*From The Pen Of Friedrich Engels- "On The 20th Anniversary Of The Paris Commune"

Click on the title to link to a "Marx-Engels Internet Archive" article by Friedrich Engels in honor of the 20th anniversary of the heroic fighters of the Paris Commune in 1891.

Markin comment:

I should note that there was a little historical controversy over the 'editing' of this piece by the leaders of the German social-democracy to take the sing out of Engels' remarks. So much for untrammeled freedom of expression so beloved of the "big tent" social democrats, then and now.

*From The Archives Of The “Revolutionary History” Journal-A Letter About Lenin-Karl Kautsky

Click on the headline to link to an American Left History pots related to this entry.

Markin comment:

This is an excellent documentary source for today’s militants to “discovery” the work of our forbears, whether we agree with their programs or not. Mainly not, but that does not negate the value of such work done under the pressure of revolutionary times. Hopefully we will do better when our time comes.
*******
From What Next? No.12, 1999

A Letter About Lenin-From What Next? No.12, 1999

A Letter About Lenin-Karl Kautsky

After Lenin’s death on 21 January 1924, Karl Kautsky was contacted by Panski-Solski, the Berlin correspondent of the Soviet government’s newspaper Izvestia, and invited to contribute a commemorative article on Lenin. As a vociferous opponent of the Bolshevik regime, who had been memorably denounced by Lenin in the pamphlet Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky, the theoretician of German social democracy was no doubt astonished to receive such a request. However, Kautsky accepted Solski’s invitation, and wrote the letter/article which is reprinted below. It was indeed published in Izvestia, accompanied by an editorial introduction commenting that even ‘an open enemy of Leninism’ like Kautsky recognised ‘the greatness of the genius of the proletarian revolution’. The article was later published in the Austro-Marxist theoretical journal Der Kampf (Vol.17 No.5, May 1924, pp.176-9), as Ein Brief über Lenin, from which the translation that appears here is taken.

DEAR COMRADE Solski! As you see, at present I am not in Berlin but in Vienna. I did not receive your letter until today, so I was not in a position to respond in time to your invitation. I deeply regret this, as I would very much have liked to join in honouring the dead leader of the proletarian revolution. I may have had grave reservations about the political and economic methods he pursued in his last years; I may personally have been profoundly disparaged by him because of the existing differences between us, and I found even more painful the persecution of elements, socialists included, in Lenin’s sphere of influence who disagreed with his views. But in the moment of death one has to evaluate the whole man, not just a few years of his life, nor just a few aspects of his work, and must put aside all personal grudges. Our differences should not blind us to the importance of his passing.

He was a colossal figure, only a few such as whom are to be found in world history Among the rulers of the great states of our time, there is only one who to some extent comes close to him in impact, and that is Bismarck- And the two have much in common. Their aims were of course diametrically opposed: in the one case, the domination of the Hohenzollern dynasty in Germany; in the other, the proletarian revolution. That is a contrast between water and fire. And Bismarck’s aim was small, that of Lenin tremendously great.

But like the iron chancellor, Lenin too was a man of the most tenacious, unshakeable and daring will. Like him, he grasped very well the significance of armed force in politics and could apply it ruthlessly at the decisive moment. When Bismarck stated that the great problems of the time must be resolved by blood and iron, this was also Lenin’s view.

Of course, neither of them believed that blood and iron were enough on their own. Like Bismarck, Lenin also was a master of diplomacy, the art of deceiving his opponents, of surprising them and discovering their weak points, in order to overturn them. And just like Bismarck if he believed that the road he was on would not to lead to his goal, Lenin was ready, without any reservations, to immediately reverse his course and set out on another road. With the same ease with which Bismarck in 1878 went over from free trade to protectionism, Lenin turned from pure communism to the ‘NEP’ (New Economic Policy).

But of course, as is self-evident and has already been noted, in addition to similarities between the two there were also differences, and certainly not minor ones, in their aims. Lenin far surpassed Bismarck in his understanding of theory, which he studied enthusiastically, and in his absence of self-interest. Bismarck had no time for theory, and he used the possession of state power for personal gain.

However, Lenin lagged behind Bismarck in his knowledge of foreign countries. Bismarck carefully studied the states, their power and the class relations in them, with which his foreign policy had to deal. Lenin, by contrast, although he lived for decades as an emigrant in Western Europe, still never achieved a full understanding of its political and social peculiarities. His politics, which was completely adapted to the peculiarities within Russia, was with regard to foreign countries based on the expectation of a world revolution, which to anyone who knew Western Europe must have appeared from the start as an illusion. Here we find the profoundest difference between Bismarck and Lenin. The former established his power through the success of his foreign policy, the latter through his domestic policy. The cause of that lies not only in a difference in the type of talents of the two men, but also in a difference in the environments in which they worked.

Bismarck came to power in a country where the masses had already woken to intense political life through the French Revolution and the Napoleonic War, and then through the 1848 Revolution. To impose his complete authority over them and to abolish their independent thought and action proved impossible. In that he failed utterly. Lenin by contrast came to power amidst masses who were agitated to an extreme extent because of the war, but who had not yet had the experience of independent political thought and aspirations over further generations, and thus after the waning of the agitation were subordinated without difficulty to the power of Lenin’s superior personality and his comrades.

Here lies the deepest root of Lenin’s great success, but here also the beginnings of my greatest reservations concerning his system. Because the liberation of the proletariat means above all the fullest independence of its thought and activity. Considerable, promising beginnings in that direction already existed in the Russian proletariat before the revolution of 1917. Lenin thus began by granting the proletariat the fullest freedom. But the political and economic consequences of his methods forced him increasingly to restrict it. I will not dwell on this, for here I overstep the bounds of an obituary and turn it into a polemic.

It should also be noted that despite my reservations concerning Lenin’s methods I do not despair of the situation of the Russian revolution. From my standpoint it appears that Lenin may have led the proletarian revolution to victory in Russia, but he was unable to make it bear fruit. In this respect the Russian revolution is not yet finished. It will not be taken to the grave with Lenin.

In Russia, too, the aspirations of the working masses for independence will finally gain acceptance. And then all the fruits, which the Russian revolution contained within it in the greatest abundance, will ripen.

Then will all the working people of Russia, and all the working people of the world, without divisions in the movement, remember with gratitude all their great pioneers, who over decades full of struggle and tribulations prepared the Russian revolution and then led it to victory. And also for those who today stand in opposition to the Communist Party, the name of Lenin will not be missing from this pantheon.

This situation of the unity of the working masses of the world in jointly honouring their fallen hero, in freely working together to build the socialist society, is one I may not yet see, before I follow Lenin into the land from which no traveller ever returns.

Vienna, 28 January 1924


Karl Kautsky

After Lenin’s death on 21 January 1924, Karl Kautsky was contacted by Panski-Solski, the Berlin correspondent of the Soviet government’s newspaper Izvestia, and invited to contribute a commemorative article on Lenin. As a vociferous opponent of the Bolshevik regime, who had been memorably denounced by Lenin in the pamphlet Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky, the theoretician of German social democracy was no doubt astonished to receive such a request. However, Kautsky accepted Solski’s invitation, and wrote the letter/article which is reprinted below. It was indeed published in Izvestia, accompanied by an editorial introduction commenting that even ‘an open enemy of Leninism’ like Kautsky recognised ‘the greatness of the genius of the proletarian revolution’. The article was later published in the Austro-Marxist theoretical journal Der Kampf (Vol.17 No.5, May 1924, pp.176-9), as Ein Brief über Lenin, from which the translation that appears here is taken.

DEAR COMRADE Solski! As you see, at present I am not in Berlin but in Vienna. I did not receive your letter until today, so I was not in a position to respond in time to your invitation. I deeply regret this, as I would very much have liked to join in honouring the dead leader of the proletarian revolution. I may have had grave reservations about the political and economic methods he pursued in his last years; I may personally have been profoundly disparaged by him because of the existing differences between us, and I found even more painful the persecution of elements, socialists included, in Lenin’s sphere of influence who disagreed with his views. But in the moment of death one has to evaluate the whole man, not just a few years of his life, nor just a few aspects of his work, and must put aside all personal grudges. Our differences should not blind us to the importance of his passing.

He was a colossal figure, only a few such as whom are to be found in world history Among the rulers of the great states of our time, there is only one who to some extent comes close to him in impact, and that is Bismarck- And the two have much in common. Their aims were of course diametrically opposed: in the one case, the domination of the Hohenzollern dynasty in Germany; in the other, the proletarian revolution. That is a contrast between water and fire. And Bismarck’s aim was small, that of Lenin tremendously great.

But like the iron chancellor, Lenin too was a man of the most tenacious, unshakeable and daring will. Like him, he grasped very well the significance of armed force in politics and could apply it ruthlessly at the decisive moment. When Bismarck stated that the great problems of the time must be resolved by blood and iron, this was also Lenin’s view.

Of course, neither of them believed that blood and iron were enough on their own. Like Bismarck, Lenin also was a master of diplomacy, the art of deceiving his opponents, of surprising them and discovering their weak points, in order to overturn them. And just like Bismarck if he believed that the road he was on would not to lead to his goal, Lenin was ready, without any reservations, to immediately reverse his course and set out on another road. With the same ease with which Bismarck in 1878 went over from free trade to protectionism, Lenin turned from pure communism to the ‘NEP’ (New Economic Policy).

But of course, as is self-evident and has already been noted, in addition to similarities between the two there were also differences, and certainly not minor ones, in their aims. Lenin far surpassed Bismarck in his understanding of theory, which he studied enthusiastically, and in his absence of self-interest. Bismarck had no time for theory, and he used the possession of state power for personal gain.

However, Lenin lagged behind Bismarck in his knowledge of foreign countries. Bismarck carefully studied the states, their power and the class relations in them, with which his foreign policy had to deal. Lenin, by contrast, although he lived for decades as an emigrant in Western Europe, still never achieved a full understanding of its political and social peculiarities. His politics, which was completely adapted to the peculiarities within Russia, was with regard to foreign countries based on the expectation of a world revolution, which to anyone who knew Western Europe must have appeared from the start as an illusion. Here we find the profoundest difference between Bismarck and Lenin. The former established his power through the success of his foreign policy, the latter through his domestic policy. The cause of that lies not only in a difference in the type of talents of the two men, but also in a difference in the environments in which they worked.

Bismarck came to power in a country where the masses had already woken to intense political life through the French Revolution and the Napoleonic War, and then through the 1848 Revolution. To impose his complete authority over them and to abolish their independent thought and action proved impossible. In that he failed utterly. Lenin by contrast came to power amidst masses who were agitated to an extreme extent because of the war, but who had not yet had the experience of independent political thought and aspirations over further generations, and thus after the waning of the agitation were subordinated without difficulty to the power of Lenin’s superior personality and his comrades.

Here lies the deepest root of Lenin’s great success, but here also the beginnings of my greatest reservations concerning his system. Because the liberation of the proletariat means above all the fullest independence of its thought and activity. Considerable, promising beginnings in that direction already existed in the Russian proletariat before the revolution of 1917. Lenin thus began by granting the proletariat the fullest freedom. But the political and economic consequences of his methods forced him increasingly to restrict it. I will not dwell on this, for here I overstep the bounds of an obituary and turn it into a polemic.

It should also be noted that despite my reservations concerning Lenin’s methods I do not despair of the situation of the Russian revolution. From my standpoint it appears that Lenin may have led the proletarian revolution to victory in Russia, but he was unable to make it bear fruit. In this respect the Russian revolution is not yet finished. It will not be taken to the grave with Lenin.

In Russia, too, the aspirations of the working masses for independence will finally gain acceptance. And then all the fruits, which the Russian revolution contained within it in the greatest abundance, will ripen.

Then will all the working people of Russia, and all the working people of the world, without divisions in the movement, remember with gratitude all their great pioneers, who over decades full of struggle and tribulations prepared the Russian revolution and then led it to victory. And also for those who today stand in opposition to the Communist Party, the name of Lenin will not be missing from this pantheon.

This situation of the unity of the working masses of the world in jointly honouring their fallen hero, in freely working together to build the socialist society, is one I may not yet see, before I follow Lenin into the land from which no traveller ever returns.

Vienna, 28 January 1924

*From The Archives Of The “Revolutionary History” Journal-The German Left and Bolshevism by Walter Held

Click on the headline to link to an American Left History post related to this entry.

Markin comment:

This is an excellent documentary source for today’s militants to “discovery” the work of our forbears, whether we agree with their programs or not. Mainly not, but that does not negate the value of such work done under the pressure of revolutionary times. Hopefully we will do better when our time comes.

********
From Issue no.6, 1997 of the Marxist Discussion journal What Next? By kind permission of the editor Bob Pitt, 24 Georgiana St, London, NW1 0EA, email wh@tnext.freeserve.co.uk, who introduces the article..

The German Left and Bolshevism by Walter Held

Like the previous piece, this article first appeared in the February 1939 issue of the New International. It is a reply to Max Shachtman’s article, Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg, which was reprinted in What Next? No.4. In contrast to the ‘revisionist’ approach to the history of the early Communist International which Held would adopt in his later article Why the German Revolution Failed (reprinted in the first issue of this journal), he presents here a fiercely orthodox defence of Leninism against Luxemburgism. In doing so, he raises a number of issues – the relationship between spontaneity and Marxism, and the appropriate form of revolutionary political organisation, for example – which will hopefully be the subject of further discussion.

INTELLECTUAL life in the Soviet Union throughout the rule of the epigones has consisted exclusively of the struggle against ‘Trotskyism’, to the point where it finally perished on this diet and all that is wafted to us today from Stalin’s realm is the icy air of the grave. The struggle against Trotsky, which was conducted under the sign of canonising Lenin and Bolshevism as Stalin understood them, also collided with the disturbing shade of Rosa Luxemburg. And upon the ukase of the ruffian and illiterate to whom not very deferential history, by one of its odd dialectical capers, confided the heritage of one of the most gifted scientific minds of all times, a pack of yelping curs flung themselves upon the corpse of the great revolutionist that was thrown before them. At that time it was the self-evident duty of every Marxian publicist who takes his task seriously, to come forward in defence of the memory of the great proletarian leader and to underscore as they deserved to be her progressive sides, her immortal merits. In contrast to Stalin’s kept young rogues, Rosa Luxemburg had to an outstanding degree those qualities which distinguish a true revolutionary leader: scientific seriousness in the treatment of every question, unselfish absorption in the cause, self-discipline and exemplary courage.

If, however, the question is once more put today of the content of the differences between Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg – and it must be put again, in so far as this question relates to the solution of present tasks – we cannot content ourselves with a simple obeisance to the memory of Rosa Luxemburg. Besides, it would mean today to profane instead of honour Rosa’s memory if we were to allow the discussion on this theme to be influenced in the slightest by the Stalinist publications. Shafts from this side cannot touch Rosa Luxemburg. As an ideological current Stalinism is dead. It does not stand before history as accuser, but as accused.

On the other hand, there are today numerous currents which counter-pose to the Bolshevik conception, so to speak, a Luxemburgian conception. These gentleman see in Stalin’s total police dictatorship and the Moscow Trials the direct result of Lenin’s ‘centralism’ and deduce that Rosa Luxemburg has remained correct in her polemic against Lenin’s alleged overestimation of centralised leadership. This at first blush fascinating argument overlooks, nevertheless, the fact that if Lenin is to be made responsible for Stalin, it is no less justified to load Rosa Luxemburg with the responsibility for the rule ... of Hitler. And actually there is in both assertions a kernel, only a kernel, of truth, but it is just this kernel that must be discovered.

Comrade Max Shachtman, in an exceptionally interesting article on this theme (Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg, New International, May 1938), endeavoured to explain the differences between Lenin and Luxernburg by the historic diversity of Russian and German conditions. Now such an investigation of the objective background of the divergences is naturally entirely necessary for an understanding of them. But the investigation cannot stop there; otherwise we run the risk of falling into Austro-Marxism, that is, a Marxism which confines itself to demonstrating, with the aid of the Marxian method (a caricature of the Marxian method), that everything happened as it had to happen, and which thus eliminates from history the responsibility of the subjective factor. In reality, however, we all know that the revolutionary labour movement up to now foundered not on the objective situation as such but on its subjective subjugation. Then if we are to overcome the crisis of the labour movement, we must pitilessly lay bare the ultimate causes of this subjective failure and make the balance sheet of this dearly paid-for historical experience part of the inalienable theoretical capital of the Fourth International.

International significance of Lenin
In defence of Luxemburg’s ‘anti-Bolshevism’ comrade Shachtman correctly points out that even Lenin erred in his estimation of the factions of the German social democracy. Lenin’s great mistake consisted in this, that he applied his organisational, literary, strategical and tactical plan only to Russia, and pursued it to its final consequences only within the Russian movement, that, indeed, he regarded Bolshevism as the representation of the tendency of Bebel and Kautsky on Russian soil. So great was Lenin’s confidence in Kautsky that he paid no attention to the difference that arose in 1910 between Kautsky and the German left, and thus missed a highly favourable opportunity to create a firm support for Bolshevism in Germany, to extend the Bolshevik plan internationally. And in the last analysis, this mistake, this failure, this exclusively national application of the essentially international Bolshevik plan, is the deepest reason for the isolation of the Russian Revolution and, therefore, for the Stalinist Thermidor and impending fall of the Soviet Union. Or in other words: the gifted Leninist works What Is To Be Done? and One Step Forward, Two Steps Back of the first years of this century are in no wise of specifically Russian – as comrade Shachtman seems to assume -but of international significance. The ideas developed in these books on the relationship of spontaneity to conscious plan, on the role, organisational structure and tasks of the revolutionary party and their relationship to the proletariat and the other classes of society, the relationship of Marxian science and the labour movement – all these ideas have nothing specifically Russian in them,

In his work which appeared three years after the victory of the October Revolution, ‘Left Wing’ Communism – an Infantile Disorder, Lenin then tried to make the Bolshevik conception of 1903 accessible and understandable to the West European workers. The question why this attempt failed should be treated anew in connection with the hapless March adventure of the German Communist Party, and we reserve this for a later article. Here it is a question only of the following: whoever studies attentively ‘Left Wing’ Communism and compares it with the early writings of Lenin, will find again the same ideas and the same conception, even if in highly popularised form. That, however, would refute the view that Lenin did not consider his ideas of 1903 as ‘export commodities’. In 1903, Lenin did not think of any exporting only because he imagined lie was importing into ‘backward’ Russia the ideas of Bebel and Kautsky which had long ago become avowed truisms in ‘progressive’ Germany, in order to have them prevail over the revisionist, opportunistic and centrist currents of Martinov and Martov; whereas in reality it should have been a question of counter-posing the Bolshevik conception, the programme of What Is To Be Done?, to the whole theory and practice of the Second International, the Bernsteinian as well as the Kautskyian and Luxemburglan tendencies.

It would, however, be wrong to ignore the enormous qualitative difference in the historical mistakes of Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg. While Lenin succeeded in creating the first truly Marxian party, which led the Russian proletariat to the summits of power and thereby gave the world proletariat a tremendous impulsion and a vast mass of new points of view, experiences and lessons; while Lenin’s conception of 1903 found its highest confirmation in the planfully directed October uprising; Rosa’s conception suffered a terrible shipwreck in January 1919, and the German left presented us, besides a series of remarkable characters and martyrs to the cause, only the bitter lesson of a new defeat.

At bottom, the disastrous mistake of Rosa Luxemburg was concentrated in the question of the role of the party, in the definition of the social democracy as ‘the self-movement of the working class’, which she counter-posed to the brilliant Leninist definition of ‘the revolutionary social democrats as Jacobins bound up with the working class’. ‘The social democracy as the self-movement of the working class’ can never be anything but trade unionism transferred to the political sphere. Such a social democracy will never shake bourgeois society to its foundations. It will either run its head vainly against the solid walls of the bourgeois state or voluntarily submit to the latter as it stands. The proletarian class as a whole is, under the conditions of capitalism, not in a position to raise itself to such a level of consciousness as to be able to confront the bourgeoisie in a superior manner in all fields, to destroy bourgeois authority and to replace it with proletarian authority. Capitalism would not be suppression, exploitation and slavery if that were not the case. That is just why the problem is to create out of the specialists closely bound up with the working class a firmly disciplined organisation which, with the aid of Marxian armour, destroys bourgeois authority first in theory and then in practical reality, and leads the ’self-movement’ of the working class beyond the limits set for it-

Two Mistakes

Now Rosa Luxemburg had the advantage over Lenin of observing the German party at closer range. That is why she recognised its conservative character as early as 1904. She sees that the party is stuck in the mud of tradition, refuses to raise up new problems, limps behind the masses. And what conclusions does she draw from this? ‘The conscious initiative of the party leadership in the shaping of tactics plays only a slight role.’ ‘The fighting tactic of the social democracy is the result of a continuous series of great creative acts of the experimental, often elementary class struggle.’ ‘The unconscious precedes the conscious, the logic of the objective historical process precedes the subjective logic of its bearers.’ ‘The only subject upon whom the role of guide now devolves is the mass of the working class.’ In short, in her despair over the conservative inertia of the social democratic apparatus in Germany, Rosa Luxemburg created what Lenin characterised with full justice as the ‘not-to-be-taken-seriously nonsense of organisation and tactics as a process’, although, to be sure, he overlooked the fact, as we have already emphasised, that Rosa was completely in the right in her characterisation of the German party. But even here Rosa committed the grosser mistake. She separated form from content, she combated centralism as such, instead of counterposing the centralism of the revolutionary Marxists to that of the opportunists. In this way, Rosa, in spite of the fact that she agreed with Bolshevism in most political questions at the international congresses, was driven to the same position to which Menshevism fled in the face of Lenin’s intransigence. And history prepared the same fate for both of them, deciding each time in its own manner for centralism; while the Bolsheviks drive the Mensheviks out of the soviets, Noske succeeds in flinging Spartacus out of the chamber of the German revolution and shutting the door behind it.

The lack of final consistency accompanied Rosa throughout her political life, whereas Lenin, precisely because of the relentlessness with which he carried out a once recognised necessity, was in a position to accomplish his historic mission.

In her work written in 1899, Social Reform or Social Revolution, which will forever remain a pearl in Marxian polemical literature, Rosa Luxemburg rightfully demanded the expulsion of the Bemsteinians from the party. In the second edition of this work, which appeared in 1908, she omitted all the corresponding passages. Bemsteinism had eaten its way into the flesh of the German party like a fungus; the flesh was decomposing. But what new consequence did Rosa draw? None at all. She threatened the petrified leadership: the masses will teach you new mores! But if the masses will correct the mistakes of the party out of their own initiative, why then the demand for Bernstein’s expulsion in 1899? In 1910, Rosa saw through the pedantic officialdom of Kautsky and attacked him sharply in a series of articles. Yet again she does not draw the final consequence of her judgement. Although she stops her Sunday visits to Kautsky and thus gives new evidence of her spotless and exemplary character, she is nevertheless lacking politically in the same measure of resoluteness. If the party was ravaged by Bernsteinism and even the ‘Marxian centre’ of the Neue Zeit had come to a standstill in the routine of the ‘tactic that stood the test for forty years’, then it was absolutely necessary to unfurl the Marxian banner anew and in the eyes of all, with the formal question whether to constitute a new party immediately or to remain for a while inside the social democracy as a firmly-disciplined faction, playing a minor role. In any case, however, it was necessary to come out against the reformism and centrism of the social democracy in every single question and permanently, to drive it out of reality instead of letting oneself be driven out by it. The German left never raised the question clearly, much less did it have a firm plan for resolving it.

Luxemburg’s Allusions

It is known that Lenin first regarded as a Hohenzollern forgery the number of the Vorwärts which bought the report of the vote of the German social democracy in the Reichstag. This is not to be wondered at and is in accord with his previous attitude, i.e., with his illusions relative to Kautsky and the German centre. But Rosa, who had seen through the opportunistic character of the German party ten years earlier, who experienced the worst disillusionment above all at the Jena congress of 1913 – what was her attitude? She gave way to convulsive sobbing in the Vorwärts editorial board, thought she was going mad, yes, even the thought of suicide came to her mind. Again a reaction which wrings from us the greatest human sympathy and respect for this singular woman, but which nevertheless also clearly discloses the main political weakness of the German lefts. She had seen through the Bernsteinians and the Scheidemanns, the Legiens and even the Kautskys and Hilferdings, and in spite of it she was steeped in illusions about the social democracy, in spite of it she believed that this Bemstein-Kautsky social democracy would pass a great historical test. In reality, if the German left had drawn the final consequence from its criticism of the official social-democracy – and whoever does not draw the final consequence in politics, lands unfailingly under the wheels – it would have been prepared for the Fourth of August, foretold it and warned against it. It is clear that in this case the catastrophe of the Fourth of August would not have taken on anything like its scope, the reorganisation of the vanguard would have proceeded much more easily and the revolutionary maturing accelerated much differently, and the German revolution in general would have taken a different course. Thus even Liebknecht allowed himself to be taken by surprise by the decision of the Reichstag fraction and it took months for the tiny handful to assemble again: Rosa Luxemburg, Franz Mehring, Clara Zetkin, Karl Liebknecht, Leo Jogisches, Paul Levi. The profounder reason for the illusions of the German left with regard to the whole social democracy was founded, in turn, in its main error, in the disastrous ignoring of the reciprocal relation between party and masses. Rosa Luxemburg and her friends consoled themselves with this, that in the great historical crisis the masses would correct the party and sweep it along, Now they had to witness the fact that there was nothing for the masses to do in this situation except to follow – even perhaps while gritting their teeth – the instructions of the party.

Yet, while Lenin immediately draws the last consequence from the Fourth of August with his customary keenness – ‘The Second International Is dead, long live the Third!’ – and now seeks to develop, also in the International, all the elements to a Bolshevik conception of things (see, for example, his criticism of the Junius brochure), the German left continues to remain steeped in its fundamental mistake. The same erroneous conceptions on the role of the party which Rosa Luxemburg defended in 1904, recur in an article she published on 31 March 1917 in the Duisburg organ of the USPD, Der Kampf. ‘The Spartacus League tendency’, it says, ‘does not counter-pose to the Independent social democracy another programme and a fundamentally quite different tactic, which supply at every moment and as a permanent structure the basis of a separate party existence [that’s just what the problem was! W.H.], rather it is only [!] another historical tendency of the whole movement of the proletariat, from which follows, to be sure, a different attitude in almost every question of tactics and organisation. The opinion, however, that from this follows the necessity or even only the objective possibility of now jamming the workers into different, carefully separated party cages corresponding to the two tendencies of the opposition, is based upon a conventicle-conception of the party.’

From the ‘not-to-be-taken-seriously’ nonsense of the organisation as a process runs a straight line to this no less curious philosophy of an organisation which, although it does not counterpose to the opportunistic tendency any independent programme and any fundamentally quite different tactic, nevertheless does embody ‘another historical tendency’. With such light ideological baggage did Spartacus march in the German revolution. The catastrophic effect was not to be averted.

The German Catastrophe

Came November 9, the ’spontaneous people’s revolution’, which the SPI) resisted to the very last minute, but for which neither the Independent SPD nor Spartacus had taken the initiative. The November revolution in Germany could overturn the solid structure of capitalism just as little as could the February revolution in Russia; in both cases they were only able to eliminate the monarchistic embellishment. The real work first began after November. It is of course to the honour of Spartacus that it recognised this and refused to be party to the general round of fraternisation which always followed every popular uprising organised ‘from below’ and victorious at the first shot and into which such ‘Bolsheviks’ as Stalin also fell in February 1917. Still, Spartacus committed the reverse mistake and adopted an ultimatist attitude towards the masses. The same Rosa Luxemburg who in her criticism of the Russian revolution had reproached the Bolsheviks for the lack of democracy and the suppression of the soviet minority, refused to be elected onto the Executive Council of the Berlin Workers’ and Soldiers’ Councils together with the social democrats of the Ebert tendency. The masses did not accept this ultimatum of the Spartacus League, and the result was an Executive Council without Spartacus. The further result was that Spartacus did not get the slightest influence upon the elections to the first German Council Congress and remained without representation in it. Liebknecht had to confine himself to impotent attempts to conquer the congress ‘from without’. These events ought now to have sufficed to show Spartacus what its task was: namely, Lenin’s programme of April 1917. Patiently explain, restrain the small revolutionary minority from ill-considered steps, penetrate into the mass organisations and all the classes of the population, expose and polemically annihilate the reformists and centrists, in order, finally, at the historically ripe moment, to proceed to the insurrection.

The founding conference of the Communist Party, which finally takes place at the end of December 1918, decides however to drive the line of abstentionism to the point of absurdity, to boycott the elections to the National Assembly; there is even a discussion on withdrawing from the mass trade unions, And Rosa, who had just accused the Bolsheviks because they renounced the institution of the National Assembly after the victory, that is, possessing power they exercised the dictatorship – Rosa suffered the misfortune of becoming the prisoner of a party which renounces the National Assembly before the victory, and which, as a small minority, undertakes the hopeless task of imposing its ultimatum on the vast majority. Although she herself spoke for participation in the elections and lamented the ‘immaturity’ of the congress, she did not recognise that her own disorganising organisational principles had suffered shipwreck here, that in her own way she had created a Utopian-radical instead of a Marxian party. No surgeon can operate with a dull knife, no Marxist can act with an undisciplined, Utopian party. And still Rosa does not dare to carry out the break with this Utopian element, she herself becomes the victim of the organisational fetishism with which she wrongly reproached Lenin, and she goes to the operating table of history with a dull instrument. Possibly it is only because she has still not yet grasped the fact that the success or failure of the revolution depends upon her own self, upon her own policy. And thus we also find once more in the Spartacus programme, adopted, characteristically, unanimously by the same congress which decided on abstention from the elections, the old mistakes. Just read the following passage: ‘In tenacious struggle with capital, breast to breast in every factory, by direct pressure of the masses, by strikes, by creating their permanent organs of representation, the workers can achieve control over production and finally the actual direction.’ ‘The Spartacus League is not a party which seeks to reach dominion over the working masses or through the working masses. The Spartacus League is only [!] the most conscious part of the proletariat, which, at every step of the whole broad mass of the working class, points out its historical tasks.’ It follows clearly that Rosa Luxemburg had an entirely inadequate picture of the course of the proletarian revolution, She conceived of the proletarian revolution as a sort of new November revolution, as a chain of strikes and uprisings which finally merge into a general strike or even a popular uprising. With her the role of the party was confined to summoning the masses to action, until fully the power will fall into the lap of the party as a ripe fruit, something like the social democracy reaped the fruits of the first revolution. She did not recognise that it is the task of the party to assemble the masses and to discipline them like troops for a battle, and that the leadership of the party, like a gifted field commander or general staff, must have the strategic plan of battle in its head and convert it into a reality.

It was the ignoring of this task of the party that led Spartacus to the worst mistake that a revolutionary party can ever commit, namely, to play with the insurrection. For the Spartacus insurrection of January 1919 was nothing but a completely planless, quite inconceivably naive playing with the fire of insurrection. The narrow-minded counter-revolutionists, Hohenzollern sergeant-majors, stupid fanatics of Order and bloodhounds of the bourgeoisie, Noske and Ebert, set a trap for Spartacus and Spartacus fell into the trap with covered eyes. And thus did also Liebknecht, Luxemburg and Jogisches suffer the typical fate of all German revolutionists, which the exceptionally talented poet Oska Panizza, who later went mad, epitomised in the unsentimental phrase: ‘Until now the Germans have unfortunately known only the passive form of beheading ... being beheaded.’ While, on the contrary, the Russians under the leadership of the Bolsheviks proceeded to the realisation of the prediction made as far back as 1896 by the same Panizza: ‘Russia, that lurking brain, will some day burst out frightfully and the people of the Bakunins and Dostoievskys will gain its freedom by a fallen head.’ Between beheading and being beheaded, however, between active and passive, between Lenin and Luxemburg, there is no compromise.

*The Question Of The Stillborn German Revolution Of 1923-Part Two- German Communist Party Leader August Thalheimer- 1923: A Missed Opportunity? The German October Legend And The Real History Of 1923 (1931)

Click on the headline to link to an online copy of 1923: A Missed Opportunity? The German October Legend and the Real History of 1923 by August Thalheimer. Here again it was too long to place in this space.

Markin comment:The Bolshevik-led revolution in Russia in October 1917 was consciously predicated by the leadership (Lenin, Trotsky, etc., some others pushing forward, some being dragged along in the fight) on the premise that the Russian revolution would not, could not, stand alone for long either against the backlash onslaught of world imperialism, or on a more positive note, once the tasks of socialist construction reached a certain point. The purpose of the Communist International, founded in 1919 in the heat of the Russian civil war, by the Bolsheviks and their international supporters was the organizational expression of that above-mentioned premise. To work through and learn the lessons of the Bolshevik experience and to go all out to defeat world imperialism and create a new social order. I might add that political, social, and military conditions in war-weary World War I Europe in 1918 and 1919 made those premises something more than far-fetched utopian hopes. And central to those hopes were events in Germany.

If the original premise of Marxism (espoused specifically by both Marx and Engels in their respective political lifetimes) that the revolution would break out in an advanced capitalist European country then Germany, with its high level of capitalist development and socialist traditions and organizations, was the logical place to assume such an event would occur. And that premise, despite the betrayals of the German social democratic leadership in the war period, animated Lenin and Trotsky in their planning for the extension of socialist revolution westward. The rise of a “peace” socialist wing (the Independent Socialists) during the late phases of the war, the events around the smashing of the German monarchy and the creation of a socialist-led bourgeois republic in the wake of military defeat, the ill-starred Spartacist uprising, the working class response to the later Kapp Putsch, the also-ill-starred March Action of 1921, and the possibilities of a revolution in 1923 in reaction to the French exactions in the Ruhr and other events that year all made for a period of realistic revolutionary upheaval that was fertile ground for revolutionaries. And revolutionary hopes.

As we are painfully, no, very painfully, aware no revolution occurred in that period and that hard fact had profound repercussions on the then isolated Russian experiment. That hard fact has also left a somewhat unresolved question among communist militants, thoughtful communist militants anyway, about the prospects then. The question boils down to, as foreshadowed in the headline to this entry, whether there was any basis for the notion that a revolution could have occurred in Germany in 1923. We know what happened because it didn’t, but there are sometimes valuable conditionals pose in absorbing the lessons of history, our communist history. The yes or no of a German revolution is one such question. I have given my opinion previously-if there was no chance of revolution in Germany in 1923, win or lose, then the whole notion of proletarian revolution was just a utopian dream of a bunch of European outcast radicals. The corollary to that proposition is that, in the year 2010, the socialist cooperative notion that we fight for, other than as an abstract intellectual idea, is utopian, and that we are the mad grandchildren (and great-grandchildren) of those mad Europeans. That idea, with world imperialism wreaking havoc and breathing down our backs relentlessly in all quarters makes that corollary ill-founded. So let’s take another look at Germany 1923 from the several perspectives I have gathered in today’s postings.

Hands Off The Girls Scouts!- In Georgia- And Everywhere

Click on the headline to link to an MSNBC-AP story about the plight of some Georgia Girls Scouts at the hands of local law enforcement.

Markin comment:

Sure, I know we still have at least the remnants of a bourgeois democracy that allows us, within shifting limits, to pursue our leftist political agenda. But on some days, and today is one of them, I am not as sure as the linked story to this entry describes in detail. It seems down in Georgia, old redneck Confederate state Georgia, that we will probably be hearing more about as we head closer to the observances of the 150th anniversary of the beginning of the American Civil War ( I will just say one thing about that here for now, William Tecumseh Sherman, and that name should put paid to that) some rogue cop decided to take a serious stand against rampant shopping mall crime and corral a bunch of Girl Scouts who were selling their cookies (yes, it is that time of years) at that site. Without a permit. All hell broke loose, or would have if cooler (and more public relations-conscious) heads had not prevailed. Now we leftist know, or should know, that our politics, especially our street politics are bound to bring us in confrontation with the police, the prime defenders of the bourgeois capitalist state. That comes with the territory. But Girl Scouts, under any probable scenario short one of the darling holding a gun to your face in order to get you to buy their damn cookies. Come on.

But see it never comes to that. Believe me it never comes to that last scenario. I, unlike that lightly-brained (and clueless) Georgia cop, figured out long along that in dealing with the Girl Scouts when they get into high selling mode come late winter the best course is surrender. And cut your losses. See, for the past several years I have bought my Girl Scout cookies exclusively from a family of sisters down the street as they, in turn, came of Girl Scout age. It’s automatic, as each winsome smiled girl comes knocking at the door and says (no sales pitch necessary) what kind and how many do I want. And I just hem and haw, and say oh I don’t know, peanut butter and mint. That, my friends is the secret. Order two boxes and be done with. No scowls about the cheap guy who only buys one crummy box to piece them off. Now, I am a respected repeat customer, and get an extra winsome smile and a thanks at the end of the transaction. And here is the beautiful part now when I am accosted by some other cookie sellers all I have to do is say that girl's family name and they back right off. Nice, right?

This whole transaction thing has got me to thinking though about what this primitive capitalist accumulation cookie-selling thing means in the big picture. Sure it is meant to get some funds for some worthy endeavor to keep these kids off the streets. And learning the rudiments of capitalist business procedure are an undeniable part but let me get a little dreamy here. Under our future socialist society where we collectively allocate plenty of resources for kids’ stuff, educational or adventurous, there will be no need for such quaint practices as winsome, smiling young girls stiff-arming people to buy some cheap jack cookies. Well, maybe, some future Young Pioneers will want to do so as a game to see how kids had to hustle for dough in ancient times. Sure, that might be fun. But until that day- Hands Off The Girl Scouts!

*From The Archives Of The “Revolutionary History” Journal- Guest Book Reviews

Markin comment:

This is an excellent documentary source for today’s militants to “discover” the work of our forbears, whether we agree with their programs or not. Mainly not, but that does not negate the value of such work done under the pressure of revolutionary times. Hopefully we will do better when our time comes.
***************
Reviews

Max Adler, A Socialist Remembers, Duckworth, London, 1988, pp174, £16.95

This memoir, with its dedication:

To the memory of my parents

Rudolf and Selma Adler

(Theresienstadt and Auschwitz 1942)

and for my wife Janka

is distinguished by many features, features lacking in similar books dealing with the same period and circumstances. Although certainly not a theoretical work, it is objective, self-critical and devoid of self-pity or hysteria. The writing is clear, especially on the complicated national and ethnic problems following the break-up of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, into which the author was born, in Pilsen, now Plzen, in western Bohemia.

The story of his school life is a tale of constant revolt against teachers and parents. He relates how:

Czechoslovakia was very tolerant in religion. At 14 you could go to a government office and declare, either that you wanted to change your religion, or that you wanted to contract out of a religious community altogether without entering another. There is even a German and a Czech term for this which does not exist in English: you could become ‘konfessionslos’, in Czech ‘bez nabozenstvi’, i.e. without any religion. On my fourteenth birthday I promptly declared myself ‘Konfessionslos’. As a consequence I no longer had to attend religious instruction. There was a rabbi in Pilsen, a Dr Golinsky, a wise and learned man. Like most of the clergy he was underpaid and poor, and to supplement his income he undertook religious instruction himself. According to the educational laws there had to be a minimum of 10 pupils for a non-obligatory class. We had been 10, and when I left there were only nine. The rabbi was not a very religious man: he was far too wise and worldly for that. But he needed the money, and he went to my father, who had had no idea that I had renounced my religion, and told him the story.

My father took a step which shows what a good and intelligent man he was. He did not scold me, for he knew that I had the backing of the law, but he appealed to me by pointing out how poor the rabbi was, that he needed the money and that I, as a Socialist, should support him. The result was that I agreed to attend the class on condition that I need not prepare the lessons, and that I kept quiet.

As a student in Vienna he was an active member of the Austrian Socialist Party. He collected the dues of the party members in his district, one of whom was Otto Klemperer, the conductor. The Prague Social Democratic paper appointed him their Vienna correspondent. He gave lectures at the Austrian party school, where he also studied ‘Marxian economics’ under Dr Benedikt Kautsky, son of Karl Kautsky. As a member of the Schutzbund (the military section of the Socialist Party) he took part in the 15 July 1927 ‘Bloody July’. Here is his account:

It is a sad story. In the smallest of the Länder of which Austria was composed, the Burgenland, which formerly belonged to Hungary and in which Germans, Magyars and Croats lived together peacefully, two members of the Social Democratic Party, simple workers, were murdered by the Austrian Fascists. This was at the beginning of July, and the whole working class movement was deeply shocked. At the trial the murderers were discharged, in spite of all the evidence, by reactionary judges. When it became known in Vienna that the murderers of Schattendorf had got off scot free, tens of thousands of workers assembled before the Ministry of Justice. At first there were peaceful demonstrations. The Schutzbund was mobilised to keep them in order, and I was in the middle of it.

Suddenly the building was set on fire. We in the Schutzbund tried our best to prevent it, but we could do little with an enraged working class who felt that the judgement of Schattendorf was directed against the whole working class movement, as in fact it was. This gave the police a good excuse to shoot at the demonstrators. Eighty-five were killed outright and hundreds were wounded ...

I will never forget the burial of the victims at the cemetery in Vienna when Otto Bauer, the party leader, spoke before the 85 coffins of the victims. It was very moving. We felt that a chapter in the history of the Party was closed. In fact, this event was the beginning of the end of the once-powerful Austrian working class movement. A few years later they lost the civil war.

Next year he was involved in a less serious incident:

There was a strike of the waiters in the Cafe Pruckl, a well-known coffee house in the Ringstrasse patronised by the rich. To help the strikers the Socialist student organisation arranged for about 40 students to go there early in the morning, order a glass of soda water (the cheapest drink available, served by blacklegs) and sit the whole day to prevent paying patrons finding a place. We took food and books with us, and remained completely silent so as not to give the police an excuse to expel us. Also present were various prominent Social Democrats, including a member of parliament. It was no good: at five o’clock the police attacked the coffee house and arrested a number of students, among them myself. We were taken to the police prison, which I had known well enough from previous arrests, accused of having offended the police by shouting at them (which was not true) and then released.

The case made a stir in Vienna, and all the newspapers reported the trial. Of course they slanted their reports according to their political leanings. Thus the Nazi Deutschösterreichische Tagezeitung ran the headline “Prague Jew demonstrates against Cafe Pruckl”. Even the Communist daily, the Rote Fahne (Red Flag), printed a hostile report.

While still studying in Vienna he was offered, and accepted, the co-editorship of a new paper, Friegeist in Reichenberg (now Liberec). Opposite Reichenberg on the German side was a small town in which was advertised a Fascist meeting. In spite of the notice at the entrance, “Entry forbidden to dogs and Jews”, Max attended and reported. The speaker was Adolf Hitler. The year was 1930. In 1931 Max took over the secretaryship of the German Social Democratic party in Slovakia and the Carpatho-Ukraine. In the chapter headed Gun running for the Schutzbund, is the following report:

In 1932 the situation in Austria became critical. There was danger of a civil war between the Socialist Schutzbund and the Fascist Heimwehr; a year later it broke out. Czechoslovakia had an extensive common frontier with Austria, and it was in her interest to help save democracy in that country. In real terms this meant that the Schutzbund should be provided with weapons. Having been a member of the Schutzbund myself in my Viennese days, I knew a good deal about this organisation.

The problem was how to smuggle weapons over the border. The German Social Democratic Party urged the government to make Pressburg the focal point of the weapon smuggling, because Pressburg was close to the Austrian border, and there was also the Danube. My comrade Wagner and I were the central figures in this affair. Money was plentiful, because it came from the government.

Railway carriages were secretly loaded with rifles, ammunition, dynamite and machine guns near the Pressburg railway station. The problem was how to get all this into Austria, and into the right hands. There were two possibilities: either to send the stuff by way of the Danube to Vienna, or to use lorries to take it over the Austrian border. We dispatched several loads on Danube boats, and the rest by lorry.

My wife proved very brave. Many times she went to Vienna to the Austrian Party Presidium, especially to the leader, Otto Bauer, and to General Deutsch who was in command of the Schutzbund. In her overcoat were sewn messages noting when a new load was ready for dispatch.

After the civil war in Austria, which the Socialists lost, many members of the Schutzbund were sentenced to imprisonment or death. Otto Bauer sent a letter to Max warning him not to cross into Austria, as his name was prominently mentioned in the Schutzbund trial. With the Munich agreement and the Nazis’ occupation of the Sudetenland, Chamberlain gave the German Social Democratic Party 1,000 visas for the same number of families. Adler’s wife obtained one for themselves and their five year old son. They flew out of Prague to Britain. There the book ends.

One of the first places he stayed in Britain was a Welsh village, where, with his aptitude for and interest in minority languages, he learned Welsh from the village school mistress. With his knowledge of statistical methods, which he had studied at Vienna, he got himself a job as a statistician with the Daily Herald, where he was elected Deputy Father of the NATSOPA Chapel (National Amalgamated Society of Operative Printers). From about 1952 he was a member of the Workers’ League, and assisted in its publication, the Workers News Bulletin. I am indebted to a member of the Workers League at that time, Joe Thomas, for the above information.

I have also before me a copy of a letter Max wrote to the Jewish Socialist Group in March 1985, when he was 80 years old, saying he would like to join their organisation, but, because of his frail health, he would not be able to attend meetings, demonstrations, etc, but he would support them modestly with some contributions, and had recently been supporting the miners’ strike with a contribution of £100 a month.

He died in 1986.

Ernest Rogers

*From The Archives Of The “Revolutionary History” Journal- Book Reviews

Markin comment:

This is an excellent documentary source for today’s militants to “discover” the work of our forbears, whether we agree with their programs or not. Mainly not, but that does not negate the value of such work done under the pressure of revolutionary times. Hopefully we will do better when our time comes.

**********

Reviews

Karl Kautsky, The Materialist Conception of History, translated by Raymond Meyer and John H. Kautsky, annotated and introduced by John Kautsky, Yale University Press, New Haven 1988, pp.558, £35.00


John Kautsky, the grandson of Karl Kautsky, the ‘Pope of Marxism’, has rendered an immense service in presenting this book in a form that English readers can use. The measure of his achievement (and even more so, that of his grandfather, the author) can be gauged from the fact that this version is smaller than either of the volumes of the German text, but by judicious editing none of the coherence of the original is lost.

The book’s value can hardly be overestimated. Kautsky was the literary legatee of Marx and Engels, and the great systematiser of their work. This volume is thus a synthesis, if not an encyclopaedia of the world view of the German Social Democratic Party, and indeed of the Second International as a whole.

It also represents, of course, the background against which Lenin and Trotsky developed their ideas. Kautsky’s negative attitude to Freud, for example (pp.58, 93, 106-7, 511), stands in marked contrast to Trotsky in Culture and Socialism, and readers of Lenin’s Materialism and Empirio-criticism will be interested to learn that Kautsky placed far more value on Mach’s work than Lenin did (p.31). Those who are fond of holding forth on the superiority of Lenin’s dialectics over Kautsky’s alleged ‘mechanical materialism’ will be surprised to find out that he is very critical of Engels’ concept of the ‘dialectics of nature’, holding that “like Hegel, we assume that the dialectic in which the thesis itself generates its own antithesis holds good only for human development in society” (p.218).

Coming to the broad sweep of history, students of the Marxist theory of historical development will note that Kautsky identifies and describes the Asiatic Mode, in which he includes Egyptian, Mesopotamian, Indian and especially Chinese society (pp.140, 278), whose basic mechanism he accepts as hydraulic works (pp.214, 307-10), and delineates the causes of its limitation and stagnation (pp.317-8, 331, 337-8, 543). He even anticipates the theories of Umberto Melotti’s Marx and the Third World when he explains the state form of the Soviet Union as a reversion to “a new despotism, a bureaucratic military despotism under the leadership of a dictatorship of intellectuals’ (p.414). He has none of the reservations of our modern quasi-Marxists at describing Classical society as slave-based (pp.346-7) and ascribes the ultimate failure of the city state to the inbuilt tendency of the slave mode of production to stagnation and decline (p.352).

There is, of course, a weaker side to the book. Kautsky’s Olympian detachment deserts him when he goes over once again his polemic with Bolshevism, which he accuses of holding “that every antagonism among peoples and classes can only be fought out by bloody war” (p.320), and it is inevitably over the question of revolution and the class theory of the state that he appears most limp. He assures us that “there is no longer room for armed struggle as a way of carrying on class conflicts” in a democratic state, in which even the mass strike “hardly seems applicable” (p.376). Industrial capital, we are told, “cannot simply be expropriated without economic damage to society and to the workers themselves” (p.377). Considerable exegetical violence is done both to Marx, whose concept of the dictatorship of the proletariat is identified with a democratic republic (p.390), and to Engels, whose forecast of the state taking possession of production as “an act” is put down to an inability to understand that “this transition can only be a more or less slowly advancing process” (p.446).

Kautsky’s book was published in 1927, in the middle of the palmy days of the ‘Roaring Twenties’ and the Stresemann Era, and its trouble-free, evolutionary, unproblematic conception of gradual upward human progress seemed to be a reasonable assumption at the time. Hegelian discontinuities and dialectical leaps are noticeably absent from it. As he admits in several places (pp.6, 66, etc.) he came to his theory of historical change through Darwin rather than Hegel or Marx, and in the end his work is really no more than an immense Darwinian evolutionary rationalisation. History was shortly to deal it a series of rapid and cruel blows. Two years later came the Wall Street crash and another two more years were to see Hitler in power and Kautsky in exile in Prague, where he died in 1938 witnessing the massive wreck of the German workers’ movement.

For there were others who also took their inspiration from Darwin, and developed his insights in unforeseen ways. As opposed to Kautsky, who took over the theory of evolution, others were more interested in natural selection and the survival of the fittest. In several places Kautsky has to argue against racial theories erected on just these Darwinian premises (pp.12,4-5, 137, 149). For the moment Hitler’s movement was no larger than a cloud, the size of a man’s hand, in an otherwise clear sky. “If the expression ‘intensification of class antagonisms’ means that the class struggles assume increasingly violent forms“, Kautsky notes, “then the view implicit in that expression would certainly not be correct” (p.428). He writes his political epitaph, and unfortunately that of the German proletariat as well, with massive if unconscious irony:

The question of whether the capitalists will undertake an armed attack on democracy comes down ... to the question of whether they will be able to find an adequate armed force that is available to them for this purpose ... Today it is the Fascists who have become the paid executioners of the people’s freedom. They are certainly dangerous, but fortunately only under certain conditions that the capitalists cannot conjure up as they choose. In order to be politically effective, the Fascists must appear in large numbers ... In Germany, they will have to be almost one million strong in order to attain this proportion. In an industrialised country, it is impossible to get hold of such a large number of scoundrels in the prime of life for capitalistic purposes (p.394).

Al Richardson



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Reviews



Max Adler, A Socialist Remembers, Duckworth, London, 1988, pp174, £16.95









This memoir, with its dedication:

*From The Archives Of "Women And Revolution"-The Lessons Of Class Struggle- Hamburg: Women Spark Shipyard Occupation (1984)

Markin comment:

The following is an article from the Spring 1985 issue of "Women and Revolution" that may have some historical interest for old "new leftists", perhaps, and well as for younger militants interested in various cultural and social questions that intersect the class struggle. Or for those just interested in a Marxist position on a series of social questions that are thrust upon us by the vagaries of bourgeois society. I will be posting more such articles from the back issues of "Women and Revolution" during Women's History Month and periodically throughout the year.

********

Markin comment:

With the desperate need to ramp up the class struggle today (from our side, the bosses have been on a seemingly eternal offensive) this is a good article not only about the vanguard role that women can, and have, played in important class struggles in the past but about the tactics and strategy necessary to win struggles, ifonditions make that possible.


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The Lessons Of Class Struggle- Hamburg: Women Spark Shipyard Occupation (1984)

Last fall in West Germany strikes and plant occupations broke out in the key Hamburg and Bremen shipyards against massive layoffs of the workforce. The nine-day Hamburg HDW [Howaldtswerke-Deutsche Werft] shipyard occupation in September was sparked in large part by the militant actions of a group of women, wives of shipyard workers. W&R, along with comrades of the Trotzkistische Liga Deutschlands (TLD), section of the international Spartacist tendency, recently spoke at length with Birgit Wojak, one of the main activists of the women's group; we are pleased to print below excerpts from this very exciting interview.

The TLD had raised key demands during the occupation, in leaflets and discussions with workers in Hamburg and nationally, to extend and win the workers' strikes. These included: "For factory occupations in all plants hit by mass layoffs and closings! For a joint national shipyard, steel and mine strike!" Layoffs were hitting the vital Ruhr steel and mining districts. At the same time the Board of Directors of HDW (which is owned by a state conglomerate) announced that in HDW's Hamburg branch one half of the 4,500 workers would be laid off and in HDW's Kiel branch one out of every three of the 9,000 workers. This "hot autumn" of workers' demonstrations, strikes and occupations
potentially posed the most important class battle for the German workers in 30 years.

The Hamburg and Bremen shipyard occupations took place as political ferment in West Germany is greater than at any time since the founding of the Federal Republic in 1948. The deployment in West Germany of the first-strike Pershing 2 missiles, under the command of the anti-Soviet fanatic Reagan, has deeply polarized West German society. The dramatic actions of the North Sea shipyard workers is a further sign that the West German capitalist order, long the relatively stable core of NATO Europe, is now beginning to break down under the combined impact of war mobilization and economic crisis.

But as Wojak graphically describes, not only the "IG Metall" union bureaucracy and the SPD [Social Democratic Party], but even the so-called "leftists" who had control of the Hamburg occupation itself, did everything in their power to undercut the struggle and prevent the workers from carrying it to victory. The main brake on the German working class is the Social Democrats. Though out of power when these shipyard layoffs were announced, they were the architects of the West German bourgeoisie's present austerity program which has meant massive attacks on the working class.

The dramatic Hamburg occupation—and its betrayal— showed above all the need to forge a revolutionary working-class party by splitting the working-class SPD ranks away from the pro-capitalist tops.

The TLD's aggressive propaganda campaign around the occupations presented a broad programmatic alternative for the workers. Its leaflet noted the importance of the foreign workers: "Yesterday and today these foreign brothers are in the front lines of the struggle.... Full citizenship rights for foreign workers and their families!" The TLD further noted: "While the IG Metall bureaucracy wants to stiffen the backbone of the German steel magnates in the protectionist Common Market cartel, the 'left' is mobilizing for a 'National Steel Company/ or a 'National Shipyards Company.' But if the capitalist economy is not done away with, these nationalized companies (like HDW) will serve the capitalists. As opposed to the Rostock Yards only a few miles away [in East Germany], whose order books are filled with contracts for icebreakers, passenger ships, etc., running for years thanks to the Soviet planned economy, the capitalist 'solution’ to the crisis in the shipyards is arms production: battleships and submarines for war against the Soviet Union."

Lenin said that the fate of the October Revolution was inseparable from the victory of the German October. The converse of that is that the failure of the German working class, the best organized working class in Europe, to live up to its revolutionary obligations has led to two world imperialist wars. The TLD's leaflet concluded: "A militant strike in steel, the shipyards and coal would show the workers the way to prevent stationing NATO first-strike weapons. By strikes—not 'minutes of warning' against the 'superpowers.' For the Breits and the Loderers the Bundes-wehr is a 'peace force. They hate the Soviet Union and fear a new Bremen Soviet Republic, a new Ruhr Red Army—a German October.

"For the revolutionary reunification of Germany by a social revolution in the West and proletarian political revolution in the East! Smash the anti-Soviet war drive! For unconditional military support of the DDR/Soviet Union! For a socialist planned economy! For the Socialist United States of Europe!"

W&R: Can you tell us something about your background that you feel contributed to your becoming an activist in this struggle and occupation? Wojak: The thing that made me just want to do something—I didn't know what I wanted to do—was that my mother died, basically because she worked herself to death. Normally she shouldn't have been allowed to work at the job she did because she had asthma. She worked as a presser in a knitting mill and couldn't handle the wool dust. My father had to retire early as a partial invalid. He lost a leg, also worked 25 years at HDW as a welder, and now he can hardly do anything. The only thing my father had was my mother. He's just vegetating. And that was the main thing that made me say, that's not going to happen to me, and I wasn't going to put up with it any longer. And they want to fire my husband from the HDW plant.

W&R: Plans were announced for massive layoffs in the shipbuilding industry in early spring and a "warning strike" was called, including demonstrations. How did you become involved in the struggle? Wojak: I was approached by my husband to get involved with this women's group—they were actually all wives of men who were already active in the HDW shipyard and who were also affiliated with one political current or another. I met the women's group myself at a forum and found out that they had gone into the Hamburg parliament, tried to storm the microphone to draw attention to the situation of workers in the entire shipbuilding industry. The mike was cut off immediately so that they couldn't say anything. And because they had counted on that they had written an "Open Letter" to the mayor of Hamburg, the Social Democrat von Dohnanyi, and rained these leaflets from the gallery down onto all the parliamentarians. And they unfurled a banner reading, "HDW and MAN wives fight together with their men." Two women were picked out and criminal charges were brought for disrupting a public parliamentary session.

I met these women at a forum on this HDW issue, and Klose, the former Social Democratic mayor of Hamburg, was present. What struck me about this forum in particular was the workers; there were a whole lot of workers from HDW there. They were absolutely furious and wanted a complete change. And this Klose, he just tried to channel it into orderly channels that he could keep in hand. In the beginning, when I heard about what they did, it seemed to be a little bit too radical to me. But that Klose wanted to steer the workers in a very definite direction that he could keep in hand seemed even more awful. So I decided then to go to this women's meeting and take a look for myself.

At this first women's meeting I went to, in April, one woman said right away, yeah, maybe we can still see to it that there are a couple of strikes at HDW, and if it all
doesn't do any good, then we have to occupy the plant. And I thought, sure, if they occupy the plant, that's a long way off, and you don't have to go along with them. But during the occupation, in September, it turned out that some of the workers— I count myself among them as well—that we were the ones who carried out the occupation, whereas the women who had been talking weren't at all the ones who did the occupying. These women as well as so-called "activists" in the plant saw the plant occupation as a means to put pressure on the government to save jobs. And then when I participated in this occupation and got angry every time I had to leave the occupied shipyard and had to sleep alone in my bed at home, I saw it as if I had seized a piece of this shipyard along with all those workers. W&R: The women's committee waged a hunger strike that led up to and in some sense precipitated the September shipyard occupation. What motivated it?

Wojak: In all our work between the warning strike in the spring and during the occupation in September, we tried to do all kinds of actions to mobilize the workers so that they would occupy or put up any line of resistance against the layoffs at all. Whenever there was any kind of plant assembly or when any new events in the shipyard came up we stood in front of the gates with our banner and passed out leaflets, calling on the men to defend themselves, to do something, offered them our help. The result was that the men laughed at us. Then this situation came up in a plant assembly where we said, either we're going to storm the microphone now, just like in parliament, or you guys read these things aloud. And the guys running the meeting were scared to death that we'd storm the mike, because they didn't expect the workers to do the same thing the parliamentarians did, namely nothing, when the mike was turned off, but that the workers would probably resist. So under this pressure, they read what we had written. And for the rest of the plant assembly we were surrounded by a ring of company cops. W&R: What were your demands? Wojak: Our demands were basically the men's demands. They were for the 35-hour week, statification of the shipyard under control of the workforce (we extended it to real control). Then there was the men's demand for "useful alternative production," and that filter systems be installed in power plants so they don't pollute the atmosphere so much. In fact, there was quite a hard discussion with one of the women in the women's group about this, with the result that the men raised "alternative production" as a very hard demand and we just raised it on the side.

W&R: Who were they, and what were the political currents in the women's group?

Wojak: The political people in the plant were primarily from the DKP [pro-Moscow Stalinists], people from the GIM [German section of the United Secretariat], people from the SPD, from the union—in fact all the political groupings were present. In the women's group there were the DKP, KPD [Maoists], GIM; there were people from Arbeiterpolitik [Brandlerites] who got in through women's groups in the union. It was the same with the Social Democrats who also had influence through the unions and some women's groups.
This discussion about "useful alternative production" that came up in the women's group was introduced by me, because I was the only really unpolitical woman there and saw immediately what this "useful alternative production" basically meant for jobs. I told them that it's baloney and meaningless for jobs, whereas all the others supported it at first. The minute I started this discussion I had the feeling that all these women had a narrow-minded view of the whole situation because of their political orientation. That led me to view everything essentially more critically than before.

Maybe one more reason why the hunger strike happened. We wanted to spur the men on to fight. And we had found out that at Hoesch, in the Ruhr, where layoffs in the steel industry are also an issue, there was also a women's group, and they had waged a hunger strike. We had exhausted all the possibilities—standing in front of the gates; in plant assemblies; we went into the union and meetings organized by the union, where we were regularly thrown out. But the men saw us, and you couldn't pretend we weren't there. The Hoesch women had videos of their hunger strike and of the men's strike, and they advised us, if you do a hunger strike, there's no way it can fall through—you definitely have to do it.

From the very beginning we said we don't want to starve ourselves to get sick or die or something, but we agreed from the first if we do a hunger strike to limit it to three days. Because we thought, three days: that's enough to get it in the public eye. And if the men haven't gotten it together after three days to pull off a decent action, then even a ten-day hunger strike won't do any good.

W&R: So how long did the hunger strike go on before the occupation began?

Wojak: We waged a three-day hunger strike right before the occupation. When it got under way there were five women who took part in it from the first to the last day. And there were nine on the last day. We didn't just want to wage a hunger strike without drawing in the men in the shipyard. Because we didn't know that they would publish the list with the mass layoffs at just the same time, we had convinced the men beforehand to carry out an action in the plant as well, if we did this hunger strike. We won them over to boycotting overtime at that point. And then-it became known in the yards—that was the afternoon before the hunger strike, right before quitting time—as people found out that 1,354 people were supposed to be laid off, there was a symbolic occupation of the plant gate for two hours, with only 1,200 people taking part.

The first day of our hunger strike, when nobody knew anything about it beforehand, even the men in the shipyard, about 80 percent of the workforce said completely spontaneously, if the women go on a hunger strike then we'll boycott the canteen for the day. That was a very important thing, because you could see that we women were recognized by the men in the shipyard for the first time. The canteen had been contracted out to a private company before the layoffs were announced, and some women who worked in the canteen were thrown out and rehired for considerably less pay—we wanted to boycott the canteen until the women got the same pay as before.

All the men who were at all political had laughed at us before for this demand, and said that no worker would follow this demand because their own stomachs are more important than other people's stomachs. And the fact that 80 percent carried out this canteen boycott— and they really went hungry, because they didn't know they were going to boycott the canteen and didn't bring sandwiches from home—that proves that they were simply wrong, that the workers forgot their own empty stomachs in their solidarity.
This whole hunger strike was received by all the workers in the shipyard extremely well anyway, although they hardly dared to approach us because of their preconceptions—these poor, weak women, they're standing there and what's more, going hungry for us, and what have we done? They could hardly look us in the eye. And after quitting time that evening, here came all the workers and they brought us flowers. Most of them just kind of shoved them in our hands and walked on by.

W&R: So how did the actual plant occupation begin?

Wojak: The first one to call for an occupation, or for a massive action, I believe, was me. After the three days of the hunger strike were over, there was a closing rally. We had gotten an enormous amount of solidarity and over DM 9,000 ($4,500) in contributions. Several plants declared their solidarity, and it was not only for the women but for solidarity against all layoffs.

We held a rally at the end where each of the women who had taken part in the hunger strike was supposed to say something to the brothers in the shipyard. And I was the last one, and I had lost my notes. So I just called on the men to just do something, and if they didn't fight, that we women would think up something to do to them that would be pretty nasty. W&R: Lysistrata meets the class struggle. Wojak: But the effect of that was not that they all got terribly scared of me or the women, but they applauded it wildly, they cheered it, they picked it up like something they'd wanted to say themselves for a long time. And finally somebody said it. The hunger strike was over on Friday and then came the weekend. The gates were picketed from the outside so that no overtime could go on—organized by the men and some of the women picketed too.

There was a general plant assembly during the hunger strike where the men fought with the bosses and got us the right to speak. A plant assembly is where the whole plant comes together in one room, organized by the union—there's a minimum of four assemblies annually. And the Management Committee [the bosses] and the plant council are there and make reports. Every individual worker can speak.60 this plant assembly continued on Monday morning. It ended with a march of the workers through the inner city in a demonstration of 3,000. And after the demonstration all the workers went back into the plant and continued the plant assembly and then voted to occupy the plant. And that was adopted 100 percent.

W&R: And who was elected the leadership of the occupation?

Wojak: There was a prominent supporter of the DKP, who had worked out this occupation plan just in case. And they were essentially the people who had been working together beforehand—like the DKP, SPD, KPD, GIM, unionists.

W&R: What was the relationship of the official union leadership of the Metalworkers [IG Metall] to the occupation?

Wojak: Before the occupation the IG Metall didn't look upon it kindly and it didn't look on the women's activities kindly either. A week before the hunger strike somebody from the union put out the word that the HDW women are dead, they don't exist anymore. And then when this demonstration through the center of town took place and afterwards the occupation was voted, they were singing a different tune all of a sudden. Because they probably saw that the workers just couldn't be stopped. So they said, we'll support every action; go ahead, and we'll always be behind you. Only I'm talking about the local union organization in Hamburg—there wasn't so much as a letter of solidarity from the IG Metall from the rest of the country. During the occupation the union reps didn't behave worse than the "activists" in the plant, which were in all these parties, but they were awful enough themselves.

W&R: We haven't discussed the laws that come from the 1950s—the "Factory Regulation Law" (Betreefasver-rassungsgesetz). Can you explain why this law is followed so slavishly, and what it in fact means with regard to workers' struggles?

Wojak: The "Factory Regulation Law" is a law the government passed that means limitations on the workers, especially in strikes. It's a terribly thick book that's not easy to explain. But for example it says that in your plant you can't just support strikes in other plants or collect money for them. All the plant assemblies— how they are to be held, whether there are secret or open ballots, are governed by it. And a plant occupation is a violation of the "Factory Regulation Law" because a worker can't just seize the plant that belongs to someone else.

W&R: The fact that the members of the plant council are bound to silence is also laid down in the "Factory Regulation Law" as well, including about layoffs. Wojak: Yes. In the case of this list of 1,354 people to be laid off, for example, the members of the plant council were obligated not to make that public. This law basically just hinders the workers from using their power m any way whatsoever against the bosses. And the unions haven't done anything against it and are therefore complicit.

W&R: What was the role of the women's committee during the occupation?

Wojak: Pretty pathetic, because we had set as our goal calling on the men to wage a fight. And in fact we reached that goal with the hunger strike. So during the occupation we didn't want to stand on the sidelines; but we really didn't know at all what we ought to do
I myself concentrated on extending the strike together with two other women. We went to AC Weser, to a shipyard in Bremen where they had decided long before the HDW occupation to occupy\ this shipyard because there was no more putting the brakes on these workers or holding them back from doing an action like that. So we drove to Bremen and were totally depressed when we got there, because the conditions under which the shipyard was occupied were really awful for the workers. They had one last ship in Bremen which was up for repairs, and then the whole shipyard was supposed to be shut down, closed

We weren't allowed to speak to the workers there before the occupation was voted. And when they did vote to occupy, you could see that a crime was perpetrated against the workers, because the occupation was coupled with the condition that the necessary repairs for this one ship still had to go on during the occupation. Further, the occupation in Bremen was; an extremely late point in time—one day before the occupation in Hamburg was given up, and it w; planned that way.

During the HDW occupation a ship was literal kidnapped from the HDW workers. The cables were cut. One worker was injured, not very seriously, bi people could in fact have been killed. We took the brothers in Bremen a cable from this captured ship as warning that they should keep a close watch on the ship. The workers welcomed us with cheers. We g more applause for what we said there than ever before although it was just to give them a little courage at really nothing more. Afterwards we also discussed with a whole lot of workers, and a lot of them who h been for going on with these repairs changed this opinion within five minutes and didn't want to do it anymore.

Another guy, the DGB [German trade-union federation] chairman in Bremen, spoke, and first express his solidarity and cozied up to them like mad and said you guys are in an unusual situation; so an unusual situation demands unusual means and you guys have
grasped them. And it's right that you have occupied your shipyard and you ought to occupy it a while longer—and then you ought to let the bosses and the politicians decide what ought to happen to the shipyard. And even then the workers applauded. And there was this worker sitting next to me during this speech, and it just slipped out of my mouth: how can this man be allowed to speak here? Why doesn't somebody throw him out? Then he really thought about it, at first he didn't say anything at all, then he said, yeah, that's outrageous, what he's saying here. He can't be allowed to do that. But then the guy up front was already gone. But before, this guy had clapped too.

We had these buttons with "Stop the death of HDW in installments—HDW must stand" on them, with the HDW insignia and over that "HDW Occupied" on a red background. And a worker in Bremen just had to have it, and he gave me his helmet. It has a sticker on one side, "AC Weser Occupied," and on the other "HDW Occupied."

When we women came back from this shipyard occupation, we didn't have the feeling that this occupation would be a support for the HDW workers, but that it was something designed to. go against workers' struggles. When we got back to HDW, we told the strike committee what was going on, that AC Weser wouldn't be a support for Hamburg and that they would have to extend the struggle in other ways. They said it wasn't right to tell the workers something like that. I did tell the workers that, and I know one other woman—from the GIM—also told it to the workers.

W&R: The TLD raised the demand to extend the strike to mining and steel, where there were also plans for substantial layoffs and firings. How do you feel about that demand, and given a revolutionary leadership, do you think it could have been an outgrowth of the shipyard occupation?

Wojak: It would have been possible, definitely. The question of extension was already very close, even without a revolutionary leadership, and only a spark would have been necessary to ignite it. But with a revolutionary leadership there would have been a guarantee for extending it.

W&R: How did the occupation end, and what did the workers win or lose?

Wojak: The HDW occupation lasted nine days. The mass of workers lost their jobs. The layoffs were carried out just like they had been planned. The layoffs are continuing today. The workers in the plant have worse working conditions than before, there's speedup. There have already been two deaths as a result.

The reason the occupation was broken off then was: yeah, they said we have the chance of getting a decent severance plan. They didn't even get the severance plan they had before the occupation but one significantly worse.

The foreign workers are in a very bad position. They are the ones primarily hit by the layoffs. About 50 percent of the foreign workers at HDW were fired. And they can be deported immediately if they don't get a new job, and they don't have a chance to get a new job either. So they won absolutely nothing, except when one or the other can draw the lessons—that you have to design an occupation differently, that is, not carry out an occupation under such conditions, but from the very beginning set the conditions yourself and not let them be dictated to you.

The occupation ended with a general plant assembly, which includes the lower- and middle-level management. Then the Management Committee has the right to take part; most of the time politicians are also invited—but not to this one. The Management Committee announced that if they didn't give up the occupation then they might fire the whole workforce— in one fell swoop. Without notice. People weren't quite convinced that that would in fact happen. But in the 70s that did happen once, when two shipyards, the Deutsche Werft and the Howaldtswerke fused. They fired the whole workforce because they were on strike, and afterwards they just hired back the part that they needed. So the threat of firings was in the air. Then there was the second thing. The Management Committee had announced that if Hamburg resisted and continued the occupation, the works would go deeper and deeper in the red, and then they wouldn't have any other choice but to split off Hamburg and Kiel from one another, as affiliates or even as two independent companies. But this plan has existed a long time, even without the occupation.

W&R: What was the role of the DKP and the KPD and the GIM during the occupation, and in the plant assembly meeting?

Wojak: From the first moment they set their stakes all on negotiations—negotiations with the politicians in Bonn and Schleswig-Holstein, since HDW is 100 percent state-owned. Those are both Christian Democratic governments. And their role was precisely to put pressure on these politicians, to say, "Do something about the shipyard please. Don't throw all these people out onto the street, after all." They all agreed completely on that. Those were always the things that kept coming up even before the occupation, in strikes or other actions—apply pressure. You can also see it in this program for "useful alternative production." That was drafted by people from the DKP, from the GIM— in effect a somewhat broader version of the strike committee together with people from the union and other activists. Then the union took it up and printed it as a program. For all practical purposes their aim is to give the capitalists a hand, how to make it, if you can just get a little bit more capital to boot, without having to fire guys.

W&R: I understand that in the course of the occupation a GIM supporter in the workforce put up a banner of Solidarnos'c'. How was this received?

Wojak: This Solidarnos'c' banner actually only had a slight meaning for the workforce. It was one banner among many. There were other banners from other plants, for example AEG Schiffbau brought over a huge banner. Such banners were received with more applause and many more workers also crowded around them. Solidarnos'c' itself was seen as the shipyard workers there going into the streets, and they stuck together and fought for their rights. Solidarnos'c'' real role wasn't seen; most of the workers don't know much about Solidarnos.

The thing is, they tried to block every political discussion in the union. There was a band in the yard one evening and they were singing some kind of political things, and a guy from the SPD took the mike away from them and said, look, leave politics out of this; the shipyard occupation isn't a political affair. The workers who got wind of it were pretty pissed off. And I noticed how they attacked the union bureaucrats pretty hard: what is this, and everybody can say what they want to here, and even if there's political stuff here—there's a highly political situation at HDW. He went away then, but the musicians didn't have the nerve to start again. But that was just the way discussions about Solidarnos'c' or issues in a larger context during the occupation were blocked, and the GIM supporters hung the sign up, intervened by doing that, but didn't tell the workers anything about it.

W&R: What role did these left groups play in the plant assembly discussion regarding the occupation in the face of the fact that the occupation had spread to Bremen, so that ending the occupation at that particular point in Hamburg was particularly criminal.

Wojak: It was criminal. The political groups were all straining to reach the same goal, told the workers, yes, under these conditions where we have to take into account that the whole workforce will be fired, where there's no sort of severance plan at all, and then the poor foreigners will be fired and won't even be able to take home any severance pay at all if they're deported—at such a point we can't call on you guys to continue the occupation, although we would have really liked to. That was what was said during the occupation, during the vote, by all the political groups. And Bremen. The workers in Bremen were of course terribly disappointed. They probably did see it as criminal, what happened in Hamburg. Only the strike committee (which was the same as the plant council in Bremen) said, what's so bad about that? Hamburg and Bremen don't have anything to do with each other.

W&R: Let's return to the question of the foreign workers. It's my understanding that the foreign worker also supported the end of the occupation even though they had the most to lose by the layoffs. Why was that?

Wojak: It was essentially Turkish workers who sup ported ending the occupation. Not because they were Turkish, but simply because the Turks speak the leas German, and because they were absolutely no properly provided with information. Hardly anything was translated. There was one Yugoslavian woman in our women's group and we were the first ones in the shipyard to have leaflets and placards in Turkish and Yugoslavian when we went into the plant assembly during the hunger strike, and a lot of foreign workers stood up. They applauded us and brought us chairs, because finally somebody in the shipyard was thinking of the foreign workers. I believe that without the women, the foreigners wouldn't even have known what was going on at the beginning of the occupation.

There was one Turkish guy in the yard who could speak good German. They told him, this is the way things are, and then it was up to him the extent to which he passed on the information to his brothers, or not. He handled it by saying, listen, the next vote is going to be about this or that, and if I raise my hand, that's correct, so you guys do the same. Of course, in this vote on the occupation that wasn't possible—it was secret, and nobody raised his hand. Most of the Turks had no idea what they should do and were totally unsure of themselves.

I heard that a couple of days beforehand there were also people in the yard who had threatened the Turkish workers. There was almost a physical fight. They threatened that if the Turks continued to participate actively in the occupation they would beat them up, or they threatened them in other ways. As far as I could find out these were people that came from the [Turkish fascist] Grey Wolves.

W&R: Did the workers in the shipyard occupation take any measures such as forming workers defense guards to defend against the fascistic Grey Wolves or other fascist groups that might attempt to break up the occupation?

Wojak: No, none at all. There was no defense, neither against the fascist groups, nor against the scabs, nor against the police attacks that had been threatened.
I have to add that there were a whole series of scabs during the occupation: almost all the white-collar workers worked during the occupation, and after a couple of days parts of the machine shop started working—in the end I believe it was half of the machine shop that worked, first secretly and then openly.

First the workers said, look, they're working. They can't do that. We're going to throw them out. And then there were discussions with the strike committee, and they said, no, that would disturb the "peace and quiet" in the yard, and peace and quiet and order [Ruhe und Ordnung], that's the one thing that you have to maintain in such a big occupation, and you ought to go to the people and talk to them and try to convince them not to work. When I came onto the yard the next day I asked, well, did you guys throw out the white-collar workers? And the workers said, no, we have to keep it quiet, and all that creates an uproar, and we can't do that either. That's the way they manipulated the workers' opinion in practice.

I ask myself how these people in the strike committee wanted to convince people to continue the occupation or not to work, when they themselves had made a deal with the management about painting the bottom of a ship and sent the workers off to work. The painting has to be done in two coats—if the second coat isn't done, then the first coat is ruined too. And for doing that they got from the management deliveries of food to the canteen for one more day.

A number of times in the Social Democratic daily paper there were two-page spreads: HDW will be cleared; police attack; police intervention threats—in order to confuse the workers about what they ought to do. When the first article came out I was in the yard too, and the workers said—a lot of them anyway—what do they think they want, the police? They won't even get in here; the gates are shut tight, and right behind the gates is the fire station. We have water cannons, we have helmets, we have clubs, we have everything here. They won't get in here at all; we'll know how to defend our shipyard for sure. And the next day I asked, what are you guys doing now, and they said, well, when the police come, then we'll let them carry us all away. We won't offer any resistance. And so that's another sign how the opinion was manipulated by the strike committee.

W&R: One of the points made in the TLD's leaflet directed at the HDW occupation was the comparison between the Rostock shipyards in East Germany, where the order books are full—a demonstration of the power of a planned economy—and HDW, which is even turning away work from the Soviet Union at the same time it's laying off thousands of workers. Did this contrast have any impact on the workers during the occupation?

Wojak: This discussion definitely existed in the shipyard, this comparison between the DDR yards in general and shipyards in the Soviet Union, and here in West Germany—simply because these orders to build ships were refused. The workers said, sure, build ships—if it was a question of what kind of ships we need, we could be booked up too. The thing is whether we want to build them—or whether our bosses want to build them. And they just don't want to. And that's whose fault it is that we aren't getting any more work in the harbor.

W&R: After the occupation you put out a leaflet in which you call for a study of the lessons of the occupation. What do you think those lessons are?

Wojak: The lessons of the occupation are that the workers' interests were not represented during the occupation at all, otherwise they would have had something to take home with them from such a large-scale occupation. The people who are responsible for this are the strike committee, who belonged to all the political parties. It would have definitely been possible to extend a strike to all the shipyards, to the mines and to the steel industry, like it says in the TLD's leaflet. That was the least that could have happened. Such an extension into broad areas would have paralyzed a large part of the West German economy. At that point the HDW occupation would have been just one point of a massive campaign.

But of course you can't carry out such an extension if you basically don't want to win but only want a couple of concessions from the capitalists. If you lay the basis for things like this, then the consequence is that the workers take the power. And you have to want that.

There was criticism of a lack of solidarity from other plants. Well, if you don't offer me something to fight for, then what am I supposed to go running off and fight for?
During the occupation I saw what would have been possible, and I saw what all the parties and political groupings did. I saw what the social democrats of the SPD did. They said to the workers, we are the party; we'll do everything for you; we'll save your jobs, but we're going to do it together with the capitalists. And together with the capitalists means against the workers. That's not a party that can be the leadership of an occupation or of strikes, or of the workers' interests.

The DKP did nothing different from the SPD. Maybe there was a little bit more leftist touch in their speeches, but looking at what they did, they are indistinguishable. The GIM was in the shipyard, and they hardly opened their mouth. But the one guy from the GIM that was in the strike committee was also indistinguishable. It's exactly the same with the KPD, and the people from Arbeiterpolitik didn't have any different program either.

The first thing the workers have to have, that's a decent party that represents their interests. When you read the TLD's leaflet, you saw that they did represent the workers. The other political groups, parties—they wanted to keep the TLD out of the shipyard as far as possible. And discussions they had with individual workers were also not looked on kindly.

All the political groups except the TLD said, the workers—they're not that advanced; they can't do all that yet; and they don't understand all that yet. But I'm a worker myself. If somebody asks me, do you want to determine what's produced in your plant, I'll say of course I want that. And if he asked me, do you also want to determine how much you earn, then I'll say, of course I want to determine that. And do you also want to determine your hours and your working conditions? Then of course I say I want to determine that too. I don't have to be so all-fired advanced for that; every worker understands that. And that's what the TLD said. And it's simply necessary to have a party, one you can really turn to with your interests and doesn't turn right around and betray the workers again.