Otto Rühle (German Marxist activist) Add a review

Karl Heinrich Otto Rühle (German: [ˈʁyːlə]; 23 October 1874 – 24 June 1943) was a German Marxist writer, educator, Reichstag deputy, and prominent theorist of the council-communist movement. He is known for his rejection of party politics in favour of workers' councils, his critique of Bolshevism, and his famous declaration, "The revolution is not a party affair".

Initially a member of the Social Democratic Party (SPD), Rühle became a prominent voice in the party's left wing. Along with Karl Liebknecht, he was the one of the first Reichstag deputies to vote against war credits in 1915. He was a co-founder of the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) but left in 1919 to play a leading role in the Communist Workers' Party of Germany (KAPD). After his break with the KAPD in late 1920, he developed a political tendency that was both anti-party and anti-union, centred on the Allgemeine Arbeiter-Union – Einheitsorganisation (AAU-E).

Writing under the pseudonym Carl Steuermann, Rühle produced a pioneering Marxist analysis of fascism in the early 1930s. His theoretical work extended to a critique of the Soviet Union as a form of state capitalism and of Bolshevism as a bourgeois ideology, famously equating it with fascism as "Red Fascism". After fleeing Nazi Germany in 1933, he spent his final years in exile in Mexico, where he participated in the Dewey Commission to investigate the Moscow Trials. He died in Mexico City in 1943. Largely forgotten for a time, Rühle was rediscovered by the anti-authoritarian student movement of the 1960s, and his writings have remained influential in libertarian socialist and council-communist circles.