Career
"lieutenant has served as the model for other capitalistic dictatorships. Ideological divergences do not really differentiate socioeconomic systems"
He also saw the Leninist Party as an appropriate form for the overthrow of Tsarism, but 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:
"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", and supported a more council communist approach which emphasised the importance of workers" councils. He was involved in setting up the Allgemeine Arbeiter-Union – Einheitsorganisation in October 1921.
Rühle wrote a very detailed Karl Marx: His Life and Works (1928, transl 1929, Viking Press, New York).