[Footnote 5: By this figure the author seems to be referring to the
population of the impoverished Germany of the future if the course of
Socialism proceeds on wrong lines.]
V
For some decades Germany will be one of the poorest of countries. How
poor she will be does not depend on herself alone, but on the power
and the will for mischief of others--who hate us.
However, poverty and wealth are relative terms; Germans are still
richer on the average than their forefathers; richer than the Romans
or Greeks. The standard of well-being is set by the best-off of the
competitors, for he it is who determines the current standard of
technique and industry, the methods of production, the minimum of
labour and skill. We cannot, as we have already seen, keep aloof from
world-competition, for Germany needs cheap goods. We must therefore
try to keep step so far as we can.
Even if we shut our eyes and take no more account of our debt to
foreign lands than we do of the war-tribute, we must admit that the
average standard of well-being in America far surpasses the German.
Goods are not so dear as with us, and the wages of the skilled worker
amounts to between seven and ten dollars a day--more than 100 marks in
our money; and many artisans drive to their workshops in their own
automobiles.
If, now, we ask our Radicals how they envisage the problem of
competition with such a country, which in one generation will be
twenty-or thirty-fold as rich as we are, they will blurt out a few
sentences in which we shall catch the word "Soviet system," "surplus
value,"[6] "world revolution." But in truth the question will never
occur to them--it is not ventilated at public meetings.
Among themselves they talk, albeit without much conviction, about
"surplus value"--which has nothing whatever to do with the present
question, and in regard to which it has been proved to them often
enough that so far as it can be made use of at all, it only means
about a pound of butter extra per head of the population.
The economic superiority of the Western powers, however, goes on
growing, inasmuch as to all appearance they are getting to work
seriously to establish the new economy (which we have buried) in the
form of State Socialism. A healthy, or what is to-day the same thing,
a victorious economy, does not leap over any of its stages; it will
work gradually through the apparently longer, but constant, movement
from Capitalism to State Socialism and thence to full Socialism; while
we, it seems, want to take a shortcut, and to miss out the intervening
stage. And we lose so much time and energy in restless fluctuations
forward and backward, hither and thither, that this leap in advance
may fall short.
If anything could be more stupid and calamitous than the war itself it
was the time when it broke out. There was one thing which the big
capitalism of the world was formed to supply, which it was able to
supply, and, in fact, was supplying: the thing which not only
justified capitalism, but showed it to be an absolutely necessary
stage in the development of a denser population. This was the
enrichment of the peoples, the rapid, and even anticipatory
restoration of equilibrium between the growing population and the
indispensable increase in the means of production; in other words,
general well-being. The unbroken progress of America, and the almost
unbroken progress of England will demonstrate that in one, or at most
two, generations the power of work and the output of mechanism would
have risen to such a pitch that we could have done anything we liked
in the direction of lightening human labour and reconciling social
antagonisms.
Alas, it was in vain! The rapid advance to prosperity of the people of
Central Europe, who had been accustomed to thrift and economy, went to
their heads; they fell victims to the poison of capitalism and of
mechanism; they were unable, like America in its youthful strength, to
make their new circumstances deepen their sense of responsibility; in
their greedy desire to store as much as possible of the heavenly manna
in their private barns they abandoned their destinies to a
superannuated, outworn feudal class and to aspiring magnates of the
bourgeoisie; they would not be taught by political catastrophes, and
at last, in the catastrophe of the war, they lost at once their
imaginary hopes, their traditional power and the economic basis of
their existence.
Those who are now pursuing a policy of desperation are unconsciously
building their hopes on the breakdown which brought them to the top:
they are avowedly making the hoped-for revolution in the West the
central point of their system. If the West holds out, they will be
false prophets; but it will not only hold out, it will in the
beginning at all events, witness a great and passionate uprising of
imperialistic and capitalistic tendencies. If there is any one who did
not understand that a policy based on hopes of other peoples'
bankruptcy is the most flimsy and frivolous of all policies, he might
well have learned it from the war.
Germany must forge her own destinies for herself, without side-glances
at the good or ill fortune of others. Had time only been given us to
pass naturally from the stage of a prolonged and corrupted childhood
into that of a manly responsibility, our ultimate recovery would be
assured. But we have to accomplish in months what ought to be the
evolution of decades; our national training has left us without
convictions, we have no eye for the true boundaries of rights, claims
and responsibilities, and we hesitate as to how far we must or ought
to go. Unprepared, weakened, impoverished and sick, we are required,
at the most unlucky moment, to work out a new and unprecedented order
of life. Before even the educated classes are capable of forming a
judgment on the question, the most incapable masses of the rawest
youth, of the lowest classes of society, are let loose, and sit upon
the judgment-seat.
It is not only that we have been rich and have become very poor, but
we were always politically immature, and are so still. If the order of
Society is to be that of root-and-branch Socialism, it will mean the
proletarian condition for all of us, and for a long time to come.
There is no use in flattering ourselves and painting the future better
than it is; the truth must be spoken with all plainness. If we work
hard, and under capable guidance, each of us will at most have an
effective income of 500 marks in pre-war values, or, say, 2000 marks
for the family. This average will be higher if we proceed on the
principles of the New Economy,[7] but again will be reduced by the
necessity for allowing extra pay for work of higher value. If to-day
the average income available is markedly higher than the above, the
reason is that we are living on our capital; we are living on the
products of work which ought to be reserved for the maintenance and
renewal of the means of production; in other words we are exhausting
the soil and slaughtering our stock. We are also consuming what
foreign countries give us on credit; in other words, we are living on
borrowed money.
It is childish lying and deception to act on the tacit assumption that
thoroughgoing Socialism means something like a garden-city idyll, with
play-houses, open-air theatres, excursions, picturesque raiment and
fire-side art. This in itself quite decent ideal of the average
architect, art-craftsman and art-reformer if expressed in dry figures
would, "at the lowest estimate" as they say, demand about fivefold the
capacity for production attainable by the utmost exertions and with a
ten hours' day _before the war_--before the downfall of our economy
and our exploitation by the enemy.
To place one-third of our working-class in decent, freehold dwellings
would alone, if the material and means of production sufficed, require
the whole working-capacity of the country for two years. Even after
the last manufacturer's villa-residence, the last palace-hotel, have
long been turned into tenements, the solution of the most urgent part
of the housing-question will still be an affair of decades. For the
sake of the last remnant of our self-respect we must finally tear
asunder that web of economic falsehood, woven out of ignorance, mental
lethargy, concealment and illusion, which has taken the place of the
political. Let us see any one attempt to prove that Germany can carry
on, I do not say a well-off, but even a petty tradesman's kind of
existence, unless our means of production can by some stroke of magic
be multiplied tenfold--on paper it can be done with ease--or unless
the production value (not turnover), which an adult working-man can
with the utmost exertion bring into being in the course of a year does
not many times exceed the average value of 2000 marks.
No doubt the young folk of our big cities promise themselves a merry
time for six weeks when they have got power, the shops, the wardrobes
and the wine-cellars into their hands. For the leaders, it may last a
little longer than for the rank-and-file. And then, for those of the
former who have any sense of honesty, will come a question of
conscience, which may be delayed by printing paper-money, but cannot
be solved by any appeal to the people.
If Bolshevism were the contrary to what it is--if it were a success, a
thing not absolutely impossible in a peasant-State, we might
understand the self-assurance of those who, in opposition to our
forecast, expect everything from the will of the people, the Soviet
system and the inspirations of the future. We do understand it in the
case of the drawing-room communists, and the profiteer-extremists who
are out not for the cause, but for power, and perhaps only for
material objects.
I know that by these observations I am favouring the cause of those
sorry dignitaries of a day, the Majority Socialists, but I cannot help
that. The truth is not false because it favours one party, nor is
falsehood truth because it harms the other. The Socialism now in
power is doing the right thing, although it is doing it out of
ignorance and helplessness--it is waiting, and getting steam up. It is
better to do the right thing out of error than to do the wrong thing
out of wisdom. Out of error: for besides omitting to do what ought not
to be done it also omits the things it ought to do--among others, the
introduction of the New Economy.[8] It is like mankind before the
Fall; it does not know good from evil, what is useful and what is
noxious, what can be done and what cannot. Well--let it take its time;
it shall have time enough.
This time must be turned to good account. When we have come to the end
of these observations we shall understand what a huge task lies
between us and the realization of the new social order. In this case
the longest way round is the shortest way home. And even if Germany
should choose the mountain road with its broad loops and windings, we
shall stray often enough, and go backward now and then; while if, in
impatient revolt, we try to climb straight up, we shall slip down
lower than where we started. Let us never forget how mysteriously our
social and political immaturity seems to be bound up with our once
lofty and even now remarkable intellectuality and morality.[9] We have
not won our liberties, they have fallen into our laps; it was by the
general breakdown, by a strike, by a flight, that Germany and her
former rulers have parted company. These liberties, social and
political, are not rooted in the soil, they can hardly be said to be
prized among the treasures of life, it is not their ideal, but their
material side which attracts us. Those who used to shout Hurrah! now
cry "All power to the Soviets!" and the day will come when they will
again shout Hurrah! Then we shall witness a real sundering of our
different visions of the world, visions now buried under a mass of
interests and speculations.
In any case, whether the change is to be catastrophic or evolutionary,
the journey will be a long one, and every attempt to hurry it will
only prolong it further; it will throw us back for years, or it may be
decades. Above all things, we must know whither we are going. In order
to adapt ourselves to a new form of society we must know what it _may_
look like, what it _ought_ to look like, and what it _will_ look like.
We shall find that Germany is not going to be landed in an earthly
Paradise, but in a world of toil, and one which for a long period will
be a world of poverty, of a penurious civilization and of a
deeply-endangered culture. The unproved, parrot-phrases of a cheap
Utopianism will grow dumb--those phrases which offer us entrance into
the usual Garden of Eden with its square-cut, machine-made culture and
gaudy, standardized enjoyments--phrases which assure us that when we
have introduced the six-hours' working day and abolished private
property, the cinema horrors will be replaced by classical concerts,
the gin-shops by popular reading-rooms, the gaming-hells by edifying
lectures, highway robberies by gymnastic exercises, detective novels
by Gottfried Keller, bazaar-trifles and comic vulgarities by works of
refined handicraft; and that out of boxing contests, racecourse
betting, bomb exercises, and profiteering in butter, we shall see the
rise of an era of humility and philanthropy.
In the Promised Land as we conceive it, the classes which are now the
bearers of German culture will lose almost everything, while the gain
of the proletariat will be scarcely visible. And yet for the sake of
this scarcely visible gain we must tread the stony path that lies
before us. Willingly and joyfully shall we tread it; for out of this,
at first, dubious conquest of equal rights for all men will grow the
might of justice, of human dignity, of human solidarity and unity.
That is truly work for a century, and yet for that very reason the
hard path will lead to its reward. We must learn to know it, and to
understand that it is a path of sacrifice. We must not accept the
invitation of fools to a Christmas party--fools who will make the
welkin ring with their outcries when they find out their
self-deception. Let us tread our path of suffering with a pride which
disdains to be consoled by illusions.