MIA > Archive > Paul Frölich
From International Press Correspondence, Vol. 3 No. 35 [17], 3 May 1923, pp. 308–309.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.
Public Domain: Marxists Internet Archive (2021). You may freely copy, distribute, display and perform this work; as well as make derivative and commercial works. Please credit “Marxists Internet Archive” as your source.
The profoundest silence is being preserved on the subject of the reparations program drawn up by the Second International at its Conferences in Berlin and Paris. This silence is certainly not intended as a confession that this program will not bear the light of day. No, it is a diplomatic secret. This program, as we shall see, accomplishes the transition from profane class war – the gentlemen of the social democratic parties will pardon the hard word – to “higher politics”.
We must be grateful to Mr. Jean Louguet, who is now introduced to us not only as the grandchild of Karl Marx, but also as the godchild of M. Clemenceau – we must be thankful to him that be at least permits us to read the initials of this epoch-making document. This he does in the New York World of March 31, where he writes as follows;
“The World cannot expect me to break my obligation to preserve silence on our negotiations, but I can make certain definite statements as to the results obtained.
“Our plan, which has been worked out by the great German socialist Hilferding and the brilliant young French deputy Auriol, permits of the whole debt being completely paid off within three years. The loan required for this has to be raised by a financial consortium.
“Such a plan would place France in a position to receive the 44 milliard francs of reparation payments which she has already expended, as well as the remaining 50 milliards which she requires, while 10 or 15 milliards would go to Belgium.
“The plan is based on a reduction of the reparation obligations to the payments for the devastated districts, and abandons most of the foolish demands for the payment of war pensions, introduced by Lloyd George into his Versailles treaty.
“At the same time the plan provides for the annulment of the various war debts and securities by a mutual God’s peace treaty.”
This is delightful! For four years the whole world has been racking its brains to find out now the economics of the world, thrown out of gear, are to be set working again by the aid of Germany’s payment of debts. On this account we are undergoing the severest economic crises, the acutest international antagonisms, the war in the Ruhr, the danger of a new world war. And the Second International has a recipe for satisfying everybody within three years. And this recipe, the creation of the great Hilferding and the brilliant Auriol, is kept a secret! The Second International knows how to raise a loan which would enable Germany to pay more than 100 milliard francs to France and Belgium within three years. But how this devilish Ioan is to be raised, under what guarantees, etc. remains the secret of the Second International. Or does it let the secret leak a little? In the Populaire of April 11, the brilliant young deputy Vincent Auriol congratulates himself on the agreements made by Loucheur in London. He states that the Matin, in an apparently semi-official notice, declares that the French government is not against Loucheur’s plan so long as France’s share does not fall below 26 milliard gold marks.
Mr. Vincent Auriol further informs us that the Frankfort program (2nd Intern. 1922) has formed the basis for the present specialized and detailed program. This agrees with Loucheur’s loan guarantees. And what are these guarantees? In the Daily Telegraph we read:
The program thought out by the great Hilferding and the brilliant Auriol thus agrees, in its guarantee paragraphs, with a plan which would rob Germany of her most important financial sources and positions of economic power, and would dismember and colonize her.
Now we are quite willing to believe that Mr. Auriol’s article, in which he states triumphantly that Poincaré’s path leads from the Ruhr to Frankfort, that is, to the bosom of the beatific Second International, was merely born of a small demagogic need of the day. But with demagogy he has betrayed, against his own will, the real essential character of his program.
Apart from the Utopian character of this piece of bungling, a character sufficiently apparent from the few facts mentioned, it is a program based on purely bourgeois mentality. It is the program of the victor, dictated to the vanquished. And it could not be otherwise, for it is the program of an International which is internally cleft asunder by national antagonisms, and is only held together by the need of maintaining its agitation and its mass deception; an International within whose own confines there are victors and vanquished. It is the program of an International which still regards the treaty of Versailles as something sacred, however much it may talk to the contrary, which still regards Germany as vanquished and thus guilty, condemned to pay even if it perishes in the attempt. An International upon which the idea never dawns that this same Germany, which it holds to be vanquished and guilty, the Germany which is to be made to pay with its last drop of blood, is none other than the Germany of the working and starving, the Germany of the proletariat.
No, such an International can never draw up a socialist program for saving the world out of its chaos. For such a socialist program has to be drawn up on the foundation of the joint and systematic work of the international proletariat, and the pre-requisite for this is the joint and self sacrificing struggle of the international proletariat against all exploitation, robbery, and oppression.
Mr. Jean Longuet, Clemenceau’s godchild, informs us on the Paris conference: “The conference decided to inform president Harding of the plan.”
The Second International keeps its program secret from the masses of its own party comrades, it submits the program to president Harding. The object is thus no proletarian action, but a diplomatic demarché. The Second International does not trust to the fighting will of the proletariat, but to the “good will” of greedy and imperialist America. It seeks to revive the old bigoted faith in the man at Washington, who during and after the world war deceived the working class, especially the German working class, lulled it into a feeling of security, and betrayed it into the frightful defeats of the revolution. And now the international proletariat is to be again deceived, rendered inactive, and led into defeats, by means of this program.
It is not the improved and specialized program formulated by the Second International at Frankfort, not the program of humbug, of great war victors, and of deception, which will lead the workers to victory and save the world from ruin, but the program made by the International Committee of Action at Frankfort, the program of International proletarian struggle.
Last updated on 2 September 2022