strategy?)
German social democrats and the French minority 118 think they can rest on the laurels of Versailles. The former think of nothing but rescuing the capitalist order which is under heavy threat to the east of the Rhine; the latter have nothing to fill their heads but the clever contrivances of the left wing bloc119 and the next election campaign. The German Communists, however, are facing up to famine, fascist counter-revolution and Allied imperialism.—Every day, the pressing cries of the hungry rise up towards them; every week, striding over the bodies of poor wretches shot down by the municipal police in the marketplaces, people coming from all parties make their way towards them. Each week they are hit by repression. They have thousands of comrades in prison. They make up a party of revolution. In the face of fascism, they had to act.
“Our tactic towards fascism,” I was told recently by a Berlin militant, “has already been crowned by success. Six months ago, fascism was making inroads into the working class here and there. It was rising rapidly when the occupation of the Ruhr gave it the powerful additional boost of a legitimate awakening of national feeling. Now, though it is far from being defeated, its progress has been blocked. It is no longer the demagogy of anti-Semitic National Socialism, which has a grip on certain proletarian elements who have been demoralized by the squalid maneuvers of social democracy; instead our revolutionary arguments are beginning to bite on the middle classes who have been proletarianized and disoriented. Moreover, since German fascism is split internally into two tendencies, the Pan-Germanists and the separatists,120 while working-class unity is being established more and more around the KPD—as is shown once again by the events in Thuringia—for the moment the Soviet star has the advantage over the swastika. And that’s quite important, for things are no joke at present.”
The fact is that “Sedan Day” (September 2) was a fiasco for fascism; that after two or three debates with Communist speakers, the National Socialist Workers Party published in its paper, the Völkischer Beobachter (Popular Observer) on August 14, a formal ban on its members debating with Communists; that the three public debates held between fascist speakers and our comrade Hermann Remmele—at Stuttgart on August 2 and 10 and at Göppingen on August 16—have, like Radek’s articles,121 made their way throughout the Germany of reaction, ready armed for civil war…
Let us look together through the little pamphlet which contains Remmele’s speeches to the south German fascists, and we shall be able to clarify our ideas on what imbeciles—or dishonest politicians—have called “National Bolshevism.” “You are fighting Jewish finance,” said Remmele to the fascists. “Good, but also fight the other finance, that of the likes of Thyssen, Krupp, Stinnes and Klöckner!” He thus got these anti-Semites to applaud the class struggle. “You are fighting against the workers because your masters, the big capitalists, want to divide and rule, to set members of the middle classes like you, who have been ruined and will be proletarianized tomorrow, against us workers!” Thus he got these reactionaries to applaud the united front of all the expl
oited. “Are you patriots?” he asked, and described how big German industry was associated in many profitable affairs with French capital, selling its manufacturing secrets, like the Baden Aniline trust,122 preparing for Germany to be colonized and getting rich from the devaluation of the mark. “Which of you wants to get killed for this capitalist Germany?” And he had the whole hall shouting: “Nobody!”
The positive part of his argument is simple: “Hungry Germany can only liberate itself by first of all shaking the yoke of its national capitalism.” “The Treaty of Versailles can only be canceled when there is no longer a capitalist Germany.” “One people has already shown you how to liberate yourselves: look at the example of the internationalist Soviets!” “Together, we are 16 to 18 million proletarians whose wages have fallen by at least four fifths; and nine to 11 million people in humble circumstances who have been ruined. They used to tell you that communism would take everything away from you; now it’s capitalism that has taken everything from you. The proletariat will liberate you as it liberates itself.” “The national unity of Germany can have no other support than the international workers’ movement.”
This Communist orator, speaking to fascists in Württemberg, made them cheer André Marty123 and working-class France which would “produce thousands of mutineers like Marty, if the French armies marched against the German Revolution.” By thus reminding Germans, deceived by the chauvinist incitement of Stinnes’s press, filled with hate at the acts of Degoutte in the Ruhr, embittered by poverty, that there is a red France, the France of the Commune, a France which has made or attempted four revolutions in a century, and which will never be the executioner of a great movement of liberation, he is perhaps, for the people of Le Populaire,124 engaging in base demagogic agitation.
The German Communists want to engage the fascists in discussion, with their full program, with all the powerful intransigence of revolutionary ideology. Examine Remmele’s speeches in detail; you won’t find a single concession, a single tactical omission. To arouse the virtuous indignation of the social democrats of France and Germany against this remarkable propaganda campaign, it was necessary to tear quotations out of context, to do violence to the facts, to deliberately ignore other facts—such as the huge labor of organizing armed resistance to fascism carried out by Communists throughout Germany—and to employ the most vulgar agitational devices. “Radek has shaken hands with Count Reventlow,” wrote Vorwärts. (And Remmele replied: “We’re offering you a united front, you who murdered Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, you whose Noske has the blood of 15,000 revolutionaries on his conscience!”)
The fascist movement is born of the wretched condition of middle classes pauperized by the struggles of the imperialist epoch and disappointed by democracy, by pacifism, by reformism, by the milk and water socialism on which they were fed at a time when prosperity seemed to be their guaranteed destiny. It has raised up against the proletariat millions of men who are determined to risk everything because they have lost nearly everything, enemies of socialism which has deceived them, and for the same reason inclined to adopt the opposite of their beliefs of yesterday. In Germany, it constitutes the last resort of the capitalist order; and as it could count on social layers consisting of more than ten million people, it would be, when the time came, supported by high finance and heavy industry, officered by the police and the Reichswehr, led by the best strategists from among the Kaiser’s officers, and hence a terrible instrument in the hands of reaction.
The German Communists approached it and hit it in the most vulnerable places; in its absurd ideology, in the conscious doubledealing of its leaders, in the anti-capitalist and anti-democratic feelings of its rank and file. The occupation of the Ruhr sent a wave of nationalism across the whole of Germany. The Communists sometimes neutralized it, sometimes transformed it into an additional revolutionary element. Instead of letting Ludendorff and Hitler mislead working-class forces into a repressive civil war, they have succeeded in neutralizing a section of the middle classes in favor of revolutionary internationalism which seeks—which is—peace between peoples.
Where they wanted people to cheer Hindenburg, we got them to cheer Marty.
Towards civil war
As Communists, we are far from failing to recognize the power, the creative capacities, the vitality which the capitalist system still displays. But it seems to me that it would be perfectly symbolized by a mad engineer. He would be a skillful builder of bridges, aqueducts and highly developed machines. He would produce admirable pieces of work—but not without exploiting his labor force pitilessly. But at certain moments, overcome by his madness, this technician, this logician, would commit enormous mistakes, condemning his entire work to ruin. European capitalism is indeed this mad engineer.
The German bourgeoisie has just lost a second war. The first, begun by opposing imperialisms when capitalist society was at its peak, led to ruin in Europe, caused the Russian Revolution and, in Germany, the revolution of November 1918. The second war, the economic war in the Ruhr, has confronted bourgeois France and Germany with the fact of an October revolution (though one which might well only happen in the springtime…). Why? Because the financial and industrial oligarchy to the east of the Rhine did not want to yield to its French rival any of the profits derived from the exploitation of “national” labor; because the Comité des Forges was determined to establish complete hegemony over German heavy industry, and imperialist France was determined to consolidate its prestige… What will happen to this prestige, which is certainly notorious, to this hegemony and to this wealth, if tomorrow red flags are unfurled over the cities of Germany? Herr Stresemann wonders with anguish. M. Poincaré isn’t concerned. He is the master of the situation just as Napoleon was in 1812.125 The mad engineer, I tell you! Even in his most lucid moments, he never ceases to carry within his brain the dementia that is dooming him.
Dilemma
Germany has capitulated. In order not to surrender a halfpenny of their wealth, the German capitalists are handing over to French imperialism the Germany of labor, bound hand and foot and with an empty belly. But perhaps it is already too late. Passive resistance is ending in catastrophe. It has emptied the state’s coffers, filled the pockets of the wreckers, and paid for arming the forces of reaction. As a result the wind of revolt has blown across the land and raised up the proletariat of the Ruhr against both French imperialism and “national” capitalism. The struggle is over. What is left is bankruptcy, the wreckers and reactionaries standing armed in front of their bags of stolen coins, the restless masses obeying the logic of facts, following the avalanche and rolling with it. Will Stresemann and Hilferding succeed in stopping the avalanche?
What would that mean?
Will they succeed, during the three to five months of cold and hunger which lie ahead, in producing out of nothing a paper money which is worth something? Can they give bread to 30 million poor people who no longer have any? Can they resist or channel to their advantage the civil war which is looming? Can they satisfy French imperialism without committing suicide?
If they can, then the mad engineer will carry on.
If they can’t, then the revolution will begin.
In both cases, doubtless, M. Poincaré will have won: but capitalist Europe is running a serious risk of dying from its victory.
Between two dictatorships
The Great Coalition, “the last resort of German democracy,” has become, as a result of its capitulation, almost as unpopular as the Cuno government was the day before the factory committees drove it out. The German People’s Party, the German Democratic Party and the Catholic Center Party are, like the SPD, in the middle of internal crises. Herr Stresemann had announced—at the same time as the end of passive resistance in the Ruhr—in off the record statements that if necessary he will assume dictatorship. In this regard, the newspapers have spread the rumor that citizen Noske, the dictator whom commander Ehrhardt dreamed of some time ago,126 had come to Berlin to confer with the
head of state…
All very well, but…dictatorship against whom? You can’t exercise a dictatorship in a vacuum. Against fascism and the large scale industry for which Stresemann is simply a rascally old lawyer? An absurd supposition. Against the proletariat? But citizen Noske could not repeat his achievements of 1919. Then he was able to arm against the workers all the reactionary scum, to use the likes of Ehrhardt, Lüttwitz and Hoffmann. If he tried the same thing now it would mean the immediate end of his party and shortly thereafter of his regime; for the working masses would not spare him, and Ludendorff would not show mercy to the “rogues who made the November revolution.”
As far as the leftward evolution of the social democratic masses is concerned, there are a growing number of indications. The SPD regional congress in Berlin has just recognized (resolution published in Vorwärts on September 25) the bankruptcy of the coalition policy and demanded a return to class struggle. At the same time it voted for a resolution of support to the socialist prime minister of red Saxony, Zeigner, and congratulated him on his persistent campaign in favor of purging the Reichswehr.
The Great Coalition is no longer supported by either the majority of the bourgeoisie—who don’t want its taxes and are more and more anxious to see a sharp turn to the right—or by the rank and file of the SPD who are understanding more and more clearly that the Communists are right. On one side white Bavaria is arming, on the other red Saxony is working. Between the two, Hilferding and Stresemann are printing more paper money.
Von Kahr and Gessler—imitation dictators