Nationalism and Culture by Rudolf Rocker Read Free Book Online Page A

uncontrolled profit economy a production-for-use economy based on new principles must be instituted if Europe is not to be ruined. Nevertheless, it becomes even more apparent that socialism as a movement has in no wise.^rown to meet the situation. Most of its representatives have never advanced beyond shallow reform, and they waste their forces in factional fights as purposeless as they are dangerous, which in their idiotic intolerance remind us of the behavior of mentally petrified church organizations. Small wonder that hundreds of thousands of socialists fell into despair and let themselves be caught by the rat-catchers of the Third Reich.
    It could be objected here that the necessities of life itself, even without the assistance of the socialists, were working toward the alteration of existing economic conditions, because a crisis with no way out becomes at last unendurable. We do not deny this, but we fear that with the present cessation in the socialistic labor movement there may occur an economic reconstruction about which the producers will have absolutely nothing to say. They will be confronted with the accomplished facts which others have created for them, so that in the future, too, they will have to be content with the part of coolies which had been planned for them all the while. Unless all signs deceive us, we are marching with giant strides toward anVpbch of state capitalism, which is likely to assume for the workers the shape of a modern system of bondage in which man may be regarded as merely an instrument of production, and all personal freedom will be absolutely extinguished.
    Economic conditions can, under certain circumstances, become so acute that a change in the existing social system is a vital necessity. It is only a question in which direction we shall then move. Will it be a road to freedom, or will it result merely in an improved form of slavery which, while it secures for man a meager living, will rob him of all independence of action? This, and this only, is the question. The social constitution of the Inca Empire secured for every one of its subjects the necessary means of subsistence, but the land was subject to an unlimited despotism, which cruelly punished any opposition to its command and degraded the individual to a will-less tool of the state power.
    State capitalism might be a way out of the present crisis, but most assuredly it would not be a road to social freedom. On the contrary, it would submerge men in a slough of servitude which would mock at all human dignity. In every prison, in every barrack there is a certain equality of social condition. Everyone has the same food, the same clothes, renders
    the same service, or performs the same taskj but who would affirm that such a condition presents an end worth working for?
    It makes a difference whether the members of a social organization are masters of their fate, control their own affairs and have the inalienable right to participate in the administration of their communal interests, or are but the instruments of an external will over which they possess no influence whatsoever. Every soldier has the right to share the common rations, but he is not permitted to have a judgment of his own. He must blindly obey the orders of his superior, silencing, if need be, the voice of his own conscience, for he is but a part of a machine which others set in motion.
    No tyranny is more unendurable than that of an all-powerful bureaucracy which interferes with all the activities of men and leaves its stamp on them. The more unlimited the power of the state over the life of the individual, the more it cripples his creative capacities and weakens the force of his personal will. State capitalism, the^most dangerous antithesis of real socialism, demands the surrender of all social activities to the state. It is the triumph of the machine over the spirit, the rationalization of all thought, action and feeling according to the fixed norms of authority, and