The New Society | Page 2

a suitable policy in regard to
property and education; above all, by a limitation of the right of
inheritance. Of socialization in the strict sense there is, for this purpose,
no need. Yet a far-reaching policy of socialization--and I do not here
refer to a mere mechanical nationalization of the means of production
but to a radical economic and social resettlement--is necessary and
urgent, because it awakens and trains responsibilities, and because it
withdraws from the sluggish hands of the governing classes the
determination of time and of method, and places it in the hands that
have a better title, those of the whole commonalty, which, at present,
stands helpless through sheer democracy. For only in the hands of a
political people does democracy mean the rule of the people; in those
of an untrained and unpolitical people it becomes merely an affair of
debating societies and philistine chatter at the inn ordinary. The symbol
of German bourgeois democracy is the tavern; thence enlightenment is
spread and there judgments are formed; it is the meeting place of
political associations, the forum of their orators, the polling-booth for
elections.
But the sign that this far-reaching socialization has been actually
carried out is the cessation of all income without work. I say the sign,
but not the sole postulate; for we must postulate a complete and
genuine democratization of the State and public economy, and a system
of education equally accessible to all: only then can we say that the
monopoly of class and culture has been smashed. But the cessation of
the workless income will show the downfall of the last of
class-monopolies, that of the Plutocracy.
It is not very easy to imagine what society will be like when these
objects have been realised, at least if we are thinking not of a brief
period like the present Russian régime, or a passing phase as in

Hungary, but an enduring and stationary condition. A dictatorial
oligarchy, like that of the Bolshevists, does not come into consideration
here, and the well-meaning Utopias of social romances crumble to
nothing. They rest, one and all, on the blissfully ignorant assumption of
a state of popular well-being exaggerated tenfold beyond all possibility.
The knowledge of the sort of social condition towards which at present
we Germans, and then Europe, and finally the other nations are tending
in this vertical Migration of the Peoples, will not only decide for each
of us his attitude towards the great social question, but our whole
political position as well. It is quite in keeping with German traditions
that in fixing our aims and forming our resolves we should be guided
not by positive but by negative impulses--not by the effort to get
something but to get away from it. To this effort, which is really a
flight, we give the positive name of Socialism, without troubling
ourselves in the least how things will look--not in the sense of popular
watchwords but in actual fact--when we have got what we are seeking.
This is not merely a case of lack of imagination; it is that we Germans
have, properly speaking, no understanding of political tendencies. We
are more or less educated in business, in science, in thought, but in
politics we are about on the same level as the East Slavonic peasantry.
At best we know--and even that not always--what oppresses, vexes and
tortures us; we know our grievances, and think we have conceived an
aim when we simply turn them upside down. Such processes of thought
as "the police are to blame, the war-conditions are to blame, the
Prussians are to blame, the Jews are to blame, the English are to blame,
the priests are to blame, the capitalists are to blame"--all these we quite
understand. Just as with the Slavs, if our good-nature and two centuries
of the love of order did not forbid it, our primitive political instincts
would find expression in a pogrom in the shape of a peasant-war, of a
religious war, of witch-trials, or Jew-baiting. Our blatant patriotism
bore the plainest signs of such a temper; half nationalism, half
aggression against some bugbear or other; never a proud calm, an
earnest self-dedication, a struggle for a political ideal.
We have now a Republic in Germany: no one seriously desired it. We

have at last established Parliamentarianism: no one wanted it. We have
set up a kind of Socialism: no one believed in it. We used to say: "The
people will live and die for their princes; our last drop of blood for the
Hohenzollerns"--no one denied it. "The people mean to be ruled by
their hereditary lords; they will go through fire for their officers; rather
death than yield a foot of German soil to the foe." Was all this a
delusion? By no means;