MIA > Archive > Heinrich Brandler
From International Press Correspondence, Vol. 3 No. 28, 22 March 1923, pp. 224–225.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.
Public Domain: Marxists Internet Archive (2021). You may freely copy, distribute, display and perform this work; as well as make derivative and commercial works. Please credit “Marxists Internet Archive” as your source.
Today we are in Germany, as a result of the social democratic policy, the complete collapse of capitalist “reconstruction”, the collapse of finance, of food provision, and of production. The country has a floating debt of 4½ billion marks. While the enormously high prices render the food problem more and more acute for the proletariat, the agrarians gather in huge profits, Although the dollar is falling, the prices continue to rise.
The capitalist offensive becomes daily more aggressive.
The results of the policy pursued since the collapse are, a lower living standard of the proletariat, expropriation of the lower bourgeoisie. The whole structure of German society has been thrown into utter confusion, and many members of the intellectual and military classes have not only been forced into the ranks of the proletariat, but even far below it. It is precisely these elements which supply the foundation of Fascism.
The German bourgeoisie refuses to raise by taxation even those amounts required to maintain its own state apparatus. 90% of all taxes are raised from the wages of workers, clerks, and officials, and only 10% of these direct taxes are collected from the bourgeoisie. The German bourgeoisie uses every possible medium for its enrichment, even undisguised high treason, as recently proved by the Haden Aniline Co’s deal.
Our first task is to mobilize the proletariat. In the year 1918 we demanded an alliance with the sole proletarian state, – Soviet Russia. At that time the social democratic lack of faith in the revolutionary power of the proletariat was so great that the social democrats declared such an alliance to be useless, for within 3 months Czarism would he ruling Russia again.
They went begging to the Entente bourgeoisie, and fell upon their knees before it.
And yet all the then existing Entente governments have vanished; the Soviet government is the only one remaining, and it stands more firmly than ever. The French proletariat will not rebel for a Cuno or Stinnes government. But if the proletariat had the cower in its lands, then the French proletarians in uniform would have acted precisely as they did in Archangel when they were called upon to fight against the Soviet government.
The French imperialists are now striving for precisely the same aims as those striven for by the Germans in the war.
On the one side we see decay and ruin in the reactionary ranks, and on the other side the growing revolutionary forces of the proletariat.
Last updated on 12 October 2021