Witness to the German Revolution by Victor Serge

“imposed” on property owners have a place in it solely to serve as a counterbalance to the much more real sacrifices they want to impose on the workers. In all these speeches, three ideas recur time after time:
    1. wages are too high
    2. it is necessary to work harder (longer hours)
    3. salvation lies in exports…

    But from now on prices of coal, food, clothing, paper in Germany are above world prices, so German industry cannot attempt to regain its ability to compete except by gnawing away at wages… And this task has been enthusiastically taken up by the Great Coalition government which Kautsky calls the “last arrow in Germany’s quiver” (Arbeiterzeitung, Vienna). The metaphor is well chosen. For this arrow is being fired by the social democrats into the back of the German workers.
    At the same time Stinnes’s paper, Die Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung, is pursuing some significant campaigns:
    1. against the payment of civil servants’ salaries quarterly, in advance
    2. against high wages (!)
    3. against the overestimates it has noted in the official cost of living index
    4. for the need to work harder
    The paper of the big industrial employers expresses its satisfaction at the support given to the exploiters by the SPD in these charming terms: “When the train is running off the rails, you don’t look at the color of the brakes.” We shall see whether the socialist brakes can stop the Stinnes train from going off the rails…
    In any case, one thing is sure: the social democrats in the Great Coalition are nothing but the accomplices and the tools—and consciously at that—of economic and political reaction.

By unemployment and by repression
    The attack on the starvation wages of the German worker must in fact be pursued on the economic and political levels at the same time.
    A large number of firms are closing down, either because they really are forced to by the crisis—which must be the case with small
firms—or because it is in their interest to suspend work until the end of the war in the Ruhr and to subdue workers by unemployment. Nearly a thousand firms in Saxony are in process of being wound up. In Hamburg, the stopping of work in numerous factories is going to make over a 100,000 wage earners unemployed; the management of the textile factories in Neumünster has stopped production following a disagreement about wages. In Dresden, there are 17,000 jobless. In Bavaria and Silesia, the publishers of periodicals have ceased publication. German book publishers and booksellers say they are unable to publish any new books this year. In Berlin, only 30 tram routes will continue running, and the majority of the staff have been sacked. Workers are sacked and laid off, firms are wound up, closed down… For his part, the exploiter is quite sure of not going short of bread and butter; as for the workers, they must make do as best they can. That will teach them to be more conciliatory.
    There is an obvious parallel here with the Russian Revolution. Our Russian comrades know that the sabotage of production by the employers (the closing of numerous firms, the lockouts disguised under the appearance of winding up, etc.) often, in 1917, obliged Russian workers to take over factories and workshops. On more than one occasion factory committees decided to resume work in firms where the bosses, who had not been expropriated, had deliberately stopped production. The German bosses should watch out: they think that by increasing unemployment, they are preparing a reserve army of labor which will be degraded and defeated: but it might, on the contrary, provide an army for the revolution.
    Arrests will achieve nothing. Arresting the Russian Bolsheviks in July 1917 102 did not prevent October. In parallel to the verbal offensive of ministers and bourgeois hack writers, and to the very clear
economic offensive being waged by the employers, it is perhaps hoped that the