The Necessity of the Mass Strike

For some time now, the question of the mass strike has again occupied the party to a great extent; it is being discussed in meetings and in the press and will undoubtedly also play a role at the next party congress. However, it only concerns the party and not yet the working masses; that is why some people consider the whole discussion to be pointless talk. But wrongly so. Once it occupies the masses, then it is a matter of action, then we are faced with practical realization, and everyone knows that certain situations are necessary for this, which do not depend on us alone. In the liberation struggle of the proletariat, the Party has the task of clearly recognizing the development, of mentally grasping how the masses act and will act, and therefore of being a leader in the struggle. Therefore the party must be theoretically clear about this means of struggle before it can develop its highest power in practice; and it is this theoretical clarification that is at issue now. The masses will only come into motion when a revolutionary situation stirs them up powerfully; the party is now being driven to a renewed discussion of the question by its realization of the inadequacy of the previous methods, above all also under the impression of the effects of the tactics of recent years.

It is therefore completely inappropriate to ridicule the “mass actionists”, as Kautsky did in Die Neue Zeit, for example, for being abandoned by the masses. For us it is not a question of a special predilection for mass actions, but of the theoretical insight that they are necessary and that the party can no longer advance without them. If it were true that the masses are not amenable to a method of struggle which the party clearly recognizes as the only means of advancing in the struggle for freedom, this would certainly be a strange fact which deserves special discussion. For us, the first and most important question is: is the mass strike really necessary, or can we manage, albeit more slowly, without it? And because it is not a question of defending against attacks on Reichstag suffrage – there can hardly be any disagreement about its application in this case – the question is also whether the mass strike is necessary and expedient as a weapon in the struggle for universal suffrage in Prussia.

Some doubts have recently been raised about this. The harshest means can only be applied where the most important political interests of the working class are concerned. The right to vote for the Prussian Landtag, it is said, is not such a vital interest, since the most important political questions are decided in the Reichstag. Only the right to vote in the Reichstag is a vital interest for the proletariat; the Prussian right to vote is only a matter of the struggle against the Junkers, of the removal of feudal ruins, and therefore the workers will never devote all their strength to it.

It is undoubtedly true that the division of power and the functions between the Reichstag and the Diet make the struggle more difficult. If there were only one parliament, to which a general equal suffrage could be obtained, as in Belgium, the matter would be much simpler. If, at the foundation of the German Empire, the most important political matters pertaining to capitalism had not been assigned to an imperial parliament with universal suffrage, we would certainly have had revolutionary movements in Germany several decades ago. Under universal suffrage, the workers were able to fight politically and develop their power, but now they are increasingly coming up against the limits of this suffrage. The Reichstag is not the ruling, decisive power in the empire; Germany is not a country governed by a parliament. Next to the Reichstag stands the government; even if it is called “the allied governments”, which, assembled in the Bundesrat, can throw all the resolutions of the Reichstag into the wastepaper basket, it is in reality the Prussian government, which, having all the means of power of a modern state at its disposal, confronts the Reichstag as an equal power. In parliamentary terms, this government is based on the Prussian Landtag; the Landtag in Berlin is therefore the stronghold of all anti-working-class reaction, and if one wants to strike at the heart of this reaction, then it must be attacked in this cave. One should not be deceived by the outward appearance that it is called a Junker parliament, nor should one think of Junkers as something feudal; Prussian electoral law is the most genuine moneybags electoral law, and if so many Junkers come out of it, that only proves – that the Junkers are nothing but the political objectors, the bodyguards of capital, which in reality rules. Of course, this cheeky praetorian guard takes what is necessary for itself and maltreats the good bourgeoisie to boot – the whining and hissing about it is then presented to us in the sublime appearance of a world-historical class struggle between nobility and bourgeoisie. In reality, capital and the Junkertum stand here faithfully together; they know that the Landtag forms the backing of the government against a democratic Reichstag. It is therefore clear that here lies the most direct object of struggle in the class struggle; every thrust against the old walls of this fortress is a strengthening of the power of the Reichstag against the government. If one does not merely want to defend oneself in imperial politics when the right to vote is attacked, but to attack, to advance, to conquer rights, then there is only one way: the Prussian suffrage struggle. If it is a vital interest for the proletariat to conquer the democratic forms that make the will of the majority of the people the law of the land, then the conquest of universal suffrage is such a vital interest for Prussia, and indeed for the entire German proletariat.

Here the objection could be raised that a demand whose necessity can only be grasped through deeper political insight is not suitable as a slogan for mass action. But that is not the case here. Apart from the fact that the party has the possibility of providing the broadest political enlightenment in such a case, the Prussian suffrage struggle is also close to the immediate consciousness of the proletarian. The momentum with which the masses took to the streets everywhere in 1910 is evidence of this. For the workers, the Prussian system of government brought together everything that they hated from the bottom of their souls, everything that annoyed and annoyed them every day at every turn, everything reactionary that did not necessarily belong to capitalist exploitation and therefore oppressed and outraged them as a backward barbarism. The spiritual and material oppression of the working class is embodied in the Prussian schoolmaster and the Prussian policeman; the struggle for democratic Prussian suffrage speaks directly to every worker as a struggle against all the political pressure that weighs on him.

The objection to mass strike propaganda has been that it harms the trade unions, which are thereby prevented from continuing to work quietly to improve working conditions. But it is precisely from the point of view of the trade union struggle that the need for a vigorous fight for Prussian suffrage is most obvious. While in the first decade of the great period of prosperity that lies behind us – roughly from 1895 to 1905 – a considerable improvement in living conditions was fought for, there is no longer any talk of this in the later years. The strengthening of the employers' associations and the concentration of big business on the one hand, and inflation on the other, meant that what was laboriously improved in nominal wages could hardly make up for the rise in prices, and that in many cases the standard of living was even directly worsened. If this was the result when the economy was good, what will it be like during the crisis? It cannot be said that the organizations are to blame here; they have grown significantly in size and financial strength during this time. The balance of power has just shifted; by concentrating its power, business has halted the advance of the workers from the time of the first great trade union upswing. This cannot, of course, mean that all further progress is now cut off; but it does mean that it is unlikely that much progress can be made by purely trade union methods as long as the present power relations between workers and employers continue to exist. Now the employers feel strong above all because they have the whole power of the state at their back; only when a great shift of power occurs in the political sphere will it be possible to push them back again considerably - such a shift would lie in a retreat of the government before a vigorous suffrage struggle of the workers. The reversal of the great organizational power of the trade unions in the political struggle, in order to first clear the way for further advances in their own field – that is the political mass strike in the struggle for Prussian suffrage.

In all areas it is not possible to make significant progress without taking up the struggle for basic democratic rights with more powerful means. The sooner this truth penetrates the working masses, the better prepared they will be for this struggle.