extracts from the speech by ERNEST MANDEL, a leader of the United Secretariat of the Fourth International, speaking to an audience of over 350 at the Socialist Outlook Rally in London on Friday
NDEPTH What is happening in East Germany and in Czechoslovakia is the beginning of a revolutionary movement which combines May 1968 and the Prague Spring multiplied, I would say by two or three times.
Sheer quantity transforms itself into quality, if you look at the figures. During three days in East Germany while I happened to be there, from November 4 to November 6, two million people took to the streets in a country with 16 million inhabitants. The equivalent for France, Italy or Britain would have been seven million demonstrators in three days: that has never happened in history.
In Leipzig, for eight successive weeks, every Monday night 200300,000 took to the streets in a town of 500,000: this means the entire working class and a large part of the high school and student youth were there.
To quantity you have to add quality. Rosa Luxemburg would have had tears in her eyes to see the Berlin working class on November 4 in the largest mass demonstration of German history. One million were in the streets, manufacturing for themselves - 99 per cent of them spontaneously - some 7,000 different banners with different slogans, each more anti-authoritarian than the next, and with a fine spirit of humour and insolence, scepticism and hope. Anti-bureaucratic and socialist to the core, they showed a self-confidence which it is rare to see in such large crowds.
This self-confidence is confirmed and strengthened by the rapidity of the conquests of the mass movement. Practically every day the masses make a new conquest. In addition there has been the tremendous outburst of opposition inside the East German Communist Party, the SED, which is the most unforeseen and gratifying aspect of what has been going on.
There is no precedent in the history of the Stalinist movement for anything of this type. The SED opposition asked first for the right to organise tendencies and even factions. This was not granted - but they started de facto to organise tendencies. Then they tried to combine among themselves to get an extraordinary congress of the party. 25,000