Nationalism and Culture by Rudolf Rocker Read Free Book Online

transformation of capitalistic society. The whole capitalistic economic system has gotten out of control. The crisis, which formerly was only a periodic phenomenon of the capitalistic world, has for years become the normal condition of social life. Crisis in industry, crisis in agriculture, crisis in commerce, crisis in finance! All have united to prove the inadequacy of the capitalistic system. Nearly thirty million men are condemned for life to miserable beggary in the midst of a world which is being ruined by its surplus. But the spirit is lacking—the socialistic spirit that strives for a fundamental reconstruction of social life and is not content with petty patchwork, which merely prolongs the crisis but can never heal its causes. Never before has it been so
    clearly proved that economic conditions alone cannot change the social structure, unless there are present in men the spiritual and intellectual prerequisites to give wings to their desires and unite their scattered forces for communal work.
    But the socialist parties, and the trade union organizations, which are permeated with their ideas, have not only failed when it became a question of the economic reconstruction of society j they have even shown themselves incapable of guarding the political legacy of the bourgeois democracy J for they have everywhere yielded up long-won rights and liberties without a struggle and have in this manner aided the advance of fascism in Europe, even though against their will.
    In Italy, one of the most prominent representatives of the Socialist Party became the perpetrator of the fascist couf d'etaty and a whole group of the best-known labor leaders, with D'Aragona at their head, marched with flying banners into Mussolini's camp.
    In Spain, the Socialist Party was the only one which made peace with the dictator, Primo de Rivera."Likewise today, in the glorious era of the Republic, whose hands are red with the blood of murdered workers, that party proves itself the best guard of the capitalistic system and willingly offers its services for the limitation of political rights.
    In Englan d, we witness the peculiar spectacle of the best-known and ablest leaders~of the Labor Party suddenly turning into the nationalistic camp, by which action they inflicted on the party, whose advocates they had been for decades, a crushing defeat. On this occasion Philip Snowden charged against his former comrades that "they had the interest of their class more in view than the good of the state," a reproach which unfortunately is not justified but which is very characteristic of "His Lordship," as he is now called.
    In Germany, the social democracy as well as the trade unions have supported with all their powers the notorious attempts of the great capitalist industrialists at the "rationalization" of industry, which has reacted so catastrophically upon labor and has given a morally stagnated bourgeoisie the opportunity to recuperate from the shocks which the lost war had given them. Even a pretentiously revolutionary labor party like the Communist Party in Germany appropriated the nationalistic slogans of reaction, by which contemptuous denial of all socialistic principles they hoped to take the wind out of the sails of threatening fascism.
    To these examples many more might be added to show that the representatives of the great majority of organized socialistic labor hardly have the right to reproach the bourgeoisie with political unreliability or treason to its former ideals. The representatives of liberalism and bourgeois democracy showed at recent elections at least a desire to preserve appearances, while the pretended defenders of proletarian interests abandoned
    their former ideals with shameless complacency in order to do the work of their opponents.
    A long line of leading political economists, uninfluenced by any socialistic considerations, have expressed their conviction that the capitalistic system has had its day and that in place of an