Witness to the German Revolution (10 page)

At Halle, the fascists of the Stahlhelm attacked the newspaper offices, and there was a pitched battle. Not far away, at Helmstedt, Young Germans
⁹⁶
attacked Communists and left one dead.

In accordance with a new press decree, signed by Cuno and Ebert on August 10, which provides for the suspension and confiscation of newspapers calling for violence against the republic, the Berlin edition of
Die Rote Fahne
in Berlin has been seized on two occasions. In Hamburg, the senate has declared martial law. In all the working-class centers, the army and police are patrolling.

In Berlin, municipal employees, workers in gas and electricity supply, and the trams and underground, a substantial number of railway workers, some of the printers from the Reichsbank and at least three quarters of the workers in large scale industry are on strike. Technische Nothilfe
⁹⁷
is running train services in the suburbs. The situation remains “grave”—that means the movement is strong—in Hamburg, Szczecin, Halle, Leipzig, Dresden, Hanover, Lübeck and Wroclaw.

The demands are as follows: immediate resignation of Cuno, confiscation of food stocks to ensure that the poor section of the population is fed, withdrawal of the decree forbidding the formation of workers' hundreds,
⁹⁸
a minimum wage of 60 gold pfennigs
⁹⁹
per hour, unemployment pay in proportion to the original rate, freeing of political prisoners. These are clearly political and economic demands. The first has already been won, and those about wages and food supplies have found an echo in the conditions put by the SPD to the bourgeois parties for the formation of the Stresemann government.

The factory committees decided to end the strike on Wednesday, August 15. The government has instructed the press to play down
the importance of the strike movement. It is nonetheless the case that the factory committees, which have achieved a united front of SPD, USPD,
¹⁰⁰
Communists and members of no party, and which in reality are standing on the platform of Communist demands, with unconditional support from the KPD, have just fought a major battle, though not yet the decisive one, and they have won it.

Even the mass of the SPD rank and file, as is shown by numerous local demonstrations and especially the social democratic conference at Brunswick, are clearly hostile to collaboration with the bourgeoisie. The Great Coalition is the work of the “Socialist” leaders. Now there will be a period of relative peace which should give it time to discredit itself more fully in the eyes of the petty bourgeoisie and backward workers in whom the name of a Hilferding still inspires some vague hope.

The Great Coalition at work
Correspondance internationale
, September 8, 1923

The new ministers of the Reich are turning out to be almost as wordy as M. Poincaré. While the French prime minister is making speeches on the tombs of his dead, these ministers are making speeches about the gaping hole into which their moribund Germany is going to fall. Stresemann of the upper bourgeoisie and the socialist Hilferding are at one in affirming that if their government fails, it will be “Germany's last constitutional government.” “We are democracy's last resort.” Probably they are right. But let's watch them at work. Or rather let's listen to them, for what they mainly do is talk.

They talk with particular emphasis of certain things they want us to remember. On August 22, Herr Stresemann told the party leaders that he would not hesitate to take dictatorial measures and that it was essential to increase exports and limit imports. Financiers and politicians assented. On August 23, to the Reichstag's
budget committee, a major speech by citizen Hilferding. “Extreme gravity of situation, brink of the abyss, possible disappearance of Germany (sic).” The government, which itself is showing a deficit—and to some tune!—is obliged to subsidize private industry which is showing a deficit. “Without control of trading in the dollar, there cannot be any foreign or domestic policy.” “Wages have reached and often exceed the peacetime level.” The next day, Herr Stresemann, speaking to the association of manufacturers and traders, explained the allusion of his social democratic accomplice: industry will do its sums in gold. “As for wages, we must not dream of bringing them back to the level they reached in the flourishing Germany of yesteryear, they must be appropriate for the difficult situation we are facing at present…” At least he is speaking in a straightforward fashion. On August 28, interviewed by one of the staff of the
Münchener Neueste Nachrichten
(
Latest News from Munich
), Herr Stresemann, who is clearly obsessed with the point, came back to it once again. “Wages higher than before the war are becoming a great danger.” On August 31, Herr Raumer, economics minister, insisted in a programmatic speech that wages had risen quicker than the mark had lost value; moreover, it was necessary to work harder, to export more… On Sunday, September 2, in Stuttgart, Stresemann joined in the chorus: the propertied classes must make sacrifices but the working classes must work harder.

So here we have a clear and consistent government campaign. The sacrifices which will be “imposed” on property owners have a place in it solely to serve as a counterbalance to the much more real sacrifices they want to impose on the workers. In all these speeches, three ideas recur time after time:

But from now on prices of coal, food, clothing, paper in Germany are above world prices, so German industry cannot attempt to regain its ability to compete except by gnawing away at wages… And this task has been enthusiastically taken up by the Great Coalition government which Kautsky calls the “last arrow in Germany's quiver”
(Arbeiterzeitung,
Vienna). The metaphor is well chosen. For this arrow is being fired by the social democrats into the back of the German workers.

At the same time Stinnes's paper,
Die Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung,
is pursuing some significant campaigns:

The paper of the big industrial employers expresses its satisfaction at the support given to the exploiters by the SPD in these charming terms: “When the train is running off the rails, you don't look at the color of the brakes.” We shall see whether the socialist brakes can stop the Stinnes train from going off the rails…

In any case, one thing is sure: the social democrats in the Great Coalition are nothing but the accomplices and the tools—and consciously at that—of economic and political reaction.

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

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

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

Arrests will achieve nothing. Arresting the Russian Bolsheviks in July 1917
¹⁰²
did not prevent October. In parallel to the verbal offensive of ministers and bourgeois hack writers, and to the very clear
economic offensive being waged by the employers, it is perhaps hoped that the police offensive against the factory committees and the KPD will stave off the danger. During the recent general strike, there were more than 200 random arrests in Berlin. The following day, more than 10,000 workers were sacked by way of reprisal, and the SPD minister Severing dissolved the Berlin organization of
Betriebsräte
(factory councils). The banned organization transferred to Jena (Thuringia), that is to say, it went underground. Searches and arrests followed. Almost the whole of the Berlin committee of the KPD is behind bars, as are almost all the Communist municipal councillors in Berlin.
Die Rote Fahne
has been confiscated several times this week, and has now been suspended for a week. The Communist newspapers in Wroclaw, Magdeburg and Hamburg have been confiscated or temporarily suspended; the conference of the KPD in Württemburg has been banned. It is said that the appropriate ministers are considering prosecuting the arrested militants for high treason. Providing the ministers in question aren't themselves locked up before the preliminary investigations are completed!

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

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

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

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