The Dangers of the Mass Strike

When the dangers of a planned undertaking are mentioned, this can have two meanings as a rule: either this far-sighted consideration is intended to try to eliminate the dangers beforehand, or it is intended to serve as a warning to deter the unwary from the undertaking. There can be no question of eliminating the dangers in advance in a mass strike; as a rule, therefore, the purpose of pointing out the dangers is to influence the workers to refrain from such foolish thoughts. However, this will not help much; if the circumstances arouse great excitement and a strong fighting mood in the masses, they will not be held back by such warnings, however well-founded they may be; there have also been enough situations in history in which it was necessary to fight at the risk of even greater disadvantage, even with insufficient forces. Nevertheless, a critical discussion of these warnings is necessary, because it is not indifferent to the force of a mass movement whether the leading vanguard, the core force of the party, which can be determined to a great extent by rational considerations, resolutely takes the lead or only fearfully and reluctantly allows itself to be dragged along.

These discussions are not about the personal dangers for the fighters. Everyone knows that sharper forms of struggle can demand great personal sacrifices; only when the enthusiasm and combativeness of the masses have risen to such an extent that they pay no heed to these sacrifices will the time have come for the great mass struggles. But those who, out of pity for these victims, would like to warn against the struggle, should be reminded that in Germany alone the capitalist greed for profit claims ten thousand lives every year, one hundred and forty thousand seriously injured, poor human lives, uselessly wasted and carelessly set aside – would it not be a saving of human lives if the power of capital were to be curbed by a sacrificial struggle and these accidents thus considerably reduced? Not only struggle, but also non-sacrifice requires sacrifice; therefore the thought of personal sacrifice will hardly be able to keep the proletariat from fighting. The situation is different with the dangers that threaten not individuals but the workers' movement as a whole.

If, we are warned, we take revolutionary action against the state authorities, they will abandon all consideration and use the harshest means against the proletariat. It will dissolve and destroy our organizations and take away our rights, e.g. the right of association. And even if this does not happen, if we suffer a defeat through insufficient strength, the organization will become completely incapable of fighting due to the exhaustion of the classes and mass desertion of the members. A time of reaction will then come in which much of what the proletariat has laboriously built up will be destroyed and lost. Today, the proletariat has more to lose than its chains: it should therefore think ten times before starting such battles.

But it is a strange notion that the state power can give and take away at will the political rights of which the proletariat avails itself, and that it lies in wait, as it were, to attack our organization as soon as we abuse them for revolutionary purposes. Is the right of association a right that we have acquired through our good behavior and that is taken away from us as soon as we show ourselves unworthy of it? Everyone knows that we have fought for it and that we fight for it anew every day. If it depended only on the good and bad will of the government, it would have been lost long ago under the pressure of the agitators. We do not ask what a reactionary government might like to do when the proletariat resorts to mass strikes in order to paint this as a spectre on the wall; we have to ask what such a government can and cannot do. During the struggle, as a defensive measure against the pressure of proletarian action, it can seek to paralyse, destroy and dissolve the organization of the workers with all its legal and violent power. But if it does not succeed in breaking the mass strike — as long as it does not break the firm cohesion, discipline, confidence and self-confidence of the workers, the attack on the external forms is of little help — its action is at an end; it is only a temporary measure of struggle. For it cannot turn this dissolution of the organization into a permanent condition. If it were to attempt to hold down the proletariat by depriving it of such bourgeois rights, it would do itself the worst harm± it would create a tremendous bitterness which would whip up the masses to the most energetic attacks, without at the same time being able to weaken in the least the tremendous power which the masses possess in their organizational consciousness, in their political insight and their solidarity. And however little insight a government may be credited with, it instinctively feels that a modern capitalist society cannot possibly exist without certain rights and freedoms for the workers and cannot rest permanently on violence.

More serious than the danger of repression from above is that of the internal disintegration of organizations due to the discouragement that can result from defeat. History, especially in other countries from the English Chartist movement to the Russian revolution, offers a plethora of examples of this, and it is probably this experience that makes many labor leaders shy away from such great struggles. But in doing so they overlook the very thing that is otherwise most strongly emphasized by the opponents of the mass strike: the difference between those countries and today's Germany. Almost always it was a question of masses that had only recently flocked to the organizations and were now streaming out again. In our case, however, we are dealing with organizations whose members have made organization more and more second nature through long practice. We can safely assume that these organized workers will not immediately turn their backs on the organization in the event of a setback. In trade union struggles, too, one suffers defeats without the union becoming incapable of fighting; here, too, one could emphasize the same danger without abandoning the struggle. Much of the unorganized forces that flow into the rising action will disappear again in the event of a setback, but this is the special feature of the coming struggles in Germany, that one can count on a solid, unshakeable body of fighting troops. Of less importance in this connection should be the well-developed treasury system; even if no general rigid rules can be given, and the federations must decide according to the respective circumstances to what extent their treasuries can play a role as an aid, it can nevertheless be considered a principle that a political mass strike cannot be led and won through the trade union treasuries; there can therefore be no question that after such a struggle the trade unions would be left without means and powerless in the face of the arbitrariness of the employers.

Does the proletariat really have more to lose than its chains? Certainly it has acquired many things, but the question is whether it can lose these possessions. It has not acquired security and prosperity; its possessions consist in institutions and organizations that serve the struggle against poverty and exploitation; they consist in spiritual and moral achievements that are the sources of its power. What it has acquired is a possession of strength, of power; and this strength cannot be lost in the struggle; after all, it is itself only a product of the struggle. And it was only through tireless struggle that the proletariat was able to build up all its institutions and organizations, its support institutions, its cooperatives, its insurance system, its educational institutions. If these were now a reason to shy away from fiercer struggles, lest they be endangered, they would be a source of weakness instead of strength. But it is just the opposite; on the one hand, their achievements strengthen the power of endurance, on the other hand, their inadequacy incites them to fight again and again. It is true that they need secure legal relations as a basis; but this is not offered to them by the ruling class's awareness of the law, but by the respect that proletarian power instills through its willingness to fight. Awakened in the storm of the class struggle, they are not fragile, delicate structures that must be anxiously guarded and protected; conversely, only the struggle will strengthen the power in the masses that sustains and expands them. What the proletariat possesses alongside its chains is a piece of strength that cannot disappear through the struggle, but can only grow until it is sufficient to break the chains.