The Peasant War in Thuringia, Alsace and Austria I mmediately after the outbreak of the first movement in Suabia, Thomas Muenzer again hurried to Thuringia, and since the end of February and the beginning of March, he established his quarters in the free imperial city of Muehlhausen, where his party was stronger than elsewhere.He held the threads of the entire movement in his hand.He knew what storm was about to break in Southern Germany, and he undertook to make Thuringia the centre of the movement for North Germany.He found very fertile soil.Thuringia, the main arena of the Reformation movement, was in the grip of great unrest.The economic misery of the downtrodden peasants, as well as the current revolutionary, religious and political doctrine, had also prepared the neighbouring provinces, Hesse, Saxony, and the region of the Harz, for the general uprising.In Muehlhausen itself, whole masses of the lower middle-class had been won over to the extreme Muenzer doctrine, and could hardly wait for the moment when they would assert themselves by a superiority of numbers against the haughty honourables.In order not to start before the proper moment, Muenzer was compelled to appear in the role of moderator, but his disciple, Pfeifer, who conducted the movement there, had committed himself to such an extent that he could not hold back the outbreak, and as early as March 17, 1525, before the general uprising in Southern Germany, Muehlhausen had its revolution.The old patrician council was overthrown, and the government was handed over to the newly-elected "eternal council," with Muenzer as president.
The worst thing that can befall a leader of an extreme party is to be compelled to take over a government in an epoch when the movement is not yet ripe for the domination of the class which he represents and for the realisation of the measures which that domination would imply.
What he can do depends not upon his will but upon the sharpness of the clash of interests between the various classes, and upon the degree of development of the material means of existence, the relations of production and means of communication upon which the clash of interests of the classes is based every time.What he ought to do, what his party demands of him, again depends not upon him, or upon the degree of development of the class struggle and its conditions.He is bound to his doctrines and the demands hitherto propounded which do not emanate from the interrelations of the social classes at a given moment, or from the more or less accidental level of relations of production and means of communication, but from his more or less penetrating insight into the general result of the social and political movement.Thus he necessarily finds himself in a dilemma.
What he can do is in contrast to all his actions as hitherto practised, to all his principles and to the present interests of his party; what he ought to do cannot be achieved.In a word, he is compelled to represent not his party or his class, but the class for whom conditions are ripe for domination.In the interests of the movement itself, he is compelled to defend the interests of an alien class, and to feed his own class with phrases and promises, with the assertion that the interests of that alien class are their own interests.Whoever puts himself in this awkward position is irrevocably lost.We have seen examples of this in recent times.We need only be reminded of the position taken in the last French provisional government by the representatives of the proletariat, though they represented only a very low level of proletarian development.Whoever can still look forward to official positions after having become familiar with the experiences of the February government -- not to speak of our own noble German provisional governments and imperial regencies -- is either foolish beyond measure, or at best pays only lip service to the extreme revolutionary party.
Muenzer's position at the head of the "eternal council" of Muehlhausen was indeed much more precarious than that of any modern revolutionary regent.
Not only the movement of his time, but the whole century, was not ripe for the realisation of the ideas for which he himself had only begun to grope.The class which he represented not only was not developed enough and incapable of subduing and transforming the whole of society, but it was just beginning to come into existence.The social transformation that he pictured in his fantasy was so little grounded in the then existing economic conditions that the latter were a preparation for a social system diametrically opposed to that of which he dreamt.Nevertheless, he was bound to his preachings of Christian equality and evangelical community of possessions.He was at least compelled to make an attempt at their realisation.
Community of all possessions, universal and equal labour duty, and the abolition of an authority were proclaimed.In reality, Muehlhausen remained a republican imperial city with a somewhat democratic constitution, with a senate elected by universal suffrage and under the control of a forum, and with the hastily improvised feeding of the poor.The social change, which so horrified the Protestant middle-class contemporaries, in reality never went beyond a feeble and unconscious attempt prematurely to establish the bourgeois society of a later period.
