THE RUHR ELECTIONS On July 6th the population of the largest and most important "Land" of the German Federal Republic went to the ballotboxes. North Rhine - Westphalen is the most industrialized part of West Germany. It is the region of coal deposits and of the iron and steel industry. North and south of the heavy-industrial nucleus lie great areas of conversion industries, and in between, especially in the north, agricultural Westphalen. In the history of the development of German labor the working-class strata of the Ruhr region played an ideolo. rically less class-conscious role than those of the East Germar regions such as Thüringen, Saxony and Berlin, and those of
West German industrial centres such as Hamburg, Frankfort, and the Wuppertal-Cologne region North Rhine - Westphalen. The steady immigration of labor backward regions of eastern Germany (East Prussia - Schelsien) during the industrial upsurge at the turn of the century caused to be established
Pushed by the British bougeoisie, Turkey, which in 1954 evidence of Clive Evatt, an Australian Labour MP, who
FOURTH INTERNATIONAL region a strong Catholic Christian labor tendency with a strong organization that even today has deep roots among the workers. On all these grounds the 6 July elections were of great significance because they would show what political evolution was taking place among the masses of such mixed workers. The decisive choice in the elections was: For or against the Adenauer policy, for or against arming the German Bundeswehr with atomic weapons. All other questions were pushed into the background by these problems. As in the elections to the Bundestag, the German Socialist Party, the SPD, fought on the defensive, without any reliance on a socialist policy. As in those elections, it was in appearance a question only of another bourgeois alternative to the The struggle against the atomic threat was carried out in a Adenauer regime. bureaucratic way. The mass marches in Hamburg and Bremen were high-points that could not and would not again be reached, because through their dynamic character they constituted a danger to the bureaucratic petty-bourgeois leadership of the SPD.
a this way the election struggle waged by the SPD wa owise to be differentiated from its traditional parliamentar we election propaganda. The election results showed the following tendencies. Adenauer's party, the CDU, lost 800,000 votes and fell from 54.4% of the effective votes to 50.5 %. The SPD gained 200,000 votes and rose from 33.5 % to 39.2 0%. The former coalition-partners of the SPD lost serious parts of their body of voters. Hence the SPD's purpose, to check the Adenauer regime in the Ruhr, in spite of a comparatively good electoral success, could not succeed because of the voting losses of its possible coalition-partners. What does this election show?
The trend of the working class to the Social-Democracy, as the only alternative to Adenauer's policy and as the representative of the working class's day-to-day continues, in spite of the non- and anti-socialist policy of its leadership. That is shown by the very clear successes of the the industrial bastions, such as Mühlheim, Duisburg, Gelsenkirchen, Dortmund, Bielefeld, etc., where more than 50 %, and such centres as Cologne, Wupperthal, Düsseldorg, Essen, Oberhausen, etc., where more than 40 % of the The SPD defensive tactics, however, failed to politicize broader circles of the working class.
The Christian workers were not to be won over either by godless propaganda or by Social-Democratic conciliationism toward the princes of the church and getting dressed up in Christian costume. Only by an openly led class struggle, a struggle for the workers' own particular interests, were these working-class sectors to be freed from following their
That the working class of the region did not give an even greater concentration of votes to the SPD comes from the fact that the percentage of SPD votes cast by women in their separate voting-booths ran on the average 10 to 12 % below the men's votes. Had their voting been equally massive, the SPD would have reached 50%.
The prohibited Communist Party, the KPD, tried to participate in the elections by means of "independent" slates. It is revealing that Adenauer's CDU, which had forced the illegalization of the KPD through the Supreme Court, in all cases favored the recognition of these "independent" slates. It wanted thereby to bring about a split in the working-class vote. The "independent" slates did not appear with clear revolutionary propaganda, but just legally with slightly sharper formulations against Adenauer and his policy. But in the election they merely made completely obvious the total bankruptcy of the West German KPD. Not even those who had been inscribed members of the KPD before it was banned voted for these slates. To show their electoral percentages, one has to insert several zeros between the decimal point and the figure. This experience has shown that Stalinism is no political factor in labor developments in West Germany.
The loss of votes by the Refugee Party, the BHE, from 4.6 % to 1 % shows that the refugees have been assimilated into the political life of the Federal Republic and that the refugee problem is vegetating only in the outer circles of 6) All right-wing Radical parties lost precipitately in votes and just were not in the race. Here is the demonstration that the bases are not yet present for a fascist mass development in the Federal Republic. The satisfied petty bourgeoisie still sees, as the representative of its interests, the big capitalist party of the clergy, the DU he CDU fought and won its election campaign in defense of rearming the Federal Republic with atomic weapons by means of unbridled anti-Bolshevik hate-propaganda. The Budapest events, occurring during the election campaign, fitted in with the anti-Bolshevik complex of the petty bourgeoisie and gave plausibility to the CDU's rearmament propaganda among the middle classes. Thus the crime of Budapest was an active help to Adenauer in the Ruhr elections.
The losses by all bourgeois parties to the benefit of the CDU shows that the Germany bourgeoisie also from now on sees in Adenauer and his policies (foreign policy!) the great defender of their interests.
The stability of both big parties (CDU and SPD) demonstrates a tendency in Germany toward a two-party system showing a polarization of the class struggle.