Otto Rühle (1874 - 1943)

Fri Oct 23, 1874

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Otto Rühle, born on this day in 1874, was a German left communist educator and writer who participated in the Spartacus League (along with Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht). Rühle was also a vocal opponent of both World War I and World War II.

Although Liebknecht and Luxemburg were murdered in 1919 for their involvement in the German Revolution, Rühle lived on to participate in the left opposition of the German labor movement, developing an early communist critique of both Bolshevism and fascism.

Rühle saw the Soviet Union as a form of state capitalism that had much in common with the state-centered capitalism of the West as well as fascism.

“This distinction between head and body, between intellectuals and workers, officers and privates, corresponds to the duality of class society. One class is educated to rule; the other to be ruled. Lenin’s organisation is only a replica of bourgeois society. His revolution is objectively determined by the forces that create a social order incorporating these class relations, regardless of the subjective goals accompanying this process.”

- Otto Rühle