Otto Rühle

Otto Rühle, born on October twenty-third, eighteen seventy-four, was a notable German Marxist writer, educator, and revolutionary. He emerged as a significant figure in the council-communist movement, advocating for workers' councils over traditional party politics. Rühle famously declared, 'The revolution is not a party affair,' highlighting his commitment to grassroots organization.

Initially affiliated with the Social Democratic Party (SPD), Rühle became a prominent voice within its left wing. In nineteen fifteen, he, alongside Karl Liebknecht, was one of the first Reichstag deputies to oppose war credits, marking a pivotal moment in his political career. He co-founded the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) but departed in nineteen nineteen to take a leading role in the Communist Workers' Party of Germany (KAPD).

After breaking with the KAPD in late nineteen twenty, Rühle developed a political stance that was both anti-party and anti-union, focusing on the Allgemeine Arbeiter-Union – Einheitsorganisation (AAU-E). Under the pseudonym Carl Steuermann, he produced groundbreaking Marxist analyses of fascism in the early nineteen thirties, critiquing the Soviet Union as a form of state capitalism and equating Bolshevism with fascism, coining the term 'Red Fascism.'

Fleeing Nazi Germany in nineteen thirty-three, Rühle spent his final years in exile in Mexico, where he contributed to the Dewey Commission investigating the Moscow Trials. He passed away in Mexico City in nineteen forty-three. Although largely forgotten for a time, Rühle's work was rediscovered by the anti-authoritarian student movement of the nineteen sixties, and his writings continue to influence libertarian socialist and council-communist circles.