Read Online Witness to the German Revolution by Victor Serge - Free Book Online Page A

industrialists—while the working population, whose passive resistance is the only genuine one, and which is bearing the whole burden of it, because it is consciously defending the future of the German proletariat, has been dying of hunger. Now the scandal is becoming public. It’s a bit late, for now there is nothing left to give to the insatiable profiteers of the Ruhr. These, as the Russian paper in Berlin, Nakanunie , puts it very well, have won a battle, not against M. Poincaré, but against their own nation.
    Here we have grasped in action one of the features of dying capitalism. The dominant class, pushing the logic of its instincts to the logical conclusion, becomes the enemy of the nations whose industrial and financial power it has helped to create. As soon as a leak is discovered that will sink the massive ship, all those on board think of nothing but looting. During the Russian Revolution, the émigrés looted, sold and resold the “homeland.” The disaster of capitalist Germany has several comparable causes:
    1. The flight of capital. The German capitalists moved thousands of millions of gold marks abroad.
    2. Stock exchange gambling on a falling market; the enrichment
of the bandits of commerce and industry by the fall in value of the mark (the process is well known: low wages, cheap goods, victorious competition abroad—and the ultimate ruin of the country).
    3. The enormous swindle that was the economic war in the Ruhr.
    The capitalist is the enemy of the nation; from now on the true interests of the nations are those of the workers’ International.

The victims of the Ruhr
    Will they be forgotten because Mussolini has opened fire on Corfu, 105 because there is an earthquake in Japan, because Degoutte’s soldiers have been trampling on them for too long and because the popular press needs some fresh, up-to-date dramas?
    A hundred thousand people have been brutally driven out of their homes. The whole working-class press has been gagged. Dozens of working-class militants have been sentenced by court-martials or are waiting to be sentenced. There is killing almost every evening, at random, of those who pass along the dark streets, a gaunt worker returning home without having found tomorrow’s bread… Towns are isolated as they were in medieval sieges. All postal communications in various major districts have just been suspended for three days.
    In the hospitals of Frankfurt there is an old woman of 86, eight pregnant women, a mother suffering from pleurisy accompanied by her sick child, the mother of newborn twins; all these
women have been expelled from the “peacefully occupied” region by the French authorities.
    There have been expulsions, and there still are expulsions, sometimes at a day’s notice, sometimes at one hour’s, of numerous workers’ families, including old people, invalids and newborn children. Up to September 4, there had been 1,600 hundred expulsions in the Palatinate alone. Obviously the great majority of these were poor people.
    And these impoverished people are at one and the same time making the fortune of the German profiteers in the Ruhr and the careers of General Degoutte’s zealous underlings.
    As far as we know, not a single voice has been raised in the advanced French press to stigmatize these disgraceful facts. The press of the French bourgeoisie in 1923 is as servile towards imperialism as the German press was in 1914. In 1914, 93 German intellectuals, the cream of the universities and the literary salons, spoke out in support of the invasion of Belgium. In 1923 the mandarins of the Sorbonne, the Collège de France and the Académie, 106 of all the professorial chairs and all the institutions of higher learning, are silent at the occupation of the Ruhr. All bourgeoisies, all imperialisms, all literary lackeys are the same…

A bluff: the confiscation of foreign currency
    While notes for a 100 million marks