Witness to the German Revolution Read Online Free PDF

everything that has gone wrong, to call everything by its proper name, and to show the solutions: seizure of real values, workers’ government, 80 rapprochement with Soviet Russia.

Herr Cuno leaves…
    Herr Cuno has not yet resigned at the time of writing, but he has got himself into such an impossible position that people are talking of nothing but his departure. Who will replace him? Today, Monday, July 30, the food shortage has got worse. Many stalls in the open-air and covered markets are closed: there is no food. A bourgeois newspaper Neue Berliner Zeitung, writes, “We are facing a catastrophe much more serious than a cabinet crisis.” Herr Cuno, the skillful businessman from the Hamburg-America Line, has squandered a large amount of public funds, brought the Reich close to bankruptcy, destroyed the mark he aimed to “stabilize,” left the country facing famine and massively discredited the bourgeois government. A wonderful achievement for democratic institutions! This minister—”responsible to parliament,” as they all are—having created this pretty mess, makes his bow and departs. But who will replace him? Nobody wants to pick up the terrible inheritance. People are talking of a “Great Coalition,” to include right wing bourgeois elements, Herr Stresemann, and the SPD. The reality is that in order to carry on imposing on the German people a policy of ruin and starvation—to the advantage of a few plutocrats and a rabble of speculators—they absolutely must have the cooperation of the SPD. And one way or another that cooperation is guaranteed. We shall assuredly soon see the official social democracy attempt one last supreme effort to save this wretched bourgeois state as it crumbles…

Comparing Germany and Russia
    There are some curious controversies taking place here and there between Communists and nationalists, fascists or National Socialists. The proletarianized intellectuals, young people from the middle classes who have fallen into poverty and who are haunted by nostalgia
for the great prosperous Germany of the Hohenzollern, 81 are not completely blind and deaf. They remember that, together with the social democrat Noske, they have put down three attempts at revolution. 82 And what is the result after five years of order, democratic perhaps, but certainly bourgeois? The Ruhr, hunger, bankruptcy, and the fear of worse to come. Germany is no longer a great power, nor even a small one: a French soldier can trample it underfoot. It is easy for our Communist comrades to show their opponents the example of red Russia, which has indisputably become one of the great powers of Europe and Asia, holding the diplomats of all bourgeois nations at bay, strengthening its Red Army, developing air transport, organizing trade fairs and great exhibitions, reorganizing its transport services, preparing, less than two years after the famine, to export corn, creating new banknotes (chervonets) 83 which are perfectly stable and are quoted on the exchanges at London, Stockholm and Copenhagen like the pound sterling, increasing workers’ wages and paying them—as has just been done in various Petrograd factories—in chervonets! The evidence is powerful. It is true that Russia has suffered enormously. But what tribulations are still ahead for Germany? It is a proven fact that peoples who have been slaughtered, ruined and thrown into chaos by imperialist wars can be saved only by revolution. It is a proven fact that from now on the bourgeoisie is unworthy to rule nations. The Russian bourgeoisie allied itself with foreign intervention against the revolutionary nation, looted public funds (Kolchak), sold off the fleet (Wrangel, Merkulov), mortgaged the
national wealth and ended up by collapsing ignominiously. While Germany has been in a state of collapse, the German bourgeoisie has invested funds abroad, speculated, sold to the French the secrets of its chemical