Reality of proletarian struggle versus workerist myths
It was on June 17th, 1953. Important sectors of the proletariat rose up in East Berlin before this revolt spread all over the “German Democratic Republic” and was repressed by the intervention of the Red Army (red with insurgent proletarians’ blood).
We will not here, in this short text, develop in detail how this movement expressed itself. We only insist on drawing the main forces and weaknesses, which historically recur from one struggle to another despite the particular conditions that make emerging such a struggle at a place and a moment, and not at others. Our goal is not to tell a story but to draw programmatic lessons from previous struggles for the future insurrections. Nevertheless, we invite comrades to read Cajo Brendel’s booklet “1953: The Working Class Uprising In East-Germany” (which was one of many sources of inspiration) despite the fact that we have reservations about the ideological framework (i.e. councilism) of this militant and that we criticize in the course of the present text.
This uprising, some weeks after Stalin’s death, put back on the forefront of history the visceral antagonism that opposes two social classes with antagonistic and contradictory interests and programs. And this, whatever shape the bourgeoisie takes to contain proletarians. Because it’s always with force that the proletariat imposes its existence of a class which is deprived of all and its necessity to put an end to this old world, whatever the nature of the facade restoration may be or the colour (red, white, brown…) used to repaint our exploitation. At the strongest moment of the counterrevolution, whereas our enemies robbed our flags, whereas their state proclaims itself to be a “workers’” one and they pretend to manage us in the name of the “dictatorship of the proletariat” (which in fact never existed and was replaced by their dictatorship over the proletariat), it’s the internal contradictions of the social relation that make class struggles re-emerging. Continue reading “June 1953 – Proletarian uprising in East Germany”