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From International Press Correspondence, Vol. 3 No. 70 [46], 8 November 1923, pp. 800–801.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.
Public Domain: Marxists Internet Archive (2023). You may freely copy, distribute, display and perform this work; as well as make derivative and commercial works. Please credit “Marxists Internet Archive” as your source.
All over the world a mighty solidarity movement has begun for the support of the German workers. The International Workers’ Relief has issued an appeal calling upon the workers of the whole world to form Relief Committees at once, and systematically to collect funds in aid of the starving German working men and women, children, and old people. The appeal refers to the great wave of solidarity which swept over the international working class at the time of the famine catastrophe in Russia in 1921, and calls upon all productive workers to carry through the present action with the same energy and enthusiasm as was done in aid of the starving Russian workers and peasants. The appeal points out that the German famine differs from the Russian in not being the result of a natural catastrophe, but of the complete dissolution of German economics and the complete bankruptcy of the capitalist economic system in Germany, it is accordingly the more important and the more necessary that the international working class comes to the help of the victims ol this collapse.
The appeal made by the International Workers’ Relief has not fallen upon deaf ears. Relief Committees have immediately been organized in all countries, and have already begun actively the work of collecting. The Russian Comrades are especially zealous. The workers and peasants of the various Russian towns and villages are connecting with one another in the endeavor to repay with interest the fraternal help received from the international working class in the year 1921. Thanks to this immediate response to the passionate appeal of the International Workers’ Relief, it has already been possible for the Central Committees of this body to distribute 200,000 hundredweight of corn, chiefly Russian rye, in the most needy industrial centres of Germany. 40,000 hundredweight was placed at the disposal of the Saxon Workers’ Government for distribution to the unemployed and destitute, 15,000 hundredweight have been sent to Thuringia, and at the same time the International Workers’ Relief has organized the distribution of food to 3,000 working women daily in Berlin. The famine relief movement of the international proletariat, thus begun by these first actions of die International Workers’ Relief in aid of the German working class, is to be greatly extended within the next few weeks. The German working class will receive fresh courage from the consciousness that it does not stand alone in the struggle, but is supported by the working class of all countries.
Last updated on 29 April 2023