Under the battle cry: “Loyalty is the marrow of honor”, the SPD and the trade unions only a few months ago placed the capitalist field marshal on the presidential throne of the Reich. Now, with their “Front Fighters’ Cabinet” of Paul the Savior, they have received, like dismissed lackeys, a lout in return.

The feudal-monarchist reaction, the Junker great landowners, heavy industry, and the military mustache have, through the Papen government, established the rule of the saber—with, in the background, the lurking appeal to war. The stock exchange greeted the birth of the cabinet of “national concentration” with a boom. A section of capital, after all, was hoping to rid itself of its debts through the coming inflation.

The new Papen government continues to spin Brüning’s noose, only a few sizes coarser. With this noose the working class is to be gagged until suffocation—for the salvation of capitalist exploitation and the greater glory of Christian culture. Standing on the ground of the Weimar Constitution, the cabinet of barons has renounced any parliamentary basis. It has chased away the Reichstag and relies instead on Schleicher’s “socialists” and their rule “over the street.” The “Soviet” enemy Hitler, with his once again legalized brown murder squads, forms the extra-parliamentary foundation of the new government. In his emergency decree, Herr von Papen has—through new taxes, throttling of social policy, and the lifting of the ban on the SS and SA—transformed the Ebert Republic from a “welfare institution” back into a state of order.

The incorporation of fascism into the state apparatus means the impending ban on the workers’ movement and bloody terror against the workers themselves. In this, the Papen government is certainly pursuing no different course than the previous coalition governments—including that of Brüning—only it will and must pursue it more consistently. Just as fascism is not a method of oppression existing outside the bourgeois world, but only the further development of bourgeois democracy by other means.

The proletarians must not look on calmly at this development with fists clenched in their pockets, and still less give space to cowardly resignation in the form of “letting the new men run their course.” To try to tame the Nazis through the Center Party, on which the Social Democracy speculates, is political hangover. It is easier to confront an impending danger than to eliminate one that has already arrived. But the Junker reaction, with the Brownshirts as its civil war army, can only be beaten back and smashed decisively if the masses of wage-slaves pass over into unified revolutionary activity and go on the offensive. The organizational fragmentation of the proletariat, however, stands in the way of this.

Everywhere voices are now being raised to create a united front. Suddenly everyone feels called to act in unity. Even the Social Democracy and the trade unions have donned the toga of opposition and are once again grinding out the old records of “class struggle,” insofar as they have not already been burned. As necessary as the united action of the working class against the brown pest of murder is, it must at the same time be stated clearly in this moment that a muddled unity-gruel will lead to a disgraceful defeat of the workers. To sacrifice the lessons of the revolutionary years for the sake of unity means to sacrifice the revolution itself.

If the KPD now, after hesitant wavering and the zigzag of its various united-front slogans, publicly calls upon the SPD to take joint action against fascism, this means inviting the enemy into its own camp. For not only have these organizations been the foster fathers of Hitler; even today the ADGB answers the nationalist tirades of the saber government with the declaration “that there is no national movement without the German working class.” To harness Braun and Severing to the cart of the workers’ movement means to drag that cart backward together into the swamp of class betrayal. In the face of the terrorist wave of Schleicher’s “socialist” bands, Vorwärts whines: “Fellow countrymen, we Social Democrats are as good sons of the people as you are! Get to know us first.” And as their sole measure against the impending intensified plundering of the poor and poorest, the Social Democratic cretins gush about: “Our weapon—the ballot! The reckoning on July 31st!” If the KPD wants to engage in “antifascist action” with these trailblazers of fascism, this means issuing the SPD a radical alibi and granting a general pardon for its desertion from the proletarian banner.

One will object to us that, within the ranks of Social Democracy and the trade unions, there are also oppositionist fragments of workers pressing against the policy of the leadership. That they are merely fragments is not in itself proof of their revolutionary capacity for development. Nor does the KAP take a hostile stance toward the organized inclusion of new forces that are unfolding toward revolutionary action—as the history of the party in assimilating the resolute Left has shown. What is decisive is the influence of the party on the ideological transformation of such groups.

Whether the Social Democratic workers’ oppositions, because of their more “European” orientation in contrast to the “Communist,” with its pro-Russian stance, provide a better ground for the KAP and its tactics, as some of our foreign friends believe, may still be doubted. Too vast is the sea of workers’ blood that Social Democracy has spilled in order to save capitalism. And this blood was spilled—whether amid loud public jubilation or, at best, with the silent toleration of the Social Democratic workers themselves. Just as the purest woman cannot pass in and out of a brothel for years without consequence, neither will the political refuge that a number of workers, repelled by the slogan-politics of the Comintern, have once again sought in the SPD, leave them untouched.

The left wing of the SPD, which has found its crystallization in the Kämpfer group, is undoubtedly developing views that are close to the standpoint of the KAP—for example, on the question of trade unions and parliamentarism. The same applies to the Reichenbach group, which went into the SAP. Yet, if the distance between lip and cup is often great, the contradiction between theory and practice in these groups appears to us not merely a matter of distance, but rather the fruit of political asylum.

The Party represents the interests of the proletarian class, undeterred by its ideological fluctuations. It will not shut the door on workers who wish to fight in this front, even if they have once marched under the enemy’s banners; but to concentrate its persuasive energy primarily here, merely because this opposition is learning to speak our language, would be to stray onto side paths. One must look to their fists, not to their mouths.

So, if the prospects for a joint, unequivocal class policy with these Social Democratic dissenters and their push forward are not so promising, how do things stand with the various council communists? Here, too, what was written at the beginning applies: no mush of unity, just because fascism looms threateningly at the gates. Never has a strong KAP and Union been more necessary than now, but in order to arrive at organizations capable of striking action, which decisively intervene in the wheel of history, it is all the more necessary to speak sharply and clearly about what is. To gloss over real contradictions, merely in order to unite the council communist groups into one organization, would be a step backward and an obstacle to unity itself.

A revolutionary unity cannot, at its outset, be the product of the negotiating table. Even less can it be a cartel with a purely Social Democratic party, as, for example, the Communist Workers’ Union in Leipzig has undertaken. Not so long ago, the Leipzig KAU was bursting with puffed-up indignation against the Party. Now it is forming an anti-fascist united front with the SAP! – This stupid party-hatred reveals itself, at the very first practical question, as the most outright confusion.

For the KAP, its principles form the basis of its action. These principles are the principles of the proletarian revolution. The recognition of the necessity of revolution is the source of the unification of the working class. The true united front tactic therefore lies in the sharpest possible counterposing of what divides. This is the bridge to common revolutionary action. By continuing, undeterred by all the united front clamoring, its unequivocal and clear revolutionary class policy, the KAP builds from below the insurmountable front of the proletarian revolution against capitalism and its henchmen of murder.