Mass Action and Party

The wave of unemployment is swelling into a tidal surge. The tax avalanche gnaws at the meager wage. Municipalities and the "Father State"—through their "austerity measures"—drive millions of uprooted people to despair, lurking at every corner with rubber truncheons and firearms. The trade unions and Social Democracy—the well-paid, callous lackeys of this starvation democracy—are outraged at the "audacity" of the hungry for daring to speak out, instead of cheering the state that is killing them.

As always in such crisis-laden situations, a variety of miracle doctors are once again mobilized, peddling their patented solutions for how the proletariat can lift itself out of the muck without too much pain.

"Political mass strike!" we read every day in the 'Rote Fahne'. The drumbeat has grown rather muted lately, though. Just a few weeks ago—if we were to take the scribblings seriously—we were supposedly on the brink of "Soviet Germany." Now the "great battle day" has been postponed to March 6; until then, we must march in place to avoid disrupting unity—yet this "marching in place" still drowns out the monotonous cry: "Political mass strike!"

What is this "political mass strike"?—A few days ago, the workers at Opel went on strike. They remained isolated—their demands were not the kind that moved the class—and they had to crawl back in defeat. The 'Rote Fahne' loudly proclaimed: "Political mass strike at Opel!" And if we take a closer look at the opportunistic grandstanding during the chauffeurs’ strike in Berlin, it fits right in with actions like the "plumbers’ strike," the textile workers’ strike in Hartmannsdorf, the shoemakers’ strike in Berlin—a whole chain of isolated actions. The "political mass strike" becomes a ridiculous farce, degraded into a mere phrase. Another name for fragmented putschism.

In the background stands Brandler, issuing "warnings." He preaches a united front "with our Social Democratic brothers." Don’t isolate ourselves from the masses. Don’t "split" the unions, but "conquer" them. This hardened fellow speculates that the dumb proletarians will forget that this united front led to the gallows forest in Hungary, that this "united front" shattered the mass strike of Berlin’s munitions workers in 1918, that his united front in Saxony in 1923 handed the proletariat over to Social Democratic executioners. He calculates: Social Democracy will beat the illusions out of the workers’ heads themselves, proving there’s not a spark of proletarian understanding left in it. And the Thälmanns and Leows, through their blunders, will ensure that the proletariat—disillusioned anew—turns to them. To their "left," Urbahns is fishing around. What he wants differently from Brandler, even those still following him—only the devil knows why—can’t seem to define.

Everywhere the same phenomenon: each faction holds its policy up as the infallible recipe. And deep down, the proletariat wants nothing to do with these recipes. It remains passive.

This is not to say that such passivity is something to welcome—quite the contrary. It’s oppressive to see with what patience the proletariat endures the insolence of the capitalist class and its parasitic lackeys. But lamenting this passivity won’t break it.

And at its core, that’s not even the question requiring some specific "tactic." The workers’ movement is rich with examples of how this apparent passivity can flip into activity so swiftly that these miracle doctors recoil in fright—and where the working class lacks the strength to sweep them aside, they become active helpers of the counterrevolution.

The working class senses dimly that every isolated strike against monopolized capitalism fizzles out. The unemployed, through years of desperate resistance, have learned that they cannot change their plight as long as they remain alone.

The class justice of this bankrupt democracy has etched into workers’ minds with centuries of prison sentences that individual bravado is suicide. The great army of the working class is taught daily by the facts that it can no longer fight an enemy with prewar weapons—an enemy that battles with entirely different tools, with entirely different economic, political, and technical means. The proletariat no longer believes in the trade unions as organizations capable of waging the class struggle or being "conquered." It no longer believes in the Zörgiebel party. It no longer believes in parliamentary windbaggery. It no longer believes in the recipes of parliamentary phrase-mongers.

It feels that tremendous historical upheavals have taken place and are still unfolding. It is searching for a way out. This groping for the saving shore need not manifest in "highs" and "lows" on the streets. The ceaseless, necessary provocations of the capitalist profit-makers—necessary for them because only through relentless increases in exploitation can they scrape together capital accumulation to dump their goods on the world market—drive toward an eruption of the unbearable tension. The proletariat’s action begins when the spark of worker solidarity activates millions. An outwardly trivial trigger can set the geyser loose. Mass strike! This is not a new slogan, not a will-o’-the-wisp of parliamentary bluff tactics. A political mass strike that emerges from the chaos of this rubber-truncheon democracy is the working class’s declaration of war—against parliamentary and union betrayal as well. It is the proletarian "rabble" seizing the organ of the capitalist state.

The miracle doctors and profiteers of proletarian defeat leave the proletariat just as unclear about the true historical meaning of the political mass strike in today’s situation as they do about the situation itself. And that, too, is "tactics." If the proletariat grasped that only a mass uprising can bring salvation, that this uprising must target the capitalist order to have any meaning, and that this order includes its parliamentary and union profiteers, it would ask: What’s the point of this ridiculous squabbling over union posts, over legally bound statutory works councils tied to democratic legality, this carnival around the voting booths of democratic corruption?

None at all!
And not only that.

Then it becomes the task of the communists to bring these connections to the proletariat’s consciousness every day. To demonstrate, through the capitalist provocations in every sphere, that the conditions of class struggle have outgrown the petty squabbles mediated by potbellied bureaucrats. That it’s time to draw the organizational conclusions from the economic-political conditions: the organization of the fighting class on a higher level. The union of the working class, structured by workplaces, woven into a centralized unity, infused with the will: "All for one, one for all." We know that the will to create the class organization of the proletariat is identical to the will to fight at all. And yet, every effort must be strained to prepare. For the revolution will not triumph in its first surge. A wave of ups and downs, of heroism and fatalism, of enthusiasm and passivity will reflect over it, over the deepening crisis of the capitalist order, until the duration and depth of the crisis leave no other way out but victory or barbarism.

But amid the surf of lies and stupidity, of despair and death-defying boldness, of iron will to fight and stinking decay, there must stand—like a rock in the sea—the revolutionary fighting party of the communists, the party of revolution.

Its resolutions—made by the members themselves—must hold until repealed. It must be able to hold every member accountable, no matter where they stand, if they invoke the "self-determination" of other organizations. And whoever clings to these "principles" must be exposed as a hypocritical, stinking opportunist and cast out.

We have no more time to lose; the watchword must be: Ready at any moment!

For the party’s task is to act as an ideological collective force, to hasten the mental transformation of the proletariat in the process of struggle, to lead by fighting, to unleash the strength within the proletariat that enables it to fulfill its historical mission.

The Central Committee meeting of the KAPD must be the first step toward mobilizing these forces. It is about learning from past mistakes to face coming storms as a disciplined unity.