To Working Women of France and Germany

Workers, employees, professionals, mothers, spouses, sisters and daughters of all those who work in workshops, factories and mines, offices and fields, what will you do?

A terrible catastrophe, a new war threatens you!

Mr. Poincaré, the „factotum“ of the French imperialists, has militarily occupied the coal district of the Ruhr. He wants to collect, by pointing his bayonets, the „pledges for reparations“ requested by the French Metallurgical Committee. And, precisely, referring to the Treaty of Versailles.

Mr. Cuno, the „factotum“ of the German capitalists, is also referring to it and is inciting the employees and workers of the mines and railways to passive resistance, and even to strike, to stop the excavation and transport of coal.

Those miners and railroaders who possess a class consciousness declare: Neither for Mr. Poincaré and Mr. Schneider du Creusot, nor for Mr. Cuno and Mr. Stinnes! Away with the occupation troops! No „sacred union“ with the mine owners and the German bourgeoisie! We will work neither under the threat of French bayonets nor under the threat of German cannons. Strike? Yes. But only to impose on the German owners of the mines, our postulates determined by our hunger for a daily bread and the thirst for a truly human life.

Women of the working people of Germany and France!

Listen to the voice of your brothers, the miners of the Ruhr.

And the voice of your own class! Do not fall victim to the lies that the capitalists of this and that side of the Ruhr present in their newspapers and through their lying politicians. In both camps they talk about the Fatherland. But behind this beautiful word is hidden the safe of the capitalists. In the occupation of the Ruhr, it is neither the German homeland nor the French homeland. It is only about the profit that they want to squeeze out of the many thousands of miners, metallurgists and proletarians of every category. The struggle between the lords of French metallurgy and the German mining barons for a share in this profit is still going on.

As in the catastrophic newspapers of August 1914, Messrs Poincaré and Cuno and their servants unleashed the worst nationalist hysteria to disguise the fact that this is nothing but big business. In France the bankruptcy of the State which is threatening the workers of Germany with appalling misery, the petty bourgeois and the proletarianized intellectuals, are bad advisers. The monarchists and the militarists brazenly try to exploit the situation in order to re-establish the old Wilhelm regime. A mere coincidence can trigger a war, which would become a new world carnage even worse than that of 1914, given the tension of the international situation. All the conferences of bourgeois governments demonstrate the inability of the capitalist bourgeoisie to restore peace in the world and show that the bourgeoisie is ready to sacrifice peace for the sake of capitalist profit, which can be derived from financial agreements, from cotton plantations, from oil sources, etc.

Women of the working masses of France and Germany!

You still mourn your dear dead that the fratricidal war of 1914 took from you. Your heart bleeds at the sight of the maimed, the blind, the crippled and the sick, who have been put off from you by the battles and the truces. If men should forget the atrocities and horrors of war, you women will never forget them.

Raise your voices! Make your cry resound in unison, regardless of language differences, and demand loud and strong: We do not want the occupation of the Ruhr, which can only lead to a new military massacre! Down with them all! We have only one fight to fight for, the last fight that will free the workers from the capitalist yoke!

Women of the oppressed class!

There is yet another enemy lurking! Misery, the child of capitalist exploitation! Before long French working women will know the fate that befell on the Germans! In countless families in Germany the fire is out, supplies are exhausted, children are wasting away and dying. The famine continues to grow in both countries, the rents increase, taxes become more and more unbearable. The decrease in wages and unemployment hit harder and harder the masses of the poor, the weak, the attempts of the proletarian masses to improve their standard of living are cruelly repressed by the police, the courts, the guns of the capitalist and bourgeois state.

The subjugation of the Ruhr workers to the double yoke of German and French capitalism will result in lower wages, longer working days and higher unemployment. First for the German workers, and later, as a backlash, also for the French proletarians. Capitalist exploitation knows no country. It crosses borders and is international. The working people of France and Germany are going through the same ordeal. Their struggle must therefore be animated by international solidarity against capitalist exploitation.

Workers, peasants, employees, masses!

It is our duty to fight to prevent the reconstruction of social life, destroyed by the war, from taking place in favor of the ruling class and paid for by the increasing exploitation of workers of both sexes. It must take place in favor of those who work.

Down with taxes on basic necessities! Down with the profits of merchants, entrepreneurs and unscrupulous businessmen! Down with exploitative usury!