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electric plants and railway stations.
These first drops of blood produced an indelible rust on the wheelwork of
the State, and by the third day the lack of discipline had evidently eaten its way
into the bureaucracy to judge by the arrest of several high functionaries in the
Foreign Office. On March 15th, the National Assembly was convened in Stuttgart
and Bauer said to President Ebert, when speaking of the bloody incidents in
Berlin:  Kapp made his mistake when he interfered with the disorder.
The master of the situation was Bauer, the moderate Bauer, with his
respect for order. He alone knew that Kapp s attempt at revolution could be
decisively quelled by widespread disorder. Neither a conservative full of
authoritative principles, nor a liberal with a respect for law, nor yet a democrat
loyal to Parliament as a channel for political struggles, would ever have dared as
he did to rouse the illegal intervention of the proletarian masses and defend the
State by trusting to a general strike.
Machiavelli s Prince would have boldly summoned the people to fight
against either a sudden attack or a Government conspiracy, and Machiavelli s
Prince was surely more Conservative than a Tory of Queen Victoria s day, even
though the State was not responsible for his moral prejudices or his political
education. But then he was schooled in those common historical examples of the
tyrannies of Asia, Greece, and the Italian Signories of the Renaissance.
On the other hand, the tradition in conservative or liberal European
Governments forbids any appeal to illegal action by the proletarian masses,
whatever the peril that has to be faced. Later on people in Germany wondered
what Stresemann would have done had he stood in Bauer s shoes. We may be
sure that Stresemann would have considered Bauer s appeal to the proletariat as
a most incorrect procedure.
Bauer s upbringing, it must be remembered, was Marxist, so that he
naturally had no misgivings as to the choice of means with which to fight a
revolution. The idea of using a General Strike as a legal method of defending a
democratic State against a sudden attack from military or Communist quarters
could not be alien to a man brought up in Marx s teaching. Bauer, however, was
the first to apply one of the Marx s fundamental principles in the defense of the
State. His example is of the greatest importance in the history of modern
revolutions.
The faith of the German people in Bauer during the five days of illegal
Government began to waver and gave place to unrest and fear when Kapp
proclaimed on March 17th that he was relinquishing power because  Germany s
extremely critical condition demanded the union of all parties and citizens in
order to face the danger of a Communist Revolution. The Socialist Party had
lost control over the General Strike, and the real masters of the situation were the
Communists. The Red Republic had been proclaimed in some of the suburbs of
Berlin. Workers councils were springing up here and there all over Germany. In
Saxony and in the Ruhr, the General Strike had ushered in revolt and the
Reichswehr came up against a perfectly good Communist army, provided with
cannon and machine-guns. What would Bauer do? Kapp had been turned out by
the General Strike-was Bauer to disappear in a civil war?
Faced with the need of suppressing a workers revolt, Bauer s Marxist
education revealed its weakness. Marx said that  Insurrection is a fine art. But
his art is the capture of power, not the defense of it. Marx s revolutionary
strategy aims at the capture of the State; his method is class warfare. Lenin had to
upset some of the basic principles of Marxism in order to stay in power, as
Zinoviev observed when he wrote:  Henceforth true Marxism is impossible
without Lenin. The General Strike had been Bauer s weapon in defending the
Reich against Kapp: if the Reich was to be spared a proletarian insurrection, the
Reichswehr must be called in. Von Luttwitz s troops were nonplussed by the
general strike but they could easily have overcome a Communist revolution.
Kapp, however, had relinquished power at the very moment when the
proletariat gave him an opportunity to fight on his own ground. Such a blunder
on the part of a reactionary like Kapp is incomprehensible and unjustifiable. But
a Marxist like Bauer could not see that the Reichswehr at that moment was the
only possible weapon with which to meet a proletarian insurrection, and his
mistake is easily explained. Meanwhile, after several useless attempts to agree
with the leaders of the Communist revolt, Bauer handed over to Muller. It was a
wretched end for a man of such fearless honest and moderate ideas. Both
European conspirators and liberals still have a great deal to learn from Lenin and
Bauer.
CHAPTER FIVE
BONAPARTE-OR THE FIRST MODERN COUP D ETAT
What would have happened if Bonaparte, on the eighteenth Brumaire,
had found a man like Bauer pitted against him? Such a relationship between
Bonaparte and the honest chancellor of the Reich offers some interesting
possibilities. Bauer was not one of Plutarch s heroes but a good middle-class
German, whose sentimentality had been entirely suppressed by a Marxist
education. Such a moderate man could be infinitely resourceful. But it was a sad
fate which decreed that a man of such common virtues should be confronted
with an ordinary and unfortunate hero like Kapp ! Bauer was the very rival for
Bonaparte, the very man who could have faced the victor of Arcole nicely on the
eighteenth Brumaire. In him, Bonaparte would at last have found a worthy
opponent.
It may well be said that Bauer was a German of Versailles and Weimar,
and a modern European, while Bonaparte was a European of the Eighteenth [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]