Party and revolution Rühle is most famous for his dictum, "The revolution is not a party affair". This encapsulated his fundamental critique of the party form as an instrument of proletarian revolution. For Rühle, all parties were inherently bourgeois in their structure and function, aiming to exercise power on behalf of the working class, rather than enabling the class to exercise power itself. He argued that the revolutionary organisation of the proletariat could only be the
workers' councils, which encompassed the entire class and were the direct expression of its self-activity. This position, which he developed after 1920, distinguished him from the mainstream of the KAPD and theorists like
Herman Gorter, who continued to see the need for a
vanguard party to lead the councils. Rühle's rejection of the party form was a foundational element of his council-communist theory and a key reason for the later influence of his ideas in
anarchist and
libertarian circles.
Critique of Bolshevism Rühle was one of the earliest and most trenchant left-communist critics of
Bolshevism. Based on his experiences in Soviet Russia in 1920, he came to view the Bolshevik state not as a proletarian dictatorship, but as a new form of bureaucratic rule. He argued that the Bolshevik revolution was not a proletarian but a
bourgeois revolution, which had carried out the tasks of modernizing and industrializing Russia under a
state-capitalist regime. The Bolshevik Party, in his analysis, was not a party of the working class but of a new ruling class of intellectuals and bureaucrats. He saw the Comintern's centralized and militarized structure as an attempt to impose this Russian model on the workers' movements of the West, a policy he believed would be disastrous. This critique led him to break decisively with the Comintern and the KAPD.
Analysis of fascism and state capitalism Under the pseudonym Carl Steuermann, Rühle authored one of the first Marxist analyses of
fascism,
Weltkrise – Weltwende. Kurs auf den Staatskapitalismus (
World Crisis – World Turn. The Course towards State Capitalism, 1931). He saw fascism not as a uniquely Italian or German phenomenon, but as a general tendency of modern capitalism in its period of crisis. For Rühle, both bourgeois democracy and fascism were forms of capitalist rule, and the development of capitalism was leading all countries towards a form of
state capitalism, characterized by the fusion of economic and political power. In his 1939 work
Fascisme brun, fascisme rouge (
Brown Fascism, Red Fascism), Rühle controversially argued that the Soviet system under Stalin was a form of "
Red Fascism", structurally equivalent to the Nazi regime in Germany. He saw both systems as
totalitarian forms of state capitalism, which, despite their ideological differences, shared a common basis in the suppression of workers' self-activity and the centralized control of the economy by a bureaucratic ruling class. His work
The Struggle Against Fascism Begins with the Struggle Against Bolshevism (1939) further elaborated on this theme. == Legacy ==