Otto was born in Großvoigtsberg, Saxony on 23 October 1874. His father was a railway official. In 1889 he started to train as teacher in Oschatz. While there he became involved with the German Freethinkers League. In 1895 he became the private tutor for the Countess von Bühren, while also teaching at Öderan.[1]
Political career
He joined the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) in 1896 and soon established a socialist Sunday school.[1] However he was dismissed as a primary school teacher in 1902, and soon supported himself as a writer and editor of social democratic newspapers in Hamburg, followed by Breslau, Chemnitz, Pirna and Zwickau. Rühle had already become a vocal critic of existing teaching methods and set up a social democratic educational society for the Hamburg area. In 1907 he became an itinerant teacher for the SPD's educational committee and developed a reputation in the SPD, through his socially critical educational writings: "Work and Education" (1904), "The Enlightenment of Children About Sexual Matters", (1907), and, above all, "The Proletarian Child" (1911).
While Rühle saw the Leninistvanguardist party as an appropriate form for the overthrow of tsarism, it was 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, arguing:
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.[3]
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 and to Marxism–Leninism as well as to bourgeois democracy and fascism.[6]
With the signing of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact in 1939, Rühle began to see the parallels between the two ideological dictators, writing:
Russia was the example for fascism. [...] Whether party 'communists' like it or not, the fact remains that the state order and rule in Russia are indistinguishable from those in Italy and Germany. Essentially, they are alike. One may speak of a red, black, or brown 'soviet state', as well as of red, black or brown fascism.[7]
Because of his connection to Leon Trotsky, Rühle found it difficult to find work in Mexico and was forced to hand-paint notecards for hotels to financially survive.[8]
^Roth, Gary (2015). Marxism in a Lost Century: A Biography of Paul Mattick. Leiden/Boston: Brill Nijhoff and Hotel Publishing. p. 195. See the PDF version.
"Non-Leninist Marxism: Writings on the Workers Councils" (2007). St. Petersburg, Florida: Red and Black Publishers. ISBN978-0-9791813-6-8. It includes Ruhle's "The Revolution is Not a Party Affair" and "Report From Moscow".
