Page:The Lessons of the German Events (1924).djvu/68

 tactics of the United Front in the various countries. The time will come when entire and now still powerful Social-Democratic parties will collapse, or, if they persist in their treachery, will burst like soap bubbles; and when whole strata of the Social-Democratic workers will come over to us. The tactics of the United Front further and expedite this process.

Shortly after the occupation of the Ruhr by the French Army, the Executive of the Communist International drew the attention of all the Sections to the approaching revolutionary crisis. The International Conferences in Essen and Frankfurt were also devoted to this question.

The beginning of the revolutionary wave in Germany was signalised by the great strikes in the Ruhr and the struggles in May and June, the strike in Upper Silesia, the metal workers strike in Berlin, the fights in the Erzegbirge and the Vogtland and the political mass strike of August, 1923, which brought about the fall of the Cuno Government.

The rapid increase in the acuteness of the situation was expressed in the rise in prices, the depreciation of the currency, inflation, burdensome taxation, the decline of parliament, the increased capitalist offensive following on a feeble offensive of the proletariat, food scarcity, decreases in wages, the abolition of the social conquests of the working class, as well as in the growth of separatist and particularist movements, the increasing impoverishments of the old and the new middle classes, and in the decline of the influence of the democratic middle parties. The whole burden of the war in the Ruhr was laid upon the proletariat and the middle classes, who were being steadily proletarianised. The aggravation of the class antagonisms proceeded step by step with the rapid decline of German capitalist economy, which was severed from its centres of power.

In many provinces, the starving masses armed themselves and marched into the country in order to seize the foodstuffs they lacked. Large sections of the middle classes fell into despair and vacillated between the two poles which indicated a way out of their plight, the Communist and the Fascist groups. In the large towns plundering, hunger demonstrations and rioting became frequent occurrences.

In the months leading up to the winter of 1923, the relation of class power in Germany moved steadily in favour of the proletarian revolution. Before the movement in the Ruhr began, the eighteen to twenty millions of the German proletariat were far removed from any nationalist frame of mind. A profound ferment was taking place among the six to seven million petty bourgeois of the towns and the four to five million small peasants and tenant farmers.