FIGHT FOR POWER IN GERMANY.

Hokitika Guardian, 27 May 1920, Page 3

FIGHT FOR POWER IN GERMANY.

HOW THE PEOPLE SUFFER

(By G. Ward Price.)

BERLIN

“Not peace, but armistice,” is the threat with which the advanced wing of the German Socialist Party agreed to call oil' the general strike and return to work. And the advanced wing , not only of the Socialist, but also of every party in Germany has gained enormously in numbers by a natural process of radical reaction since the German J linkers made their ill-planned, ill-tim-ed, ill executed revolution, and retired from the political stage ifl this country covered with ridicule and cont'us-

For the Majority Socialist!, that big moderate Republican group which represents tho ordinary, steady, levelheaded middle and working class opinion of Germany, lias raised a devil which it cannot tamo. •

When the Majority Socialist Cabinet of Ebert, Bauer, and Noske drove off in the sunlit hours of that early Saturday morning to Dresden they left behind them an appeal to the workers of Germany to rise against tho Junker usurpers in a general strike.

The workers of Germany took up the Government’s appeal with enthusiasm. Everyone struck, from Under-Secre-taries of State to sewermen. The nation just stopped. Nothing functioned any more. You went to the tap to turn on the water ; there was no water. You switched on the light; nothing i happened. If you wished to go to the other end of Berlin you had to walk there; no tramway cars, no trains, no cabs. No food came into the markets, no ice was made for the refrigerators; the streets remained uncleaned. The whole complex system of services which make up modern economic existence was paralysed.

The result was that the Junker Government was strangled in tho cradle. It could not even publish a manifesto because there was no one.to print it.

One of the first things General von Luttwitz did was to send out callingup orders to a number of officers ol the Reserve, so as to increase the military strength behind him— a flagrant infraction of the Peace Treaty, by the

The only way to get these orders to their destinations was by the post. But as the post had stopped working he could not circulate them at all. Ministries depend for their lighting upon municipal (lower-stations just as much as public houses do, and it is difficult to remodel the Constitution of a country by the* feeble light .oi wax candles. So the Kajip regime disappeared—crushed by the general strike. That, however, was by no means the end of the general strike; The Indepcn. dent Socialists and the Communists of Germany bad, at the appeal of the liepublican Government, defeated the Junker attempt at usurpation of power. But now the same parties began to sav, ‘‘Why shouldn’t wo proceed a step farther and drive out the bourgeois!’ Republican Government itself?”

And for a day or two it looked as if they might do it. The Republican Government only bought off the Old Man of the Sea it had placed upon its own neck by wholesale concessions, which already place practically the dominant power of Germany into the hands of the Advanced Socialists. And so, when the latter finally agreed to lay down the weapon they had tried and proved so deadly, they did so with the threat I have quoted at the opening of this article. And that threat is not an empty one. The next'few weeks in Germany will see a desperate strife of propaganda between the Moderates and the Reds.

The former will play for time, hopin.* that if they can stall off the renewal of tlie attack long enough, old differences, forgotten in the prevailing flush of victory just' now, will creep back into the ranks of the Extremists, mid that the self-confident, aggressive block which is now striving eagerly towards the establishment of a Soviet Government in Germany may somehow weaken and split up.