GERMAN COMMUNISTS.

Evening Star, Issue 18288, 30 May 1923, Page 6

GERMAN COMMUNISTS.

Peactioally the same thing is going on in the Ruhr now as was happening on the Rand not very many months ago. Armed bands of Communists are picketing mines, intimidating miners, and damaging the plant. Where opposition is offered to them the usual development is a pitched battle. . In South Africa the revolutionaries reckoned on racial feeling as a factor in promoting the success of their attempt to seize a big industry, but they were doomed to swift disillusionment. In the Ruhr their field of action presents even more favorable conditions as to racial enmity. Yet to combat the forces of chaos we have the spectacle of Germans volunteering as police and being armed by the French; while the Westphalian minors, in spite of humiliating industrial conditions and a severe economic struggle for existence, are three to one in favor of continuance of work in defiance of the Communists. The question naturally arises to what extent the French occupation of Rhineland is responsible for this state of chaos. It is irapossibe to say. One thing may bo regarded as certain, and that is that the will to provoke an industrial revolution existed among a section of the German people prior to the French advance beyond the i Rhine. Following the armistice workers*

and soldiers’ councils sprang up all over Germany, and in many places usurped the functions of local government. “November 9, 1918,” says a German Socialist writer, “lifted the German working class into the saddle; tho next thing to do was to start riding. . . . Unfortunately,

the Gorman proletariat and its leaders showed themselves to be inadequate to tho performance of its task. . . . And as the revolution is not yet over either for Germany or for other nations, but baa released a current which will go on flowing for decades, tho tragic course of tho German revolution ought to servo as instruction and warning to the proletarians of all countries.” Tho present developments in the Ruhr are the latest phase in that tragic course, and they were fairly accurately forecasted by this writer.

The extent to which Russian influence is responsible for tho Ruhr outbreak is also problematical. “ One is almost persuaded that the struggle is between Paris and Moscow,” wrote tho ‘ Daily Chronicle’s' Essen correspondent last week-end, in referring to tho Russian flour distribution depots in tho district and the activity of Bolshevik propagandists. Tho pertinacity of tho Moscow world revolutionaries is, indeed, surprising. Karl Radek, one of tho leading Bolshevik intellectuals, who has intimate knowledge of tha political and economic conditions of Germany, has admitted that the catchword of Soviet dictatorship and tho whole Communist agitation had failed in Germany. About two years ago tho intrigues of Bolshevik agontsprovocatours led to such a decomposition of the United Communist Party of Germany that one Socialist writer claimed that there remained of it only a handful of insignificant disrupters. He stated in a recent volume that there are now only 150,000 politically organised Communists in Germany. Nevertheless, says tho same authority, after Russia, Germany has suffered the severest shock from tho impact of the forces resulting from tho war. “It snems as if Germany is. on the eve of a now and most severe economic and political crisis. It will need tho wisest and most energetic policy on tho part of tho German democratic forces, and the most moderate' and at the same time most positive attitude on the part of foreign States, if Germany is to escape fresh convulsions, which sooner or later would be fateful for the whole of Europe.” This is an aspect which France cannot afford to ignore. There is a suspicion that internal convulsions in Germany are not altogether displeasing to her, as they tend to promote the disintegration of her neighbor which France seems to regard as the only sure guarantee of her own security. But such upheavals are in themselves a distinct menace to France. The “ World Revolution ” pays little heed to national frontiers. Its agents play on national antipathies, and make use of them for their own ends; but the chief of those ends is that all antipathies must eventually bo merged in the one great hatred of the proletariat for capitalism.