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Otto Rühle | |
|---|---|
 Rühlec. 1930 | |
| Member of theReichstag | |
| In office 12 January 1912 – 9 November 1918 | |
| Constituency | Pirna-Sebnitz |
| Personal details | |
| Born | Karl Heinrich Otto Rühle (1874-10-23)23 October 1874 |
| Died | 24 June 1943(1943-06-24) (aged 68) |
| Political party | |
| Spouse | |
| Occupation | Writer, politician, educator |
Karl Heinrich Otto Rühle (German:[ˈʁyːlə]; 23 October 1874 – 24 June 1943) was a GermanMarxist writer, educator,Reichstag deputy, and prominent theorist of thecouncil-communist movement. He is known for his rejection of party politics in favour ofworkers' councils, his critique ofBolshevism, and his famous declaration, "The revolution is not a party affair".
Initially a member of theSocial Democratic Party (SPD), Rühle became a prominent voice in the party's left wing. Along withKarl Liebknecht, he was the one of the first Reichstag deputies to vote against war credits in 1915. He was a co-founder of theCommunist Party of Germany (KPD) but left in 1919 to play a leading role in theCommunist Workers' Party of Germany (KAPD). After his break with the KAPD in late 1920, he developed a political tendency that was both anti-party and anti-union, centred on theAllgemeine Arbeiter-Union – Einheitsorganisation (AAU-E).
Writing under the pseudonym Carl Steuermann, Rühle produced a pioneering Marxist analysis offascism in the early 1930s. His theoretical work extended to a critique of theSoviet Union as a form ofstate capitalism and of Bolshevism as a bourgeois ideology, famously equating it with fascism as "Red Fascism". After fleeing Nazi Germany in 1933, he spent his final years in exile in Mexico, where he participated in theDewey Commission to investigate theMoscow Trials. He died in Mexico City in 1943. Largely forgotten for a time, Rühle was rediscovered by the anti-authoritarian student movement of the 1960s, and his writings have remained influential inlibertarian socialist and council-communist circles.
Otto Rühle was born on 23 October 1874 inGroßschirma,Saxony, the son of a railway official. He studied at the teacher's seminary inOschatz from 1889 and became an official in theFreethinker movement while still a student. After working as a private tutor and a teacher, he was dismissed from his post as a primary school teacher in 1902.[1]
Rühle had joined theSocial Democratic Party (SPD) in 1896 and founded a socialistSunday school.[1] After his dismissal, he became a writer and editor for social-democratic newspapers inHamburg,Breslau,Chemnitz,Pirna, andZwickau. He was an early critic of what he saw as outdated teaching methods and became a leader of the social-democratic education society in Hamburg. In 1907, he became a traveling teacher for the SPD's central committee, gaining a national reputation for his socially critical pedagogical writings, includingDas proletarische Kind (The Proletarian Child) in 1911. In 1912, Rühle was elected as the Reichstag deputy for the Pirna-Sebnitz constituency, a position he held until 1918.[1]
Rühle was part of the far-left wing of the SPD, alongside figures likeKarl Liebknecht,Rosa Luxemburg,Franz Mehring, andPaul Mattick.[2] Together with Liebknecht, he was one of the first Reichstag deputies to vote againstwar credits in March 1915.[1] In 1916, in solidarity with the imprisoned Liebknecht, he resigned from the SPD parliamentary faction. He was a co-founder of theSpartacus League and participated in its conference on 1 January 1916.[1] His public call for a party split in a letter to the SPD newspaperVorwärts on 12 January 1916 put him in opposition to Rosa Luxemburg, who still hoped to win over the party leadership.[1] Rühle did not join theIndependent Social Democratic Party (USPD) when it was formed in 1917, but instead became a leader of the Left Radicals (Linksradikale) inDresden and Pirna.[1]
During theGerman Revolution of 1918–1919, Rühle played a prominent role in theworkers' councils movement in Dresden. On 9 November 1918, he became chairman of the Revolutionary Worker and Soldier Council and, a day later, co-chairman of the United Revolutionary Worker and Soldier Council of Greater Dresden.[1] However, on 16 November, he and other members of theInternational Communists of Germany (IKD) resigned from their functions, refusing to cooperate with the SPD and USPD.[1]
At the founding congress of theCommunist Party of Germany (KPD) in late December 1918, Rühle was a delegate for the IKD and a leader of the opposition that argued strongly against any participation in the upcoming elections for theWeimar National Assembly.[1] Despite his disagreements with the party leadership, he was tasked with helping build the KPD inSaxony in early 1919. Throughout the year, he, along withHeinrich Laufenberg andFritz Wolffheim, became a leader of the party's left opposition.[1] This opposition rejected the KPD's turn towards parliamentarism and trade union work, advocating instead for direct action through factory organisations and workers' councils.[3]
At the KPD's second party congress inHeidelberg in October 1919, Rühle and other ultra-left delegates were forced to leave the proceedings after voting against the leadership's "Theses on Communist Principles and Tactics".[1] The third party congress in February 1920 formally expelled Rühle from the KPD.[1]
In April 1920, Rühle was a co-founder of theCommunist Workers' Party of Germany (KAPD), which brought together the expelled left wing of the KPD.[1] In June 1920, he traveled to Moscow as a KAPD delegate to theSecond World Congress of the Comintern.[4] Rühle returned from Russia profoundly disillusioned, convinced that theRussian Revolution was degenerating and that theBolsheviks were imposing an authoritarian and bureaucratic model on the international workers' movement.[5] He refused to remain at the congress and argued for a complete break with the Third International.[5] This stance put him at odds with the KAPD leadership, which still hoped to fight for its positions within the Comintern, and he was expelled from the KAPD in December 1920.[1]
From this point on, Rühle became a leading theorist of acouncil communism that was explicitly anti-party and anti-union.[1] He collaborated withFranz Pfemfert and the journalDie Aktion and was a key figure in theAllgemeine Arbeiter-Union – Einheitsorganisation (AAU-E), an organisation that attempted to unite political and economic struggle outside of the traditional party and trade union forms.[1]
After theNazi seizure of power in 1933, Rühle's house was ransacked by theSA, and he emigrated to Prague with his wife,Alice Rühle-Gerstel, a noted psychologist and writer whom he had married in 1921.[6] In Prague, he became involved in pedagogical work. Rühle's work from this period shows the influence of his wife's background in theindividual psychology ofAlfred Adler, which he attempted to synthesize with Marxism.[7]
In 1936, Rühle and his wife moved to Mexico, where he had been appointed as an educational advisor to the government.[6] In Mexico, he became associated withLeon Trotsky and was a member of theDewey Commission in 1937, which investigated the charges made against Trotsky in theMoscow Trials.[6][8] As a result of this activity, he lost his government advisory position due to pressure fromStalinists. He spent his final years living as a painter under the pseudonym Carlos Timonero.[6]
Otto Rühle died inMexico City on 24 June 1943. His wife, Alice, committed suicide later the same day. At their funeral, eulogies were given by, among others, Franz Pfemfert and Fritz Fränkel.[6]
Rühle is most famous for his dictum, "The revolution is not a party affair".[9] This encapsulated his fundamental critique of the party form as an instrument of proletarian revolution. For Rühle, all parties were inherently bourgeois in their structure and function, aiming to exercise power on behalf of the working class, rather than enabling the class to exercise power itself.[10] He argued that the revolutionary organisation of the proletariat could only be theworkers' councils, which encompassed the entire class and were the direct expression of its self-activity.[9] This position, which he developed after 1920, distinguished him from the mainstream of the KAPD and theorists likeHerman Gorter, who continued to see the need for avanguard party to lead the councils.[9] Rühle's rejection of the party form was a foundational element of his council-communist theory and a key reason for the later influence of his ideas inanarchist andlibertarian circles.[11]
Rühle was one of the earliest and most trenchant left-communist critics ofBolshevism. Based on his experiences in Soviet Russia in 1920, he came to view the Bolshevik state not as a proletarian dictatorship, but as a new form of bureaucratic rule.[5] He argued that the Bolshevik revolution was not a proletarian but abourgeois revolution, which had carried out the tasks of modernizing and industrializing Russia under astate-capitalist regime.[12] The Bolshevik Party, in his analysis, was not a party of the working class but of a new ruling class of intellectuals and bureaucrats.[12] He saw the Comintern's centralized and militarized structure as an attempt to impose this Russian model on the workers' movements of the West, a policy he believed would be disastrous.[13] This critique led him to break decisively with the Comintern and the KAPD.[14]
Under the pseudonym Carl Steuermann, Rühle authored one of the first Marxist analyses offascism,Weltkrise – Weltwende. Kurs auf den Staatskapitalismus (World Crisis – World Turn. The Course towards State Capitalism, 1931).[15] He saw fascism not as a uniquely Italian or German phenomenon, but as a general tendency of modern capitalism in its period of crisis.[15] For Rühle, both bourgeois democracy and fascism were forms of capitalist rule, and the development of capitalism was leading all countries towards a form ofstate capitalism, characterized by the fusion of economic and political power.[16]
In his 1939 workFascisme brun, fascisme rouge (Brown Fascism, Red Fascism), Rühle controversially argued that the Soviet system under Stalin was a form of "Red Fascism", structurally equivalent to the Nazi regime in Germany.[17] He saw both systems astotalitarian forms of state capitalism, which, despite their ideological differences, shared a common basis in the suppression of workers' self-activity and the centralized control of the economy by a bureaucratic ruling class.[18] His workThe Struggle Against Fascism Begins with the Struggle Against Bolshevism (1939) further elaborated on this theme.[19]
Largely forgotten for a period after his death, Otto Rühle was rediscovered by the anti-authoritarian student movement of the 1960s.[6] His writings were widely circulated, often in pirated editions (Raubdrucke), and he became a popular figure in the emergingNew Left.[6] His uncompromising critique of the party-form, his early analysis of the Soviet Union as state-capitalist, and his theory of fascism continue to be influential in council-communist and libertarian socialist milieus.[20] His insistence on the self-emancipation of the working class through its own autonomous organs of struggle, the workers' councils, remains a central theme in anti-Leninist Marxism.[20]
