Classics | Arthur Moeller van den Bruck | Germany's Third Empire | Part 2 | Socialist

II. SOCIALIST

1

The whole error of socialism is latent in one sentence of Karl Marx: "Hence men set themselves only such tasks as they can fulfil."

This is untrue. Men set themselves only such tasks as they cannot fulfil. It is their genius who inspired them. It is their daimón who spurs them on.

The essence of Utopia is that it is never realized. The essence of Christian hope is that it is never fulfilled. The essence of the millennium is that it lives in prophecy, but never in the present.

Marx did not offer any proofs of his assertion. If he had attempted to corroborate it from the history of the past, he would have had to bow to facts. He would have had to perceive that every future proved to be far indeed from what its preceding present had dreamed. Marx, however, amplified his assertion: "For if we look into the matter closely we find that a task is set only when material conditions are ripe for its fulfilment, or are in the process of ripening." But who is it who sets the task? For we cannot suppose that tasks set themselves. Who is it who formulates them and then avails himself of the existing material and spiritual conditions for their fulfilment? Apart from whether they are feasible or not, who sets them?

Marx was a penetrating materialist. But he did not rise above materialism. Marxism has explored all the metamorphoses of matter, but has not enquired about causes. Marx’s materialistic dialectic has pushed to its utmost limit a creed which is content to explain everything that is, as the result of action and reaction. But his dogma is inadequate. He ignored the question of the underlying cause. He amassed material: concrete material, statistical material, rationalist material. The Marxists claim that herein lies his achievement, herein his title to fame. But the question remains: Who animates the material?

Marx believed that development is the result of a series of consequences, each one of which follows inevitably from the one before. He believed that not only was their direction predictable, but that the goal was also known: in his case the direction of the proletarian movement of the nineteenth century and the socialist goal of a near future. He did not perceive that things must be called into existence before they can develop, that their existence depends on a process of evolution which goes forward by leaps and bounds, the consequences of which are completely unpredictable. He failed to grasp that amongst things thus evolving and thus developing, a task does not necessarily evoke its own fulfilment, but evokes a counter-task which neutralizes and cancels it.

We men are perpetually setting sail for the Indies hoping to find some America en route. Our goals are realms not yet sighted, whose conditions—material and spiritual—we do not know. Only when we have paced these shores, can we look back over our course and point out the relation of cause and effect.

Till that time comes we have to depend on our will and our courage and the voice of our inspiration. Our fate is forged without our knowledge. We speak of the foresight of Providence, because we ourselves cannot foresee what is foreseen for us.

2

Marx was always uttering warnings against social utopias. But he spoke with the over-emphasis with which people repudiate the very qualities they themselves possess.

Marxism has in fact all the symptoms of a materialistic utopia. Marx credited the proletariat with the power to create a perpetuum mobile. Provided it was logically conceived it ought to be feasible. But the world itself is the perpetuum mobile. And Demiurgos allows no meddling with his job.

Rationalist logic bears the same relation to truth as statistics bear to reality. It embraces everything except what is vital. Logic convinces us of progress, but history refutes it. Men have always been setting out on fresh adventures without being sure of the way, or even of the goal. To this spirit of enterprise, that sets itself tasks without any certainty of being able to fulfil them, we owe all the values and achievements of history.

We owe these values, these achievements, to anything but calculation. The clever thinker would like to reduce life to a sum in arithmetic the answer to which must come out correctly. The role which calculation plays in history is in fact extremely small. We are bounded on every side by the incalculable. The shrewdest calculations have always been those which look beyond the obvious factors that can be weighed and measured, and reckon with the distant imponderabilia. Calculation can be best be valid for a short space of time where the measure of persons and circumstances can be taken. The calculator must always be prepared for unforeseen phenomena to upset his most careful reckonings and fling them on the scrapheap.

The Marxist calculations held good for some seventy-five years or so. They have now been smashed to smithereens, and the doctrinaire does not exist who can seccotine together the fragments of Karl Marx’s vision. He saw that neither the positivist religion of Comte and Saint Simon, nor the phantasies of Cabet, Fourier and Father Enfantin, nor yet the social criticisms of Proudhon had availed to bring about a radical alteration in communal human life. He studies the history of revolutions and perceived that the "modern mythologies," as he called them, of Liberty, Equality and Fraternity had indeed revolutionized political institutions, but had left social institutions as they were before.

Christianity has failed to realize Christ, or to convey His message to men, and has allowed His redeeming power to be frittered away in a war of creeds. And what of the virtue on which Plato built his philosophers’ state? It was a state founded on slavery. Plato’s virtue has proved even more impotent than Christian faith. For uncounted millennia men have lived on the earth, and always some have been fortunate and some unfortunate. No religion, no humanitarianism, no statecraft has been able to abolish this injustice. No spiritual, moral or political influence has yet persuaded man to establish social justice. The fault lies with men themselves. They have not been able to rise to the conception. The flesh is weak, and man always thinks first of his "I." Marx conceived the idea of getting hold of man by his "I" and luring him by the weakness of the flesh.

How would it work to set up a mass-state in which each should have his place and his prosperity guaranteed? How would it work to turn to organize a social revolution from below? To appeal to the modern slave to organize a new, popular, economic, Spartacus rebellion? Marx envisaged the problem only from the outside. He attempted no preliminary conversion of individual men, he based his calculation on their common human nature and their all-too-human greed. He made his appeal, not to their strength but to their weakness, and gave no thought to the "loss of their soul" as he displayed before their eyes the "whole world" which they were invited to gain. The founders of all great religions had extolled an eternal life beside which this temporal life was negligible. Marx took the other course, he appealed crudely, sensually, to men’s economic interest. His achievement was a ruse.

Some prophecies come true. There are some men gifted with a sensitivity towards the present, so acute, so penetrating, so far beyond the normal that they become, as it were, confidants of the future, and they possess powers enabling them to help to mould the future. Such men may be allowed to prophesy, but they must be men physically and mentally at one with the people. Marx was not such a one. He was a Jew, a stranger in Europe who nevertheless dared to meddle in the affairs of European peoples. He was not intimately in touch with their history; their past was not his past, and the traditions which had determined their present, were not his. He had not lived through the centuries with them, his feelings were different. Marx is only comprehensible through his Jewish origins. It is no accident that he displays Mosaic, Maccabean traits, traits of the Talmud—and the Ghetto. He is poles apart from Jesus, yet he stands at his side like a Judas who would fain make good his treachery to his Master. In all his writing there is not one word of love for men. Against a background of sinister passion there flame through his words the fires of hate, retaliation and revenge. Christ’s message was supernational, therefore it could reach even the peoples of the north. Marx’s message was international, therefore it was able to mislead Europe and set Europe by the ears. He addressed his message to the proletariat because he thought that amongst them national distinctions were non-existent. Jew that he was, national feeling was incomprehensible to him; rationalist that he was, national feeling was for him out of date. He ignored the upper strata of Europe because he did not belong to them and had no clue to the values that they had created through the centuries and had handed on as a precious heritage to their children, a heritage in which he and his forefathers had no share. He felt his affinity with the proletariat. He bade them abjure any national feeling they had had and learn to feel themselves a class apart. It did not occur to him that perhaps national socialism might be a condition of universal socialism; that men can only live if their nations live also.

Here lay his grave miscalculation. Marxism had proclaimed a blessing; it saw the coming of a curse. Marx set mankind a task in the belief that "the material conditions were ripe for its fulfilment, or were in process of ripening." But the World War overthrew his reckoning, and the Revolution that followed wiped it out. Marxism reckoned with men as an international proletariat, but it did not reckon with the world as it was, with the nations and the conflict between nations. Marxism counted on a highly-developed system of economics under which a socialist should replace a capitalist order of society. But a doctrine that thought in terms of economics only, was powerless in face of primary political exigencies which history cannot ignore.

Every tree is known by its fruits. So is Marxism. The secret of Christ’s influence has lain in the eternal validity of His eternally unattainable perfection. Marx exercised a certain influence on the proletariat of Europe, but an influence limited in extent and short in duration. The whole spirit of Europe was against him, the spirit of two thousand years which the stroke of a pen cannot abolish. Marxism made headway only amongst the young nations who were aimless and unsure of themselves, amongst such Germans as had thrown overboard their political tradition, amongst the Russians who had broken loose from theirs. But even here Marxism ultimately failed. It seemed triumphant in the early days of revolution, but it was not long before it found itself at odds with ineffaceable national characteristics, and with the local economic conditions of each country. In Russia Marxism was compelled to compromise with world-capitalism; in Germany it was compelled to compromise with the Republic, with democracy and with parliamentism which are German—for the moment.

Instead of progress there came retrogression. The War left behind victorious and conquered nations, but both alike had to readjust themselves to conditions the very opposite of what the Marxist had foreseen. Marx had prophesied: "in proportion as the exploitation of one individual by another ceases, the exploitation of one nation by another will also cease." The War saw the establishment of that state pictured by Thomas More, whose pacific citizens arrange for mercenaries to do their fighting—whose statesmen corrupt the leaders of the enemy country and undermine its morale by propaganda—whose inhabitants exploit victory to introduce slavery, and enjoy themselves in peace without the necessity of work by compelling their conquered neighbour to work for them.

Such is the world in which we live today: not Karl Marx’s world. We are the more bound to expose the miscalculations of Marxism that—

Socialism is unwilling to acknowledge them. To do so would be to demonstrate all too unmistakably why the Socialist Revolution failed both politically and economically.

3

The Revolution does not lack its own philosophy.

A materialist philosophy, and a materialist conception of history were well adapted to a materialist revolution.

When the Revolution broke out—in Russia, in Germany—it seemed as if the Year 1 of the new era had dawned which should prove the Marxist thesis to be valid: namely, that far from man’s existence being rooted in man’s consciousness, man’s consciousness is on the other hand rooted in man’s economic existence.

The materialist outlook is anthropomorphic. It does not lift man metaphysically above and beyond himself, but rationalistically drags him down to what it conceives to be his real self. It was the rationalist age of enlightenment that saw the birth of this philosophy. Up to that time man’s thought had always been cosmic; it had found its justification in the divine justice and the divine holiness. It was conscious of a spiritual immanence. The rationalist’s pride was to see only the animal in man. The humanist had stressed the mystic tie that binds the creature to the Creator. The rationalist created l’homme machine, a living automaton, a miracle of mud. Creation was explained not through the Creator but through the creature, and the creature was reduced to the sum of the matter of which he was composed and on which he was nourished. Rousseau’s vegetative ideal, which aimed at being philanthropic, only added a sentimental touch. The French Revolution put these theories politically to the test and demanded "rights" for the enlightened man, expressly based on his "physical needs."

German thought rebelled against this degradation of man. German minds took heed of the spiritual as well as the bodily needs of man and evolved the conception of the "education of the Human Race," by which all that had been lost might be re-won. Their interpretation of universal history had nothing to do with a mechanical "Progress," but passionately sought to recapture for man the ideals he had abandoned. Our escape from rationalism to idealism was signalized by the attention’s being directed not to human rights but to human dignity. More than a hundred years ago Kant said: "Man cannot think too highly of Mankind."

But this idea was too lofty for us. Kant’s successors lived up to Kant’s ideas as best they could, and in the period immediately following him they succeeded in maintaining themselves on a fairly high spiritual level. But they were too easily satisfied with the height they had attained. The idealist conception of history became too familiar, was too easily taken for granted and lost its force. Thus the field was again left open to the materialist conception of history which sought to explain man’s historical existence from his economic circumstances. This tendency set in immediately after Hegel. The idealist idea of evolution was now interpreted biologically, and Marx was entirely logical when he took over Hegel’s dialectic, turned it "upside down," as he expressed it, and discovered the "rational kernel" in the "mystic shell," proceeding then to fill the shell with materialist and revolutionary content.

Social institutions were in those days being exposed to far-reaching changes. Large-scale industry was developing. A working-class was being evolved, the contractor was becoming the capitalist. The age of world-economics began in England. These sociological phenomena challenged attention. The materialists brought to the task clear-sightedness, experience, empiric observation, socialist insistence and, to a certain extent, also a practical scientific method. In this lay their strength, in this their limitation. They accumulated facts but they did not interpret them. The disciples of Saint Simon re-interpreted Christianity preaching the rehabilitation of the flesh and happiness on earth to mankind in the mass. But positivism devoted so much thought to mankind in the mass that it ignored the individual man. Comte even went so far as to explain that for him "individual man" simply did not exist; "only mankind exists, for we owe all our development to society."

The materialist conception of history made its début as a science of sociology, directed towards the future, but applicable to the present and explanatory of the past. Hegel had intentionally confined history to the history of states. The materialist now confined it to economics. Marx denied later that he had ever considered the "economic factor" as the "sole decisive factor," and Marxists have pointed out that amongst the subject deserving of future attention he had made headlines such as "nations, races, etc." But these afterthoughts have been tacked on to the materialist conception of history without in any way modifying or correcting it. It was superfluous for Marx and Engels to try to patch their doctrines in order to "avoid misunderstandings." The materialist conception of history admits of no misunderstanding. Its significance lies in the consistent one-sidedness with which it has been thought out to the very end. It is one massive unified structure erected in the field of historical thought. It cannot be tampered with. It can only be overthrown. If Marx and Engels had seriously pursued their belated lines of thought they would have been compelled to recognize that their whole thought-structure was erected on a foundation of preconceptions. We must judge their building by its foundation. It is one system amongst many others—not the only system, as Marx and Engels contended—a system essentially of its own day, as ephemeral as the period that gave it birth. Its authors conceived that they had built for all time: that they were the prophets of Tomorrow, the sociological critics of Today and the philosophical historians of Yesterday.

Marx’s examination of Hegel’s thought convinced him that "legal institutions and state constitutions cannot be understood by themselves, nor yet explained by the so-called general development of the human mind, but they have their roots in material human circumstances." Marx saw the "economic movement" not indeed as the sole human movement, but as "by far the strongest," the "most decisive," the "most original." Following him, the Marxists assumed that the State, Law, Power, the whole complex of ideas which the non-materialist interprets as man’s adaptation to reality, were in fact a "superstructure" which man had built on the foundation of his "economics." The "sum of the circumstances of production" determined, Marx asserted, the economic structure of society, and formed "the real basis on which a legal and political superstructure is reared." Summing up, he said: "the methods of production condition all the social, political and intellectual processes of life." Nothing could be more explicit.

Marx endeavoured to corroborate his theses by reference to history. This imprudence exposes the weakness of his case. History is for Marx solely the "history of class war." He fine-combed successive centuries to see whether their most heroic episodes might not prove to have some subtle connection with money or "the acquisition of wealth," or at least "the acquisition of power." He convinced himself that such connection underlay the relations of serfs to their masters, of the towns to their feudal lords, and of monarchs to their barons. The German nobles of the Wars of Liberation are for him "the hired mercenaries of England," while the Tory’s passion for "King and Constitution" is a cloak for devotion to his "ground-rents."

It is of course undeniable that every period has its materialistic phenomena; that the most sacred of causes is accompanied by less sacred manifestations, that there have always been men, parties and classes actuated by base motives of self-interest. The economic factor can never be eliminated from human affairs; we must certainly not overlook it, but neither must we forget that it is a factor only and not the whole.

The materialist conception of history cannot go outside its own domain: the material. When Marx invades the intellectual and spiritual domain, which he had not observed, because as a materialist it was foreign to him, he had recourse to theories of action and reaction and interaction between the material and the spiritual. Marx enquired: "What does the history of ideas prove, but that intellectual production varied with material production?" This is unquestionably true. The question is which alters which? Does the material alter the intellectuals? or does the intellectual alter the material? Marx assumed the former. But which comes first: man himself? or man’s power of action, his power to make things happen and his power to let things slide? Our opinion is that man came first. Marx opined that it needed no profound reflection to see that "according to the circumstances of his life, according to his social relations, according to his social existence, his ideas, views, and conceptions, in short his consciousness, are altered." It is our opinion that consciousness came first and that consciousness altered life. Man himself made an alteration of conditions possible. It is man who makes history, not history man. In the economic sphere therefore it is not the new economic order which radically alters life, but the radically altered life which creates a new economic order. The ideas of Power, Law and State are not a "superstructure" reared by man on an economic basis, as Marx postulated. The exact opposite is the case: the ideas of Power, Law and State are the foundations on which the structure of economics is reared. History is not independent of economics, but she first creates economics, and hence economics are dependent on history. The primary laws of history are political laws; economic laws are secondary. Marx was so obsessed with economics that he ignored nations, and individuals he ignored more completely still. Marx seriously believe that the State was doomed, that history would dissolve in economics.

The materialist conception of history made its first mistake when it assumed that once upon a time, when conditions were patriarchal, a state-less human society had existed. History opens with the hostility of groups, which cling together for their own defence. The materialist conception of history made its second mistake when it conceived that the future would restore a state-less human society. Economics can never replace the state, not even in domestic politics, still less in foreign politics. A people could not even be fed without a government. How can the impulses, the passions, the will, the ambition, the gifts, the enterprise of the nations be regulated and directed except by the state? Socialism demands a state-less society, but it ignores the necessity of government, and it shuts its eyes to the existence of nations. To renounce the state is to renounce national history.

Marx once remarked that: man must "prove in practice" the validity of his thought. The materialist conception of history had had this opportunity of putting its thinking to a practical test. We have had a World War; amongst the motives for the War the foremost were political motives, motives of State, of Power, or Justice—or Injustice, as the case may be—and, secondarily, economic motives. The consequence was that we have had to experience a Peace which was first and foremost a Peace of State, Power, and Injustice, and that we have experienced a Revolution which set out to be a Socialist Revolution but ended by leaving the states still in existence: powerful states for the conquerors, impotent states for the conquered. History gave her verdict for the state, while the shattered economic system, far from leading to a new economic order, was abandoned to its fate and proved wholly unable to help itself. History gave the verdict, not for Marx but for Hegel. Napoleon once said: la politique c’est le destin; and he was right. In so far as we had been "economic men" we sank to the lowest level of human thought, that most contemptible plane on which the dread sentence is pronounced: "fate is economics." Here German thought—or, to be more exact, thought expressed in German—reached its nadir.

Let us here note that to think according to laws which have again and again proved their validity, is to be reputed "conservative," while to abandon oneself to expectations which are never fulfilled, is to be reputed "progressive."

4

The materialist conception of history boasted itself a science of experience. The socialist here saddled himself with a paradox since he is speculating about a hypothetical future of which in the nature of things experience can know nothing.

The socialist was nevertheless uncritical enough to summon natural science to his aid, hoping to get reinforcements for his theories of the future. He therefore called Darwin as a witness in the case. Marx had announced that "natural selection" although "coarsely expounded in English fashion" might be taken "as the scientific basis of our theories." Following him, Engels assured his disciples that the fundamental economic thought underlying the Communist Manifesto was "to base the science of history on the same law of progress that Darwin had shown to be valid for natural science."

Someone should have at once called the socialist’s attention to the fact that Darwin’s evidence proved the case for the other side. The socialist, however, was determined to have his science of sociology at any price, and would not be instructed. The German social democrat next seized on the principle of natural adaptability and good old Bebel, ever full of scientific zeal, hastened to draw the deduction: since Darwin has proved that organisms adapt themselves to their environment, all the socialist need do is to provide man with the desired social conditions and the human animal will immediately modify its character to match. It is only necessary to substitute "mankind" for "nations" and all national sentiment will be eradicated. It was left to the natural scientists to point out to Bebel that his new social organization would have passed away centuries before mankind had had time to adapt itself. The socialist assumed that new social conditions could forthwith create a new human animal. But history cannot so easily be blotted out, nor a people with its country and its language. There exist pre-prehistoric factors and eternal forces which unfailingly reassert themselves and make a mockery of abstract calculation.

Thus the materialist conception of history has every natural science against it, and in its favour nothing but the popular pamphleteering of bogus "science." Eager as the socialist professes to be for education and enlightenment, he lent no ear to the teaching of Ernst von Baer, though from him he might have learned that evolution begs the question of origins, and that we can only explain evolution when we postulate an original act of creation to which all life, not excepting man’s, owes its existence. The socialist was equally deaf to the teaching of Moritz Wagner, whose theory of separation supplemented the theory of selection. This might have taught him something valuable about the origin of nations, since separation in space is the compelling cause of the differentiation of species, and the socialist has got after all to reckon with the existence of nations in the present, even if he pictures a future without them. The social democrat has been equally deaf to the researches of Ludwig Wolkmann, who examined and refuted the Marxist position from the standpoints of anthropology, morphology and genealogy. The socialist refuses to take heed either of nations or of individuals; he abhors dualism and takes refuge in the commonplaces of monism. He denies that the existence of opposites is a principle of nature, that there can be a dualism of mind and matter, and that inside this dualism the human mind has the organizing initiative. He will not acknowledge that man has himself evolved his body; that man’s brain dictated the upright attitude; that man’s history has been his own and greatest achievement.

Schiller long ago formulated the idealist conception of history, which sees in man a free moral agent, controlling nature. The materialists never got beyond the positivist point of view which confines history to an attempt to understand conditions, describe their phenomena and analyse their components. There is, however, another point of view possible: a metaphysical, which includes the physical, an intellectual, which includes the scientific: a point of view which recognizes the sublimity and rises above the degradation of man: the only point of view from which an answer is possible to the question: Who created the circumstances? It is no answer to reply that the circumstances created themselves. Marx never allowed himself to speculate whether perhaps materialism might not be merely a transition to some greater principle behind. He clung to the assertion that men make their own history, not as free agents, but under the compulsion of given circumstances. Again we ask: but who created the circumstances? There can only be one answer: Man himself is the datum.

Materialism would be vindicated if mankind had produced nothing but matter. But mankind has produced values, a whole hierarchy of values, amongst which material values take the lowest place. Material conditions are easily observed, easily examined, easily calculated, easily reduced to statistics. They readily tempt a rough-and-ready thinker, and still more readily tempt the masses who never think—though as we saw in our own Revolution they can on occasion act—to give an a priori position to the physical forces and to give at most an a posteriori position to the metaphysical, if not to deny the latter altogether. But the course of history is not determined by material forces, but by imponderabilia.

The materialist conception of history, which gives economics greater weight than man, is a denial of history; it denies all spiritual values and takes as its political ideal a socialist order of society after the establishment of which the only task left to man will be to regulate his own digestion. The materialist conception of history is an expression of the nineteenth century and of the twentieth century to date. Its materialist historians judge other periods by their own. It would have been true and straightforward if the Marxist was content to say: this is a picture of us men as we are today—poor and unhappy and exploited, in our age of factories and stock exchanges; mean-minded also, and realist, and fallen far from the glory of greater generations. But the Marxist has not been content to say this. On the contrary he has taken pride in reducing the spiritual achievements of all time to hypothetical material motives. He has allied himself with the psycho-analytic method—a natural product of materialist thought—which takes more pleasure in exploring man’s shame than his glory. Man revolts against the merely animal in himself; he is filled with the determination not to live for bread alone—or, at a later stage, not alone for economics—he achieves consciousness of his human dignity.

The materialist conception of history has never taken cognizance of these things. It has concentrated on half man’s history: and the less creditable half. The one-sidedness of the socialist’s philosophy has brought disaster on the socialist; he has thought economically but not politically. The high economic development of a materialistic age brought in its train, not socialism, as Marx had hoped, but: the World War. Its outbreak brought other historical forces into play than class contrasts and class war. Even if economic rivalries had been the sole causes of the War, the War would still not have been possible without the preceding national rivalries and the ideas of justice or injustice that accompanied them. National passions, transcending economics, caused the War; and love of injustice—posing as love of justice—inspired the Peace. The Marxist and the Socialist had reckoned without these forces. The World War restored history to her due place, and among the most mighty lessons of history is this: that politics, not economics, determine the course of history. Hence it comes that the socialist, who for one brief moment hoped that he would come to power and be able to dissolve capitalist society, and establish a glorified economic regime, finds himself confronted instead with a chaos of sick, shattered, insane economics.

When the Revolution first broke out the socialists were full of good hope. True, the party began to feel a slight shiver of nervousness as they reflected on the possible effect on foreign politics of their Ninth of November; a slight uneasiness in the face of history, to which they had never given a thought, and by which they would now be held responsible. The revolutionary ideologue, however, Robert Müller, an outsider of Marxism, coined the formula of "Durchwirtschaftung" ("Super-economics"). Socialism should bring release from matter. The super-economics which socialism should bring to birth would be hailed as an act of human emancipation. A super-economic constitution should set man free from all anxiety about his daily bread. Rational economics should give man the key of paradise. Instead of achieving economic emancipation we have been plunged into an aggravated economic slavery that beggars all previous experience. We thought only of economics, of bills of exchange, of reparations. We thought of today’s prices, and yesterday’s prices, and the prices of tomorrow. We thought of tariffs and index figures, of strikes and a rise in wages. The morning’s dollar level became the substitute for morning prayer. We are still thinking of nothing but the miseries of today: the capitalist and proletarian think of nothing else. We have sunk to a depth which man never reached before: the materialist conception of history has reached its zenith.

Can this last forever? We know that it cannot. Disgust at materialism, at ourselves, has seized us. Reaction has set in, a reaction against socialism itself. Socialism can only help if it can purge itself of its materialism, its rationalism and—what has been the most fatal thing of all—its liberalism.

The socialist party cannot take this line; it is tied up with opportunism, whether it remains radical, as in Russia, or only poses as being radical, as in Germany. But the individual socialist can take it, socialist youth can take it, the socialist working man can take it. They can turn their backs on intellectual socialism which has deceived them and adopt an emotional socialism which opens wider vistas than Marxist calculations.

The German communist feels he has the Marxist logic behind him; and so he has; he would have to give up utopia if he gave up Marxism. But if he will give it up, he gains much in exchange for a doctrine that has been exploded and the chaos in which he is at present plunged. Marxism is most logical; but for sheer logic it entirely missed reality, when the World War brought it face to face with facts which had not been on the agenda.

The one fact of the Marxist programme that remains is the proletariat. But the outcome of the World War had revealed the fact that the problems of the proletariat are not class problems but national problems.

The Third International still feeds out of the hand of the Bolshevists. Socialism has tottered across the floor and taken refuge under the wing of democracy. The proletariat remains, but from a party point of view it is now the case that socialist and proletarian are no longer synonymous terms.

The socialist was unable to give an answer to proletarian problems. The question of the proletariat remains an open question, vast, obscure, alarming—but a question apart.

5

The socialist catastrophe goes back to the Marxist dogmas. It goes back the disciples, hangers-on, and pioneers of Marxism. It goes back to what used to enjoy a European fame as classic socialism: the German Socialism of the German Social Democrat.

Marx had expressly urged the German proletarian to be "the theorist of the European proletariat," and Engels boasted that the German socialist was proud to claim descent not only from Saint Simon, Fourier and Owen, but also from Kant, Hegel and Fichte. The seventy-five years of German socialism from its birth to the outbreak of the World War showed little enough trace of this august descent. It would seem that the "inversion" of Hegelian philosophy which Marx had effected, had buried German socialism under such a mass of matter that it had lost all power to think historically or act politically. It relied wholly on Marxian logic, and in the belief that logic was eternally unchangeable, abstained from applying to it the tests of continually-changing reality. Among the exegetists of Marxism who sought scientific corroboration for the socialist creed Kautsky must never be forgotten, for he succeeded in writing books distinguished by a complete absence of thought. These pamphlets, for they deserve no more dignified title, lowered the standard which people had begun to demand of socialist literature. Materialism has produced no classic, while the idealism of philosophic history has influenced historians of the calibre of Ranke and Jakob Burckhardt, beside whom there exists no materialist historian worthy of mention.

The German socialist was a good party man. His Marxian faith was of so orthodox a quality that his mind was closed to all the demands of political reality. The German social democrats were ruined by the combination of agitation and enlightenment. They accepted uncritically everything which lent itself to propaganda, everything which seemed "radical," everything which seemed "new." This was their undoing. The German socialist believed that he thought internationally, while not attempting to inform himself about foreign affairs. The pride of the party was in its organization, which was masterly. Even the anti-militarism of the Social Democrats’ programme did not prevent them feeling flattered when their organization was compared with that of the Prussian army and the discipline of both was held up as a proof of German practical efficiency. But they avoided the question: in what contingency would this socialist organization be called upon for service—and would this contingency possibly be one of foreign politics—and under what colours would the organization serve? Meanwhile the honest German working man was made to learn all the clauses of the communist manifesto by heart, especially the last which summoned the proletariat of all nations to unite. A non-existent International was lauded, and at congresses the International Song was sung to the delegates of other countries. The foreigners were greeted by the strains of the Marseillaise sung with great cordiality and with that odd reverence which the domestically-minded German petit bourgeois loves to accord to everything exotic. All this contributed, as it was bound to do, to the misleading and ultimately to the ruin of our own people.

It was easy to detect traces of the English origin of the system that Marx and Engels left; its originators had evidently been students of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations. We need not stress the fact that the German social democrats did not take up the lines of thought that had been at least sketched out by Marx and Engels, bearing on the political and economic inter-relations of the nations, nor even attempt to pursue the more serious domestic trains of thought of Freiherr von Stein. The most valuable of all studies for them would have been the works of the great German political economist, Friedrich List, who superseded the English maxims by his national system and sketched for Central Europe a continental economic plan centred on Germany. In a period dominated by the Manchester and later by the imperialist school of thought, he was observant of the changes in the relative strengths of the nations and the rise of those tensions which precipitated the World War. But the socialists left Friedrich List out of their curriculum. The German socialist who was all for Marxist class warfare, and ignored Darwin’s nature warfare, felt that his pacifism demanded of him that he should close his eyes to the possibility of any war between the European nations. He preferred indeed to combat German militarism, and thus to act against the interests of his own people. It would have been perhaps too much to expect that the German socialist should take account of current imperialist ideals. These were not allowed for in the Marxist doctrine, but they were evidence that there were some Germans, at home or abroad, who had a mental picture of the real world we lived in.

Amongst his other omissions the socialist omitted to pay attention to the most serious of all the problems that confront civilized states: the problem of over-population. Marx had of course been guilty of the same omission. There are nations who possess land and space and food supplies and raw materials and freedom to move and expand: and there are nations who do not. There are therefore nations who have no proletariat, or only a negligible one on the fringes of an economic system built up on national self-sufficiency and colonial exploitation, and who can find a place for their small excess population in industry. There are other nations whose natural agrarian economy is superseded by artificial industrial economy, within whose borders the population is tightly packed, and chafes and jars and jostles seeking an outlet in vain. The countries with a declining population can live in comfort, the over-populated countries cannot. Marxism is powerless in face of these laws of population. The socialist is in love with justice; but there can be no justice for individuals until there is justice for nations.

In the early days of socialism it was recognized that the inequalities of national possessions constituted a problem. Proudhon had perceived that the question of property was a question of land, and had spoken of an equal distribution of the world, and suggested that where inequalities had arisen they should be met by a redistribution in every generation. Marx, however, dismissed Proudhon as a brilliant sophist who dealt in paradoxes and accused him of "scientific charlatanism and political opportunism." Marx himself spoke of a "law of population," but he referred to private property and not to national property, to the consequence and not the cause. Marx spoke of the "over-population amongst the working classes" as "an inevitable product of the development of wealth on a capitalistic basis," the product of the accumulation of capital under industrial conditions. He considered this surplus mass of "easily exploited human material" as "independent of the actual increase in population." Marxism here argues in defiance of its own theories, for it is not industry which has caused over-population, but over-population which has made industry possible.

The German social democrat has clung to the concentration theory and to the accumulation theory and to the theory of catastrophe. He is only now beginning to direct his attention to nations and not to classes alone. He has at last—most reluctantly, be it admitted,—given some thought to agrarian socialism. He was unwilling to confess that there existed a class of manual labourers who did not feel themselves proletarians, but he is now at least approaching the problems of the national food supply. At no time has he, however, ventured to face the question of over-population, the most urgent of all social problems which began to call for attention in the ’80’s when large-scale emigration proved that we were, as Hans Grimm phrased it, "a people without room." This same German social democrat who contrived to reconcile Darwinism with pacifism—undisturbed by the reflection that Nature represents a fight for existence in which the victor is the survivor—never appears to have contemplated the possibility of a struggle between the nations in which the German nation might be defeated, though an increasing and industrious population had a right to victory. The German social democrat would not see that the solution of the over-population problem is socialism. He would not ask whether the true system for regulating the production and consumption of an excess population might not be found in imperialism. He repeated parrot-wise that imperialism was a system for the exploitation of foreign countries and, like capital, a matter of profit only.

Yet the thesis might well have been maintained—and brought home to the proletariat—that the possession of the earth is the means indicated for an over-populated country to find means of livelihood: a practical, living, politically workable thesis. By an irony of fate the truth of this has been revealed to the working classes of two countries, France and England, whose populations are decreasing, and has been concealed from the German working man, the inhabitant of an over-populated country. In England every stratum of the people is aware that power takes precedence of economics. The trusting German proletariat believed what its social democrat leaders preached: that a day was coming when states and nations would be no more, when all men would possess the earth in common, and providential economics would care for the well-being of the masses.

It would have required socialists of vision to disentangle preconceived ideas from political realities. Such men were not forthcoming. No wonder that our people were unprepared for the World War, when their socialist leaders were so unprepared.

Neither the outbreak nor the issue of the War has availed to alter this mental attitude of the German social democrats. Some of them it is true now wail: "Too Late" when they see our colonies snatched from us, whose acquisition they so bitterly opposed. With our colonies we have lost our supplies of raw material and our openings for emigration. But still the German socialist will not face the population question, because he suspects that the problem is one of national warfare transcending class warfare.

The German socialist has been told that there twenty million souls too many in Germany. He does not let himself realize that these are his own proletarians—for Germany has become a proletarian people, and anyone may now belong to the proletariat. He tries to talk us out of all anxiety, and assures the German working man that there is room in Germany for all Germans. In proof whereof he quotes the fact that before the War we were welcoming among us hundreds of thousands of Poles and Italians. He does not see that the population problem is here crossed by a cultural problem. Thanks to the widespread technical ability of our people, to our national education, to our admirable military service and to our defence training, our excess population, whether on the land or in the town, is qualified for higher-grade work. We were able to hand over "lower-grade" tasks to illiterate Poles, Italians and what not. The twenty million of our excess population are a mentally superior proletariat; they are too good for coolie work. The problem that they present is emphasized, not solved, by pointing out that we used to have room for coolie labour from other countries.

The population problem is THE problem of Germany: a socialist problem if you will, but more exactly a German problem. Since access to the outer world is forbidden us we must look for its solution within our own borders; and since it cannot there be solved, a day must come when we shall burst our frontiers and seek and find it outside.

6

The immediate result of the War is that the declining populations have won and the growing populations have lost.

A just peace was promised to the conquered, and solemnly guaranteed. But the victors exploited the peace to give to those who already had.

The victors have no population problems. Their countries give a home to all who speak their tongue. In addition they possess other lands to which their people may migrate. They have divided up the globe between them. Since the word "annexation" has acquired an ugly ring, and "sphere of influence" is no less suspect, they have invented the idea of the mandate and conferred it on themselves through the League of Nations. They have now not enough people to take possession of these countries and administer them to full advantage, or to bring them up to that level of progress which they consider it their peculiar privilege to promote. The population problem of the victors is that of declining populations.

It must be conceded that the British are a nation of enterprising people with a great colonial and dominion tradition. They comprise some fifty million English, Scotch and Irish on whom they draw for the whole Anglo-Saxon empire. And though they are nowadays in difficulties—difficulties primarily of numbers;—though they are now withdrawing from their remoter outposts in Murman and Persia and have stooped to various concessions in Egypt, India and Turkey, yet they will certainly find some expedient, by judicious redistribution or by admitting others to partnership, unless insurrection or loss of territory puts an end to their domination of the world.

The French on the other hand are helpless in face of their depopulation problems. They have been striving in vain for the last forty years to maintain their forty million. They have the greatest difficulty in producing enough white French citizens to break in their black French population for purposes of robbery. Yet they also possess half the world which the British awarded them as the price of the World War. The self-centred Frenchman, however, never willingly lives outside France. His preference is for Paris, where he encourages people from other countries to come and admire him. He is unaware how much behind the times his empty country is, with its sparse population and its little houses in which the rentier can thrive but not the pioneer. France has not enough people to meet the demands of her own old country, still less enough to bear the burden of work in new and distant countries. The Frenchman is no colonizer, no imperialist; he is merely a slave-driver wherever he happens to have power. His neglected colonies are simply plundering-stations which he defends with a Foreign Legion recruited from the unfortunates of Europe. On the Rhine he maintains African troops for a thrust against Germany, so that the least-populous country in Europe may politically dominate the most densely populated. Surely the day will come—must come—when this living paradox which Versailles created shall have an end.

The population problem lifts its head wherever there is a people which has not living room proportionate to its numbers and lacks the opportunity for its people to earn their living outside, wherever a growing population is forced to draw from abroad its food supplies and the raw or half-raw materials for its industry. The population problem cannot be isolated; it develops into an economic and then into a political problem: the problem of all blockaded states. The problem prevails amongst all nations who as a result of the War have lost the power to dispose freely of their human resources. Russia is another victim; for though she has room enough for her millions, she lacks free access to her nearest and most important neighbours. She is driven to barter with the capitalist powers, offering economic concessions that imperil her national independence in exchange for freedom of trade. Even Italy is a victim; for she is driven to divert her emigration to South America, though Tunis and Algiers lie at her doors obviously destined to absorb her surplus population, did they not belong to underpopulated France.

The population problem unites all conquered peoples in a common cause; and wherever it remains unsolved the nation is in effect a conquered people. Will the German socialist not at least grasp the fact that German pre-war imperialism was a valiant attempt to solve the population problem? It put an end to the leakage from Germany. Though it was only a temporary and imperfect attempt at solution, it at least enabled considerable sections of our people to continue to live in Germany whom we should otherwise have had to lose. It developed industry and trade to the point that over sixty million people were able to find work in a country naturally able to support only forty million. It perfected labour-saving technique which paradoxically gave more employment. Our colonial possession were for the moment modest enough, but our imperialism was taking thought for their increase and extension: it was thinking of the future.

When our imperialism lost the War, our socialism lost it also. Before the social problem of classes can be solved, the national problems must be solved, and the chief of these is the German problem. The English working man can live because his country possesses the power to cater for its nationals; the French can live because they have more space than people. But the Russians cannot live because they do not know what they can work with or what they can live on; and the German, Italian and Central European peoples cannot live because they do not know either where they can work or how they can exist.

The age of enlightenment enlightened us about everything except the vital conditions of human life. Its omissions are now being repaired by belated advice. Neo-Malthusianism is teaching us that human numbers can be brought into relation to available space. With a characteristically German lack of political insight Wilhelm Dons—who was obsessed by the problem of over-population—evolved the idea of deliberate population restriction as a cultural achievement, and found aesthetic grounds for his crusade against "numerical expansion." Hatred for mankind in the mass made him go so far as to state that it mattered far less whom the earth ultimately belonged to, than what it looked like. Could anything be more abhorrent than his picture of the world as a sort of nature sanctuary whose language is Esperanto? German imperialism might have made our world mighty also in its outward forms. But the outcome of the War compels the artist modestly to turn to handicraft. He has ceased to be one of the luxuries of a luxury-civilization. He need not indulge in the vain hope that he, who is only a bye-product of history, can exercise a formative influence on history itself.

It is in vain to study statistics, to found scientific institutes for research into population problems to regulate the relations between nations. It is in vain to hope that international pacifism will be able to teach the nations to have a population conscience. Since Versailles we know that such hopes are German illusions. The efforts that have been made to solve our economic difficulties by founding settlements for ex-soldiers and for unemployed, and thus by intensive small-scale agriculture to make room for ourselves, deserve more serious attention. Ex-servicemen’s settlements are a natural post-war phenomenon, but they are only possible on a large scale for a victorious people, not for a conquered people, whose territory has been curtailed. Land-settlement makes no appeal to the multitude. It is a private, at most a corporative solution of the population problem, but not a socialist solution. At best it offers a solution to the individual, but not to the nation.

The experience of these land-settlements has proved that we cannot meet the population problem by partial palliatives. The issue at stake is the nation’s freedom of movement which we have forfeited. It has been calculated that there is still room in Germany for another five million. Even if this maximum figure were theoretically correct, it is practically false and psychologically false. It reckons with men of sedentary, not with men of enterprising disposition. It offers no solution to the emigrant and the adventurer. The man who finds no place for him in the home country wants to travel and see the world before deciding where to settle down. Land-settlements within Germany are a counsel of despair. Even if we succeeded in planting people in every corner of Germany we should only create a China-in-Europe. And if we succeeded in making this China-in-Europe into one immense market garden, we should do so only at the sacrifice of our deepest instincts: the urge to dare, to undertake, to conquer. Nothing chafed us so much before the War as the fact that large-scale thinking was forbidden us. Are we now to moulder in pettiness?

Neo-Malthusianism offers us counsel: to restrict our birth-rate. This is no heroic solution. Over-population is part of Nature’s design. Nature must solve the problem. Malthus’ maxim was: prosperity limits the number of offspring. There is no prospect of prosperity for us today. We are a country with a surplus population of twenty million. Emigration is forbidden to the proletariat; it is forbidden to the nation. There is nothing for us but forcibly to break forth. Our last hope centres in our people, they constitute the only power that we still possess. Our race totals some hundred millions. It may be that the future will see fifty million Germans in distant lands and foreign parts, and only the second fifty in Germany itself. But this distribution presupposes an immense shift of population, the least obstacle of which is the Treaty of Versailles. Meantime Germans are coming to us from every direction. They are returning from the confiscated and conquered territories; they are returning from overseas. A multitude is assembling which cannot be numbered. A new migration of the peoples is preparing which will be irresistible.

The German nation is astir. Its path is blocked. It has lost its bearings. It seeks space. It seeks work: and fails to find it. We are becoming a nation of proletarians.

The conditions of life thus imposed press hardly on the most intelligent, but they have the power and the will to resist. They take the lead, they indicate political solutions, national solutions. They have no thought for class, their only thoughts are for the nation, for this people of sixty million in Germany. The masses for their part are becoming politically-minded, nationally-minded. They are rebelling more and more against the pressure of their fetters; and the more they realize the true cause of their bondage the more powerfully they rebel against their gaolers. Their first revolt is directed against the oppressor, real or imaginary, in their own country. No one can foresee whether a civil war of thirty millions against thirty may not be necessary to clear our path to freedom. In spite of all internal conflicts, however, underlying them, interpenetrating them, the human pressure of our over-populated land is exerted in one direction only: outwards towards the spaces we require.

It is no negligible fact that our blood flows in veins of all the world, in the veins of the under-populated as well as of the over-populated countries. It spreads our thought abroad, it spreads the unrest which is our fate. It will end by breaking the spell which the older nations—who would fain take their ease at our expense—have cast on us.

We are no people of the dispersion. We are a cramped, imprisoned people. And the straitness of the space into which we have been herded is the measure of the danger that we constitute.

Shall we not base our policy on the existence of this danger?

7

Every people has its own socialism.

Marx disturbed German socialism at the very root. He stifled the seeds of a national socialism which were beginning to shoot in Wilhelm Weitling and, in another form, in Rodbertus. Marx’s influence was characteristic: he was the ruthless dissector of the European economic system. A homeless man. He had no roots in the past yet he took upon himself to mould the future. We must now set about making good the mischief he effected.

Every people has its own socialism.

The Russians have demonstrated it. The Russian socialism of the Revolution gave birth to the new militarism of the Soviets. Those same millions who broke off the War because they wanted peace and only peace, allowed themselves to be formed into a new red army. There came a moment when the only factories in the country that were still at work were the munition factories. The Russian bowed his head in patient acceptance of the severe militarism of a new autocracy. He had shaken off the bureaucrats and police of the Tsar’s autocracy which smacked of St. Petersburg and the West, and which had come to seem foreign and hostile. But he welcomed the autocracy of socialism; he had asked for it; he accepted it, Bolshevism is Russian, and could be nothing else.

Every people has its own socialism. The German working man does not believe it even yet. That is very German of him. Before the War he had listed so gladly and so long to the comforting gospel of a union of the proletariats of all countries. He really believed it when they told him that proletarians everywhere have the same class interests, that they have more in common with each other than with the other classes in their own country. The German working man marched to the War because he obeyed the dictates of his own sound nature and the wholesome discipline in which he had been reared. That was also very German of him. He ended the War in his own way because he thought it was lost and the voice of the tempter came over to him, promising him that a just peace would be granted to his people. That was also very German of him. Then he lost his head. He believed nothing. He did not believe his leaders. He has kept nothing but an idealism which will not admit that he has been betrayed. He must learn to admit it. He must learn to recognize that he has never been so enslaved as he is now by the capitalists of foreign nations. Having recognized this he must act accordingly.

Every people has its own socialism.

Remembering the statements made at pre-War international Socialist Congresses we see in what illusions the German working man indulged. Hervé was in those days the mouthpiece of the fiercest anti-militarism. He addressed an audience in a German town and assured them of the progress of anti-militarism in France. He asserted that the French General Staff was morally disarmed, he assured them that the outbreak of a war would be the signal for a rising of the French proletariat. This did not prevent this same Hervé from becoming the most violent patriot; this did not prevent the French proletariat from holding out to the last in the War against Germany. That was very French.

In the very same German town the English socialists rejected a resolution intended to torpedo any future war by a military strike of the proletariat, on the grounds that England did not come into the question at all, because no English government could possibly carry on a war without the support of the English working classes. But it was the English working classes who made it possible for their government to prepare the War, to declare the War, and to win the War. That was very English.