428 THE CLASS STRUGGLE DOCUMENTS 429 and mine are asserting their right and power to rule, and be masters of their own destiny.
Your masters see that the spirit of revolt is spreading to your countries. In both England and America the idea of Bolshevism is making rapid headway. Great Labor demonstrations frequently take place at which the workers demand that the means of wealth production shall be taken over by the workers. At these meetings strong protests are expressed against the invasion of Russia. Your masters know that the source and centre of the revolutionary World movement is Russia, and they are determined therefore to crush it out, and remove the menace to their power, That is why you are here. That is why your masters will not permit you to rejoin your loved ones who are eagerly looking forward to your return.
You see that the war has now been converted into a gigantic conflict between Labor and Capital. It is a conflict between Progress and Reaction. conflict between those who are inaugurating a new era of social and economic liberty for the toiling masses, and those who desire to retain the present sordid commercial system, with its sweating, poverty, and war. And you who obey the orders of your governments are fighting to maintain the old order, you are fighting on the side of Reaction against the forces of Labor and Progress.
Is this worth dying for? Do you really desire to bleed and die in order that capitalism may continue. Say no?
Form Soldiers Councils in each regiment, and demand of your governments, demand of your officers to be sent home. Refuse to shoot your fellow workers in Russia Refuse to crush our Workers Revolution.
The Group of English speaking Communists.
of the rural proletariat. Thus Junkerdom answers the first independent move of the proletariat of the land with the last word of the bourgeois state with musket and sword, This act expresses its knowledge that this is a fight for the whole, for its ruling position on the land. And the power of state of the Ebert Republic, in placing itself at the disposal of the Junkers at the first hint that the class struggle is smouldering in the lowlands, stands opposed to the rural proletariat from the beginning to the tool of Junkerdom. Thus they are seeing to it that the workers of the country may speedily become aware of the revolutionary significance of their movement.
The reasons that the rural proletariat is so late in taking up the quarrel with the large landowners are obvious. Its division into small communities and its isolation place much greater hindrances in the way of independent action than in the case of the urban proletariat. In the prerevolutionary period the Junker power succeeded in hermetically shutting off the agricultural workers from every political movement. Only the Revolution made political life accessible to the country folk. In the first months of the Revolution they had to make up the studies that the urban working class had hammered into it during two generations. To them even the hackneyed demogogic phrases of the Scheidemanns regarding bourgeois democracy were a revelation. What wonder, then that in the elections to the National Assembly they streamed in large bodies into the camp of the Majority Socialists and that they together wih the petite bourgeoisie stepped into the gaps which the desertion of the metropolitan workers had torn in the ranks of the Majority Socialist Party organization. Then there is another thing: The economic ruin did not show itself in so harsh a form to the rural proletariat as it confronted the proletarian masses of the cities as naked hunger and wholesale unemployment. The country had become accustomed during the war first of all to nourish itself duly. many small farmers who in normal times had sold the food they raised and underfed themselves with substitutes of various kinds, now for the first time eating the butter, cheese, eggs, poultry, meat, fruit, etc. themselves. Only the excess over their own needs was shipped to the cities. Thus. hunger or its most glaring was spared the country people during the war and during the Revolution itself.
Unemployment among the agricultural workers, particularly after the departure of the prisoners of war, was unheard of; on the contrary, there was a dearth of hands.
The end of the war, the return to the native village or estate, the destruction of the old militarism, bourgeois democracy, these things at first sufficed the rural proletariat. Those who did not take part in uniform in the military rebellion that was such a significant feature of the 9th of November, had followed the urban proletariat passively in the November Revolution. This passivity of theirs had aside from the unripeness of the city revolution itself enabled the bourgeoisie to win its isolated counter revolutionary victories in revolutionary centers in Berlin, in Bremen, in the Ruhr region, in Central Germany, in Munich. Not only did the passivity of the country permit the bourgeoisie to throw itself. undivided upon the revolutionary centers; the military power of the counter revolution, the volunteer troops were recruited largely from the ranks of the land proletariat and the small farmers.
In the re establishment of militarism in the shape of the volunteer system the political passivity and revolutionary immaturity of the rural workers was revealed.
As long as the rural working class itself sat quiet, as long as the The Agrarian Program of the Communist Party of Germany At the moment of publishing this agrarian program Germany is for the first time experiencing far reaching strikes of the agricultural workers in Bielefeld, in Pommerania, in East Prussia. Smaller, short breathed strike activity has preceded in Magdeburg, in West Prussia, in Lubec.
Here and there communities of small farmers had favored the apportionment of the large estates within their district this happened back in the May days of the Ebert Haase Government but the armed power of the Ebert Republic let them know at once that property is inviolable, and they sank back at once into their former lethargy.
The present strikes of the agricultural workers in Bielefeld, Pommerania, East Prussia, etc. once more open the dispute between the agricultural proletariat and the large landowning class. The former is for the time being fighting for individual economic demands, still unconscious of the revolutionary significance of its newly begun fight. The Junkers on the other hand, with the sure instinct of the ruling class, have immediately grasped the fact that the srikes of the farm workers are more than any individual move of the agrarian proletariat in normal times. In a number of Pommeranian districts a state of siege has been declared, Government troops have been ordered to forcibly put down the rebellion