Ruth Fischer



Ruth Fischer (11 December 1895 – 13 March 1961) was an Austrian and German Communist and a co-founder of the Austrian Communist Party in 1918. She later became a staunch anti-Stalinist activist.

Stalin and German Communism: A Study in the Origins of the State Party (1948)
Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1948
 * Russian policy had to be redefined in a new world setting, and the principal factor to be taken into account was the hostility of the Russian peasant. The New Economic Policy had broken the straightjacket of War Communism, but the market did not begin to function spontaneously. The revolution had broken the connections between industry and the village, and new ones were not easily built up.
 * p. 472
 * A nationalized industry, or partially nationalized industry, can be integrated into a classic capitalist economy without breaking it contour. What decides the character of nationalized economy is the relation between man and man, is whether the working class has the key role in its control. Without a fundamental change in the class structure, nationalization alone equals not socialism but state capitalism. Under state capitalism the exploitation of the worker continues and can even be intensified.
 * p. 485
 * Stalin’s direct appeal to proletarian instincts, begun in the 1923 fight against Trotsky, was continued and amplified into a new manipulatory device which developed to its full flower during the dekulakization period of the 1928-1929.
 * p. 538
 * The content of the struggle between Bolsheviks and Mensheviks embraced every aspect of the change that a revolution would bring about. The Mensheviks insisted that social conditions in Russia were not ripe for socialism and that their task was to lead a democratic bourgeois revolution against Tsarist autocracy; and Lenin, contrary to Leninism as later fabricated, agreed fully with his Menshevik adversaries that it would be folly to hope that from the starting point of overthrowing feudal Tsarism a socialist society could be realized in Russia.
 * p. 648
 * The Bolsheviks were able to take power in 1917 in spite of their numerical insignificance not because they had fashioned a fool-proof coup d’état but because they advanced on the crest of a revolutionary peasant wave, which in the hinterland had carried out revolutionary slogans months before they were taken over by the Bolsheviks. At the head of this vast peasant mass, the Bolsheviks were enabled, in the first phrase, to overcome the resistance of large urban groups and, later, when foreign intervention and the regrouping of the White forces had reduced Soviet Russia to the Grand Principality of Moscow, to overcoming all counter-revolutionary attempts and throw the invaders back to the borders of the country.
 * p. 649
 * When the Russian famine reached its peak in 1932-1933, most of the peasantry had been Collectivized, either in the forced-labor camps or on the collective farms. On the  kolkhoz, the peasant had, exactly as before the revolution, a small plot of his own, not quite sufficient to feed himself and his family adequately; but the major portion of his labor power was forcibly directed into cultivating the land of his masters. Terror, from a weapon in the class war, had become the motive power of a new type of economy.
 * p. 651
 * In 1923, Stalin’s terrorist subduing of the revolting Georgians contributed substantially to Lenin’s break with him.
 * p. 651
 * After the Russian-German pact of 1939 divided Poland, almost one million Poles were deported by the  NKVD to Siberia, and another million by the Gestapo to forced labor in Poland and Germany… Mass deportation was an important accomplishment to the russification of East Prussia, the Baltic states, the Balkans.
 * pp. 652-53
 * The anti-Nazi camp also was split down the middle, split by an ax wielded by Stalin—an ax called social fascism—by which the Communist half of the anti-Nazi camp was made into the silent ally of  Hitler.
 * p. 656

Attributed

 * You cry out against Jewish capital, gentlemen? Whoever condemns Jewish capital, gentlemen, is already engaged in the class struggle, even though he does not realize it. You are against Jewish capital and want to eliminate the stock manipulators. This is right. Trample the Jewish capitalists under foot, hang them on the lamp post and stamp them out. But what do you want to do with the big capitalists, the Klöckners, Stinnes...?
 * Attributed in the Social Democratic Party's report Vorwärts, August 22, 1923. The autenticy of the quote is not certain. As reported by in