Otto Rühle

Otto Rühle (23 October 1874 in Großschirma – 24 June 1943 in Mexico) was a German Marxist active in opposition to both the First and Second World Wars, and a founder along with Karl Liebknecht, Rosa Luxemburg, Franz Mehring and others of the group and magazine Internationale, which posed a revolutionary internationalism against a world of warring states, and also the Spartacist League (Spartakusbund in German) in 1916.

The Spartacist League took an oppositional stance to Leninism, and was attacked by the Bolsheviks for inconsistency. Though Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg were murdered in 1919 for their involvement in the German Revolution, Rühle lived on to participate in the left opposition of the German labour movement, developing both an early communist critique of Bolshevism, and an early opposition to fascism. Rühle saw the Soviet Union as a form of state capitalism that had much in common with the state-centred capitalism of the West, as well as fascism:

"It has served as the model for other capitalistic dictatorships. Ideological divergences do not really differentiate socioeconomic systems."

He also saw the Leninist Party as an appropriate form for the overthrow of Tsarism, but ultimately an inappropriate form for a proletarian revolution. As such, no matter what the actual intentions of the Bolsheviks, what they actually succeeded in bringing about was much more like the bourgeois revolutions of Europe than a proletarian revolution:

"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."

Rühle was also critical of the party as a revolutionary organisational form, stating that "the revolution is not a party affair", and supported a more council communist approach which emphasised the importance of workers' councils. He was involved in setting up the Allgemeine Arbeiter-Union – Einheitsorganisation in October 1921.

In Anti-Bolshevik Communism, Paul Mattick describes Rühle as an exemplary radical figure within a German labour movement that had become ossified into various "official" structures; a perpetual outsider defined by his antagonistic relationship with the labour movement, to Leninist party communism, as well as to capitalist democracy and fascism.

Rühle was a member of the Dewey Commission which cleared Trotsky of all charges made during the Moscow Trials.

Rühle wrote a very detailed Karl Marx: His Life and Works (1928, transl. 1929, Viking Press, New York).

In 1921 he married Alice Gerstel, a German-Jewish writer, feminist, and psychologist.