I
Is there any sign or criterion by which we can tell that a human
society has been completely socialized?
There is one and one only: it is when no one can have an income
without working for it.
That is the sign of Socialism; but it is not the goal. In itself it is
not decisive. If every one had enough to live on, it would not matter
for what he received money or goods, or even whether he got them for
nothing. And relics of the system of income which is not worked for
will always remain--for instance, provision for old age.
The goal is not any kind of division of income or allotment of
property. Nor is it equality, reduction of toil, or increase of the
enjoyment of life. It is the abolition of the proletarian condition;
abolition of the lifelong hereditary serfage, the nameless hereditary
servitude, of one of the two peoples who are called by the same name;
the annulment of the hereditary twofold stratification of society, the
abolition of the scandalous enslavement of brother by brother, of that
Western abuse which is the basis of our civilization as slavery was
of the antique, and which vitiates all our deeds, all our creations,
all our joys.
Nor is even this the final goal--no economy, no society can talk of a
final goal--the only full and final object of all endeavour upon earth
is the development of the human soul. A final goal, however, points
out the direction, though not the path, of politics.
The political object which I have described as the abolition of the
proletarian condition may, as I have shown in _Things that are to
Come_,[1] be closely approached by a suitable policy in regard to
property and education; above all, by a limitation of the right of
inheritance. Of socialization in the strict sense there is, for this
purpose, no need. Yet a far-reaching policy of socialization--and I do
not here refer to a mere mechanical nationalization of the means of
production but to a radical economic and social resettlement--is
necessary and urgent, because it awakens and trains responsibilities,
and because it withdraws from the sluggish hands of the governing
classes the determination of time and of method, and places it in the
hands that have a better title, those of the whole commonalty, which,
at present, stands helpless through sheer democracy. For only in the
hands of a political people does democracy mean the rule of the
people; in those of an untrained and unpolitical people it becomes
merely an affair of debating societies and philistine chatter at the
inn ordinary. The symbol of German bourgeois democracy is the tavern;
thence enlightenment is spread and there judgments are formed; it is
the meeting place of political associations, the forum of their
orators, the polling-booth for elections.
But the sign that this far-reaching socialization has been actually
carried out is the cessation of all income without work. I say the
sign, but not the sole postulate; for we must postulate a complete and
genuine democratization of the State and public economy, and a system
of education equally accessible to all: only then can we say that the
monopoly of class and culture has been smashed. But the cessation of
the workless income will show the downfall of the last of
class-monopolies, that of the Plutocracy.
It is not very easy to imagine what society will be like when these
objects have been realised, at least if we are thinking not of a brief
period like the present Russian régime, or a passing phase as in
Hungary, but an enduring and stationary condition. A dictatorial
oligarchy, like that of the Bolshevists, does not come into
consideration here, and the well-meaning Utopias of social romances
crumble to nothing. They rest, one and all, on the blissfully ignorant
assumption of a state of popular well-being exaggerated tenfold beyond
all possibility.
The knowledge of the sort of social condition towards which at present
we Germans, and then Europe, and finally the other nations are tending
in this vertical Migration of the Peoples, will not only decide for
each of us his attitude towards the great social question, but our
whole political position as well. It is quite in keeping with German
traditions that in fixing our aims and forming our resolves we should
be guided not by positive but by negative impulses--not by the effort
to get something but to get away from it. To this effort, which is
really a flight, we give the positive name of Socialism, without
troubling ourselves in the least how things will look--not in the
sense of popular watchwords but in actual fact--when we have got what
we are seeking.
This is not merely a case of lack of imagination; it is that we
Germans have, properly speaking, no understanding of political
tendencies. We are more or less educated in business, in science, in
thought, but in politics we are about on the same level as the East
Slavonic peasantry. At best we know--and even that not always--what
oppresses, vexes and tortures us; we know our grievances, and think we
have conceived an aim when we simply turn them upside down. Such
processes of thought as "the police are to blame, the war-conditions
are to blame, the Prussians are to blame, the Jews are to blame, the
English are to blame, the priests are to blame, the capitalists are to
blame"--all these we quite understand. Just as with the Slavs, if our
good-nature and two centuries of the love of order did not forbid it,
our primitive political instincts would find expression in a pogrom in
the shape of a peasant-war, of a religious war, of witch-trials, or
Jew-baiting. Our blatant patriotism bore the plainest signs of such a
temper; half nationalism, half aggression against some bugbear or
other; never a proud calm, an earnest self-dedication, a struggle for
a political ideal.
We have now a Republic in Germany: no one seriously desired it. We
have at last established Parliamentarianism: no one wanted it. We have
set up a kind of Socialism: no one believed in it. We used to say:
"The people will live and die for their princes; our last drop of
blood for the Hohenzollerns"--no one denied it. "The people mean to be
ruled by their hereditary lords; they will go through fire for their
officers; rather death than yield a foot of German soil to the foe."
Was all this a delusion? By no means; it was sincere enough, only it
did not go deep. It was the kind of sincerity which depends on not
knowing enough of the alternative possibilities.
When the alternatives revealed themselves as possible and actual, then
we all turned republican, even to the cottagers in Pomerania. When the
military strike had broken down discipline, the officers were
mishandled; when the war was lost, the fleet disgraced, and the
homeland defiled, then we began to play and dance.
But was this frivolity? Not at all; it was a childish want of
political imagination. The Poles, a people not remotely comparable to
the German in depth of soul and the capacity for training talent, have
for a century cherished no other thought than that of national unity,
while we passively resign our territories. No Englishman or Japanese
or American will ever understand us when we tell him that this
military discipline of ours, this war-lust, did not represent a
passion for dominion and aggression, but was merely the docility of a
childish people which wants nothing, and can imagine nothing, but that
things should go on as they happen, at the moment, to be.
We Germans know but little of the laws which govern the formation of
national character. The capacity of a people for profundity is not
profundity, either of the individual or of the community. It may
express itself in the masses as mere plasticity and softness of
spirit. The capacity for collective sagacity and strength of will
demands from the individual merely a dry intelligence in human
affairs, and egoism. It would be too much to say that our political
weakness may be merely the expression of spiritual power, for the
latter has not proved an obstacle to success in business. Indolence
and belief in authority have their share in it.
But have we not been the classic land of social democracy, and have we
not become that of Radicalism? Well, we have been, indeed, and are,
with our submissiveness to authority and our capacity for discipline,
the classic land of organized grumbling; and the classic land, too, of
anti-semitism which deprived us of the very forces we stood most in
need of--productive scepticism and the imagination for concrete
things. Organized grumbling is not the same thing as political
creation. A Socialism and Radicalism poorer in ideas than the
post-Marxian German Socialism has never existed. Half of it was merely
clerical work, and the other half was agitators' Utopianism of the
cheapest variety.
Nothing was more significant than the fact that the mighty event of
the German Revolution was not the result of affection but of
disaffection. It is not we who liberated ourselves, it was the enemy;
it was our destruction that set us free. On the day before we asked
for the armistice, perhaps even on the day before the flight of the
Kaiser, a plébiscite would have yielded an overwhelming majority for
the monarchy and against Socialism. What I so often said before the
war came true: "He who trains his children with the rod learns only
through the rod."
And to-day, when everything is seething and fermenting--no thanks to
Socialism for that--all intellectual work has to be done outside of
the ranks of social-democracy, which stumbles along on its two
crutches of "Socialization" and "Soviets."[2] Orthodox Socialism is
still a case of the "lesser evil," what the French call a _pis aller_.
"Things are so bad that any change must be for the better." What is to
make them better we are told in the socialist catechism; but _how_ it
is to do so, how and what anything is to become, this, the only
question that matters, is regarded as irrelevant. It is answered by
some halting and insincere stammer about "surplus value" which is to
make everybody well off--and which would yield all round, as I have
elsewhere shown, just twenty-five marks a head. Fifteen millions of
grown men are pressing forward into a Promised Land revealed through
the fog of political assemblies and in the thunder of parrot-phrases--a
land from which no one will ever bring back a bunch of grapes.
If one would interrogate not the agitators, but their hearers, and
find out what they instinctively conceive this land to look like, we
should get the answer, timid and naïve but at the same time the
deepest and shrewdest that it is possible to give--that it is a land
where there are no longer any rich.
A most true and truthful reply! And yet a profound error silently
lurks in it. You imagine, do you not, that in a land where there are
no more rich people there will also be no more poor? "Why, of course
not! How can there be poor people when there are no more rich?" And
yet there will be. In the land where there are no more rich there will
be _only_ poor, only very poor, people.
Whoever does not know this and is a Socialist, that man is merely one
of the herd or he is a dupe. He who knows it and conceals it is a
deceiver. He who knows it, and in spite of that, nay, on account of
that, is a Socialist, is a man of the future.
Though the crowd be satisfied with some dim feeling that this, anyhow,
is the tendency of the times and that with this stream one must swim;
though the more thoughtful contemplate the evils of the time and
decide to put up with the _pis aller_; the responsible thinker is
under the obligation of investigating the land into which the people
are being led. We must know what it looks like, where there are no
rich people and where no one can have an income without working for
it, we must understand what we call the "new society" so as to be able
to shape it aright.