Witness to the German Revolution

by Victor Serge

  We must begin by saying that all is not over. The revolutionary struggle in Germany may be only just beginning. Stinnes and his menials Ebert and von Seeckt are well aware of it. If you want proof, just ask them to put a—genuine—end to martial law!

  But this enigma of a proletarian giant laid low by gnomes whose spines he could break with the back of his hand does have an explanation:

  The “formidable powerlessness of German social democracy.” The phrase is an old one; it comes from Jaurès, and I got it from a friend of Jaurès. Formidable powerlessness, there is no better way of putting it. This great party has been deadened and bureaucratized, piling up cowardice on top of disloyalty, and disloyalty on treachery so that it may be kindly allowed to keep up an appearance as a loyally passive opposition under an ultra-reactionary regime. This great emasculated party is now almost the sole obstacle to the German revolution, the only bulwark of a bourgeoisie which for years, in order to stupidly enrich itself to the detriment of the nation, has been pursuing a suicidal policy…

  …This great powerless Socialist party is so contemptible that even the bourgeoisie that it is rescuing doesn’t show it the least gratitude!

  Unemployment, a revolutionary problem

  German capitalism has survived the fearsome November deadline. Granted. But is it saved? It would be naïve to think so.

  In its calamitous present situation, nothing is more serious within the country than the problem of unemployment. In many German cities the unemployed have taken on the role of revolutionaries or of insurgents. If the number keeps on growing, while all the other causes contributing to the disintegration of bourgeois society in Germany continue to act in parallel, then will not German capitalism soon find itself in even more critical situations than those it has just extricated itself from in a rather botched fashion?

  Take Berlin. We have precise figures concerning unemployment in Berlin, from October 15 to November 17. Here they are:

  No. of unemployed Unemployed receiving assistance

  October 15 185,730 123,932

  October 20 195,300 135,500

  October 27 210,586 144,315

  November 3 223,181 158,554

  November 10 247,432 174,860

  November 17 255,841 189,600

  Note that Berlin is not in a more critical situation than the majority of industrial centers in non-occupied Germany. What is striking in these (official) statistics is the regular growth of unemployment, from week to week. Must it go on?

  The financial problem is not resolved. Germany enjoys no credit abroad and has no currency quoted on foreign exchanges. The cost of living—and hence of production, despite low wages—is higher than anywhere else. Its international political situation is that of a country with which its enemies can’t even do a deal because the government is so blatantly powerless. So there is no plausible reason for thinking that unemployment is likely to fall during the coming weeks. On the contrary, everything combines to lead us to predict its indefinite extension from the present point. Now today, in Berlin alone, 66,000 unemployed are receiving no assistance. How do they survive? The combined efforts of International Workers Aid, Austrian Aid, the Salvation Army and various charitable organizations don’t reach such a large number of the poor. Workers who have been derisorily paid and undernourished for years have been unemployed in Berlin for months. On the days of demonstrations called by the dissolved KPD they appear, with their threadbare grey military tunics—and no underwear beneath, on these cold December days—haggard, with eyes deep in their sockets and jerky movements. They appear and the green police chase them with coshes through the crowds of well-dressed passers-by on the main thoroughfares. Is that a solution? How many million unemployed will there be in Germany before the end of the winter? When they demand bread, when the red flags of the banned Communist party show them the way, what will Ebert, von Seeckt and their master Stinnes be able to do? For after all, if it is sometimes possible to replace bread with lead, this time far too much would be needed!

  Humor

  I should like to set before the eyes of the reader a recent issue of Simplicissimus, one of the old humorous journals of Berlin. In these few pages normally filled with puns, rather innocent political satires and smutty jokes, there is now expressed a deep bitterness and a profound despair.—The humor of a people reveals a lot about its mentality, and, above all since the war, humorous publications, exploiting a very understandable need to forget, expressing the irony, spite, incredulity and sarcasm of the crowds, have sometimes been an easy way to get rich.—But today German humor is no more than an embittered grin.

  In this one issue of Simplicissimus I was struck by five tragic cartoons:—A queue of poor people, in the dark street outside a shop. Someone says: “A bit of luck! We’ll get in quicker: two people in front have just fainted.” I’ve seen so many of these pitiable queues in the suburbs of Berlin that I don’t find any shocking exaggeration in this painful joke…

  Two pictures. The mother at home without bread, surrounded by anxious children: “Relax, kids, Dad’s coming home with some spuds!” But Dad will never come home: he is writhing on the cold ground, in a potato field, with a bullet in his body. It’s true: some such “thieves” have been killed…

  On another page: coming back from market two fat peasants are commenting on the decision of the doctor who has become a vet. “He says a pig is worth more than man!” Good God! Much more. The skin of an unemployed person is worth nothing. But pigskin is expensive. Very expensive.

  Two final cartoons: one is mocking the bureaucracy of the sickness insurance fund (where the doctors, who have been on strike once, are threatening to do it again); the other shows the spectre of civil war looming over the starving town.

  …It’s important to be acquainted with this underlying bitterness and despair which in Germany poisons even the mercenary laughter of “comic” papers, in order to understand that social peace has not been established in Hamburg, Berlin and Dresden, despite the exploits of the Reichswehr of the socialist Ebert…

  The transfer of the editorial offices of Correspondance internationale to Vienna makes it impossible for me to continue the publication of these Reports from Germany, which have appeared regularly for the last three months, and in which I have tried to follow current events in Germany as closely as possible. This column will therefore cease to appear. Correspondance internationale will continue to provide extensive and reliable documentation on events in Germany from other sources. RA.

  By way of conclusion to this collection, there are three articles written by Serge for the French journal Clarté, which was close to, but not formally controlled by, the French Communist Party, and to which he contributed regularly. These are more analytic than the news reports for Correspondance internationale, and also offer a broader picture of life in Germany. In the following article Serge examines the question of nationalism, which posed major problems for the KPD in 1923. Germany, as defeated power in World War I, was the victim of rival imperialisms. Yet, as Serge shows, the real enemy of the German proletariat was its own bourgeoisie.

  The Rich against the Nation

  Berlin, October 1923 Clarté, November 1923

  The present crisis in Germany, it seems to us, has finally made clear, to any careful observer who is not dominated by outdated terminology and the interests of a servile bourgeois existence, the inexorable decline of the capitalist order. It is the final proof, perhaps more convincing than the first: for between the two, there could be room for a return to reason (if reason had anything at all in common with the underlying laws which govern the capitalist order).

  In 1914, European civilization had reached the peak of its prosperity. A century of remarkable scientific, technological and industrial development was ending with Europe’s conquest of the globe. The planet was explored in all directions, carved up and colonized; for the great industrial nations it was no more than a magnificent estate inhabited by hundreds of millions of slaves with black, bro
wn, copper-colored, sallow and yellow skins… A whole intellectual aristocracy could nourish the soothing dream of a prudent evolution towards socialism on the part of the great democracies—towards a pink socialism summed up in the fully and harmoniously balanced clauses of the orators. The average inhabitants of the big cities, even if poor, enjoyed a degree of comfort that was more real than that of the average French lord at the end of the reign of Louis XIV.191 This peak of civilization came to an end on August 2, 1914. A whole age of human history died along with the first soldiers slaughtered on the frontiers of France and Germany.

  The causes of the cataclysm were the same as those of the prosperity of the old European world. Capitalist production—anarchic at first, even in its details, subsequently monopolized by oligarchies of financiers—created powerful rival coalitions which confronted each other; they were armed by science and technology; the division of the world, once completed, obliged them to fight for a new carve-up… The law of exploitation which is the essence of capitalist “order” ended up with war for colonial markets, in other words for the exploitation of the defeated peoples…

  The war cost Europe (according to statistics accepted by German experts) and the world 10,200,000 soldiers killed; an increase in civilian deaths of 6,000,000; a reduction in births estimated at 20,850,000. In total, 37 million human lives… More—for blood and money are added together under capitalism—760 billion gold marks… 16,600,000 tons of ships, naval or commercial, were sunk, 8,850 airplanes brought down. Amid this entire massacred population how many people of genius, how many talents, how many intelligent producers were there, who could have led humanity to new conquests which have now become unthinkable? The huge amount of wealth squandered in gunpowder and smoke, crushed brains and crippled flesh, could have served as the basis for a new society and a new culture. This effective suicide of a universe proves to what extent the system of which it was the logical conclusion has pronounced its own death sentence…

  No less extensive in its consequences, the German tragedy has proved and confirmed this first verdict of history. Capitalist Germany is not simply dying of the disastrous consequences of the Treaty of Versailles. One of the great internal causes of its collapse lies in the inner contradictions which are inherent to states dominated by capitalist oligarchies. It has been killed by the effect of the very same laws which, today, are producing the prosperity of such capitalist nations as the United States and France.

  While the war revealed to us what insoluble international contradictions exist between the vital interests of groups of imperialist powers (and, on another level, between the imperialist powers and the interests of civilization), the collapse of Germany has revealed to us the incompatibility of the interests of the big bourgeoisie and other social classes in the framework of a single nation (and, on another level, the incompatibility of the bourgeois regime with the interests of the nation considered as an aggregate of labor and culture).

  These thoughts, inspired by the situation of Germany, seem to me all the more correct because a strict parallel can be drawn between the present role of the German bourgeoisie and that of the Russian bourgeoisie between 1915 and 1922. In both cases, the former dominant class appears as a cause of national disintegration. The bourgeois “nation” has had its day, at least in these two European countries. I have just read in a report from the Reichstag that during the session of October 9—during the separate negotiations between the Ruhr industrialists and General Degoutte—the DNVP deputy Wulle declared that the industrialists of Borkum Island (Westphalia) 192 were determined to ask for protection from the Netherlands against “Communist terror.” And I remembered a date: on September 20, 1792, at Valmy, the soldiers of the French Revolution—of the revolution of the third estate—defeated the Duke of Brunswick with the thundering cry, heard for the first time on a battlefield, of “Long live the nation!” Until then, people had fought only for kings. There had not been national armies; the relatively small royal armies were made up of professional soldiers who were recruited, hired or forced. The French revolution replaced dynastic, feudal and noble interests with an invincible living reality: the interests of the bourgeois masses who had come to power, and who had just expropriated the court, the nobility and the clergy. The bourgeoisie became the cement of the nations that it was going to establish as states, then as predatory states… Now the Russian bourgeoisie have sold the Black Sea fleet to France and the arsenals of Vladivistok to Japan; German plutocrats, having subjected their country to unrestrained looting, are now working on dividing it up. A historical epoch has come to an end.

  For anyone observing events in Germany, the fact is obvious. In Germany today there is no longer any linen, any shoes, any guaranteed bread for the great mass of the population. The consumption of meat has fallen by three-quarters in comparison to pre-war figures, the death rate has gone up, and the birth rate has fallen. The majority of children from the common people are tubercular, the middle classes are dying of hunger.—Production is declining rapidly or has stopped. Goods produced are much inferior to those from abroad and are more expensive. There are 160,000 unemployed in Berlin, more in Saxony, a few less in Hamburg; there are food riots everywhere. State revenue is virtually non-existent; it must be no more than one hundredth of its real expenditure. The monetary inflation which has automated the plundering and starvation of the masses of the population has reached such proportions that a billion marks has become the basic unit; you need several to buy a pound of margarine.

  It would be wrong to put the blame for all this on M. Poincaré, whose policies have only precipitated the situation. They are the results, basically quite natural results, of five to six years of bourgeois power in a militarily defeated country.

  Back in 1918, the flight of German capital began. How many billions in gold were taken out of the country in every imaginable fashion? We can mention the sale, pure and simple, to foreigners, of industrial establishments, goods or shares, in order not to have to pay the proportion due for reparations and not to run the risk of impending social struggles. My friend Höllein assured me, long ago, that six to eight billion gold marks were expatriated in this way…

  As early as 1921, the whole industrial, commercial and financial bourgeoisie of Germany had made a system of speculating on the fall in value of the mark. The constant fall in value of paper money issued by the Reichsbank enabled “imperceptible” cuts in wages, making German competition unbeatable on almost all the world’s markets. In the long run, the inevitable result was a reduction of the energy of labor, through undernourishment and overexertion of the workforce, wearing out of the plant and a lack of technological improvement. But after all, they were doing excellent business. Profits from Germany were converted into dollars, pounds sterling, yen and pesetas, and invested profitably and securely in South America—or elsewhere.

  The passive resistance in the Ruhr was another source of scandalous profits. The most bourgeois German press (Kölnische Zeitung, Berliner Tageblatt, Germania) has not been able to remain silent about the enormous extent of the scandal. Half the remaining gold reserves of the Reich, about half a billion marks, is thought to have been used to finance the passive resistance; in fact, in some cases the Ruhr industrialists were able, thanks to this unhoped for source of wealth, to renew their plant, buy stocks of foreign currency (thus contributing to the fall in value of the mark), and greatly increase their political power. The state has emerged ruined from the Ruhr war. The plutocrats of heavy industry have emerged enriched, arrogant and all-powerful.

  The attempts to stabilize the mark made by Messrs. Cuno and Hilferding were profitable only to them. The Reichsbank put foreign currency on the market to make up the difference between supply and demand; the plutocrats bought it all. On the Berlin Stock Exchange you could see cunning financiers at 4:15pm taking advantage of the—fictitious—fall of the dollar brought about by the intervention of the Reichsbank and buying up cheaply currency which two hours later they sold again at a high
er price…

  Thus for some years any weakening of the state, any increase in national poverty, have been necessarily accompanied by an enrichment and increase in the power of the industrial and financial oligarchy.

  Now the drama has reached the final act. The program for reconstruction, put forward by the class of plunderers who have put the country in this situation, is known under the name of the Stinnes program. In the recent political struggles—fall of the first Stresemann government, obstruction of parliamentary government by the industrialists, Stinnes’ campaign for dictatorship and martial law—what was at stake was merely its application. It can be summed up in the following four points:

  Expropriation of the state (transfer of all publicly controlled companies to private industry, and abandonment by the state of any right of control over industry).

  Taxation policy exclusively directed against the working masses.

  Ten-hour working day.

  Dictatorship.

  The logic of this program is to replace the rational organization of labor by intensive exploitation. Without dictatorship, it obviously cannot be applied.

  This chapter of the contemporary history of Germany can be entitled: “the Rich against the Nation.” And the whole present problem is posed, more or less, in these terms:

  Will the class of bandits who are responsible for the terrible poverty of the German people—and for the ruin of German culture—succeed in imposing on the proletariat by force, if necessary with the aid of French or Senegalese bayonets, its law of all-out exploitation? This problem will probably not be solved except by civil war which at this moment seems imminent. In this case the dialectic of events will impose on the proletariat, as a basic condition for defending its vital interests, the seizure of power; and, fighting for its class power, the German proletariat will appear by the necessary course of events as the ultimate defender of a great nation of producers, of a wonderful culture—which has been more or less put to death—and of European socialism.