The Daily Worker Newspaper, May 24, 1924, Page 5

> “The idea becomes power when it pene- trates the masses.” —Karl Marx. IN THE LAND OF GLOOM -- - HEN a man has spent in a \X ] foreign country a little over four days, one cannot expect him to have a clear. view on every phase of its life. The press corres- pondent who says “he knows it all,” is fooling himself or his readers., I would not claim to give here an ade- quate account of the German economic and political situation. I will only con- fine. myself to a few indisputable facts which force themselves upon every. observer as soon as he begins to orientate himself on German soil. Low Wages, Unemployment, Starva- tion. - ACT number one is the miserable _ situation of the German working class. With the stabilization of the mark, prices in Germany, excepting rents, are on the same general level as are the prices in the United States. The average wage of a German work- ing man is somewhere in the vicinity of twenty marks a week. Peak wages for the highest skilled workers (such as the members of the printers’ union) do not exceed thirty-six marks; after deducting taxes, sick benefit Gues and other obligatory payments, the highest | - THE CAPITALIST-MONARCHIST UNITED FRONT IN GERMANY. paid worker brings home no more than thirty marks. The dollar buys now a little over four marks. Those of the German workers who are happy enough to have full-time continuous employment, earn as much as $5 to $7.50 a week. The number of such for- tunates, however, is mot very large. There are four million of unemployed ' Gn Germany today. There are twelve million who work part of the time. “How can you make both ends meet?” I asked a cabinet maker in a suburb of Berlin. The man looked at me with a smile of despondency. ' «One must,” was all he said. HAD soon a vivid illustration of | how “one must.” The man had come home after eight hours of work. He was a sturdy fellow of about thirty, tho of middle height. The meal his wife put before him on the table con- - gisted of a soup-plite of mashed po- tatoes with gravy and a piece of bread. That was all. Later in the evening he would drink a pint of beer in his union ~ hall, or maybe he would even abstain from this. ‘HE man lived in one small room . with his wife and a three-year-old " child. He could not allow himself the luxury of decent clothes. He could not allow himself the luxury of a theatre, or a concert. He could not allow him- . gelf the luxury of an “ausflug” (holiday trip) out of town on a Sunday, He could not allow himself anything, And SPECIAL MAGAZINE SUPPLEMENT THE DAILY WORKER. MAY 24, 1924 labor. His wife told me that, as a rule, the German worker eats meat only once a week. The life of the unskilled laborers is still worse. The life of the unemployed is hell. There isa move- ment afoot to change the eight-hour day for ten. In some cases it has been accomplished. That there must be dis- satisfaction among the workers under conditions like these, is easy to imagine. The Revolt of the Workers. ‘ACT number two is this bitter revolutionary dissatisfaction of the laboring masses. The wave of resent- ment is growing. The readiness to fight becomes more manifest every day. The masses have come to after the defeat of last October. In reailty, the masses had never been subdued. It is true that long years of hopeless- ness under the treaty of Versailles, long years of underfeeding and actual starvation have sapped the vitality of the German working class as a whole and have thrown a portion of the workers into a state of nerveless stupor. But even among the most de- vitalized elements smoulders the fire of revolt. Under the ashes of despair there is so much hatred for the ruling TO THE GOOD, OLD TIMES! at the election. This country, famous by its fascism, by the Hitler counter- revolution, by the shame of the Hitler- Ludendorff trial, by assaults on the Communist workers, by imprisonment of Communist leaders and shutting down of Communist papers, had, at the April landtag election, cast over 200,- 000 votes for the Communist ticket, four times as much as on the previous election. It should be noted that an open election campaign couid not be carried on by our Bavarian comrades, and that literature could not be dis- tributed freely. It should also be re- membered that Bavaria is a predom- inently agricultural state and that the bulwarks of Communism are the cen- tral, northern and northwestern in- dustrial regions. HE Bavarian vote shows the trend of the revolutionary sentiment among the German workers. Other signs of the same revoiutionary char- acter are not lacking. The labor move- ment in Germany has reached a state where, either it is Communism, that is to say class-struggle and revolution, or it is nothing at all. Social Democracy Is No More. os \re classes and so much contempt for capi- talist law and order that any shock is capable to proveke an explosion. “We have reached the end of the rope.” “We have nothing to lose.” Where this sentiment is widespread, a revolution is abroad. HE first manifestation of the strengthening will to struggle among the working masses is the wave of strikes. When I arrived in Hamburg, baggage had to be carried by the passengers themselves (to the great and bitter resentment of the paunch-carrying German “buergers”) because the porters had gone on strike. This was the first skirmish of an impending all-German railroad strike. The strike has been averted by the comprise of the union bureaucrats, but the workers are not content with the results. There has Been a partial strike of the printers. There is a miners’ strike impending. There is a strike fermentation among millions. This in spite of the A. D. G. B. (Allgemeiner Deutscher Gewerk- schafts-Bund—the German A. F, of L.) which tries to smotber the movement. ‘;. second manifestation of the Ger- man workers’ revolt is their switching over to the Left. The Com- munist movement is growing by leaps and bounds, A situation has been cre- ated where, when a worker says “fight,” he must say “Communism.” Just when I was in Berlin, the most was won by our comrades in Bavaria ACT number three is the collapse of the center. By the same token by which the workers rally to the ex- treme. Left, the bourgeois elements rally to the extreme Right, i. e. to fascism. The pacifyers, the com- promisers, the preachers of social col- laboration the prophets of all-healing bourgeois democracy are simply melt- ing away. The decay of the Social- Democracy is, perhaps, even a quicker process than the disintegration of purely bourgeois liberalism. The Soc- ial-Democracy, by becoming an ap- pendix to the capitalist state and by defending private property against the revolutionary workers, has become historically useless. Comrade Trotzky, recently provoked great merriment all over Russia by the following remark: “The English Worker,” he said, “will ask himself: ‘why should I scratch be- hind my right ear with my left hand? Why should I support McDonald who takes orders from the liberal bour- geoisie, when I can meet the same bourgeoisie myself face to face?’” This is still more true about the Ger- man Social-Democracy. Those of the American comrades who still remem- ber the Bebel-Kautsky-Ledebur Social- Democracy of pre-war times and who have not seen it in action (for reac- tion) afterwards, should keep in mind that there is practically no difference between the German Social-Democracy of the present and a liberal bourgeois party of the pre-war epoch, such as, he still belonged to the aristocracy of amazing and most encouraging victory for instance, the Russian Kadets. The SECOND SECTION This magazine supple- ment .will appear every Saturday in The Daily Worker. By M. J. OLGIN German Social-Democracy is not even using a socialist phraseology any lon- ger. (It has substituted “social con- science” for class consciousness and class-struggle.) The German “Vor- waerts” is-no more liberal than used to be the “Berliner Tageblatt” in 1912. I have personally read the following classic remark in the “Vorwaerts” of April 8: “The Russian Communists denounce bourgeois class justice in the capitalist countries, while they themselves practice proletarian class justice in the Russian Soviet states.” Proletarian class justice is equally in- acceptable to the German “Vorwaerts” as is capitalist justice. This illustra- tion alone may suffice. N practice the German Social-Demo- cracy offers nothing to the working elass which could not be and.is not being offered by the liberal portion of the bourgeoisie, Fighting against capi- talism is criminal because it under- mines the economic foundation of the fatherland. Demands presented to the bosses must be mild or else capitalism will not be able to get its due divi- dends. ‘Reparation bills must be ac- knowledged and paid because the Ger- man army is not strong enough to fight the French. Communists must be downed and smashed because they voice the hatreds of the masses and lead in revolutionary fights, against the only order which is possible at present, namely the capitalist order. This is, roughly, the ideology of the once famous Social-Democratic party. This is the tone and the trend of everyday actions. When I was in Ger- many, the Dawes committee published ts report. The Social-Democratic press was more docile and more crestfallen as regards the crazy bill than was the liberal press. In the strike wave, the Social-Democratic union bureaucrats try to compromise as quietly as is de- sirable for the bosses and on terms as mild as would only keep the work- ers from striking. When it comes, however, to persecuting the Commun- ists in the “Gewerkschaften” (unions) or even outlawing entire red sections of the unions, the same Social-Demo- erats manifest Wnusual initiative and vigor. The natural result is a catastrophal loss of Social-Democratic prestige among the mass of the workers, the collapse of Social-Democracy as a po- litical factor, a rush of the workers of any degree of class-consciousness to the sphere of the revolutionary Com- munist influence and revolutionary ac- tion. “German Social-Democracy is no more;” this is a remark repeated in Germany with the same certainty as we, in America, speak of the disap- pearance of the 8. P, (Continued on page 3)