Otto Rühle

Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) Left communism Germany Germany 1874–1943 → Died in exile

Council communist who voted against war credits with Liebknecht and declared that "the revolution is not a party affair"

German educator, writer, Reichstag deputy and theorist of council communism. Known as a travelling lecturer of the SPD, he voted against war credits together with Karl Liebknecht in March 1915. He took part in founding the Spartacus League and the KPD, was pushed out for opposing parliamentary participation and co-founded the Communist Workers' Party of Germany (KAPD) in 1920. Returning from the Second Comintern Congress he broke with the Bolsheviks and moved to a council communism that rejected the party form itself; he died in exile in Mexico.

Also known as: Carl Steuermann · Karl Heinrich Otto Rühle

Activities and affiliations

Career Timeline

From the Dresden council to "the revolution is not a party affair"

From 1912 Rühle sat in the Reichstag for the SPD for Saxony 8 (Pirna-Sebnitz). He belonged to the party's far left with Karl Liebknecht, Rosa Luxemburg and Franz Mehring, and in March 1915 he and Liebknecht were the first deputies to vote against war credits. He took part in the founding conference of the Spartacus League on 1 January 1916, but his open letter to Vorwärts that month calling for a split put him at odds with Luxemburg, who still hoped to win over the party. When the USPD was formed in 1917 he did not join it, leading instead the Left Radicals in Dresden and Pirna.

In the revolution of November 1918 Rühle became chairman of the Revolutionary Workers' and Soldiers' Council in Dresden, but on 16 November he and his comrades of the International Communists of Germany (IKD) resigned, refusing to work with the SPD and USPD. At the KPD's founding congress at the end of December he led the opposition to taking part in the National Assembly elections. Throughout 1919 he, Heinrich Laufenberg and Fritz Wolffheim fought the leadership's turn to parliamentarism and trade-union work, calling instead for direct action through factory organisations and workers' councils, until he was expelled.

A co-founder of the Communist Workers' Party of Germany (KAPD) in April 1920, Rühle went to the Second Comintern Congress as its delegate in June. Convinced that the Russian Revolution was degenerating and that the Bolsheviks were imposing an authoritarian and bureaucratic model on the international workers' movement, he refused to stay at the congress and argued for a complete break with the Third International. At odds with a KAPD leadership that still hoped to fight inside the Comintern, he was expelled from that party too at the end of the year. Thereafter he held that every party was a bourgeois form that exercised power on behalf of the working class, and that only the workers' councils, embracing the whole class, could be its revolutionary organisation; "the revolution is not a party affair" summed up this position. In the 1930s, as Carl Steuermann, he analysed fascism and criticised the Soviet Union as state capitalism.