Nothing was more significant than the fact that the mighty event of the German Revolution was not the result of affection but of disaffection. It is not we who liberated ourselves, it was the enemy; it was our destruction that set us free. On the day before we asked for the armistice, perhaps even on the day before the flight of the Kaiser, a plébiscite would have yielded an overwhelming majority for the monarchy and against Socialism. What I so often said before the war came true: "He who trains his children with the rod learns only through the rod."
And to-day, when everything is seething and fermenting—no thanks to Socialism for that—all intellectual work has to be done outside of the ranks of social-democracy, which stumbles along on its two crutches of "Socialization" and "Soviets."[2] Orthodox Socialism is still a case of the "lesser evil," what the French call a pis aller. "Things are so bad that any change must be for the better." What is to make them better we are told in the socialist catechism; but how it is to do so, how and what anything is to become, this, the only question that matters, is regarded as irrelevant. It is answered by some halting and insincere stammer about "surplus value" which is to make everybody well off—and which would yield all round, as I have elsewhere shown, just twenty-five marks a head. Fifteen millions of grown men are pressing forward into a Promised Land revealed through the fog of political assemblies and in the thunder of parrot-phrases—a land from which no one will ever bring back a bunch of grapes.
If one would interrogate not the agitators, but their hearers, and find out what they instinctively conceive this land to look like, we should get the answer, timid and naïve but at the same time the deepest and shrewdest that it is possible to give—that it is a land where there are no longer any rich.
A most true and truthful reply! And yet a profound error silently lurks in it. You imagine, do you not, that in a land where there are no more rich people there will also be no more poor? "Why, of course not! How can there be poor people when there are no more rich?" And yet there will be. In the land where there are no more rich there will be only poor, only very poor, people.
Whoever does not know this and is a Socialist, that man is merely one of the herd or he is a dupe. He who knows it and conceals it is a deceiver. He who knows it, and in spite of that, nay, on account of that, is a Socialist, is a man of the future.
Though the crowd be satisfied with some dim feeling that this, anyhow, is the tendency of the times and that with this stream one must swim; though the more thoughtful contemplate the evils of the time and decide to put up with the pis aller; the responsible thinker is under the obligation of investigating the land into which the people are being led. We must know what it looks like, where there are no rich people and where no one can have an income without working for it, we must understand what we call the "new society" so as to be able to shape it aright.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] Von Kommenden Dingen, by Walther Rathenau. Berlin. S. Fischer.
[2] Workers' and Soldiers' Councils.