The New World (II)

The world war has devastated the world and plunged it into the deepest poverty, creating chaos.

For four years, all productive forces have been put to the service of war. This means that all raw materials, all machinery, all means of transport, and all human labor have been wasted unproductively. They were used for the purpose of destruction; they were consumed not to produce anything but to defeat the enemy. The consequence had to be an absolute shortage of everything that society needs to continue to exist. That this could go on for four years was only possible because during these four years, the living conditions of the masses were reduced to the bare minimum: production for the war meant less covering of the basic needs. However, this could only offset a part of the war's waste; alongside this comes the neglect of all means of production and transport; instead of renewing them, they were exhausted. Thus, at the end of the war, one faces a complete disruption of economic life: there is a lack of means of production, raw materials, and labor; for the people have been physically weakened by the long deprivation. One might counter that capital has indeed increased and concentrated significantly. However, this capital consists primarily of titles of ownership, not productive capital. It represents ownership of factories that do not have the ability to produce immediately; it is primarily state debt, i.e., claims on vast sums of interest that must be paid to capitalists by the proletariat and the petty bourgeoisie and farmers in the form of taxes. The accumulation of capital conditions the distribution of products—it signifies that the produced products are distributed as unjustly as possible—but does not increase production. The enrichment of the powerful means that the vampyrs will further aggravate the general poverty by seizing the largest part of the meager supplies for themselves. From a purely economic perspective, the world already faces an enormous bankruptcy, a barren wasteland, and economic chaos.

Capital can no longer provide a livelihood for its former wage slaves – terrible unemployment grins in the faces of the proletariat. For capital itself is nothing anymore. The tremendous industrial development of Germany in the past half-century has suddenly been cut off. Germany has been plunged into a much lower level of economic development because of this war. Like the rest of Central Europe, it will have to start again with a primitive level of agricultural economy, and it will take decades before it can rise again to a somewhat higher level of development. These are the prospects if bourgeois production remains, meaning the bourgeoisie retains state power in its hands.

And for the near future, the prospects are even worse. The food and means of transport for its distribution are available in such small quantities that only the strictest enforcement of the most painful regulations by a strong government will enable people to survive with their bare lives. As long as the provisional Ebert government continues to waddle through with incoherent aims, trying to accommodate both classes, nothing will happen, and a worse collapse is only being prepared. A strong government can only be a class government; either an open bourgeois government that has such great means of power that it leads the proletarians barely past the brink of starvation through minimal rationing and ruthlessly suppresses them – as the previous government did during the war – or a truly proletarian government that mercilessly touches all the supplies and privileges of the bourgeoisie and determines everything that is available or to be procured for the masses and distributes it honestly.

Capitalism has nothing more to offer to the proletariat. Necessity forces socialism upon the proletariat. The people are faced with the choice: either to leave the direction of the world in the incapable hands that have caused this chaos, the bourgeoisie, the bureaucracy, the Ebert people, and then perish while they preserve their system of exploitation – or to take the direction into their own hands and get production started themselves. In the first case, production will struggle to rise because lack of capital and profit interests will hinder it, and the yield will serve to rebuild capital; in the second case, it will be energetically set in motion as self-supply for the whole working population. The choice will be made with compelling force. Not from clear insight, not from theoretical consideration of its excellence, but from immediate necessity will the workers have to implement socialism.

Ebert, or someone else, has said that this time of need is not suitable for realizing theory. For these people, socialism has always been merely an abstract theory instead of a practical necessity for the workers. They dreamed, like so many others, of an ideal capitalism in which an enlightened social-democratic parliamentary majority would carry out a peaceful transformation amid an abundance of production and welfare. But reality is different: socialism must come as a savior in the most terrible need, as the only possibility for the masses to save themselves from complete ruin. And it will be the savior. Without socialism, the people in bankrupt Russia would have completely succumbed to hunger and destruction; the beginnings of socialism have saved the masses through the worst times, economically strengthened them, despite the attacks from within and without that severely threatened food supply. Socialism will also save the masses in Germany and the other Central European countries through a planned but strictly implemented organization of production and food supply during this terrible time, while simultaneously laying the seed of a new mode of production, the seed of new freedom.

Marx told the proletarians in 1847: "You have nothing to lose but your chains." A decade ago, representatives of the workers, in defense against Marxism, said: "The workers now have something to lose, so no revolution." Indeed, as long as the workers, in times of prosperity, felt or believed they had something to lose, they did not listen to Marx; his words fell on deaf ears. Now it becomes true again. Everything that capitalism could offer, either genuinely or in appearance, is lost. The workers have nothing more to lose. Stripped of everything, naked and bare, they stand in the wilderness – at the gates of the future. They have a world to win.