End and Means in the Class Struggle

I. The Community Consciousness in the Class Struggle

It is a peculiarity of German feeling to blur, reinterpret and defile the content of an idea, a program of such truth, on the basis of erroneous, i.e. unconsciously and consciously deceptive notions of the epistemologically valid content of an idea, of such a program, by using something that is specifically called “feeling” in Germany as the standard of any doubts and proofs instead of knowledge. This kind of feeling, which is already a displacement born of uncertainty and hollow presumption, is not the motoric force that becomes a necessary and essential factor in the visualization of knowledge and its effects, but a gesture of force that, like the ostrich, puts its head into the pit of its heart. The method of “thinking with the heart”, this fraud, has earned German science not only the accusation of incompetence and banality, but also the contempt of non-German intelligentsia, which has increased to the point of rigidity. Once the veil over the German way of thinking and its accompanying phenomena, which the individual German usually feels in his own body, has been lifted somewhat everywhere and, moreover, forcibly, one cannot be surprised to find the realization everywhere that the German is only able to grasp the essence of an idea, a program, in rare cases and by giving up the possibility of withdrawing behind the cultivation of a national backing of whatever kind. But to give such an idea inner direction, to experience it logically, is, to tell the truth, not only extremely difficult for the German, but also very painful. It resembles an operation, and the important thing is not to fall under anaesthesia. I can tell the truth about it, even though, but also because I am a German myself.

European and American theorists of the proletarian class struggle have asked themselves in vain why syndicalism has found it so difficult to gain a foothold in Germany, and why the syndicalist program has to a large extent remained completely alien to the German proletariat even today. The explanation for this strange fact lies in the historical development of the common idea of the proletariat in Germany, but also in the preconditions of such a historical development, i.e. in the inner structure of the German will to exist. The German proletariat, which finds its support in a technically and materially highly developed industrial working class, forms the natural fulcrum for the proletarianization of Europe, and the entire proletarian class struggle movement of the Romance Western states, including England, rightly expected the impetus for a great movement from Germany even before the war. People consoled themselves for the increasing flattening of Social Democracy in Germany with the general consideration that the German may think slowly, but he is all the more tenacious in realizing the goal once it has been set. It is not known where this flattering view of the German proletarian may have come from. What is certain, however, is that it has been thoroughly and catastrophically disappointing. It should have been seen even before the war that the growth of the anarchist movement, as anarchism is understood in Germany, was beginning to blur the structure of the social-democratic idea of class struggle, which still existed at least in broad internal aspects. In no other country did the flattening of the revolutionary idea progress as rapidly as in Germany before the war, during the war and during the sham revolution of 1918/19. In Germany, anarchism, the struggle against coercion and the advocacy of a state without domination, was understood to be a religious idea, and only a religious idea. The German “anarchists” advocated this religious idea because it was the most comfortable and easiest thing for them, according to the structure of their nature and their emotional character, to paint a state of general humanity, understanding, goodness, vegetarianism, anti-vivisection etc. on the wall, in short the general human paradise, Eden on earth, to which they only had to emphasize that they were partisans in order to become partakers of eternal bliss. It was enough for the German anarchist and revolutionary to declare: I believe in happiness and in the community in order to have already fulfilled his profession as a revolutionary and his responsibility to the community. Naturally, by contrast, the old social democracy increasingly fell behind in terms of its unity of movement and the power of its ideas. The trade unions, which emerged from the source of the proletarian movement and cannot be denied the immense merit of forcing the proletarian masses into a united front in the first period of their existence, were condemned from the outset to ossify into bureaucracy. The lack of revolutionary spirit among the German proletariat became the inner reason for the counter-revolutionary development of the trade union idea in general.

German Social Democracy, which entered the proletarian class struggle in the trade union movement, soon confused goal and content, using as its goal an illusory content, the projection of a true content. The mass movement, carried by the purpose of establishing the proletariat as consciousness in a bloc, could do nothing other than transfer the means of struggle and organization to a small group of functionaries and leaders who declared themselves ready to bear the responsibility towards the masses for achieving the goals. Without demagogic means, this sense of responsibility cannot be borne as long as the inner commonality, as long as the inner cohesion of the individuals within the masses is missing or at least not demonstrated. The old social democracy failed to do this, and if you have followed me you will realize that it could not do otherwise.

The class struggle organized by social democracy and the trade unions was a matter of the stomach. It was about higher wages, it was about the recognition of the proletariat as an economic factor with rights within the production process, and ultimately it was also about a psychological liberation of the individual's conditions of existence. But this latter goal was only the accidental consequence of the first two. It is obvious that the communal consciousness of a class struggle, which from this point of view can only be a purely external and accidental one, could not appear and therefore could not be effective in crises in which the existence of the proletarian idea mattered, such as at the outbreak of war. A commonality in external conditions will always be subject to arbitrary shifts and dissolutions.

But class struggle, revolutionary class struggle, is something quite different. It is the communal consciousness of those people who are oppressed and oppressed. It is the communal consciousness of people who generally feel the principle of oppression and confinement, even if they themselves no longer suffer from it in their own bodies. It is the communal consciousness of a realization of events that can take place any length of time in the past. It is, to use the language of the German activists, the awareness of a snare that, labelled religion, wants to capture the creative spirit.

This class struggle is carried by the revolutionary working class, the proletariat. It is carried by the working class precisely because the sum of the oppressions and constrictions is most visibly expressed in the working class. Not because the proletarian and the worker have lacked the education, the broad view for the existential emanation of body and spirit or are closed, but because the realization of this, the realization of such constrictions, has become revolution beyond the crisis of sinking into humility and religion.

The individual mind can also revolutionize. Even the intellectual who, equipped with the techniques of knowledge, sets himself against himself. But this revolution remains fragmentary. It becomes embarrassing when it discharges itself in new science or even in bound speech in the other projections of intuitive experience. A revolution that is unfruitful in itself becomes inhibiting, it stinks. The communal consciousness of the class struggle as the inner unity of those people who are filled with the realization of being and being oppressed obliges them to unity. This obligation is synonymous with human existence, and it is the fulfilment of this obligation that can provide the yardstick for the concept of human dignity and humanity. The essential content of a concept such as “good” is a hoax as long as it does not contain the obligation to commonality. The true inner technique of the revolution is to allow this obligation to be experienced by all as a community within the commonality of class struggle consciousness.

II. Community and Solidarity

The consciousness of community, the inner connectedness creates the concept: mass. The mass is the expression of that sense of community which must be present as a psychologically effective precondition in order to bridge the differentiations of individual consciousness. It is erroneous to want to attribute an agglomeration of individuals, as it appears externally as a mass, to external influences. This is one of the main characteristics of the “German” way of looking at things. Pressure from outside can only trigger effects, but only effects of something that is already there. Pressure can break down barriers and accelerate the pace. A pressure is, as the term implies, indirect, never direct, one would have to understand the drive from outside religiously — as God. (As ridiculous as this may sound now, it is not too far removed from the psychological basis of “religion”). So a mass is not “welded together”, but it joins together, it grows out of itself, it crystallizes. It presses closer together, it clusters — admittedly out of the feeling of fear, of being inferior, of loneliness — within the atmosphere of today's capitalist new world that triggers loneliness — but its emergence develops completely independently and in the germ, uninfluenced and uninfluenceable in terms of its life content. One only falsifies once again with ideologies. Of course, one can conceptually form a different idea of the masses. A mass that crystallizes out of happiness, joy and freedom, that ignites commonality from the glow of unleashed intensity, the forward-chasing élan for expansiveness and world-embracing, the surplus of experiential ability. This is a mass that will be. But we are in the mass that is. Those who are confronted with the “masses” try to disguise their lack of awareness of the feeling of commonality, they lie instead of being ashamed, as cripples whose commonality consists in seeing and feeling themselves and the still not inconsiderable number of equally unhappy people. For the mass that is, may also be desperate, oppression-conscious and timid, but the consciousness of equal feeling is effective, it does not lie, the proletarian mass. They are proud of their consciousness!

What a difference! It is the automatically opening front of life against decay, of truth against philosophy.

But the commonality, the experience of inner solidarity, is only a precondition in this struggle, the psychologically effective basis. The division into classes is a concomitant phenomenon in the form of the effectiveness of economic conditions. The content of the effective class struggle is no longer a concept, no longer knowledge, but, beyond the despair of depersonalization, becoming individual again, personality again out of the masses, the content of this class struggle is again real struggle, the goal internally and externally, in commonality, is solidarity.

Solidarity is the decisive factor when we speak of class struggle; within the commonality, solidarity is the factor which, within the confrontation between equals who are not recognized as such by the human commonality, imposes the character of class struggle on this confrontation. It is obvious that such confrontations, such actions of solidarity, are expressed most visibly and effectively in the struggle for economic existence. That such economically solidary actions, which are a precondition for the greater realization of the general consciousness of community and which basically only aim at this, have helped to shape the concept of class struggle. Nevertheless, it must be maintained that class struggle is not the confrontation of people from the economic side, but from the idealistic, experiential and experienceable side.

In the present atmosphere of social stratification there are quite a number of processes which definitely bear the character of class struggle, without having received the designation of class struggle from the usual point of view. The most important struggle of this kind is the struggle of the sexes, the struggle waged by women against men. The history of this class struggle dates from the collapse of maternal rights, i.e. from usurpation, from the seizure of the family by men, which was expressed in the proclamation of paternal rights and the suppression of maternal rights. It would go too far here to examine the reasons that caused such a rape of the woman by the man in sociological terms. It would be going too far to go into what immeasurable misfortune has been brought upon mankind by this rape, and what a sum of intensity and happiness has been lost to the world and will continue to be lost. I must confine myself to explaining here that this loss of intensity, this sequence of rape, is certain and is increasingly being recognized by individuals. On the other hand, every woman feels it instinctively in her subconscious. The communal awareness of this loss of intensity, i.e. banal speaking, of this oppression and this injustice, is inherent in the subconscious of every woman. The efforts of literature to raise this common consciousness of women have been able to provide interesting insights, but in the end they have remained bungling work because they have not recognized the fundamental character of this struggle, because they have not recognized the comprehensive commonality of all women in this struggle, but have constructed psychologizing questions from the individual case to which they were not able to give an answer. In this kind of literature, which includes all writers who have dealt with this problem, the inability to answer a problem posed has been proclaimed as an artistic form in itself. (Expressionism is probably the strangest story of human mendacity).

The struggle of youth against age is similar to that of women against men. In the authority of education, in the superiority of the adult over the child and the adolescent given by the atmosphere of our social stratification, the youth also feels the commonality of a rape and the common awareness of an injustice. Here, too, the struggle is about the stratification of society, about the atmosphere of culture, not about individuals and not about the right to an economic existence. Although in the final effect of this idea of class struggle, the economic side will also predominate here, insofar as the sentence applies that the question of man's existence, whether solved sociologically or economically, includes a predominance of the material, precisely as a means of securing existence. The fact of existence obliges the individual to secure his existence. Only from here, in the sense of the communist world order, can the sociological structure of society, the social stratification, the problem of work and the question of the connection between individual people be considered and, if one wishes, regulated.

As an example of a further struggle, we might also mention the struggle of those who are concerned with recognition, with knowledge of their living conditions, against those who are content to believe in authoritarian doctrines in order to secure the position they have gained from them against their opponents, the doubters, the anti-authoritarians. Naturally, this can only happen through violent suppression, and the struggle of religion, of the church, of the “orthodox” against the spirit, against free thought, shows countless examples of bloody suppression. How strong this common consciousness of oppression is in this struggle is shown, for example, by the fact that bitterness, the knots of inhibited intensity are still expressed even by those who are no longer directly involved in the struggle. A whole number of professions should be mentioned at this point which to a certain extent, albeit to a lesser extent, wage a communal struggle to enforce their psychological conditions of existence.

The general characteristic of the positions of struggle referred to here is the lack of effectiveness of this struggle towards the outside, the crystallization of these conflicts as class struggle. The reason for this lack lies in the lack of solidarity. Community consciousness exists, but is not developed into joint action. The defense has become so differentiated and personal that the obligation to joint action, solidarity, seems like something completely new, something that is born anew from within and must first develop if the community consciousness of oppression is to lead to the abolition of this oppression. It is precisely from the examples mentioned above that the obligation to solidarity undoubtedly arises. Solidary action is the new commonality that is built on community consciousness. Solidary action is the inner unity in struggle. It is only because of the lack of solidarity that the German people have their terribly depressing position among the nations. Even in the phases of the present revolution the proletariat still lacks inner solidarity.

There is a long way to go. In Germany, the necessity of solidarity within the enforcement of economic demands is only now being understood. Despite the material atmosphere, solidarity can only be understood from the atmosphere of social stratification. The demands for solidarity are psychological and not tactical. The realization of such psychological demands provides the platform for the evaluation of the class struggle and for the evaluation of the means used by the class struggle. I am not afraid to say that once the problem of the proletariat, capitalism and entrepreneurship has been overcome, the class struggle will expand. It will not stop at the enforcement of material goals, even the enforcement of the communist slogan of the guarantee of existence, but will extend to the way of life and the conditions of experience of people among themselves. The obligation to solidarity, which is a matter of course for every individual proletarian today in the assertion of his economic demands, including the demand for existence within the communist economic order, this obligation to solidarity will spread to the struggle of women against men and to the struggle of youth against old age. These struggles, which are still looming far in the background today, will also crystallize into forms of solidarity. They will unleash a new revolution within the social stratification on the sociological side, and the means of such a class struggle will be perfected accordingly and will be closer to the final struggle for human community than the class struggle for the right to exist, which is still to be assessed here.

III. The Stages of the Revolutionary Atmosphere

The psychological preconditions of class struggle are those of solidarity, solidarity both as regards to its direct effect, its aim, and as regards to the origin, the communal consciousness of oppression. Accordingly, the means of the class struggle are also subdivided by themselves. The class struggle in itself is in its basic character an action of solidarity and must be so if one wants to apply the term class struggle to a conflict. But it is no less composed of a sum of individual actions of different kinds. This means that the means in the class struggle itself are basically individually different, and that the effectiveness of the means depends only on the extent to which this diversity can be made effective and combined into a common action. The consciousness of oppression as community consciousness forces out means of struggle which at first sight hardly seem to have any particular aim. It must be pointed out once again that the basic feature of this communal consciousness is not precisely the present realization of being oppressed, i.e. of an action in which one can intervene, but precisely the realization of being oppressed, i.e. of a state, an atmosphere, which eludes the intervention of external actions. It may be recalled here that this awareness also becomes effective on the basis of processes that lie far back in history, such as the oppression by the religious systems, which today have only become conscious as oppression in knowledge and have created a community platform of “freethinking”.

To go against the atmosphere of a state requires means of an equally atmospheric nature; it leads to an overgrowth of the consideration of the goal over the sum of the means that can lead to its achievement. It requires the complete realization of the new opposing and desired state in relation to the atmosphere of the state that is perceived as oppression. Beware, however, of dismissing this basic attitude merely as a revolutionary atmosphere. On the contrary, the attainment of this atmosphere is in itself a means, and it is precisely this means that becomes all the sharper and shows all the greater perspectives the more intensively one has to pass through the stages of realization of the state of oppression in relation to the state of freedom, socialism and communism that the class struggle strives for. No struggle that is to have even the slightest class struggle character can be fought without this basic attitude, without this revolutionary atmosphere seen as a means.

This revolutionary atmosphere appears, it grows out of the consciousness of oppression, i.e. the existence of the proletariat as a contradiction. It is a fraud of the Christian cultural idea to claim that “pain shared is pain halved”; the suffering that is borne or should and must be borne together in no way contributes to alleviating this awareness of suffering for the individual, but rather stimulates an intensification of the feeling of suffering. It obliges the individual to feel his suffering doubly when the person next to him also suffers. The solidary consciousness of the proletariat thus intensifies the character of suffering as a precondition of class struggle in each individual. In addition, psychic liberation begins to develop. This psychic liberation is no longer so much the work of solidary community consciousness, but is the necessity of the development of the individual psyche in order to make it capable of carrying out the class struggle in later stages. The straightforward intensification of this psychic liberation begins with contradiction, namely in the contradiction of oneself, the obligation to say no, the negation of the world and thus of the state atmosphere against which this contradiction immediately turns, and finally the feeling of well-being to say no against one's better judgment. A compromise then develops from the basis of this contradiction, namely the realization that this contradiction, which to a certain extent serves as the exhaust of an overheated atmosphere of bitterness, leads to nothing more than an intensification of the realization of being oppressed, to which all paths lead back again and again as in a maze. Hence the compromise to come to an understanding, i.e. to let it be dealt with, in which the atmosphere once recognized as oppression rises and evaporates with regard to a burden, but then also to measure the forces with which it is possible to break through the darkness, to force down the oppressors and to accept a new state oneself, which one must first prepare inwardly within oneself. It must be clearly stated that any pact beyond the clear realization of that atmospheric state is and remains a compromise. The revolutionary in the true sense of the word, i.e. the subversive, the rebel, who has truly recognized the state of the world and his own state, i.e. his relation to it, needs no revolutionary means. He creates the new atmosphere with his own condition. He shatters — figuratively speaking — the world around him with the flash of an instantaneous enlightenment and creates new relationships for himself according to his new realization. It can be argued that this contradicts practical experience and the law of development. The fact that all men have hitherto made compromises, that even the course of life itself is a compromise with the most diverse psychic and physical sources of power, has experience for itself, but by no means the logical truth. But even if one had to do without finding a way out of the maze of compromises, a clear attitude towards this awareness is enough to fundamentally and substantially change the revolutionary atmosphere of the individual.

From this atmosphere, as if seen through a fog, the goal of overthrow emerges through contradiction and bitterness. The opponents of the revolutionary class always emphasize, and they usually use this as a defensive weapon, that singled-out individuals in the revolution are confused thinkers who cannot form a clear picture of the aims of their movement. This proves the whole flimsy ideology of the propertied class. They do not realize that basically the revolutionary they mean not only cannot form a picture, which would not be so difficult, but does not want to form such a picture. The state in which he lives is a state of bitterness, triggered by the atmosphere of oppression, which is also the atmosphere of possession, around him. His struggle is therefore directed against the effects of this atmosphere with the tendency to become a state within this struggle. But this means that all the means that lead to overthrow and have thus been chosen are, as it were, stations between which he lives and the overcoming of which completely fills his inner self. The revolutionary as such is the only one who commits acts out of the revolutionary atmosphere and is prepared to live himself within these acts. He is therefore the only one to whom the word Revolutionary can really be applied.

The assessment of the individual means from this point of view is, of course, considerably different from the usual purely academic enumeration of those methods that have arisen partly from the scientific treatment of economic questions and partly from the psychiatric study of reactions and associations. The assessment therefore begins with the revolutionary atmosphere of contradiction, which leads to the crossroads of the compromise that may well be necessary, branching off into individual actions of a mediating nature, from individual terror down to the wage strike. The assessment of these means is fundamentally influenced and dependent on the extent to which the necessary precondition of community consciousness, of solidarity, is maintained. Individual terror, for all its high value within its revolutionary atmosphere, can be hostile to society if it lacks the criterion of solidarity. It should therefore be examined to what extent solidarity itself influences these means, to what extent it has made them worthless, especially in view of today's conditions, and to what extent this very necessity of solidarity is able to cancel out the unpleasant psychological after-effects of a compromise and to what extent it has itself brought about these compromises.

IV. Proletarian Class Consciousness is Class Struggle

At the moment when the sketchy remarks on the class struggle are drawing to a close, it is time to say what could have been interpreted as self-irony or misdirection. The class struggle of the proletariat is class consciousness. This realization is expressed in a particularly sharp way in the development of the German November Revolution of 1918. Insofar as this revolution can be described as a proletarian one at all, its solidarity was projected more onto militaristic than onto social oppression. The proletariat, as the realization of common oppression, experiences the authoritarian gagging of militarism only as an accidental and above all as a necessary consequence of social gagging. It can only experience militarism in the role of a prisoner who is cut off from any possibility of freedom. They therefore experience militarism no differently than any harassment by a sadistic prison administration, as a means of extorting the willingness to bear their slavery. Consequently, the rebellion against militaristic coercion, the breaking of militaristic authority, cannot be understood in any other way than as the accidental success of a prisoner against his guard. No one seriously believes that if a prisoner kicks the guard in his cell, he has thereby won his freedom. The proletariat knows deeply that it has to fight against the system, against the vast number of invisible phenomena which signify its oppression, which are the psychological and physical foundations of its state of oppression; the proletariat knows that it has to fight against this state and not against external excesses and means. Certainly there may have been the possibility of extending the chance success and following behind the guard into freedom and at the same time hitting the system decisively with the guard. But this required the will to unite, solidarity, the solid consciousness of being a proletariat; this required uncovering the source from which the solid action should have emerged, i.e. the realization of proletarian class consciousness. But only this is the atmospheric precondition and basis of the class struggle.

To understand the atmosphere of class struggle, one need only recall the various revenge trials of bourgeois society in that year. The unfortunate Munich Communists were handed over to the bourgeois mob in the hostage murder trial with a unanimity that indeed contained all the characteristics of solidarity. Nowhere among the bourgeois ideology still so strongly entrenched in Germany was there even a word of human understanding, a word of regret or disgust to be found against the conduct of the trial in Munich, which made a mockery of the basic concepts of psychology and empathy for the thoughts and actions of fellow human beings. The death sentence was greeted with howls of triumph bordering on the pathological. Rarely has what we call civic solidarity been so clearly evident as in these trials.

One must continue to follow the atrocity reports in the bourgeois press that are and have been spread about Hungary and still about Russia. Only very occasionally can one find shamefully concealed corrections or, especially in the Western European press, idealizations of such atrocity stories. In contrast, the reports about the rampages of the White Guard, about the brutality and the acts of violence bordering on madness committed by the German soldiers in Berlin, Leipzig, Munich and wherever else they had the opportunity to shake down the working class, have the sad advantage of being true. The bourgeois press also reports on this as a matter of course, without the slightest word of disgust or regret. And it is characteristic of the whole situation within the bourgeois and proletarian class struggle that the proletarian press is almost helpless in the face of these reports, that its disgust is more like a stammer, because it feels inwardly that it still has nothing to oppose to this closed bourgeois solidarity.

From the correct, perhaps the only possible conception of solidarity, the proletariat, in its attempt to further the November uprising, resorted to arresting hostages from the circles of the bourgeoisie. There is no more effective means of testing solidarity than the arrest of hostages, because it elevates the struggle from the atmosphere of the individual against the individual to the confrontation of the classes. It is the test of existence of the class struggle of the proletariat against bourgeois society, the decision as to which form of solidarity is more powerful and more consolidated in itself, because it is the latter that is victorious in this conflict. On the occasion of the hostage-taking, the bourgeois press did not fail to play the main weapon of its ideology, sentimentality, the human community swindle. It spoke of “innocent” victims who were to be slaughtered, it spoke of the “uninvolved”, of women and children who were to be sacrificed to the rage of the “mob”. And the success was nothing short of overwhelming; for even broad masses of the proletariat, an almost overwhelming majority of the working class itself, followed this ideology and condemned the arrest of hostages in order to allegedly force down the solidarity of the other classes with the weapons of the mind and other means borrowed from bourgeois ideology. It has been shown and was clear from the outset that turning away from this ideology, listening to the sentimental and flattering tones of bourgeois communal swindle, has dealt and had to deal the death blow to the solidarity of the proletariat.

Bourgeois society passes over the murder and imprisonment of proletarian fighters in silence with the same right, which, incidentally, cannot be denied the logic of experience. It describes them as people who have placed themselves outside of society and who are subjected to the consequences of the common will of this society, its instincts of revenge, which are self-protection. The proletariat did not rise up against such a view as a class, it crawled sullenly into a corner, sank back in resignation because, deprived of its essential means of existence, the solidary revolutionary atmosphere, it could do nothing at all. What matters in the proletarian class struggle is not the individual, even though every individual has perhaps become and should become a bearer of proletarian class consciousness, but what matters is the solid community atmosphere, the will for human community in contrast to the sentimental bourgeois commonality swindle, which wraps itself in the cloak of culture and the safeguarding of experience of centuries-old oppression arising from misunderstanding and ill-will, which bourgeois society calls laws.

This is the momentary picture offered by the so-called proletarian class struggle. Defencelessly exposed to revenge and the self-protection of bourgeois solidarity, without weapons against the will to exist of bourgeois society and culture based on solidarity, because without recognizing the necessity of a solidary atmosphere of class struggle, the proletariat desperately shakes up its arms, weighed down by the chains of millennia. Like a thousand divided voices, it cries out for salvation, for action and for the destruction of the bourgeois social order, and all that remains is a thousand fragmented, deep-rooted bitterness that carries its explosiveness inwards and not outwards.

And what is to be done? The intensity of that bitterness cannot provide an answer. It is nothingness, the point of ignorance taken to its deepest extreme, which the proletariat is facing. It is no longer the wage strike, the economic struggle against entrepreneurship for better living conditions for the working class, not the means of sabotage, of passive resistance, not the individual with the conflict-laden triggers of individual terror, the fight of an eye for an eye, blood for blood, not the goal of today against yesterday, but tomorrow alone can form the rallying point for the proletariat's will to exist for a new tomorrow. The existential struggle of the proletariat, which the bourgeois classes rightly call the class struggle of the proletariat, only becomes visible when the class consciousness of the proletariat, when the realization of what the proletariat means and signifies, has become so compelling that it appears in solidarity. Then the means and externalities, the actions may be conditioned by contingencies, they may be linked to individual organizations or forms of government that are to be brought down, they may differentiate themselves within the struggle for political power, which represents the closest and most visible stage of the revolutionary struggle, according to spiritual, i.e. political, according to economic, i.e. as a result of this most expedient methods. It may be party and organizational forms that will re-establish discipline and authority within the struggle according to the same expediency. The proletariat as such, the community of the proletarian class-conscious, will not find its own means, which are born in struggle, too compelling. The proletariat will always have it in its power to give birth to new forms and means of struggle out of the community, provided that it remains a proletariat, i.e. that it consciously perceives the community class, that the common goal remains the smashing of bourgeois ideology, and that the realization has become a precondition of existence in each individual: that the new society must not only mean the community of yield, but the community of the entire experience.