It has served as the model for other capitalistic dictatorships. Ideological divergences do not really differentiate socioeconomic systems.
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.
Rühle was also critical of the party as a revolutionary organisational form, stating that "the revolution is not a party affair". As a result, he supported a more council communist approach which emphasised the importance of workers' councils. In October 1921, he was involved in setting up the Allgemeine Arbeiter-Union – Einheitsorganisation. 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. 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.
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. Rühle was a member of the Dewey Commission which cleared Trotsky of all charges made during the Moscow Trials. In 1928, Rühle wrote a very detailed Karl Marx: His Life and Works.
Personal life
In 1921, Rühle married Alice Gerstel, a German-Jewish writer, feminist and psychologist. In 1936, Gerstel followed him to Mexico in 1936 and committed suicide on the day of his death on 24 June 1943.
