Every People Has Its Own Socialism

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 mold 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, his thoughts 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 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 Jew that he was, national feeling was incomprehensible to him; rationalist that he was, national feeling was for him, out of date.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 precedent of universal socialism; that men can only live if their nations live also.

***

International socialism does not exist. It did not exist before the War, still less after the War. The German working man has been the martyr of his Marxist faith. He must reconcile himself to the fact that the promise of ‘the world for the proletariat’ has been unfulfilled. He must realize that the proletarians of each country thought only of their own country. The victorious nations applied Marx’s principle of “enlightened self-interest”—which that sceptic thought he had discovered to be the basis of all morality—only to the advantage of their own countries. They concluded a peace which was most deliberately designed to exploit Germany. The problems of socialism are still unsolved.

The Revolution which aimed at realizing the democratic state did not succeed in its intentions. The German socialist has nothing now left him to do, but to ponder retrospectively on what it was in himself which prevented his solving his problems along Marxian lines. If he does so, he will perceive that it was the taint of liberalism in his socialism which was disastrous to him: an inelastic, dogmatic, rationalist liberalism that for sheer ‘reason’ could not see reality. We do not yet know who will solve the problems that remain for socialism. We cannot believe that German communism which still clings faithfully to Marx will contribute to the solution, though German communism has about it something that is savagely and obstinately German. In any case we know—and we must believe—that the German socialism which we have in mind must and will solve its problems on a higher plane than Marx’s: on a plane where the problems are not those of a class but of the nation.

We have one advantage over our enemies in the existence of the problems set us by our defeat and unsolved by our Revolution. It is a purely intellectual advantage: but it is a great one. We have only to think of the complete absence of ideas which our enemies display: their victory brought them complacency, satiety—in spite of the economic and political peril which threatens their countries.

It will be a tragedy, a catastrophe, it will be our destruction, if we do not rise to the solution of the problems before us. But if we succeed in winning through to a solution of our problems, a genuine and permanent solution for all time, then the example of the new state and the new economic order which we have created will give us an immense prestige, which will have a powerful influence on other countries, a prestige against which our enemies will be powerless.

Socialism begins where Marxism ends. German socialism is called to play a part in the spiritual and intellectual history of mankind by purging itself of every trace of liberalism. Liberalism was the unholy power of the nineteenth century which undermined and destroyed the very basis of socialism, as it undermined and destroyed the very basis of every political philosophy and of every world-order. Liberalism is a product of occidentalism which still lurks in parliaments and calls itself democracy.

To bring this German socialism to birth is not the task of Germany’s Third Empire.

This New Socialism must be the foundation of Germany’s Third Empire.

-excerpted from “Germany’s Third Empire” by Arthur Moeller Van Den Bruck (1923)