Popular interest and Mass Action

Through the modern development of capitalism, which intensifies the struggle of the classes, mass actions are increasingly becoming the most important political forces determining the fate of the peoples. It is therefore of the greatest interest for the fighting proletariat to clearly recognize the nature, conditions and effects of these actions.

Our enemies, who feel somewhat uneasy about such new means of struggle of the proletariat, whose power they do not know but instinctively fear, try to condemn them as a sign of moral depravity. To the reactionary and statist worshippers of authority, such actions are a modern form of rebellion against our imperial rule; the liberal progressives accuse them of being a violation of democracy, a rebuke to a lack of democratic sentiment. For both agree that the mass actions represent attempts by a minority to impose its will on the majority of the people by force.

But as much as the bourgeois world of all persuasions agrees on this, it is also wrong. It allows itself to be misled by the memory of its own history, in which violence was always the means of the minority to subjugate the majority of the people and to consolidate the present state order. But the practice of every proletarian mass action can show it that this no longer applies to the proletarian masses. The means it employs remain entirely within the legal bourgeois order. For what are these means? Assemblies, marching together through the streets, perhaps with flags and signs, finally the work stoppage – all the most undisputed, most lawful, most legal things in the world. The ruling class can only give them a semblance of illegality by first leaving the ground of the bourgeois order itself, e.g. through a state of siege, arbitrary prohibitions or deprivation of the right to strike. Therein lies the power of this and every proletarian method of struggle – for the power of parliamentarism is also based on it – that it can develop its full power without the slightest violation of the legal foundations of bourgeois society.

If, therefore, mass action is not violent, it is just as little true that it is the action of a minority seeking to terrorize the majority of the people. Conversely, the strength of mass action is based on the fact that it represents the interests of the broadest circles of the people. Only the vital interests of the great mass of the people, the majority of the people, are suitable to serve as a slogan and cause for mass action.

Now the same is true of all Social-Democratic politics, for it also represents the interests of the masses of the majority. But here the people's interest is expressed in the form of a general program, a more complete system of ideas, a new world view, which contradict the old traditional ideologies. To recognize the whole of socialism, even if only by the simple act of voting red, requires more reflection, more overcoming of old ideas than the recognition of one's own interest in a simple practical question. In his work “Parliamentarism and Democracy”, Kautsky pointed out the importance of the parliamentary struggle in contrast to the direct referendum on laws. For it forces people to think more deeply and to choose between the parties on the basis of their overall stance on all issues, and therein lies the politically educational value of parliamentarianism.

In mass action, however, it is important to achieve a direct result on a single issue. There the power of a simple clear slogan emerges, which is quickly recognized by the masses as their interest, without the need for great political education or socialist insight. The social-democratic workers form the vanguard, the core troops, who draw up and issue the slogans and therefore have the initiative and the leadership in the struggle. But these slogans form the most immediate and obvious vital interests of the great masses; hence they can join in and the action can become mass action. Thus the slogan of the suffrage struggle, universal suffrage for Prussia, is certainly an interest of the whole great impecunious mass of the people, who are now being disenfranchised. The fight against inflation does not only concern the struggling workers, but the widest circles of the people, far into the bourgeois world. And the danger of war also threatens the vital interests of the immense majority of the people, so that our slogan “Down with war!” will find an echo far beyond the borders of our party.

This fact, that the solutions of the mass actions can find approval among sections of the people who are otherwise not yet politically won over to Social Democracy, sometimes leads to the erroneous view that we are waging a struggle together with one section of our bourgeois opponents – the progressive liberals – against the other section of the ruling class – the reactionary Junkers. This conception is based on the strange idea that the masses not yet won over by us belong by nature to the bourgeois party for which they voted last, and that the participation of these masses in our actions means our alliance with that party. It belongs to the well-known revisionist theory that a section of the bourgeoisie feels the reaction of the Junkers to be oppressive, that together with the proletariat it will eliminate reaction and Junker rule and establish a free, progressive, liberal, worker-friendly capitalism.

The untenability of this theory has been demonstrated often enough. Reaction and Junker rule are not rooted in backwardness, but in the high development of German capitalism. The bourgeoisie needs a strong reactionary governmental power against the swelling proletarian power; it finds itself in the position of the citizens of a besieged city, who must be governed by the military and put up with much. It may hate the Junkers and rail against them, but the fear of the proletarian state paralyzes every attempt to fight them seriously. There may be an opponent on the right, but the enemy is on the left! The Mannheim party conference of the Progress Party recently showed how those who count on the liberal part of the bourgeoisie in the fight against reaction are under false illusions.

It may be somewhat different for some theorists of liberalism for whom the political struggle against junkism appears to be a struggle of abstract views. They may preach a bit about joining forces with the socialists, especially if this can lull the masses. But as soon as theory is to become practice, the hard facts of class antagonism draw a line in their politics that turns theory into a phrase.

However, the situation is completely different for the masses behind them. They lack the general political insight that they belong to us. This is partly due to their class position; the middle strata of the petty bourgeoisie and the white-collar workers do have some proletarian traits, but at the same time there is so much that is bourgeois in their economic circumstances that they find it slow and difficult to come to terms with the socialist view of the world. Their ideas are bourgeois, but they have their essential practical interests in common with the proletariat. In the aims of the mass actions this common ground is clearly visible to them; these actions therefore form a bridge over which they find their way to us in a similar way to the distant working classes. They do not join us because they are free-minded bourgeois and therefore want to go along with us; they join us because our aims are also their interests, because, although bourgeois in ideas, they are to a large extent proletarian in character. Their participation in the mass actions does not mean that the party for which they voted will go with us, but it does mean that we will win them away from that party.

What is championed in the mass actions is the interest of the great mass of the people, who therefore participate more and more vigorously in the course of the action. But because Social Democracy is the leader in these actions, they also work to win the masses more and more for our party.