This, then, is the look of the age of world wars, at the beginning of which we find ourselves standing. But behind it appears the second element of the mighty upheaval, the World Revolution. What does it want? In what does it consist? What does the word at very bottom mean? We are as far from understanding its full content today as from grasping the historical significance of the first world war, which lies behind us. It is not, as half of us think, a question of the threat to economic existence from the Bolshevism of Moscow, nor, as the other half think, of the "liberation" of the working class. These are only surface questions. In the first place, this revolution is not a merely impending threat. We are in the midst of it, and not since yesterday or today, but since more than a century ago. It crosses the "horizontal" struggle between states and nations by a "vertical" between the ruling classes of the white nations and the others, and in the background the far more dangerous second part of this revolution has already set in - the whites in general are under attack by the collective mass of the "coloured" population of the earth, which is slowly becoming conscious of its community.

This struggle is being waged not only between strata of humanity but also between strata of the spiritual life right down to the individuals. Almost every one of us has this opposition of thought and feeling in him, though without being conscious of it. That is why so few arrive at seeing clearly on which side they stand. But that very fact shows the inward necessity of this decision, which reaches far beyond one's personal desires and activities. There is very little to be gained out of the catchwords derived from the way of thinking that prevails at the moment - such as Bolshevism, Communism, class struggle, capitalism, Socialism - each of which is believed by the user to convey the exact meaning of the problem simply because he is unable to see deep down into the facts. The same thing has occurred in all former Cultures at the equivalent stage, little as we know of the details. [1]

(1. The Decline of the West, II, pp. 419 et seq., 451 et seq.)

But in the case of the Classical Age we do know enough. The climax of the revolutionary movement lies in the period between the Gracchi and Sulla, but the struggle set in a good century earlier with C. Flaminius, whose agrarian law of 232 Polybius rightly describes [2] as the beginning of the demoralization of the masses. This development was only temporarily interrupted and diverted by the war against Hannibal, towards the end of which slaves were drafted to the "citizen" army. From the time of the murder of the Gracchi and of their great opponent, the younger Scipio Africanus, the power of ancient Roman tradition to preserve the State dwindled rapidly. Marius, a man of the lower classes, and not even of Roman origin, created the first army that was based, not on universal conscription, but on the recruitment of paid volunteers who were personally attached to him, and proceeded with this army to launch a pitiless and sanguinary attack on the fundamental relationships in Rome. The older generations, trained for centuries in the statesmanship and sense of moral responsibility that had given Rome its position as a world power, were to a large extent exterminated. The Roman Sertorius attempted to found a rival state in Spain with the aid of the barbarous races there, and Spartacus roused the slaves of Italy to wipe out all that Rome meant. The war against Jugurtha and the Catilinarian Conspiracy revealed the deterioration of the ruling classes themselves, whose uprooted elements were prepared at any moment to appeal to the country's enemy and the mob of the Forum in support of their sordid financial interests. Sallust was perfectly right - it was for the sake of cash, whereof the mob and the rich speculators were equally greedy, that the honour and greatness of Rome, its race and its idea, went down in ruin. But this cosmopolitan mass of people which had swarmed into the city from all sides was - just as is the case now - not mobilized and organized from within to fight for its "right" of self-government, its "liberation" from the oppression of the ruling classes, but from without, as a means to the ends of business politicians and professional revolutionaries. From these circles there emerged - as today - the "dictatorship from below," which is the inevitable final result of radical democratic anarchy. Polybius, with his experience of statesmanship and his keen eye for the trend of events, foretold this with certainty thirty years before C. Gracchus.

"So when they begin to lust for power and cannot attain it through themselves or their own good qualities, they ruin their estates, tempting and corrupting the people in every possible way. And hence when by their foolish thirst for reputation they have created among the masses an appetite for gifts and the habit of receiving them, democracy in its turn is abolished and changes into a rule of force and violence. For the people, having grown accustomed to feed at the expense of others, and to depend for their livelihood on the property of others, as soon as they find a leader who is enterprising but is excluded from the honours of office by his penury, institute the rule of violence; and now uniting their forces massacre, banish, and plunder, until they degenerate again into perfect savages and find once more a master and monarch." [3]

"And for this change [for the worse] the populace will be responsible when on the one hand they think they have a grievance against certain people who have shown themselves grasping, and when, on the other hand, they are puffed up by the flattery of others who aspire to office. For now, stirred to fury and swayed by passion in all their counsels, they will no longer consent to obey or even to be the equals of the ruling caste, but will demand the lion's share for themselves. When this happens the state will change its name to the finest sounding of all, freedom and democracy, but will change its nature to the worst thing of all, mob-rule." [4]

(2. Polybius, The Histories, II, 21.)

(3. Ibid., VI, 9.)

(4. Ibid., VI, 57.)

This dictatorship is for the white races of today not a mere threat: we are already completely under its sway and moreover so submerged and so assured of its normality that we do not even notice it. The "dictatorship of the proletariat" - that is, of its profiteers the trade unions and party officials of all tendencies - is an accomplished fact, whether governments are actually formed by them or, owing to the timidity of the "bourgeoisie," are dominated by them. This condition was what Marius aimed at, but failed to obtain, owing to entire want of statesmanlike ability. But what he lacked his nephew Caesar possessed, and in full measure. He brought the terrible period of the revolution to an end by his form of "dictatorship from above," which set the unlimited authority of a superior personality in the place of partisan anarchy. It was a form to which he gave his name for all time. His murder and its consequences could not affect it in any way. From his reign onward, the struggle is waged no longer for gold or to gratify class hatred, but solely for the possession of absolute power.

With the fight between "Capitalism" and "Socialism" it has nothing to do. On the contrary, the class of big financiers and speculators, the Roman equites (a term which since Mommsen has quite erroneously been translated "knights"), always had a perfectly good understanding with the populace and its organizations, the voting clubs (sodalicia) and the armed bands like those of Milo and Clodius. [5] They supplied money for elections, insurrections, and bribes, and C. Gracchus in return handed over to them the provinces for unlimited exploitation under State protection. There they spread incredible misery by plundering, usury, and the selling of whole towns into slavery. To crown all, they took possession of the law-courts, where they were able to sit in judgment on their own crimes and acquit each other. They, for their part, promised the dictator everything, only to drop him and his well-meant reforms as soon as they had secured their own advantages. This alliance between stock exchange and trade unions exists now as then. It is part of the natural evolution of such periods, arising as it does from a common hatred of State authority and of the leaders of productive economy, the two obstacles in the way of the anarchic principle of effortless money-making. Marius - a political simpleton like so many popular leaders - and his backers Saturninus and Cinna, thought no differently from Gracchus; and therefore Sulla, the dictator of the nationalist side, after the storming of Rome organized a terrible butchery among the financiers, from which as a class they never recovered. After Caesar they completely disappeared from history as a political element. Their existence as a political power was intimately bound up with the age of democratic party-anarchy and did not survive it.

(5. The Decline of the West, II, pp. 455 et seq.)

This revolution of more than a century in duration has fundamentally nothing to do with economics. It is a long disintegration-period in the life of the Culture as a whole, considered as a living body. The inward form of the life falls to pieces, and with it goes the power to give it outward expression through the creative works which collectively form the history of states, religions, and arts, after that power has matured to its extreme limits. The individual man with his private existence follows the trend of the whole. His doings, his attitude, intention, thought, experience, inevitably form an element, however small, in this development. If he confuses this with purely economic questions, it is already a sign of the decay that is going forward within himself too, whether he feels and knows it or not. It goes without saying that economic forms are just as much a part of civilization as states, religions, ideas, and arts. [6] But what is commonly meant by economics is not the forms of economic life that grow up and wither independently of human will, but the material product of economic activity, which nowadays is simply equated in the meaning to civilization and history, and the decline of which is regarded, materialistically and mechanically, as the "cause" and content of the world catastrophe.

(6. The Decline of the West, II, pp. 472 et seq.)

The scene of this revolution of life, its foundation, and, at the same time, its expression, is the Megalopolis which is found arising in the Late period of all Cultures. [7] Into this world of stone and petrifaction flock ever-growing crowds of peasant folk uprooted from the land, the "masses" in the terrifying sense, formless human sand from which artificial and therefore fleeting figures can be kneaded: parties, organizations modelled on program and ideal, but in which that inherent power of growth that the course of the generations had saturated with tradition, and that most of all expresses itself in the fruitfulness of all life - the instinct for the permanence of family and race - is extinct. An abundance of children, the chief sign of a healthy race, becomes tiresome and absurd. [8] This is the gravest sign of the egoism of the Megalopolitans, who have themselves become atoms, of the egoism which is the opposite not of present-day collectivism - between these two there is no difference; a pile of atoms is no more alive than a single one - but of the urge to live on in the blood of posterity, in the creative care for it, in the lastingness of the name. Cold intelligence, on the other hand, that solitary bloom, the weed of the pavements, sprouts in incredible masses. It is no longer the thrifty deep wisdom of old peasant families, which remains true as long as the stock to which it belongs endures, but the mere intelligence of the day, of the daily papers, ephemeral literature, and national assemblies, the bloodless intellect whose criticism gnaws away everything that is left standing of the genuine - that is, the naturally grown - Culture.

(7. The Decline of the West, II, pp. 99 et seq.)

For the Culture is a growth. The more perfectly a nation represents, shows the true stamp and style of, its Culture - and amongst the noblest creations of a Culture are its nations themselves - the richer its organic disposition by status and rank, and the more genuine the respect of distances between ranks, from the strong-rooted peasantry to the urban patriciate. Here the high level of form, tradition, training, and custom, innate superiority in the ruling families, circles, and personalities, signify the life, the destiny of the whole. A society in this sense remains untouched by "rational" classifications and visions, or else it has ceased to exist. Above all, it is constituted according to rank and not "economic classes." The latter, the material, English point of view - which has developed with and by the growth of Rationalism since Adam Smith and was formulated in a shallow and cynical system by Marx a century or so ago - is not made any more right by the fact that it has won out to this moment, when it dominates the entire thought, vision, and will of the white nations. It is a sign of the decline of society, and nothing more. Before this century is through, men will ask themselves in amazement how this valuation of social forms and degrees on the basis of employer and employed - that is, according to the amount of money that the individual has or intends to have as fortune, income, or wages - ever came to be taken seriously. For under this standard it is the mere amount of money that counts, not the social position in which it was acquired and turned into a real possession. It is the standpoint of proletarians and parvenus, who are at bottom one and the same type, the same weed of a metropolitan pavement - from the thief and tub-thumping agitator to the speculator in stocks or party advantage.

But "society" implies having Culture, having "form" down to the last detail of manners or thoughts, a "code" that has been built up by long discipline over whole generations, a strict moral outlook on life which penetrates the whole of existence with a thousand unspoken and rarely conscious obligations and ties, but through them forms all members of society into a living unit - often irrespective of national frontiers, as was the case with the nobility of the Crusades and that of the eighteenth century. This it is that determines rank; this is what is meant by belonging to "society." Among Germanic races it is called, almost mystically, honour. This honour was a force which permeated the lives of whole generations. Personal honour was only the sense of the unqualified responsibility of the individual for the social honour, the professional honour, the national honour. The individual shared the life of the community, and the existence of the others was at the same time his own. Whatever he did, the responsibility was shared by all who came after him, and in those days it was not only a man's spirit that died when he was dishonoured, when his own or his family's sense of honour had been mortally wounded, whether by his own fault or a stranger's. Everything that we call duty, the basis of all genuine rights, the original substance of every sort of dignity, may be traced back to honour. The peasantry and every kind of handicraftsman, the merchant and the officer, the civil servant and the prince of ancient lineage - all have their honour. Those who have it not, those who "see no point in" maintaining the decencies vis-à-vis themselves as well as others, are "vulgar." This is the opposite of nobility, according to the code of every true society; and not poverty or want of money, as envious beings suppose today, when all instinct for superior living and feeling has been lost and the public manners of all "classes" and "parties" are equally debased.

Into the old aristocratic society of Western Europe, which by the end of the eighteenth century had reached a level of existence and refinement of form which could not be surpassed and was already becoming fragile and sickly in certain respects, the successful Anglo-Puritan bourgeoisie thrust its shoots in the eighteen-forties. Its ambition was to vie with the nobility in its mode of life and if possible be merged into it. In this absorption of new currents of human life one sees how strong these forms of ancient growth were. The planters in Spanish South America and English North America had long since formed a true aristocracy on the model of the Spanish grandee and the English lord. The second of these groups was annihilated in the Civil War of 1861 and replaced by the parvenus of New York and Chicago and their revenues from capital milliards. Later, from 1870 onwards, the new German bourgeoisie spread itself into the strict life of the Prussian officer and official class. But this is the very essence of social existence: that that which rises to higher rank by its own ability and its inward force must be disciplined and ennobled by this rigid form and its unconditioned ethic if it is thenceforth to represent it and hand it down to posterity in sons and grandsons. A live society renews itself perpetually by precious blood which pours into it from below and from outside. The capacity of the living form to take in, refine, and assimilate, without becoming unsure in the process, is a test of its strength. But as soon as this form of life becomes anything but self-evident, or even takes notice of critics who dispute the need for its existence, it is all up with it. For then one loses sight of the necessity of a structure that assigns to every sort of person and human activity their place in the life of the whole - the realization of the essential unlikeness, inequality, of the parts that is identical with organic formation. One ceases to have a clear conscience as to one's own rank and forgets how to meet subordination as a matter of course, but to the same extent the lower orders forget, only as a consequence of this, to practise this subordination and to recognize it as necessary and justified. Here, as always, revolution begins from above, only to make way presently for revolts from below. "Universal" rights have from time immemorial been given to those who had not even thought of claiming them. But society rests upon the inequality of men. That is a natural fact. There are strong and weak natures, natures born to lead or not to lead, creative and untalented, honourable, lazy, ambitious, and placid natures. Each has its place in the general order of things. The more significant the Culture, the more it resembles the structure of a noble animal or vegetable body and the greater are the differences between its constituent elements - the differences, not the contrasts, for these are only introduced by reasoning. No good retainer dreams of regarding peasants as his equals, and every foreman who knows his job refuses to allow unskilled labourers to address him on terms of equality. This is the natural feeling in human relations. "Equal rights" are contrary to nature, are an indication of the departure from type of ageing societies, are the beginning of their irrevocable decline. It is a piece of intellectual stupidity to want to substitute something else for the social structure that has grown up through the centuries and is fortified by tradition. There is no substituting anything else for Life. After Life there is only Death.

And that, at bottom, is the intention. We do not seek to alter and improve, but to destroy. In every society degenerate elements sink constantly to the bottom: exhausted families, downfallen members of generations of high breed, spiritual and physical failures and inferiors. One has only to glance at the figures in meetings, public-houses, processions, and riots; one way or another they are all abortions, men who, instead of having healthy instincts in their body, have only heads full of disputatiousness and revenge for their wasted life, and mouths as their most important organ. It is the dregs of the great cities, the genuine mob, the underworld in every sense, which everywhere constitute the opposition to the great and noble world and unite in their hatred of it: political and literary Bohemia, wastrel nobility (Catiline and Philippe Égalité, Duke of Orleans), shipwrecked academicians, adventurers and speculators, criminals and prostitutes, loiterers, and the feeble-minded, mixed with a few pathetic enthusiasts for some abstract ideal. A mushy desire for revenge for some bad luck that has spoilt their lives, the absence of any instinct of honour and duty, and an unlimited thirst for money without work and for rights without responsibilities bring them together. It is from this befogged milieu that the heroes of the moment of all popular movements and Radical parties arise. Here the word "Liberty" takes on the bloody significance that it has in the declining ages. What is meant is: liberation from all the bonds of civilization, from every kind of form and custom, from all the people whose mode of life they feel in their dull fury to be superior. Pride and quietly borne poverty, silent fulfilment of duty, renunciation for the sake of a task or conviction, greatness in enduring one's fate, loyalty, honour, responsibility, achievement: all this is a constant reproach to the "humiliated and insulted."

For, once more be it said, the opposite of noble is not poor, but vulgar. The debased thought and feeling of this underworld makes use of the uprooted masses of great cities who no longer trust their own instincts, in order to achieve their own ends and gratify their desires of revenge and destruction. That is why this helpless crowd is so persistently inoculated by the spoken and written word with "class consciousness" and "class hatred"; and why the ruling classes - the "rich" and "powerful" - are shown, in direct inversion of their real significance, as criminals and exploiters, until finally the accusers offer themselves as saviours and leaders. All the "people's rights," the discussion of which was started from above by sick consciences and loose Rationalist thinking, are now demanded as a matter of course from below by the "disinherited," never for the people; for they have always been given to those who had never thought of asking for them and do not know what to do with them. Neither is it desired that they should, for these "rights" are not meant for the "people," but for the dregs of self-designated "people's representatives"; and out of these a Radical bloc is formed whose trade is to fight against the formative forces of the Culture and puts the masses in tutelage by means of the franchise, freedom of the press, and terrorism.

Thus is born Nihilism, the abysmal hatred of the proletarian of higher form of every sort, of culture as its essence, of society as its upholder and historical product. That anyone should have "form," master it, feel comfortable with it, whereas the common person feels fettered by it and unable to move freely under it; that tact, taste, a sense for tradition, should be things that belong to highly cultivated beings by inheritance; that there are circles in which a sense of duty and renunciation are not absurd, but lend distinction: all this fills the Nihilist with a dull fury which in earlier times crept away into corners and there foamed at the mouth in the manner of Thersites, but is now widely diffused in the white nations as an actual world-outlook. For the Age has itself become vulgar, and most people have no idea to what extent they are themselves tainted. The bad manners of all parliaments, the general tendency to connive at a rather shady business transaction if it promises to bring in money without work, jazz and Negro dances as the spiritual outlet in all circles of society, women painted like prostitutes, the efforts of writers to win popularity by ridiculing in their novels and plays the correctness of well-bred people, and the bad taste shown even by the nobility and old princely families in throwing off every kind of social restraint and time-honoured custom: all of these go to prove that it is now the vulgar mob that gives the tone.

But while one half of the world smiles at the well-bred forms and ancient customs, because it no longer regards them as inherently imperative and does not suspect that it is a question of "to be, or not to be," the other half is unchaining the hatred that burns to destroy, the envy of everything that is not available to all, that is prominent and must be pulled down. Not only tradition and custom, but every kind of refinement - beauty, grace, taste in dress, easy good manners, elegance of speech, control of one's limbs, education and self-discipline - irritate the vulgar soul till its blood boils. A finely formed face, the light and dainty step of a slim foot on the pavement, are contradictions of democracy. The preference of otium cum dignitate to boxing matches and six-day races, the appreciation of fine arts and poetry, even the delight in a well-kept garden of flowers and rare fruits are things to be burnt, smashed, or stamped out. Culture, because of its superiority, is the enemy. Its creations cannot be understood or inwardly assimilated; because they are not available for all they must be annihilated.

Such is the trend of Nihilism. It occurs to no one to educate the masses to the level of true culture - that would be too much trouble, and possibly certain postulates for it are absent. On the contrary, the structure of society is to be levelled down to the standard of the populace. General equality is to reign, everything is to be equally vulgar. The same way of getting money and the same pleasures to spend it on: panem et circenses - no more is wanted, no more would be understood. Superiority, manners, taste, and every description of inward rank are crimes. Ethical, religious, national ideas, marriage for the sake of children, the family, State authority: all these are old-fashioned and reactionary. The picture of the streets of Moscow shows the goal, but let no one suppose that it is a spirit from Moscow that has conquered here. Bolshevism's home is Western Europe, and has been so ever since the English materialist world-view, which dominated the circles where Voltaire and Rousseau moved as docile pupils, found effective expression in Jacobinism on the Continent. The democracy of the nineteenth century already amounted to Bolshevism: it lacked only the courage of its logical conclusions. It is only a step from the Bastille and the equality-demanding guillotine to the ideals and street-fighting of 1848, the year of the Communist Manifesto, and only a second step from there to the fall of Western Tsarism. Bolshevism does not menace us, it governs us. Its idea of equality is to equate the people and the mob, its liberty consists in breaking loose from the Culture and its society.

There is one other thing that belongs of necessity to a ripe Culture. That is property, the thought of which causes delirious outbursts of envy and hatred from the vulgar-minded. Property, that is, in the original sense: old and permanent possession, inherited from forefathers or acquired over long years by the heavy and devoted work of the owner and cherished and increased for his sons and grandsons. Wealth is not the mere background of superiority, but, above all, the result and expression of it, a function not only of the way in which it has been acquired, but also of the ability needed to shape and use it as a true cultural element. Let it for once be said outright, though it is a slap in the face for the vulgarity of the age: property is not a vice, but a gift, and a gift such as few possess. For it, too, is the product of long training through generations of distinction; occasionally it is acquired in families that have worked their way upward - by self-education on a groundwork of sound and strong race-character, but practically never by original talent alone, without some precondition of educated environment and past example. It is not a question of how much one has, but of what one has and the way in which one has it. Mere quantity as an end in itself is vulgar. One can have, and will to have, property as a means to power - this is a subordinating of economic successes to political aims, and it affirms the ancient experience that money belongs with leadership in war and State. This was Caesar's conception when he conquered and plundered Gaul, and that of Cecil Rhodes when he got the mines of South Africa into his hands in order there to found an empire after his own heart. No poor nation can have great political successes, and so long as it regards poverty as virtue, and riches as sin, it does not deserve any. This was the fundamental though only half-conscious meaning of the old Germanic expeditions by sea and land, for with the booty acquired, ships were built and followers enlisted. This type of will-to-power is hallmarked by a royal generosity. It is the opposite of greed and miserliness and equally remote from parvenu prodigality and womanish love of one's neighbour. But this is beside the point. I am speaking of property-owning in so far as it implies the tradition of a Culture. It signifies inward superiority, it marks a distinction from whole classes of people. Not much is needed: a small well-preserved homestead, a worthy craft reputably practised, a tiny garden bearing evidence of cultivation by loving hands, a miner's spotless home, a few books or reproductions of classical art. The point is that these objects should be transformed into a personal world, should bear the stamp of the owner's personality. True possessions are soul, and only through that soul Culture. To estimate them by their money value is, however you look at it, either an incomprehension or a desecration. To divide them after the owner's death is a sort of murder. That was the Germanic conception of inheritance: morally an indissoluble unit, permeated by the soul of the dead owner who had administered it, and not a divisible sum. But who realizes this? Who today has eyes and feeling for the inward, almost metaphysical difference between property and money? [9] True estates are those with which one is inwardly bound up, as is a Germanic warrior with the arms which he takes to the grave with him as his property, a farmer with the farm on which his forefathers worked, a merchant of the old type with his firm which bears the family name, a true craftsman with his workshop and his calling; something, in a word, whose values cannot be expressed in words but only in a close tie, the breaking of which means death. That is why real "property" in the deeper sense is always immovable. It clings to the owner. It consists of things and is not merely invested [10] in them like "fortune," which can only be defined quantitatively and has actually no home. Families who are making their way upward, therefore, seek a family seat as the original form of real estate, and those who are descending in the scale try to turn it into cash. And herein lies one of the differences between Culture and Civilization.

(9.The Decline of the West, II, pp. 480 et seq.)

(10. Politische Schriften, pp. 138 et seq., 269.)

But "money" is an abstraction, [11] a pure sense of values in market language, which can only be measured mathematically by some currency or other. Its sole charm lies in the fact that one can come into it overnight - whether by gambling and burglary or by political deals and speculation with sums that one does not possess - or again can throw it away from one moment to the next. On this point proletarians and parvenus are in agreement, and here too there is an inner relationship between Bolshevism and Americanism. The money that a Radical politician or a speculator manages to get, he insists on displaying. The palaces of the newly-enriched Jacobins, the smart financiers who began with the French tax-farmers of the eighteenth century, and the American millionaires, tell their own tale; and just so was it in ancient Rome, where the display of all-too-quickly amassed wealth evoked the satire of Martial, Juvenal, and Petronius. Everything of course is really spent by such owners upon themselves, even when they "found" something, "give" lavishly, or provide someone else with a subsidy: the spectator is to them the essential. Let the whole world know, or what good is it? They enjoy the spending as spending. They like to play the Maecenas, because they have heard of its being "done," but they get no further than being what in Munich is called a Wurzen, a snobbish patron, a copy of the Roman Trimalchio. They fill their house with things they are unable to appreciate; it is only the price that matters. The art-dealers one and all batten on them now as in Caesar's time. [12] But the most unmeaning "wasters" and debauchees are nevertheless to be found in obscure taverns, where unclean gains and party salaries are drunk and gambled away, and not in the town-houses of old patricians and the country estates of old families. But because culture, the tradition of enjoyment which knows how to make much out of little, is lacking and cannot be had for money, jealousy of this kind of superiority torments all vulgar-minded people. This must be said again and again, and particularly in these days when "national" revolutionaries rave like mendicant friars about universal poverty and squalor - in delightful agreement with the Marxists, who declare the possession of any sort of wealth to be criminal and immoral and war upon everything that has this superiority in things of high culture and any who surpass others in the ability to acquire, maintain, and worthily use property, and that from envy of such ability, which they themselves completely lack. High culture is inseparably bound up with luxury and wealth. Luxury, that matter-of-course environment of things of culture that belongs spiritually to one's personality, is a premiss of all creative periods. The birth of a great art, for instance, is not possible at the present time because the true artistic life died out with the last century. Then it had its home in "society," where connoisseurs and the creators of important works could meet, and not among art-dealers, art-critics, and snobs, the "people" or the "public." And wealth, collected in the hands of the few and among the ruling classes, is amongst other things the foundation for the training of generations of leading minds through the example of a highly developed environment without which there is no healthy economic life and no development of political talent. An inventor himself can be poor, but in a beggarly people there are no great tasks to bring his gifts to maturity; often, indeed, he is not even conscious of possessing them. It is the same with the ability of statesmen and artists. That is why Germans have since 1648 been a world-remote people of theoreticians, poets, and musicians, for these alone can thrive on no money. They confused, and still today confuse, romantic visions with actual policy, for one need not pay a price for visions - except success. But wealth is a relative conception. To be "not too well-off" in England in 1770 corresponded to being very rich in Prussia. And poverty likewise: the Prussian nobility at its prime was poor, and therefore in comparison with England poor in statesmanlike qualities; for these are bred, with few exceptions, in the life of the great world; but although poor, it did not feel itself as living in poverty. [13] The absence of any considerable property or income is no misfortune or misery, so little does its presence signify happiness in the ordinary sense. Not the fact itself but a certain brooding over it, the sense of differences as contrasts, and jealousy, turn it into a misfortune. To feel miserable one must first be brought to loathe one's humble lot, and this has from all time been the demagogue's interest. In the Nuremberg of Dürer, say, the plain man enjoyed without envy the splendour of the upper classes. Something of the glitter of his own city was reflected in him; he considered that his life-course depended upon it and was sure he could never feel happy anywhere else. It is precisely the labourers and the craftsmen, with their uneducated reasoning, who are conscious that property means above all responsibility, care, and work. But from the eighteenth century, when the Rationalist view of life, history, and human destiny began to prevail, envy - which is quite foreign to the nature of good and industrious workers, was systematically cultivated by the underworld of democratic politicians and by writers of the moment such as Rousseau, who by this means earned money or satisfied their morbid feelings. The desire for other people's property - which is called "stolen goods," regardless of the work and ability put into it - was developed into a world outlook and produced appropriate politics from below.

(11. The Decline of the West, II, pp. 481 et seq.)

(12. Friedländer, Römische Sittengeschichte (1920), III, pp. 97-117.)

(13. Nor, of course, of poverty as an advantage - as some people need telling again and again. Loud praise of poverty is precisely as suspicious as scorn of riches; it is a cloak for anger at one's own inability to put an end to it.)

It was only then that the social revolution began to have the economic tendency which found expression in agitators' theories, and this tendency was concerned not with the organization and aims of the economic system, but with the monetary value of its investments and products. Contrasts between rich and poor were created, in order to start the struggle between them. The idea was that "everything" available for turning into money should be shared out or held in common; if possession of it could not be obtained, it was to be destroyed so that others should not continue to possess it. From this way of feeling and thinking, not of the lower orders of society, but of their self-nominated spokesmen, everything arose that in the Classical Age was called the equal distribution of goods, and today is called class war and Socialism. It is the struggle from the above and the below of society, and it is fought between leaders of nations and leaders from the underworld to whom the working classes are but objects and means for their own aims. Ageing society puts up only a feeble defence; its born enemies, however, continue to attack ruthlessly, until the rising Caesarism of the proletarian dictatorship makes an end of the Gracchan and Catilinarian tendencies.

We have thus obtained the premisses on which to set out the full extent, aims, duration, and logical outcome of the "white" revolution. No one has as yet ventured to do this; and indeed the attempt may have been impossible until the consequences of the first world war had brought us to the threshold of the decisive decades. Scepticism (Skepsis), the first requirement for the historic outlook, for history seeing through itself - just as contempt for humanity is the essential requirement for a profound knowledge of it - does not stand at the beginning of things.

This revolution does not commence with the materialistic Socialism of the nineteenth century, still less with the Bolshevism of 1917. It has been "in permanence" (to borrow one of its current phrases) since the middle of the eighteenth century. It was then that Rational criticism, proudly named the philosophy of Enlightenment, [14] began to turn its attention from the theological systems of Christianity and the traditional world-philosophy of the scholars - which was nothing more than theology without the will to system - to the facts of actuality, the State, society, and finally the evolved forms of economics. It commenced by depriving the concepts of nation, right, government, of their historical content, and interpreting the difference of rich and poor quite materialistically as a moral contrast, which was insisted upon by the agitators rather than honestly believed. At this point "Political Economy" came in, a materialistic science - founded about 1770 by Adam Smith in association with Hartley, Priestley, Mandeville, and Bentham - that had the presumption to regard men as appurtenances of the economic situation [15] and to "explain" history in the light of prices, markets, and goods. To it we owe the conception of work, not as the content of life and calling, but as the commodity in which the worker trades. [16] The whole history of the formative passions and the creative characters of strong personalities and races is ignored - the will, focused on commanding and ruling, on power and booty; the inventive urge, hatred, revenge, pride in personal strength and its successes; and equally, on the other side, jealousy, laziness, the poisonous emotions of the inferior. And there remain nothing but the "laws" of money and prices, which find expression in statistics and graphs.

(14. The Decline of the West, II, p. 305.)

(15. Ibid., p. 469.)

(16. Politische Schriften, pp. 79 et seq.)

At the same time there set in the flagellantism of the decaying, all-too-witty society, which could applaud the satires on its own absurdities. The admirers of The Marriage of Figaro by Monsieur "de" [17] Beaumarchais, performed in spite of the royal veto at the Château Gennevilliers to the simpering court nobility; of the novels of Monsieur "de" Voltaire, devoured in the highest circles from London to Petersburg; of Hogarth's drawings, Gulliver's Travels, and Schiller's Robbers and Intrigue and Love (the only inspired works that exist in revolutionary literature) - were anything but a lower-class public. As to what was written by the intellectuals of high society itself, the Letters of Lord Chesterfield, the Maxims of La Rochefoucald, and Système de la nature of Baron D'Holbach, it is all so very clever in style as to be unintelligible outside that circle - and it should be remembered that reading and writing were by no means universal among even the middle classes. [18]

(17. Not only these literary bluffers from the petite bourgeoisie, sons of Caron the watch-maker and Arouet the revenue officer respectively, but even "de" Robespierre was still at the time of the National Assembly thus aping nobility. They wished to be counted as belonging to the society which they were destroying: a characteristic trait of all revolutionaries of this order.)

(18. Likewise the Socialist plays and novels of the eighties and those written by Bolshevists after 1918, which those against whom the attack was launched pay to see or read in every capital in Western Europe.)

All the better were the professional demagogues, who had learnt nothing but speech-making and pamphlet-writing, able to see the value of these works as a source for first-rate catchwords with which to stir up the masses. In England disturbances began in 1762 with the case of Wilkes, who was condemned for insulting the Government in the press, and thereupon elected again and again to the House of Commons. At meetings and in systematic riots the war-cry was: "Wilkes and Liberty," rioting for the cause of freedom of the press, universal suffrage, and even a republic. In that period Marat had written, in England and for Englishmen, The Chains of Slavery (1774). The revolt of the American colonies in 1776 and their proclamation of the universal rights of man and the Republic, their trees of liberty and associations were in reality the outcome of English movements during these years. [19] From 1779 onward there arose the clubs and secret societies which spread over the whole country, aimed at revolution, and from 1790, headed by Fox and Sheridan, sent congratulatory addresses, letters, and advice to the Convention and the Jacobins. Had not the reigning English plutocracy been far more vigorous than the cowardly court of Versailles, revolution would have broken out in London earlier than in Paris. [20] The Paris clubs, particularly the Feuillants and Jacobins, were nothing but copies of the English in their programs, their organization of branches all over France, and the form of their agitation; while the English in turn translated "citoyen," the French form of address between members, into "citizen" and the newly-coined "citizeness," and adopted, further, the phrase, "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity" and the designation "tyrants" for kings. Since then, and even in our own time, this remains the form which preparation for revolution takes. It was in those days that there arose the "universal" demand for freedom of the press and of public meetings as a means thereto - the central demand of political Liberalism, the desire to be free from the ethical restrictions of the old Culture. Yet the demand was anything but universal; it was only called so by the ranters and writers who lived by it and sought to further private aims through this freedom. But the older society itself, obsessed as it was by esprit, the "educated" classes corresponding to the philistines of the nineteenth century - that is, the very victims of this freedom - exalted it into an ideal which stood above any criticism of its background. Today, when both the hopes of the eighteenth and the results of the twentieth century lie before us, we may be permitted to discuss it. Freedom from what, for what? Who financed the press and the agitation? Who gained by it? These liberties have shown themselves everywhere in their true light: as a means to be used by Nihilism in levelling society, and by the underworld in inoculating the masses of the great cities with the particular opinion - it has none of its own - which promises the best result for its aims. [21] This is why these liberties, of which universal suffrage is one, are checked, suppressed, and completely inverted, once they have done their work and given the power into the hands of their exploiters. It was so in Jacobin France in 1793, in Bolshevist Russia, and in Germany's trade-union Republic of 1918. When were there more suppressions of newspapers, in 1820 or in 1920? Liberty has always been the liberty of those who wish to obtain the power, not to abolish it.

(19. The Loyalists - i.e., Americans not in favour of the Republic - emigrated at this time more or less of their own free will into Canada.)

(20. It did not come to this in Germany because there was no real capital with its equipment of agitators, literary hacks, and professional criminals. The ideologies were there. We need only recall Georg Forster and others, who in Mainz and later in Paris appeared as Jacobins and died for their opinions. In 1793 the political clubs on Anglo-French models had to be suppressed by an Imperial law.)

(21. "No one clamours for freedom of the press but him who seeks to misuse it." - Goethe.)

This active Liberalism progresses from Jacobinism to Bolshevism logically. These are not in opposition of thought and will, but are the Early and the Late form, the beginning and the end, of one single movement. It began about 1770 with sentimental "social-political" tendencies: the structure of society according to class and rank was to be destroyed; and there was to be a "Return to Nature," to the uniformity of the herd. The place of class was to be taken by that which has no class: money and intelligence, counting-house and lecturer's chair, arithmeticians and clerks; in place of form-ordered existence, life without form, manners, obligations, respect. It was only about 1840 that this "social-political" tendency passed into an "economic-political" one. The scapegoats are now no longer the aristocrats, but the possessors, from peasant to entrepreneur. The disciples of the movement are promised, not equal rights, but the privilege of the unpropertied; not freedom for all, but the dictatorship of the city proletariat, the "workers." But this represents no change of a world outlook - which was, and still is, materialistic and utilitarian - but solely a change in revolutionary methods. The professional demagogues now mobilize a different section of the nation for class war. At first, about 1770, peasants and craftsman were approached with some hesitation, both in England and France. The cahiers of small-town and country deputies in 1789, which were supposed to represent the "Cry of the Nation," were composed by professional ranters [22] and were not understood at all by the greater part of the electorate. These classes were too deeply rooted in tradition to be unconditionally available as means and weapons. Without the mob from the eastern suburbs - the fists of the capital, always handy - the Reign of Terror in Paris would have been impossible. It is not true that the problem was one of economic necessities. Rates and taxes were sovereign rights. Universal suffrage was intended as a blow against the structure of society. Hence the failure of the Convention: peasantry and craftsmen were no reliable following for professional demagogues. They possessed a native sense of respect and self-respect. They had too much instinct and too little town-intelligence. They were industrious and had learnt something; besides, they wished to leave the farm or the workshop to their sons. No permanent effect could be made upon them by programs and catchwords.

(22. A. Wahl, Studien zur Vorgeschichte der französischen Revolution (1901), p. 24.)

Only about 1840 did the pamphlet-and-platform demagogy of Western Europe, [23] whose development had proceeded on uniform lines, discover a better medium for their ends in the uprooted mass of men who had gathered round the North-European coal area [24] - the type of the industrial worker. It is time we were clear in our own minds about one fact which has been completely smothered in the mist of the party politicians' wars: it was not the "economic distress," into which "capitalism" has brought the "proletariat," that led to the rise of Socialism, but the professional agitation which created this "clear-eyed" outlook on things, just as it had drawn an utterly false picture of the distressed peasant class before 1789 [25] - purely because it was hoped thereby to get a whole-hearted following. And the uneducated and half-educated middle class believed in this picture and does so to this day. The word "worker" has been surrounded by a halo since 1848, without consideration of its meaning and the limits of its application. And the "working class," which does not exist in the economic structure of a single nation [26] - for what have miners, sailors, tailors' apprentices, metalworkers, waiters, bank officials, ploughmen, and scavengers in common with one another? - becomes a political reality, an attacking party, which has split all "white" nations into two armies, of which the one has to feed, and to give its blood for a host of party agents, tub-thumpers, newspaper-writers, and "people's representatives," who pursue their own private aims. That is the purpose for which it exists. The contrast between Capitalism and Socialism - words for which, all this time, literature has searched in vain for a definition, for catchwords are not to be defined - is not derived from any reality, but is purely a built-up challenge. Marx introduced these terms into the English engineering industry, he did not draw them from it; and even so he could only do it by ignoring the existence of all the people engaged in agriculture, commerce, traffic, and administration. This picture of the time had so little to do with the world of reality and its inhabitants that, in theory, the South even became separated from the North: the boundary lay somewhere about the line Lyon-Milan. In the Latin South, where one needs little to live on and does little work, where there is no coal and therefore no industrialism, where thought and feeling are racially different, there developed anarchist and syndicalist tendencies whose wish-picture was the dissolution of the great national organisms into systemless, small self-sufficing groups, Bedouin-like swarms occupied in doing nothing. But in the North, where hard winters mean harder work and make such work not only possible but essential, where from time immemorial the battle has been against hunger and cold combined, there arose out of the Germanic will-to-power, and its urge to large-scale organization, systems of authoritarian Communism which aim at a proletarian dictatorship over the whole world. And, simply because in the nineteenth century the coalfields of these northern lands had attracted an assemblage of people and of national wealth of a hitherto unheard-of order of magnitude, a very different impetus was given to demagogy both within them and outwards from their boundaries. The high wages of English, German, and American factory-workers triumphed, precisely because they were anything but "starvation rates," over the low wages of the land-workers in the South, and only because of this "capitalistic" superiority of party means did Marxism triumph over the theories of Fourier and Proudhon. The peasantry had already ceased to exist for all of them. As a weapon in the class war it had small value, not merely because it was not available on the pavements at any and every moment, but also because its traditions of property and labour were contrary to the views of theory. It was therefore ignored by the catchwords of the Communist program. Bourgeoisie and proletarian - that is the picture one can take in, and the simpler one is, the less one notices how much there is left outside this scheme.

(23. Its celebrated leaders belonged one and all to the bourgeois class. Owen, Fourier, Engels were entrepreneurs; Marx and Lassalle "academics"; Danton and Robespierre had been lawyers, Marat a physician. The rest were literary men and journalists. There was not a single working man among them.)

(24. Politische Schriften, pp. 331 et seq.)

(25. Promptly abandoned when it was found not to have the desired result. In reality, in Louis XVI's time the peasant was better off in France than anywhere else in Europe.)

(26. The Decline of the West, II, p. 479.)

Every demagogy forms its program according to the section of the nation which it hopes to mobilize for its purpose. In Rome, from Flaminius to C. Gracchus, it was the Italian peasant farmers who wanted land, so that they might till it. Hence the division of the Gallic area south of the Po by the former and the demand for the division of the ager publicus by the latter. But Gracchus went under because the peasants, who had moved into Rome in masses to vote, had to go home again for the harvest. After this experience the demagogy of the type of Cinna and Catiline had to rely upon slaves and, above all, instead of on industrious journeymen (like demagogy in the Greek cities from Cleon's time) upon the unskilled populace of mixed origins which prowled about the streets of Rome and asked to be fed and amused: panem et circenses. And precisely because, for the next century, these masses had to be won over by ever-increasing expenditure, they grew, even after Caesar, to a size which made them a standing danger to the Government of the world empire. The lower the type of such a following, the more usable it is. For this reason has Bolshevism, ever since the Paris Commune of 1871, made far less effort to influence the skilled, industrious, and sober worker than the work-shy rabble of the cities which is ready at any time to plunder and murder. For this reason also have the ruling trade-unionist parties in Germany, from 1918 right into the peak years of unemployment, been careful to allow no legal differentiation between the workless and the work-shy. At that time, while assistance was being given to the supposedly unemployed, there was a dearth of workers, especially on the land, and no one seriously tried to remedy it. The sickness-relief funds were misused by thousands as a means of evading work. Unemployment in its early stages was positively fostered by Marxism. The concept "proletarian" excludes all joy in work. A worker who knows his job and is proud of his achievement has no qualifications for proletarianism. He is a drag on the revolutionary movement. He has to be proletarianized, demoralized, before he is of use to it. That is the true Bolshevism by which this Revolution will reach its climax, but by no means its close.

It is characteristic of the superficial way in which the whole "white" world thinks that this Bolshevism is regarded as a Russian creation, threatening to conquer Europe. Actually, it was born in Western Europe, and born indeed of logical necessity as the last phase of the liberal democracy of 1770 and the last triumph of political Rationalism - which is to say, of the presumptuous intention to control living history by paper systems and ideals. Its first outbreak on a large scale, after the July conflicts of 1848, was the Paris Commune of 1871, which came near to mastering the whole of France. [27] Only the army prevented it [28] - that and the German policy which gave the army its moral support. It was then, and not in Russia in 1917, that out of the facts of a besieged capital were born the workers' and solders' councils which Marx (a simpleton in practical matters) ever afterwards commended as the possible form for a Communist government. It was then that the mass slaughters of opponents were carried out which cost France more lives than the whole of her war against Germany. It was then that the work-shy rabble were in power, and not the working class: deserters, criminals and bullies, literary men and journalists, with among them, as always, many foreigners: Poles, Jews, Italians, and even Germans. But it was a specifically French form of revolution. There was no mention of Marx, but all the more of Proudhon, Fourier, and the Jacobins of 1792. A loose alliance of the large cities (that is, of their lowest classes) was to overthrow and conquer the open country and provincial towns - a notion typical of Latin anarchy. Something similar had been attempted in 1411 by the butcher Caboche with the militarily organized Parisian populace, and the same idea was copied faithfully in Petersburg in 1917 with just such another "Western" populace and with the same catchwords. The "Asiatic" side of this Russian revolution, however, which hardly emerged at the time and has still not succeeded in overcoming the Western Communistic forms of Soviet rule, found its earliest expression in Pugatchev's insurrection (1772-75), which seized the whole of the Upper Volga region and even for a time Moscow, putting Tsarism itself in peril. The fanatically religious [29] peasantry, including whole Cossack tribes, killed everything in the way of representatives of Petrine, European-made Russia who fell into their hands - officers, officials, and, above all, the new nobility. They would have treated the representatives of the Soviet bureaucracy in the same way, and their descendants would gladly have it happen today - perhaps they will really do it tomorrow. Hatred of this foreign type of government, against which the Moscow of these days is less and less able to defend itself, is very old; it goes back to the insurrection of the "Strelitz" against Peter the Great. Democrats and Socialists from the West cannot appreciate a feeling so alien to their own way of thinking. It marks the contrast between the real Bolshevism, which seethes underground among all "white" nations and has produced these very democrats and Socialists, and that other form, the hatred which is piling up among all the coloured populations of the world against the whole white civilization, its revolutionary currents with the rest.

(27. The insurrection broke out also in Lyon, Marseille, Toulouse, Le Creusot, Narbonne - these all, very significantly, in the South.)

(28. Chapter II, Section 7.)

(29. "It was God's will that Russia should be chastised by me, His humble tool," said Pugatchev, when brought before his judges.)

And now what is the attitude of "society" in the West-European Civilization since 1770, and particularly since 1848, towards the fact of this revolution from below, which has long since reached the stage of scorning and deriding its Liberal beginnings and the concessions they have won, such as freedom of the press, of unions, and of meeting, finally universal suffrage - after exploiting them to the furthest limits of disintegration? By "society" we mean here that which is now generally called the "middle classes" in England and "bourgeoisie" on the Continent - the peasants being, as usual, ignored. [30] It is a chapter of shame that here presents itself to the historian of the future. Built up though it was on the basic human facts of rulership, grade, and property, society met the Nihilist attack upon these with submission, "understanding," acclamation, and support. This intellectual suicide was the common fashion of last century.

(30. The use of citoyen and bourgeois in France since 1789 is the actual expression of this will of town against country.)

It must be stated again and again that this society, in which in our own time the transition from Culture to Civilization is taking place, is sick, sick in its instincts and therefore in its mind. It offers no defence. It takes pleasure in its own vilification and disintegration. From the middle of the eighteenth century it has broken up more and more into Liberal and Conservative circles - the latter representing merely the opposition set up in desperate self-defence against the former. On the one side there is a small number of people who, possessed of the true political instinct, see what is going on and whither it is leading and exert themselves to prevent, moderate, or divert accordingly; people of the kind who formed Scipio's circle in Rome (and whose outlook inspired Polybius' historical work), and, again, Burke, Pitt, Wellington, and Disraeli in England, Metternich, Hegel, and Bismarck in Germany, and Tocqueville in France. They sought to defend the conserving forces of the old Culture - State, monarchy, army, consciousness of standing, property, peasantry - even in cases where they had reason to object, and are therefore cried down as "reactionary." This word, which the Liberals invented, is thrown back at them now by their Marxian pupils, in that they try to prevent the logical outcome of their actions: such is our reputed progress. On the other side stands almost everything that has the urban intelligence or, if not, at least looks up to it as the badge of superiority in the conditions of today and in terms of the power of the future - the future that is already the past.

At this point journalism becomes the dominant expression of the time. It is the critical esprit of the eighteenth century diluted and lightened for intellectual mediocrity - and let us not forget that age means to part, to dissect, to disintegrate. Drama, poetry, philosophy, even science and history [31] are turned into leading articles and feuilletons written with an unashamed bias against everything that is conservative and has formerly inspired respect. "Party" becomes the Liberal substitute for rank and State; revolution, in the form of periodic mass elections fought by all available means of money, brains, and even - after the Gracchan method - physical violence, is exalted into a constitutional process; government, as the meaning and duty of State existence, is either opposed and derided or degraded to the level of a party business. But the blindness and cowardice of Liberalism goes further still. Tolerance is extended to the destructive forces of the city dregs, not demanded by them. In Western Europe Russian Nihilists and Spanish anarchists are gushed over in "good" society with revolting sentimentality and passed on from one fashionable hostess to another. In Paris and London, above all in Switzerland, both they and their undermining activities are carefully protected. The Liberal press rings with maledictions of the prisons in which the martyrs of liberty languish, and not a word is dropped in favour of the countless defenders of the State, down to the simple soldier and policeman, who are blown into the air, crippled by bullet-wounds, or slaughtered in the exercise of their duty. [32]

(31. Think of Haeckel, for instance. And Mommsen's Roman History is a pamphlet of a man of '48 against "Junkers and parsons," with a completely misleading representation of the inner development of Rome. Eduard Meyer was the first to write an unbiassed history of these events in his Untersuchungen zur Geschichte der Gracchen and Caesars Monarchie und das Prinzipat des Pompejus.)

(32. When Schopenhauer left a sum in his will for the dependants of soldiers who fell in Berlin in 1848 - no one else would have given a thought to these victims of the Revolution - literary men, headed by Gutzkow, cried out at so scandalous an action. It was the same spirit which inspired the sympathy expressed with the Bolshevist mass-murderer Trotsky when the "bourgeois" governments of Western Europe refused State protection to enable him to visit a watering-place.)

The concept of the proletariat, created of deliberate intention by Socialist theoreticians, has been accepted by the middle classes. Actually it has nothing to do with the thousand branches of strict and skilled labour - from fishing to book-printing, from tree-felling to engine-driving - and is scorned and felt as a disgrace by industrious, trained workers. It was intended solely to secure the amalgamation of these workers with the city mob for the purpose of overthrowing the social order. But Liberalism centred political thought upon it by employing it as though it were an established concept. Under the name Naturalism there arose a pitiable school of literature and painting which exalted filth to aesthetic charm, and vulgar feeling and thinking to a binding world-view. "People" no longer meant the community of the whole nation, but that section of the city masses which set up in opposition to this community. The proletarian appeared as the hero on the stage of the progressive bourgeoisie, and with him the prostitute, the shirker, the agitator, the criminal. From this time onward it has been "modern" and superior to see the world from below, from the perspective of a bar-parlour or a street of ill repute. The cult of the proletarian arose during that period, and in the Liberal circles of Western Europe, not in 1918 in Russia. A fatal notion of things, half false and half stupid, began to pervade educated and semi-educated minds: "the worker" becomes the real person, the real nation, the meaning and aim of history, politics, public care. The fact that all men work, and moreover that others - the inventor, the engineer, and organizer - do more, and more important, work is forgotten. No one any longer dares to bring forward the class or quality of his achievement as a gauge of its value. Only work measured in hours now counts as labour. And the "worker," with all this, is the poor unfortunate one, disinherited, starving, exploited. The words "care" and "distress" are applied to him alone. No one has a thought left for the countryman's less fertile strips of land, his bad harvests, his losses by hail and frost, his anxiety over the sale of his produce; or for the wretched existence of poor craftsmen in strongly industrialized areas, the tragedies of small tradesmen, fishermen on the high seas, inventors, doctors, who have to struggle amid alarms and dangers for each bite of daily bread and go down in their thousands unheeded. "The worker" alone receives sympathy. He alone is supported, cared for, insured. What is more, he is made the saint, the idol, of the age. The world revolves round him. He is the focus of the economic system and the nurseling of politics. Everybody's existence hinges on him; the majority of the nation are there to serve him. The dull lump of a peasant, the lazy official, the swindling tradesman, are legitimate targets for mirth, not to mention judges, officers, and heads of businesses, who are the popular objects of ill-natured jest; but no one would dare to pour the same scorn on "the working man." All the rest are idlers, egoists; he is the one exception. The whole middle class swings the censer before this phantom. No matter what one's own achievements in life may be, one must fall on one's knees before him. His being stands above all criticism. It was the middle classes who successfully "put over" this notion of him, and the very business-like "representatives of the people" continue to sponge upon this legend. They dinned it into the wage-earners until they believed it; until they felt themselves to be really ill-treated and wretched, until they lost all sense of proportion with regard to their output and their importance. Liberalism vis-à-vis the demagogic trend is the form of suicide adopted by our sick society. With this perspective it gives itself up. The merciless, embittered class war that is waged against it finds it prepared to capitulate politically, after having helped spiritually in the forging of the enemy weapons. Only the Conservative element - weak as it was in the nineteenth century - can, and in the future will, hinder the coming of this end.

Who is it, then, who has flattered and organized this mass of wage-earners in the cities and industrial areas, provided them with catchwords, driven them by cynical propaganda into the class war against the majority of the nation? It is not the industrious and highly trained workman, the "vagabond," as he is contemptuously called in the Marx-Engels correspondence. In a letter to Marx on the 9th May 1851 Engels speaks of the democratic Red and Communistic mob, and on the 11th December 1851 writes to him: "What is the rabble good for if it forgets how to fight?" The manual worker is merely a means to the private ends of professional revolutionaries. He is to fight for the satisfaction of their hatred of the conservative forces and their thirst for power. [33] If only workers were to be recognized as representatives of the workers, the benches of the Left would be very empty in all parliaments. Among the originators of their theoretical programs and leaders of revolutionary campaigns there is not one who actually worked for years in a factory. [34] The political Bohemia of Western Europe in which Bolshevism grew up from the middle of the nineteenth century was composed of the same elements which went to the making of the revolutionary Liberalism of 1770. Whether the February Revolution of 1848 in Paris was for "Capitalism" or that of June against it, whether "Liberty and Equality" were to be secured for the middle class in 1789 or for the lower orders in 1793 and 1918, the aims of the inciters of these movements and their ultimate motives were in fact all exactly the same; and no different is the situation in Spain today, and perhaps that in the United States tomorrow. It is from the intellectual "mob," with the failures from all academic professions, the spiritually unfit and morally inhibited, at its head, that the gangsters of Liberal and Bolshevist risings are recruited. Their "dictatorship of the proletariat" - which is to say, their own dictatorship with the help of the proletariat - is to be their revenge on those who are happy and successful, as a last means of appeasing the morbid vanity and vulgar greed for power which alike arise from unsettled self-respect, the final expression of depraved and misdirected instincts.

(33. Friedrich Lenz has demonstrated in Staat und Marxismus (1921, 1924) that it was only on these grounds that Marx attacked the states of the Holy Alliance, particularly Prussia and Russia, before he became a Socialist in 1843; and that he was still willing, at a much later date, to drop his own Communistic theory of the industrial proletariat and replace it by a rising of the peasants for the better success of his plan to destroy Tsarism.)

(34. What mostly happened, in fact, was that the worker who "worked his way up" by industry and ability rose to the management of a business. Bebel branded this in his fury as a betrayal of the working classes. In his opinion the only conscious aim of the worker should be to arrive by way of a party secretaryship at mass-leadership.)

Among all these jurists, journalists, schoolmasters, artists, and technicians one is apt to overlook one type, the most sinister of all: the sunken priest. Religion is the personal relation to the powers of the world around us, expressed in a world view, in pious usages and the personal attitude of renunciation. A church is the organization of a priesthood which fights for its temporal power. It brings the forms of religious life, and therewith the people who cling to them, under its power, and it is therefore the born enemy of all other forms of power: State, rank, or nation. During the Persian Wars the priesthood of Delphi agitated on behalf of Xerxes and against the national defence. Cyrus was able to conquer Babylon and overthrow Naboned, the last king of the Chaldees, because the priesthood of Marduk was in league with him. The histories of ancient Egypt and ancient China are full of examples of the sort, and in the West there was only occasionally truce between monarchy and church, throne and altar, nobility and priesthood, when an alliance between them against a third party promised to be advantageous. "My kingdom is not of this world" is the deep saying which is true of every religion and is betrayed by every church. But every church from the very fact of its existence falls in with the conditions of historical life; it thinks in terms of political power and material economy; it wages war in diplomatic and military fashion, and shares with other institutions of power the consequences of youth and age, rise and decay. Above all, in respect of conservative policy and tradition in State and society, it is not honest and qua church cannot be so. All young sects are at bottom hostile to State and property, class and rank, and are attracted to universal equality. [35] And the policy of any church that has grown old, conservative as it may be with regard to itself, is always being tempted to become in relation to State and society Liberal, democratic, or Socialistic - that is, levelling and destructive - as soon as the struggle between tradition and the mob sets in.

(35. And every revolutionary movement, on the contrary, has the quite unintentional and often unobserved tendency to take on the forms of a cult. The cult of Reason in the French Revolution is one example, Lenin's mausoleum another.)

All priests are human beings, and hence the fate of churches becomes dependent upon the human material of their continuously changing personnel. Even the strictest selection - and it is as a rule masterly - cannot prevent vulgar instincts and vulgar thought from becoming frequent and even predominant in times of social degeneration and revolutionary demolition. In all such times there is a priest-rabble which drags the dignity and faith of the church through the mud of party politics, allies itself with the revolutionary forces, and, by sentimental talk about loving one's neighbour and helping the poor, eggs on the underworld to set about destroying the social order - that order with which the church is irrevocably and fatally bound up. A religion is that which the soul of the faithful is. A church is worth just so much as the priest-material of which it is composed is worth.

At the beginning of the French Revolution we have, besides the swarm of degenerate abbés, who for years had mocked at authority and rank in their writing and preaching, the runaway monk Fouché and the renegade bishop Talleyrand, both of them regicides and thieves en grand, Napoleonic dukes and traitors to their country. From 1815 onward the Protestant priest tends to become more and more a democrat, Socialist, and party politician. Lutheranism, which is hardly a church, and Puritanism, which is not one at all, have neither of them as such promoted any destructive policy. The individual priest went on his own account among "the people" and into the workers' party, spoke in electoral assemblies and parliaments, wrote on "social" questions, and ended as a demagogue and Marxian. The Catholic priest, however, who was more firmly attached to his church, pulled it over with him. It became woven into the party agitations, at first as an effective medium and finally as a sacrifice to this policy. A Catholic trade-union movement with Socialist-Syndicalist tendencies existed in France as early as Napoleon III's reign. In Germany the first example of such arose after 1870, inspired by the fear that the "Red" trade unions would gain sole power over the masses in the industrial areas. And it at once came to an understanding with these. All workers' parties are dimly aware of their common cause, however much the executive groups may hate each other.

Truly, it is a long time since Leo XIII's view of world politics commanded a following, and a true prince of the church like Cardinal Kopp ruled over the clergy in Germany. At that period the church was conscious of being a conservative force, and it knew well that its fate was bound up with that of the other conservative forces - State authority, monarchy, the social order, and property - that it stood, in the class war, unconditionally against the Liberal and Socialist forces, on the "Right," and that its prospect of outlasting the revolutionary age depended upon doing so. But the change has come quickly. Spiritual discipline is shaken. The activities of the mob element in the priesthood tyrannize over the church right up to the highest positions, and those who hold them are forced to keep silence to hide their impotence from the world. Church diplomacy, formerly directed from above in so distinguished a manner, and exercising its tactical judgment over things decades ahead, gives way increasingly to the vulgar methods of day-to-day politics, to party democratic agitation from below, with its contemptible dodges and specious argumentation. Thought and action are on the level of the cosmopolitan underworld. The traditional striving for temporal power is reduced to petty ambition in the direction of election successes and alliances with other "mob" parties for the sake of material results. The mob element in the priesthood, once severely curbed, now prevails, with its proletarian way of thinking, over the really worthy section of the clergy that considers the soul of a man to be worth more than his vote and takes metaphysical problems more seriously than demagogic raids upon economic life. Tactical mistakes, such as the Spaniards made in imagining they could separate the destinies of throne and altar, would not have been made a few decades back. But since the end of the World War the church - in Germany above all, where, being an ancient power of rigid traditions, it had to pay heavily in prestige with its own adherents by descending to street level - has sunk to class wars and association with Marxism. There is in Germany a Catholic Bolshevism which is more dangerous than the anti-Christian because it hides behind the mask of a religion.

Now, all Communist systems in the West are in fact derived from Christian theological thought: More's Utopia, the Sun State of the Dominica Campanella, the doctrines of Luther's disciples Karlstadt and Thomas Münzer, and Fichte's State Socialism. What Fourier, Saint-Simon, Owen, Marx, and hundreds of others dreamed and wrote on the ideals of the future reaches back, quite without their knowledge and much against their intention, to priestly-moral indignation and Schoolmen concepts, which had their secret part in economic reasoning and in public opinion on social questions. How much of Thomas Aquinas' law of nature and conception of State is still to be found in Adam Smith and therefore - with the opposite sign - in the Communist Manifesto! Christian theology is the grandmother of Bolshevism. All abstract brooding over economic concepts that are remote from any economic experience must, if courageously and honestly followed out, lead in one way or another to reasoned conclusions against State and property, and only lack of vision saves these materialist Schoolmen from seeing that at the end of their chain of thought stands the beginning once more: effective Communism is authoritative bureaucracy. To put through the ideal requires dictatorship, reign of terror, armed force, the inequality of a system of masters and slaves, men in command and men in obedience - in short: Moscow. But there are two sorts of Communist. The one, the credulous type, obsessed by doctrine or feminine sentimentality, remote from and hostile to the world, condemns the wealth of the wicked who prosper and also, at times, the poverty of the good who do not prosper. This lands him either in vague Utopias or throws him back upon asceticism, the monastic life, Bohemia, or vagabondism, which proclaims the futility of all economic effort. But the other, the "worldly" type with the realist political outlook, hopes through its followers to destroy society, either from envy or revenge, because of the low place assigned in it to their personality and talents, or, alternatively, to carry away the masses by some program or other for the satisfaction of his own will-to-power. But this, too, likes to hide itself under the cloak of some religion.

Marxism is indeed a religion, not in the sense of its founder, but in that which his revolutionary following has imparted to it. Like any church it has its saints, apostles, martyrs, fathers, bible and mission. Like any church it has dogmas, heresy-tribunals, an orthodoxy and a scholasticism, and, above all, a popular moral - or rather two, for believers and unbelievers. And does it make any difference that its doctrine is materialistic through and through? Are those priests who agitate on economic questions any less so? What are, actually, Christian trade unions? Christian Bolshevism, neither more nor less. Since the beginning of the Rationalist age - that is, since 1750 - there is materialism both with and without Christian terminology. As soon as one mixes up the concepts of poverty, hunger, distress, work, and wages (with the moral undertone of rich and poor, right and wrong) and is led thereby to join in the social and economic demands of the proletarian sort - that is, money demands - one is a materialist. And then the pressing inward need for a high altar is supplied by the party secretariat, for a poor-box by election funds - and the trade-union official becomes the successor to St. Francis.

This materialism of the Late megalopolis is a practical cast of thought and action, whatever the "faith" may be that accompanies it. It is the mode of regarding history and public and personal life "economically" and of looking upon economics, not as a thing of vocations and the content of lives, but as the method by which with the least exertion the most money and pleasure can be secured: panem et circenses. Most people nowadays do not realize at all how materialistic they are in themselves and their thought. They may be zealous in prayer and confession and have the word "God" for ever on their lips, [36] they may even be priests by calling and conviction, and yet be materialists. Christian morality is, like every morality, renunciation and nothing else. [37] Those who do not feel it to be so are materialists. "In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread" means: do not regard this hard meaning of life as misery and seek to circumvent it by party politics. But for proletarian election propaganda the precept is certainly not suitable. The materialist prefers to eat the bread that others have earned in the sweat of their face, the peasant, the craftsman, the inventor, the captain of industry. But the famous "eye of a needle," through which many a camel passes, is not too narrow for the "rich man" only; it is equally narrow for the man who extorts bigger wages and shorter working hours by means of strikes, sabotage, and elections - and for him, too, who engineers these for the sake of his own power. It is the utility-moral of the slave-souls: slaves, not because of their situation in life - for that we are all without exception, from the destiny of being born at a particular time and place - but because to regard the world from below is mean. Does one regard the state of being rich with envy or with contempt? Does one acknowledge the man who has by personal superiority worked his way up to the rank of a leader - from locksmith's apprentice, say, to founder and owner of a factory - or hate him and try to pull him down? That is the test. But this materialism, to which renunciation is incomprehensible and absurd, is nothing but egoism of individuals and classes, the parasitic egoism of inferior minds, who regard the economic life of other people, and that of the whole, as an object from which to squeeze with the least possible exertion the greatest possible enjoyment: panem et circenses. Such people look upon personal distinction, industry, success, joy in achievement as wickedness, sin, and treason. It is the moral of class war, which lumps all this together under the name Capitalism (which had from the first a moral significance) [38] and sets it up as a target for proletarian hate, while on the other side it aims at welding the wage-earners into one political front with the underworld of the great cities.

(36. The very prevalence of this fashion in speech and writing today shows that the word has become a catchword, an empty concept, and anything but the expression of religious renewal and inner experience. There are profound religions and great men's religious convictions that are atheistic, pantheistic, or polytheistic, in China, India, the Classical world, and in the West today. The old Germanic word god was a neuter plural and was only turned into a masculine singular by Christian propaganda. The ways in which we seek to interpret the impenetrable mystery of the world around and the fact we do it have nothing to do with the order of the religious view and attitude. But here there is confusion of "religious" with "confessional," the acknowledgment of certain doctrines and precepts, and with "clerical," the recognition of the claims of a priesthood. In reality the profundity of a religion depends upon the personality of him in whom it lives. Without lay piety even a definitely priestly religion is non-viable.)

(37. The Decline of the West, II, pp. 272 et seq.)

(38. Politische Schriften ("Preußentum und Sozialismus"), pp. 77 et seq.)

Only the "worker" is permitted and commanded to be an egoist, not the peasant or craftsman. He alone has rights instead of obligations. The others have obligations and no rights. He is the privileged class whom the others have to serve by their labour. The economic life of the nation exists for him and must be organized solely with a view to his comfort, whether it falls to pieces in the process or not. That is the world outlook - fashioned by the "people's representative" class and by academic riff-raff from professor to priest - by which the lower orders of society are demoralized in order that they may be mobilized in the interests of the leaders' hatred and thirst for power. For this reason Socialists of higher quality and conservative ways of thinking, like Lassalle, supporter of monarchy, and Georges Sorel, who looked upon the defence of fatherland, family, and property as the noblest task of the proletariat (and of whom Mussolini has said that he owes more to him than to Nietzsche) are difficult to reconcile with Marx and are therefore never quoted according to their true intent.

Among the many sorts of theoretical Socialism or Communism it is, of course, the lowest, and in its ultimate intentions the most dishonest, that has won the day; the one which has been most ruthlessly directed towards acquiring power over the masses for the professional revolutionaries. We may call it Marxism or not as we please. It is equally unimportant which theory supplies the catchwords for propaganda or behind which non-revolutionary world-outlook it conceals itself. The practical thought and intention is all that matters. He who is vulgar thinks, feels, and acts vulgarly and will not be changed by donning priestly robes or waving national flags. Whoever founds or leads trade unions or Labour parties anywhere in the world today [39] is almost of necessity bound to succumb very quickly to the Marxist ideology, which slanders and persecutes all political and economic leadership, the social order, authority and property, under the collective concept of Capitalism. He will at once find among his followers the now traditional conception of the economic system as class war, and will be forced to depend upon it if he wishes to remain a leader. Once for all, proletarian egoism, with its aims and methods, is the form in which the "White" Revolution has been working itself out for almost a century, and it makes little difference whether it calls itself a social or a Socialist movement and whether its leaders insist on being Christians [40] or not. The floraison of world-improvement theories fills the first ascending century of Rationalism from the Contrat social (1762) to the Communist Manifesto (1848). [41] In those days men believed, like Socrates and the Sophists, in omniscience of human reason and its ability to control destinies and instincts and to order and direct historical life. Even in the Linnaean system the human being took rank as homo sapiens. The beast in man, which gave a forceful reminder of its existence in 1792, was forgotten. Never were people further removed from the scepticism of the true judge of history and the wise man who in all ages knows that "man is wicked from his youth up." It was thought that the nations could be organized according to doctrinaire programs with a view to their ultimate bliss, and at any rate the readers of the materialistic Utopias believed in them - though how far the writers did is another matter.

(39. This applies to the Left wing of the very national English Labour Party and to German National Socialism as much as to Spanish anarchist clubs and American and Japanese trade unions, little as they wish, at times, to hear Marx mentioned.)

(40. The leader of the Catholic Miners' union said, speaking at Essen on the 18th January 1925: "Social ideas establish themselves either by way of reform or by way of force. This is not intended as a threat, but as an established fact, and if a revolution does come again, I do not think that the heads of the German business leaders will be saved." The Catholic unions have repeatedly, with the applause of the "atheistic" ones, demanded the expropriation of mining property and industrial establishments at today's valuation - that is, without compensation. This is the expropriation of the expropriators of the Communist Manifesto (cf. the pamphlet: Christentum oder Klassenkampf? by F. Holtermann, Berlin). The growing discontent of the worthier section of the clergy against the priestly elements which helped to develop Catholic Bolshevism and drive it into an alliance with Social Democracy, is so great and has spread so extensively from them to the peasantry and middle classes that the formation of a German National Church - such as the famous Vicar-General of the bishopric of Konstanz, von Wessenberg, tried to establish at the time of the Vienna Congress - is not beyond the bounds of possibility.)

(41. The Decline of the West, II, pp. 453 et seq.)

But after 1848 all this came to an end. One of the reasons why the Marxian system became the most effective was that it was the last. Anyone who today draws up political or economic programs for the salvation of "mankind" is out of date and tiresome. He is near to becoming ridiculous. But the upsetting effect of such theories on blockheads - who in Lenin's estimation amount to ninety-five per cent of all humanity - is still very great (and is actually on the increase in England and America), except in Moscow, where there is only a pretence, for political purposes, of believing in it.

The classic "political economy" of 1770 and the equally old materialistic, or "economic," conception of history, both of which deduce the destinies of millennia from the concepts of "market," "price," "goods," belong fundamentally to this same category. They are inwardly related, in many ways identical, and lead inevitably to dreams of a Third Empire such as the nineteenth-century faith in "progress" looked for as in some way the end of history. It was the materialistic travesty of the conceptions of a Third Kingdom held by great Gothic Christians like Joachim de Floris. [42] It was to establish perfect bliss on earth, the fool's paradise of all the poor and wretched, who more and more came to be identified with "the worker." It was to bring with it the end of anxiety, the dolce far niente, and eternal peace; and the road to it was to be made by class war and the abolition of property, the breaking down of interest-slavery, State Socialism, and the destruction of all masters and plutocrats. It was triumphant class egoism, labelled "welfare of mankind" and raised morally to heaven.

(42. The Decline of the West, I, p. 363.)