V. PROLETARIAN

1

The problem of the masses grows urgent.

It clamours not from the Left only. We find the liberal—who lives on the produce of human labour, or on the produce of trade or on dividends—in full retreat before the proletarian who claims that it is he who does the work. The liberal is now doing his best to stem the tide of the masses—which he himself set in motion—by eloquently assuring them that they also belong to the nation; that the great mother, democracy, will welcome them to her bosom and will undertake the care of the proletarian with the rest. The nation, with its demagogue leaders and parliamentary leading-strings, has the pace of a mollusc; but the masses are pressing on from behind. They are thrusting froward, they are dragging others with them. They are action!

The Right is beginning to recognize the pressure and the weight of the masses. The Right consists not only of men who defend property and the enjoyment of property, but men who defend values and the indestructibility of values, men who are of the considered opinion that values have not been created merely to be again destroyed. The conservative is the guardian of these values and feels it his natural mission to prevent their falling victims to the levelling forces of democracy or proletariat: to oppose the force of personality to the forces of the masses. The position of the conserving man has been undermined. The things for which he stands have outwardly lost their value in the Revolution. They were all subtly related to the question of personality, the personality of individuals and the personality of the nation, to questions of distinction and difference, of rank and order. The people who traditionally stood for these values all proved their political incompetence during the century of the democrat and the proletarian. They proved themselves weak on each and every occasion where it behoved them to be strong. Personality is at a discount and cannot easily reassert itself against the masses. The champions of these depreciated values are indeed themselves threatened with proletarianization. Respected ranks, honourable and reserved professions, are sinking down into the proletariat, however desperately the individual may seek to avert such a fate from himself. It looks as if the whole nation was doomed to become proletarian. The problem of the masses becomes urgent therefore on the Right also. It is the problem of men who seem destined to become, though they are not yet, proletarians. The problem becomes urgent of a nation of men destined to be masters, but doomed by the outcome of the World War to become a nation of serfs.

The masses continue to envisage the whole problem as an economic one. The proletarian does not dream of a higher, more spiritual standpoint. He does not perceive that there are still people in Germany who neither wish to become proletarians themselves nor to belong to a nation of proletarians, Germans whose conception of human and national dignity is based on a system of values unknown to the proletariat.

The proletarian is dimly aware that there are things which some people possess as by hereditary right, which confer a peculiar superiority unaffected by personal, social or political status.

But he does not in the last realize the inner nature of these things; he attributes them to arrogance, to ancient privilege or to wealth; he fails to distinguish spiritual values from material values which can be dealt with by confiscation.

The proletariat, however, is beginning vaguely to reflect over the relationship of the fourth estate to the other strata of the nation. If in the course of the next generation the proletarian develops national consciousness, he may be won for the nation. The fathers have been told that they possess no country; the sons are beginning to prick up their ears when they hear talk of a country of their fathers which the sons must conquer if it is to become the possession of their children. The proletarian is developing into the young-socialist.

He is toying with communist modes of thought. He is beginning to think in terms of corporate communities and is therefore becoming more accessible to conceptions of home and country and nation. The younger working men and boys are evolving a proletarian idealism. The proletarian on the other hand who still harps on class war has no thought for the nation. He thinks first and last and only of himself. He does not yet suspect this; and it is the fact that he does not that stamps him as a proletarian. He was promised a world that should be his world. He wants to see the fulfilment of this promise which set the masses on the move. The actual world round him is a hateful, bourgeois world which he is determined radically to alter. He advances to overthrow it; no one can yet foretell whether his toilworn hand will rend it asunder, or whether his powerful shoulder will uplift it.

The masses are moving upwards from below; the problem is urgent.

The proletariat needs leaders for its advance. The masses do not know what to make of their own leaders. Did they not preach and prophesy a world democracy? The proletarian contemplates the upshot of the Revolution which was to have been his revolution. He takes note and is determined on no account to work off the Treaty of Versailles. He does what he never did before: he begins to take thought about foreign politics. Perhaps in all Germany there is no one who condemns more severely, more unreservedly, more wrathfully than the proletarian, a democracy which sought the issue out of oppression and affliction in the fulfilment of the impossible. Bitterly he begins to suspect that the democracy has selected him to bear the burden of fulfilment. This is the natural reaction from the promise of the Revolution.

Not one single leader of weight, personality or political repute was thrown up by the ranks of the proletariat. The masses were therefore reduced to following the opposition upstarts and exploiters of the Revolution. The intellectuals of 1918 used the strength of the masses to put themselves in power! They called their power democracy. The masses remained unredeemed. The proletariat has no mind to renounce the unique opportunity offered by the Revolution—the one thing that justified the Revolution—the opportunity of being the masses in action! The masses are perfectly aware that no one of themselves has got the vocation, the gift, the call to leadership. They know that the proletariat cannot lead itself. They are questioned: is it possible that leadership is a hereditary superiority, perhaps the inalienable privilege of the non-proletarian?—a gift not of the democrat but of the conservative? Little as the masses love the classes, the question quietly persists, alongside a gnawing consciousness of impotence, alongside a touching yearning to be loyal followers of someone.

The temper of the masses is still proletarian, but as the hopeless, intolerable circumstances under which we are doomed to live becomes increasingly recognized as not domestic oppression merely, but foreign oppression, the more probable a change of temper becomes; but then mass-consciousness assets itself again as class-consciousness and forms a barrier.

Trust is lacking; and leadership can be based only on mutual trust between the leader and the led. The Ninth of November was the shipwreck of leadership. Since then the secret of leadership appears to have been lost.

To be successful, a leader of today will need to persuade the masses to permit him to act for the whole nation, to preserve or win the values that are essential: first and foremost among which is the reconquest of our freedom. If he is to give the masses the opportunity of making the Revolution—grave political failure that it was—ultimately fruitful for the nation, he will require the superiority that springs of an exact knowledge of proletarian problems and persons. He must rejoice at being called to lead the proletarian masses, to direct their will into national channels—for ultimately the fate of the nation and the fate of the proletariat are inseparable. A whole people is straining at the leash—awaiting only the signal for the start.

Everywhere there are prejudices, hostilities, misunderstanding, rancours. It looks as if we should have to pass through some crisis before the proletariat learns to recognize the value of nationality. The masses are embittered and disillusioned; they are not sure what they need. But there they are!

Marx called the proletarian revolution "the independent movement of the overwhelming majority." Lenin talked of the "forward-movement of the masses," in which according to him the European proletariat was already engaged. The proletarian masses have the ponderous force of a steamroller. The Russian proletariat drove out the Constituent Assembly, but then speedily surrendered itself to a dictatorship which still directs it. The German proletariat, lacking other leadership than that of its independent party organizations, clings to the class-war idea and finds nothing better to do that to go on tilting against capitalism—naively imagining that in smiting German capitalism it is also smiting the capitalism of the world, and that presently communism will be established everywhere.

The masses are making themselves felt.

2

When the masses advanced in 1918 their movement came from the depths.

They called their movement a proletarian one. They spoke of a socialist revolution. They invoked the name of Marx. But their revolution was only an insurrection. The only watchword that issued from the throats of the demonstrators was "DOWN!" They could pour out into the streets. They could tear down a flag. They could snatch epaulettes from people’s shoulders. But that was all they were able to do—yet it was able to destroy a nation, a country and an empire.

Weitling once prophesied: "I see a second Messias coming with a sword to enforce the teaching of the first." But this annunciation of an approaching reign of justice was obscured by the later calculations of Marx whose reckoning took no heed of Man or the Son of Man, but only of the method of production, and whose political hypothesis depended on a fraternal International, materialist and rationalist, which was to usher socialism in. And now a nation which has been suckled on the Marxist creed had surrendered its sword and put its hope in the masses instead of the Messias. Suddenly released from the terror of war our foes fell on each other’s necks for sheer malicious delight that a credulous people had abandoned a world war for the sake of an eternity of world peace. They fell on each other’s necks, prince and pauper, soldier and civilian, for joy over the unbelievable ingenuousness of the German people.

The hullabaloo of the Tenth of November passed. The tribune with the inflated cheeks and the hanging curls was able to announce to the Reichstag: "The German people has been victorious all along the line!" The days of irresponsibility passed, proclamations fluttered down through the fog and the independents, handsomely paid with bolshevist gold, their sapping work accomplished, were able to announce with satisfaction: "Party comrades, we address you with joy and pride!" The consequences followed: even before the Armistice, negotiations had been carried through by this same carefree, unscrupulous, easily-swayed, light-hearted individual, who with his usual obliging promptitude set his hand to the unpleasant task. Reality overtook those who had now assumed responsibility not only for the state but for the nation: though never before had their thoughts been occupied with the nation. They had been preparing the proletariat for a class war; in the meantime it had lost the war of nations.

It was a clique of petty persons who now met in the offices of the fallen government. When they crossed the threshold they were entering the scene not only of William II’s glory but of Bismarck’s. To the end of time the German Revolution will be characterized by the total lack of personality amongst those who carried it out; not a man of them stood out by his stature above the mediocrity usual among German politicians.

There were decent well-meaning folk amongst them, who had spent their lives serving their party. They tackled the tasks that crowded in on them with the best intentions. But there were also among them embittered fanatics whose lives had been one long campaign of agitation, whose meat and drink was opposition. The former group, would fain have avoided a revolution if they could, the later regretted only that there was not something yet more revolutionary than a revolution. The majority-socialists were recruited mainly from the petty proletarian bourgeoisie. Their representatives felt themselves to be German, though they had never attached very much importance to their nationality. This latent patriotism of theirs made it possible for them to arrive at a political conception of the nation such as the German social democrats, with their absolute blindness to foreign politics, had never approached. The majority-socialist now found himself a responsible representative of the nation.

The independent-socialists on the other hand were recruited from the radicals and the literary-proletarian semi-intellectuals. If any party could be called the party of the rabble—whether well- or ill-dressed—it was this one which called itself "independent" and was in fact so very much the opposite. Its leaders were disgruntled, embittered men charged with hate: the liberals of socialism, whose activities were everywhere destructive. In the midst of our collapse they remained cosmopolitans who on every occasion drank a toast to the socialist International.

These were the sort of people to whom the Workers’ and Soldiers’ Councils had entrusted the fate of the German nation, behind the back of the long-enduring fighting forces. One and all were denizens of a narrow party-world whether they called themselves majority-socialists or independent-socialists. These men were now called upon to find their bearings in the open world of power and politics, and to conduct negotiations with the allied democracies of the world. Six of them sat together in council as the People’s Commissioners. Their helpless perplexity was only too evident; they were reluctant to realize what had been perpetrated. "What is to be done?" they asked. "What is it still possible to do?"

They could themselves do nothing—they were proletarians after all. They were obliged to have recourse of the services of renegades from the non-socialist parties, dubious adventurers bent on exploiting the situation, such as are found in every revolution. They were justly thankful when a professional diplomat was willing—for his country’s sake—to master his repugnance and represent the impotent government in foreign affairs with a last remnant of dignity. We saw our ambassador in Versailles sitting, pale, trembling, despairing, self-controlled, amongst unfeeling statesmen who scarcely sought to mask their triumph. Finally we lived to see our enemies, in that same pretentious Salle des Glaces that had witnessed the birth of the Second German Empire, coldly and scornfully following the movements of the pen with which another German signed the Treaty of Versailles on behalf of the National Assembly of Weimar. This man with the expressionless face might well have retired into obscurity after such a deed; far from it, he was not ashamed to become Bismarck’s successor as Imperial Chancellor, and he continues today the head of a political party. The German humiliation had begun. The German proletarian scarcely observed it. The humiliation was disguised in the eyes of the people as a policy of fulfilment: this had been forced on us unjustly it was true, but still our duty was clear.

The anxieties of these years centred in domestic rather than in foreign politics; foreign disillusionment could be laid at the door of the Allies, but at home the government begotten of the Revolution betrayed its perpetual anxiety, its bad conscience, its embarrassment. The home government had to answer for the domestic disillusionment. The immediate end of the Revolution had been peace; incidentally it had introduced a new system of government; it had paid no heed to a new system of economics. The revolutionaries were socialists. For seventy-five years the proletariat had been promised socialism. The masses now demanded it! But socialism was not seriously to be thought of. There was some hitch in Marx’s economic postulates. It was true that the proletariat now held "political power in its hand"—Marx’s condition precedent to a "new organization of labour." But the capitalist possessed not only capital but intelligence, technical mastery, organizing ability, commercial efficiency; he had in fine the power of experience behind him; the proletariat had only the weight of numbers. It was useless for the proletarian to attempt to take over businesses which though dependant on his labour owed nothing to his initiative. We get down to a natural difference between two human types—the director and the workman—each of which is complementary to the other but neither of which can play the other’s role. The political revolution was unable to give birth to a socialist revolution because the proletarian was intellectual unripe for a socialist revolution; because it is the distinguishing mark of a proletarian to be intellectual unripe.

The Spartacists did not recognize this cleavage. The cleavage of classes with its corollary of class warfare bulked so large in their mind that they had no eye for differences or distinctions of any other sort. They saw nothing but a perverse economic system. They knew and cared nothing for its origin, its limitations, its data, the conditions of its growth, the motives of the working economists. Marx had taught them to see everything from his point of view of surplus value and they had learnt nothing but this dogma of his. Liebknecht saw everything red. He was a man of precipitate thought, of bitter passions, of rancorous temperament incapable of perceiving realities. Liebknecht remained faithful to Marx. He was the unique, last and inadequate representative of an inadequate system, an unpolitically-minded man who sought to govern revolutionary politics by a coup d’état. His pathetic phrase about the proletariat’s "craving for happiness" related only to material goods and not to higher human happiness. When he was shot the deathblow was dealt not only to a turbulent fanatic, but to a dangerous illusion. This Jew and internationalist, this pacifist and would-be terrorist was not the victim of his accidental and indifferent murderer. He fell because there was one man left in Germany who could look reality in the face, a man who, though he was a socialist, was a soldier too: Noske.

We were left with the querulous Lebedour and the shirker Breitscheide. We were left also with revolutionary democracy’s fear of the masses. The communist manifesto was worthless; so was the Erfurt Programme. The social-democrat was proud to boast to the people of the "achievements" of a few points in his programme: a stereotyped eight-hour day (misinterpreted) and a few other so-called world-ideas to justify the triumph and the enlightened ideology of the Ninth of November. Meanwhile the Commissioners of the People were compelled to break to the people "the painful truth" that the "lot of the people" must now be one of "poverty and privation." They did not yet admit this was "the consequence of a lost war"; they preferred to call it "the consequence of four years of a criminal war-policy." They still maintained that the Revolution had been a political and socialist accomplishment, the benefits of which would presently be apparent.

In the same breath they warned the proletariat against "strikes"; implored them to renounce this trusty weapon of class war, pointing out that its employment after the Revolution was a wholly different matter from its employment before. They appealed to the people—and the trade unions joined in the appeal—not to allow the Revolution to develop into a mere "wages question." From walls and fences, from houses and street corners, from buildings and hoardings, posters proclaimed that "Socialism means Work." Socialization was the comfort of the present and the comfort of the future. Meantime amid torrents of eloquence they quietly abandoned socialism. The idea of an economic plan remained enshrined in books and only occasionally provoked someone to reflect that it was an ancient inheritance of the people and that Fichte and Stein and List had been great popular economists.

So that socialist thought should find some voice they pushed Kautsky to the fore. This nimble fool was to re-interpet Marx: and to stultify himself. The moment the red ink of his books threatened to flow as real red blood this Marxist stabbed Marxism in the back. Socialism claimed to have taken a step "from Utopia to knowledge," a more radical line of thought now demanded that the further step be taken "from knowledge to action." Communism was prepared to take this step. But when the masses, who for seventy-five years had been fed by his political party on promises of a proletarian millennium, now came clamouring for the fulfilment of these promises, Kautsky—whose Marxism was a thing of theory and not of practice—found nothing better to say than this: "Only experience can show in any given case whether the proletariat is really ripe for socialism." This famous "authority" could say "with certainty" only that: "The proletariat is steadily increasing in numbers, in strength and in intelligence; it is steadily approaching the moment of its maturity." Thus Kautsky paved the way for the German socialist retreat, a retreat in the direction of democracy, inspired by the fear of socialism. In his cowardice his first anxiety was to talk the workers out of all idea of the "dictatorship of the proletariat." He assured them that Marx had not intended this phrase to denote a dictatorship "in the literal sense of the term." "So let us hold fast—as indeed we must—to the universal, direct and secret suffrage which we won for ourselves half a century ago." He sought to make democracy palatable and reasonable by harping on the ballot box and showing that it was system of government which permitted each party to carry due weight. "Democracy denotes the rule of the majority; it denotes no less the protection of the minority." He was even condescending enough to hold out to the two anti-democratic parties of the Right and the Left the hope that they also would come to their just political rights: "In a democracy," he explained, "it is the political parties which rule. No party is secure of remaining at the helm, but no party is condemned to remain a permanent minority." Incredible but true: the lifelong champion of class war was shameless enough to betray the cause—for the sake of democracy!

Thus the labour movement, by way of a Marxism that denied the class and set up the polling booth, arrived at the opportunism of the west. The form of organization which Kautsky recommended, by which the people should rule and be ruled, was the social-democratic Republic. No communist age succeeded the age of capitalism, as Marx had promised. Instead of the favourites’ regime which monarchy gave us, instead of the bureaucrats’ regime which constitutionalism gave us, we have now got the party politics of parliament, cabinet and caucus. Scarcely a whisper was now heard of the economic power which the proletariat was to have seized; and, as a consequence, the political power, which it had secured in the days of the insurrection, slipped through its fingers. Democracy was turned loose on us. The Spartacists were not slow to see that the people had been betrayed; but however deeply the hounds of revolution might bay—the rule of mediocrity had begun in Germany. And it persisted. It seemed admirably to suit the mentality of a nation who had bartered its ambition to be a world power for an inglorious peace, and was now left with its mutilated empire.

While the communists raged over their disillusionment, there were other Germans who mourned: not the betrayal of a dogma, but the self-betrayal of a nation. They saw the Revolution only as the finale of German history. Had not a nation shattered its empire instead of defending it? Had it not permitted its proletariat to commit a folly such as nations in later times are wont in retrospect to rue? Had not the nation flung away its traditions, its memories, its destiny, and its claim to greatness—things which had hitherto given it prestige among the nations—in favour of that vulgar institution that calls itself democracy? Would it not now perish slowly and ignominiously amidst its intriguers, profiteers and swollen-headed semi-demi-intellectuals?

3

Faced by such a prospect, many a German who in a mass-age had remained, or liked to think himself, an individualist, found his thought involuntarily turning to Nietzsche who stood at the opposite pole of thought to Marx. Marx had offered to men accustomed for tens of centuries to live for and by ideas, the lure of his materialist thought and his materialist conception of history. Movements, however, beget counter-movements. When Marxism was swamped in democratic chaos, Nietzsche with his conception of aristocracy came again to the fore.

Nietzsche foresaw an age of intense reflection that would set in after the "terrible earthquake." But he warned us that it would be an age of "new questions," eternal questions as he wished them heroically understood, conservative questions as we should rather call them. And amongst these questions he reckoned the proletarian movement. Nietzsche was of course the enemy of everything that was amorphous mass and not subordination, order, organization. He felt himself to be the rehabilitation of rank amongst men in an age "of universal suffrage, that is to say where everyone has the right to sit in judgment on everybody and everything." He spoke of "the terrible consequences of equality" and said "our whole sociology recognizes no instinct but that of the herd: that is to say the sum total of cyphers where every cypher has an equal right, nay a duty, to be a cypher."

Nietzsche knew that democracy is only the superficial phenomenon of a dying society. The proletariat on the other hand was intimately related to the problem of the renewal of the human race from below. He said of the German people that they had no Today, but only a Yesterday and a Tomorrow. He saw that this future must somehow include the proletariat and he recognized that socialism (not the mere doctrine of socialism, but a vital socialism that is the expression of an uplift of humanity) was an elemental problem that could neither be evaded nor ignored.

There are two sides to socialism: on the negative side a complete levelling of human values would lead to their complete devaluation; on the positive side it might form the substructure of a new system of new values. Nietzsche saw first the negative side when he explained the nihilist movement (in which he included the socialistic) as the moral, ascetic legacy of Christianity; Christianity being for him "the will to deny life." On its other side, however, socialism is the will to accept life. Its demand is: a real place in the world for the proletariat—a material place of course, for as yet the proletariat knows nothing of ideals—a place in an economically-regulated world, since the proletariat as yet lives a merely animal existence. But Nietzsche’s final thought is of a millennium. He envisages not the abrogation of law but its fulfilment; and he sees the state as the guarantor of law. "That the feeling for social values should for the moment predominate," he notes, "is natural and right: a substructure must be established which will ultimately make a stronger race possible. . . . The lower species must be conceived as the humble basis on which a higher species can take its stand and can live for its own tasks."

The history of every revolution, whether Roman, English or French, shows that it ultimately meant a recruiting of new men and new human forces for the strengthening of the nation. So it will prove with the German Revolution—unless German history ends with the Revolution.

It is intolerable that the nation should have permanently under its feet a proletariat that shares its speech, its history and its fate, without forming an integral part of it. The masses are quick to perceive that they cannot fend for themselves, that someone must take charge of them. But individuals rise from the masses and raise the masses with them. These new individuals—and still more their sons and their sons’ sons—bring to the nation proletarian forces, at first materialist and amorphous enough, but which later, as they become incorporated into the life of the nation and absorb its spirit, are shaped and spiritualized. Such was Nietzsche’s conception of the proletariat. He thought of its duties as well as its rights. He was thinking of human dignity when he abjured the working man to remember: "Workmen must learn to feel as soldiers do. A regular salary, but no wages." Or, as he expresses it elsewhere: "There must be no relation between pay and accomplishment. Each individual, according to his gifts, must be so placed that he does the best that it is in him to do." Himself an aristocrat, he gave a nobler interpretation to communism when he foresaw a future "in which the highest good and the highest happiness is common to the hearts of all," when he prophesied and extolled "a time when the word ‘common’ shall cease to bear a stigma." For equality—with the terrible levelling-down that it implies—Nietzsche thus substituted equality of rights on a higher, and more moral plane. He demanded that the proletarian should be given the right of entry into that kingdom of values which had hitherto been barred to him. He recognized only one measure for human values and he demanded that the proletarian also should attain it.

The German Revolution put the proletariat in possession of power but forthwith snatched it away and handed it over to democracy. The proletarian is, however, again pressing for power. He will attain it only in proportion as the realizes that it is not a question of capturing and distributing material wealth, but of taking an intellectual and spiritual share in immaterial values; a question not of grasping but of deserving, not of arrogantly demanding but of proving himself of equal worth.

The problem of the proletariat is not that of its outward existence but of its inner quality.

4

Marx set out to solve the problem of the masses but never asked—still less answered—the preliminary question: what is the origin of the proletariat? Instead of recognizing that the capitalist method of production provided in the beginning a solution for the population problem—a point which he always passed over in haste—he sought as an agitator to gain power over men and the masses by political clamour, by prejudiced assumptions, by the cry of: class war.

As a man of mere intellect he stood aloof from all national ties. As a Jew he had no country. So he assured the proletarians that they had no country either. He persuaded them that there was no such thing as a unity of land and nation; that the only common tie between man and man was economic interest and that this tie—disregarding the barriers of nation and language—united them with the proletariat of all other countries. He sought to rob the working classes of all those values which were theirs by right of birth; values which had been won for them by their forefathers, and which were their inheritance also, since, though proletarians, they had not ceased to form a part of the nation.

Industrial developments, by segregating the proletarian more and more, tended to weaken his sense of these values. It never occurred to Marx that it would have been the duty of socialism to strengthen the consciousness of these values instead of dissolving it. A homeless rationalist like Marx failed to realize how gravely he was impoverishing the people who believed in him. He belonged to a race whose members were wont to exploit the fatherlands of other peoples. But while his Jewish race-brothers were usually the successful exploiters of their hosts of whatever country, Marx considered himself one of those whom his own people exploited and oppressed: one of the proletariat. Logically he should then have directed his attack against capitalism, which Jewry had introduced into Europe, and thus have expiated the guilt of his race. Instead, he attacked European industrialism and confused, in true Jewish fashion, capitalist enterprise with business. From this mistaken starting-point, Marx, the member of a socially-oppressed race, set out to help the socially-oppressed, the unfortunate, the misfits of other races. He saw this as his personal mission—though as an internationalist he remained unaware of his own race-limitations. These worked destructively. He thrust himself forward, as Jews are wont to do, without shame, without scruple, preaching the laws of a science of economics which was merely a cash transaction. He, a guest, forced himself into the life of the people who were his hosts, peoples of whose traditional, physical, psychical make-up he knew nothing. He ignored the imponderabilia that were the foundation of their existence. With the cold logic of his reason he shattered this foundation, robbed their inheritance of its value, rendered it suspect to them, snatched it from them. As a material compensation, suited to their material ambitions, he turned them into conscious proletarians, offered them the idea of "class" as their sole home and refuge and hope, from which they might conquer everything which this life offers.

On this artificial and abstract idea of class he reared the colossal structure of his thought and on the topmost turret he displayed the garish flag with the wrathful inscription: "Let the ruling classes tremble before a communist revolution! Proletarians, you have a world to win! You have nothing to lose but your chains!"

Marx’s doctrine, however, broke down through its failure to take cognizance of the evolution of the proletariat. Engels, who was a German and no rationalist, touched the truth when he once spoke of the proletariat as "a working class attracted from the country to the town, from agriculture to industry, removed from stable circumstances and pitchforked into the uncertain, ever-changing conditions of city life." He remained far more alive that Marx to European history, though he declared himself prepared, for the sake of socialism to break its continuity. Nevertheless he devoted attention to the social institutions of the past, and shrewdly noted that in the middle ages the guild apprentices and journeymen worked less for the sake of pay than for the training that was to qualify them to become "masters"—a pertinent, non-materialist observation. He did not pursue the question of what happened to those who failed to qualify as masters. Yet this was a vital reflection which might have led him to observe that in all ages the working classes tend to increase proportionately more rapidly than the employers, that not every man can rise to be a master in his trade; this might have led him on to consider the problem of excess labour with which each age has been burdened and which each age hands on in aggravated form to its successor. The superfluous human being is always with us. Below the lowest grade that is able to make good, there is always a lower stratum still, into which those sink who are finally superfluous. In the age of industry these formed the industrial proletariat. The superfluous individual used to be able to fend for himself somehow. He now became a whole class. He always used to have at least space enough. Now space is limited. To the problem of the surplus population is now superadded the problem of space-shortage.

Marx concerned himself with none of these things. His sociological research was ended when he traced the origin of the industrial proletariat to the invention of machinery and the building of factories. He did not reflect that the growth of industry and the capitalist mode of production must have been preceded by a population problem. The question was never raised: where did these masses of men come from? On the imperfect, inadequate and self-contradictory conception of class war Marx and Engels based their theory of "surplus value," without a thought for the surplus human material, which in varying densities had accumulated in the various countries. Having discovered that a proletariat existed in all countries, these economic theorists took a world-proletariat as a common factor. Their conception of this class, which existed in all countries, and which was in all countries to assert its claim to the surplus values, led to their propaganda for the International. If they had subjected their theories to a test they would have seen that the International conception broke down before a national conception. The last thing that occurred to the was to investigate the genesis, the dynamics, the psychology of the capitalist method of production before calling on the proletarians of every country to invoke a curse upon it.

Marx ignored the fact that the man who originally invented a machine had been studying technical problems for their own sake, quite regardless of whether the new processes when introduced into factories would yield results beneficial to employers or to workmen or to both. Marx the agitator deliberately misinterpreted the motives of the enterprising, manufacturing class. He did not see that factories had in fact arisen at the moment of an acute and menacing population crisis, and had come to the rescue of a proletariat whom the country could no longer absorb and who must otherwise have emigrated or perished.

Marx never even attempted to understand the psychology of the enterprising capitalist. The phenomenon of enterprise was for him always a materialist one; he left entirely out of account the psychological factors: initiative, energy, imagination. He stereotyped a coarse, contemptuous caricature of a slaveowner which would be sure to appeal to the multitude. He dared not admit that surplus value is an expression of the power to create values, and is inherent in the machines discovered and in the factories erected and in the employment of capital for enterprise and the extension of enterprise. Neither as a theorist nor as an agitator dare he confess that the relation between management-value and surplus value is not absolute but incommensurable, like many other relations in the economic sphere. He dared not point out that after the recompense has been paid to the manual worker for his work, there is other labour to be rewarded, that of the mental worker, of the inventor, of the manufacturer, of the engineer, of the manager, of the large and small capitalist, all of whom contribute to creating the possibility of work for the manual labourer and the opportunity of turning his work into value. The point, in our opinion, from which socialism should start, is not the distribution of the surplus value, but the sharing-out of the management-value.

Marx kept his eye firmly fixed on the surplus value only, which he claimed in its entirety for the proletariat; he assured the members of this class that the places of production belonged of right to them, as if the masses had invented the machines, erected the factories and built up the business enterprises. In Marx’s view the accumulation of property was more vital than the accumulation of the human beings who were massed in the factories and served the machines. Even where he spoke of "over-population" he did so expressly only "in relation to the immediate necessity for the employment of capital." Even Engels started from the thesis that "the introduction and increase of machinery" had had the direct result of "replacing millions of manual labourers by a few machine workers." He passed over the fact that the human masses displaced were already in existence. He only saw that these masses were seeking an opportunity for work and a place where they could remain, and he hoped to meet the case of their being unable to find work by enlisting them in his "industrial reserve army." He did not realize that he was studying a late phase of capitalist production and that he was studying it moreover under specifically English conditions.

He mistook transition phenomena for general phenomena and failed to see that the class-war standpoint (which he never forsook) offered no solution for the problem of over-population of which he had caught at least a glimpse. Engels had evolved a theory of "progressive misery"; Marx had maintained that a collapse of capitalism was imminent and inevitable; both these theories proved untenable. Intelligent capitalist enterprise took the direction of constructive reorganization instead of the line of collapse. Even before the War, trusts and cartels and mergers had been formed to stabilize capitalism, and after the War capitalism seized on the idea of zones and provinces on which to base a system of planned economics.

Neither Marx nor Marxists foresaw these developments. The socialists left this, their own peculiar domain, to outsiders to work. It was outsiders who brought forward these new economic ideas which the socialists had been impotent to evolve. They left constructive economic thought to men like List or Constantin Frantz, though indeed it was Nietzsche again who first used the expression "world economics," and saw ahead the "inevitable economic administration of the world." Engels occasionally spoke of the "necessity for expansion" and thus unconsciously approached the imperialist problem. For reasons of tactics and party politics, socialism had always refused to consider imperialism as anything but a problem of power, whereas it is essentially a population problem and as such the most urgently socialist question conceivable. Socialists have always pointed with particular pride to Engels as the one political thinker they had who possessed historical knowledge and even strategic gifts! But even Engels was unable to give up his class war for a world policy.

It is scarcely to be wondered at that a socialism which had never concerned itself with foreign politics should have been overwhelmed by the crisis caused by the outbreak of war which belied all Marxist preconceptions. This socialism which, according to its favourite doctrine, was expecting the imminent downfall of capitalism, lived to see the triumph of capitalism in the land of the victors, and its ruin in the lands of the vanquished, and both alike from political causes, not from economic causes. The programme of the International went aground on the rock of nationalism, whose existence had been denied by the signatories of the communist manifesto, and had been deliberately overlooked by their disciples in Germany.

The proletariat is learning that if oppressed classes suffer in body, oppressed nations suffer in soul. A third popular uprising is following on War and Revolution, an awakening of the masses. The question is becoming insistent: Can the proletariat ever emancipate itself save in connection with the fight for freedom of the nation of which it forms a part? Marx challenged the working class to set itself free. We believe that only the nation as a whole can set itself free. We repeat the question: Can the working class as such achieve emancipation alone?

Marxism misinterpreted the origin of the proletariat, its sociology, its psychology.

If we want an answer to our question we must examine the psychology of the proletariat.

Who is a proletarian?

5

The proletarian is a proletarian by his own desire.

It is not the machine, it is not the mechanization of industry, it is not the dependence of wages on capitalist production that makes a man a proletarian; it is the proletarian consciousness.

There was an assembly during the revolutionary year of 1919. In justification of the Revolution and its prospects a proletarian contended that there are far more proletarians in Germany than is commonly supposed. "Ninety out of every hundred of us," he cried, "are proletarians!" Another interrupted: "But they don’t want to be!" This contradiction sounds the knell of the proletarian movement. There is a point after which it can gain no more recruits: there are people who will not be proletarians. The man who will not, supplies an answer to the question: Who is, and who is not, a proletarian?

The proletarian’s philosophy of life is simple. Therein lies his strength. But his philosophy is also narrow, hidebound, elementary; it is inadequate, inexperienced, untried; it is without the idea of growth, without feeling for organization, without knowledge of the interrelationships of things. Therein lies its weakness, its impotence and its hopelessness. The spell which binds the proletarian is the spell of birth. As men, as prehistoric men, if you like, we were all originally proletarians, who sat about naked on the bare ground. But a differentiation soon set in; inborn superiority asserted itself, and was inherited as outward privilege. The man who was not sufficiently developed to fit into this social structure as it developed remained at the bottom, he did not rise, he sank.

He was the proletarian. Proletarians multiplied and sough to assert themselves and to claim a share in the general progress. But only those succeeded in obtaining a share who ceased being proletarians. The proletariat is what remains at the bottom. The proletarian of today will succeed in obtaining such a share provided he does not shut himself out from the social organization, from the national organization; but he will succeed only in his children. The masses lift themselves by generations. This uplift is selection. The inertia of the masses remains. There always remains a proletariat. Socialism makes an effort to hasten the raising process. Behind the fourth estate the fifth is seen advancing, dour and determined, and behind that the sixth, which is perhaps no longer a single enslaved class, but a whole nation which has been enslaved—with flags whose colours no man knows. There is always a proletariat.

Meanwhile the man who will not be proletarian is differentiated from the other, by his inherited and acquired values which give him greater intellectual mobility and a wider outlook. The proletariat has not yet taken its share in the values which our forefathers bequeathed us and which distinguish more educated, more conscious men. These values existed before the proletariat came into a world it did not understand. The proletariat has no ancestors and no experience. It took over theories which uprooted idealists of other classes formulated to suit it. What is the past? It is not anything to eat! The proletariat sees the present only. According to what it feels to be its needs, it dreams of a juster future. It does not feel itself part of a community, but a body misused by society. It has its origin in overpopulation and thinks of itself as a superfluous, outcast section of humanity for whom there is no room on the earth. So the proletarian demands a share not of the values of which he knows nothing—but of the goods which he sees in the possession of more privileged persons, of which he imagines himself to have been the creator.

The proletarian sees only his own, immediate, proletarian world; he is oblivious of the surrounding world which encompasses his and on which his is founded. His thought is keen—but short. He has no tradition of thinking. The more gifted man, who takes a share in the spiritual and intellectual values of a wider community, imbibes from these the strength to rise above class distinction, to extricate himself from the masses: to become the non-proletarian. The proletarian has no assurance that his sons or his sons’ sons will remain proletarians; they may in the meantime have learnt to find a place in the structure of society and be no longer in their own eyes proletarians. It is true that a revolution may hasten this process. In a revolution the will of the proletariat is directed to force, not power; but force is ephemeral, while power is enduring. Ultimately from a revolution there arises the man who is a proletarian and no conservative and who is yet constrained to act as a conservative: to conserve—in order to survive.

Creative conservatism is more vital in the political field than in any other. The proletariat had no political tradition. Its school had been the political party. The proletarian thinks only of the moment, he is a primitive and a materialist. But since no man can live wholly in the present, since even the most miserable of human beings yearns for some hope, the proletarian, with naive egotism, sees the future as a utopia specially reserved for him. Today a terrible reality is bringing home to him that he is living in a present of his own creation in which things, far from growing better, are growing every moment worse—and this because there were credulous people who imagined that all would now be well.

The conservative does not confine his thinking to economics, he takes account of the impulses and passions, the aims and ideals, which have gone to the making of history. His thought is not bounded in time. From all corners of the world and from all periods of history he garners the lessons which throw light on the present sufferings of his own people. The proletarian will only find salvation when he can rise to this super-economic thought and concerns himself not with building up a proletarian world, but with finding a niche for the proletariat in the historic world.

The proletariat has a right to a recognized and stable position in a society dependent on industrial enterprise and proletarian labour, but it has no right to the arrogant position of power which the socialist parties would have liked to seize for it during the revolutionary upheaval. The more modest position is of vastly greater value; it is more genuine, justified and enduring.

All the world over, proletarian thought is taking on a more intellectual and spiritual colour. In proportion as it does so, the proletarian ceases to be a proletarian. The working classes are taking their place as a part of the nation. This movement is contemporaneous with a conservative counter-movement. It is beginning to dawn on the working classes of the oppressed and unjustly-treated nations, that the social problem will never be solved until the national problem is solved, until the peoples have regained their freedom.

It is still possible that our first revolution may be followed by a second: that a communist revolution will follow on the social democrat revolution; a terrorist revolution on the parliamentary; a world revolution on the state revolution. But this second revolution would only precipitate the conservative counter-movement which would try to neutralize the disintegration and restore the cohesion necessary to the life of men and peoples—unless indeed the complete dissolution of European civilization lies ahead: which we cannot know, but for which we must be prepared.

The man who is prepared for all eventualities is the conservative. It is not his role to despair when others despair; he is there to stand the test when others fail.

The conservative is always prepared to make a new beginning.

6

The German proletarian—and the man who is forced into being a proletarian against his will—suggests another calculation.

We know ever since Versailles how many proletarians there are in Germany: twenty millions. We do not, however, know which of us belongs to the twenty millions who are "in excess." Every third man among us may any day sink into the great community of misery. This uncertainty makes proletarians of us all. We are on the way to become a proletarian nation.

The first, however, to be threatened by the fate of being "in excess" are the masses who have the proletarian consciousness: who are wilfully proletarian. If Germany perishes as the result of the Revolution, the first to perish will be the German proletariat because they are the least prepared for resistance to the march of history. It is inconceivable and intolerable to the Germans of the new generation, who have replaced the feeling for class by the feeling for nationality, that we should permit twenty million to exist among us in such social conditions that they have become inhuman and un-German. These men of the new generation do not wish to be proletarian, but a sense of comradeship makes socialists of them. Fate had made nationalists of these young men of the new generation. For them it is intolerable that the German nation is becoming proletarianized: not only the twenty, but the sixty, seventy, hundred millions: despised and outcast among the nations for all time: enduring the scorn of other nations: in servitude to other nations. These men of the new generation, who will not be proletarians, are Germans out of self-respect.

They accept the present. They believe that we stand in the middle of our history, that nothing can hinder the thousand-year future being the continuation of our thousand-year past. The Marxist knows nothing of these things. He does not perceive that the problem of overpopulation, which is identical with the problem of the proletariat, is not international but national: the vital and essential problem from which political thought must start.

The proletariat will take its position in society only when it has learnt to think of itself, not as a proletariat, but as a working class. The distinction is not a matter of terms: a working class shares in the communal life of the nation; a proletariat denies the nation. The proletariats of the western powers were conscious of their nationality; the Russian proletariat only became conscious of it when the western powers attacked the Soviet territory; only since the Occupation of the Ruhr has the German proletariat begun to recognize the economic and political lessons of history.

German communism would fain interpret history on Marxist principles; but already it is making an appeal to the labourer, the peasant and the soldier; it is beginning to reckon with non-proletarian elements. This is something new in the history of Marxism. The communist’s policy however remains international. The individual working man on the other hand, when he rattles the chains that fetter him, discovers that his class slavery is one with the greater slavery into which the whole nation has sunk. The only question is whether the national elements in the German working classes will have the power and the will to wheel the proletarian battle front in a "national-socialist" direction; or rather to wheel it right about, so that the forces which were directed to class war against our own nation shall face the foreign foe. Our political fate hangs on the answer.

The one question on which proletarian and national elements are at one, is that of foreign politics. The people are becoming more and more reluctant to toil day after day that foreign nations may enjoy the dividends. They have not forgotten the betrayal of Versailles; they realize that they were betrayed by the persuasiveness of their own leaders. They want to make an end—not of the Republic but—of the weak state which counted on their docility, their industry, their credulity and their long-suffering. Of all the socialist parties only the communist, as beseems a revolutionary party, had the courage and the ruthlessness to tell the truth. The socialists and the liberal democrats feared to confess it. The communist boldly said that the pacifist cosmos was a swindle, but he still believe in the International and hopes for the co-operation of all the proletariats of the world. He counts on the French communist and a class revolution in France. He counts on Russia and raves about the Soviet state, which as he boasts comprises one-sixty of the area of the world, the sole proletarian government which has ever maintained itself in a capitalist world. He was somewhat abashed when he had to admit that Moscow had made capitalistic concessions to the Entente. "But Russia must live," he said. Well, and what about Germany?

Amongst the values which the German proletarian has not shared is the consciousness of nationality. He believes—or till yesterday believed—in the international solidarity of the manual workers of all countries. For him history began on the day when he first heard this gospel. He at once put himself at the service of this idea. He did so whole-heartedly and unselfishly: that was very German of him. But the most German thing about him was that he did not think of his own people. It never occurred to the German socialist that the German nation was more privileged and more gifted than other nations. He had never said to himself "There are twenty millions too many of us." He did not recognize overpopulation or pressure of space. The wealthy social democrat generously contributed towards the class war of other nations, and the French proletariat accepted eagerly enough the moneys sent from Germany. The German proletarian may fairly claim that he is THE socialist par excellence. The War and the outcome of the War, the Peace of Versailles, the ultimatum of London, and the policy of Poincaré at last convinced even the German socialist that in this world of ours the people of one country are the natural enemies of the people of the other; that each nation thinks of its "ego" and that the German people stand alone, deserted and betrayed. Since the Ruhr the German proletarian is face to face with this fact. Perhaps the future will show that the Revolution was needed to gather the German proletariat into the fold of the German nation.

On a certain occasion in the Reichstag the three socialist parties protested against the reproach that "the communists are no Germans!" Amongst those who indignantly clenched their fists were the independent-socialists, though it was they who acquiesced in the "war-guilt" clause of Versailles. The international-socialists joined the protest, though one of them with the pertness of a messianic schoolteacher proclaimed that "the world" was his "fatherland." The majority-socialists also chimed in, though it was their left hand that signed the peace when their right hand had refused the office. Lastly the official communists protested also. One and all claimed German nationhood.

The net of communism is flung wide. It embraces the extreme left which dreams of a millennium in which there will be a community of goods and all men will live happily ever after, and it includes the radicalism of the extreme right which thinks of its own people and talks of a community of the nation and nowadays also, of a community of suffering. There exists thus not only an international but also a national communism. The revolutionary and the conservative of the opposition have one point in common. Each attacks liberalism, whose poison has spread and infected and destroyed all parties. Both alike abjure parliamentism as the protective covering that liberalism has assumed. The difference is that the one wishes to substitute for parliaments the dictatorship of the proletariat and the other wishes to see a state government established, which shall claim the allegiance of all trades, professions and callings and shall evolve a leading class.

Are communists Germans? There can be no question that some Germans are communists. From the heated exchange of words in the Reichstag it was clear that the communists’ first anxiety was to protest that they were Germans. The nationalist whose taunt provoked the socialists’ indignation would have done better if he had cried: "it may be necessary to fight you to the death if you start a civil war; but we do not deny that you are Germans, crooked-headed, crazy Germans; we can only regret that you are on the wrong side and fighting an imaginary enemy, fighting against other Germans instead of fighting as Germans against the French and the Poles, from whose greed and oppression we must defend ourselves."

Points of contact between nationalism and communism exist from of old; we may instance the remarkable corporative and syndicalist schemes that cropped up after the War to reorganize life on brand-new or age-old mediaeval enthusiasms. The enthusiasts who formulated them discovered the "man" in the proletarian, and discovered that he was the martyr of our civilization. The War established other relations by bringing men together. Politically, nationalists and communists face each other as foes, and are prepared to take arms against each other, but this does not prevent kindly feelings prevailing to and fro between students, officers, soldiers and working men: kindly feelings rooted in four years of comradeship which permitted the so-called educated man to discover the virtues of the simple man.

All possibility of mutual understanding vanishes, however, when the working man ceases to feel himself a man and becomes a proletarian, one atom in the party mass, thinking in doctrines taught by the party leader.

The communist working man has considerable insight into political cause and effect. He laughs us to scorn when we say we have a democracy. He laughs us to scorn when we talk of looking forward to enduring peace. He laughs us to scorn when the League of Nations is mentioned. He still pins his faith to a world revolution. He does not realize the other terrible alternatives which our working men will not be able to escape—unless we all, with the might of our sixty millions repulse the doom prepared for us—the alternative of a continued slavery, compulsory labour for our enemies for a hundred years to come, our annihilation as a free people. The German communist does not want this slavery; the German nationalist does not want it. Can they unite? The answer lies with the communist. The German working man must realize that there has been a sound reason for the continued failure of his hopes of a world revolution. The reason is that German communism was dependent on its Russian allies. The German communist admired the Russian example; he never set a German one. He speedily set aside the pacifist principles with which he had embarked on the Revolution and learnt that if a revolution is to succeed it must militarize itself. But characteristically—for he was a German—he accepted this because the word came from Moscow, from Russia, from a foreign country. The Russian conditions are different from German conditions. If Russia had poured into Germany in 1919, we should not have seen Budenny’s "Front from the Rhine to Vladivostock" which a red, bolshevist-spartacist army was to form against the capitalism of the Entente; instead, we should have seen a universal economic and political collapse in Germany, Europe and Asia to boot. The communist made party politics out of his world revolution; hence its failure.

It is cruel to shatter men’s hopes. But we must shatter one which is leading from folly to destruction. There is no millennial kingdom. There is only the empire of reality, which each nation creates in its own land. No German can live if Germany perishes. The democrat says: "Germany could at least vegetate." If permission to vegetate was an adequate ambition for a nation, then the communist would have no right to taunt the democrat with having failed to join up with bolshevist Russia. The guilt lies with the Revolution itself: the sham-proletarian revolution, which was carried out, not as a national but as an international movement; the guilt lies with the socialism that did not lead to a German socialism but to an impotent democracy. While the Revolution was working itself out, we had to spend our time in defending ourselves against Russian conditions which in our country would have been catastrophic. While we were occupied with this self-defence against Russia, our democracy was able behind our backs to come to terms with the west and begin teaching us how to "vegetate." But the German people is determined to live; and so are the German working classes.

The working man concentrates on his cause; he does not yet see that his cause is the cause of the whole nation. He does not realize that a future is impossible which fails to take account of the past. But he is learning in the present that he cannot reach his goal without the possession of certain values which those of his fellow-countrymen possess who have in the past been the makers of our history. German history will only gain significance for the working classes when they share those intangible values as they share the speech and the history of their fellow-country-men. In our history we have been victorious when we have been at one; we have always lost when we have been divided.