Page:The Lessons of the German Events (1924).djvu/35

 Social-Democratic Party is incorrect. The Social-Democratic Party will not split. The disruptive process was disturbed by the tactics of our Party and by the October collapse. I can prove by figures that the Left Social-Democrats are not in the majority. If they finally split off it will be in order to unite with the Right Communists, and then they will attempt to form a Centrist Party. Comrades, I have had letters distributed among you in which the same point of view is expressed by working-class circles.

(Laughter.)

I should like to ask the comrades of the Right to consider seriously the mood of the Leipsic comrades and how much confidence they still have in Böettcher and Brandler. You are playing with the mood of the workers. And indeed, it was only the existence of the Communist International which prevented large sections from passing over to the Communist Labour Party because of the attitude of the Party in October. If you continue to behave in this way you will disgust good workers and drive them out of the Party. Not Ruth Fischer: she is too clever to be caught in a breach of discipline.

Comrades, the collapse is therefore not to be explained by technicalities, by small errors, We shall not abandon this platform and we will fight it through to the end, for it is the only means of saving the Party—which consists of good workers—from opportunism. The representative of the E.C.C.I. pursued a tactic in Germany which was very good for its own purposes, but which nevertheless was a political masquerade. Now he comes forward and declares that he has changed his point of view completely since October: one need not always say A, one may also say B. We have read an article of his written before October in which he says that Fascism must first triumph in Germany before the workers will fight. He has the same fiery perspective as Brandler, declaring in the midst of the defeat: "We need not fight now; it would he light-minded and inexcusable to suggest fighting now, for the situation improves for us every day." This is the prospect which the comrades dared to put forward after Chemnitz and Hamburg. Brandler, as a responsible person, declared that the situation would get better every day; he added that it would perhaps require only four weeks in order to undertake the fight for power. This produced a burst of indignation in the Central Committee; it must take place in ten days, it was declared. Brandler fixed four weeks as the minimum. The following is characteristic of all these accusations: when action was possible—as for instance when on the Anti-Fascist Day we demanded that we should demonstrate—it was not done, and Brandler, in order to make the demonstration impossible, declared that if we demonstrated the world would collapse as the result of armed collisions. And to avoid this, and to avoid the suppression of the Party, he forbade