Nationalism and Culture (5 page)

in Seville the number of monasteries there had increased to sixty-two and the clergy embraced 14,000 persons.-^

And Zancada writes concerning that period: "In the year 1655 seventeen guilds disappeared from Spain j together with them the workers in iron, steel, copper, lead, sulphur, the alum industry and others." ^

Even the conquest of America by the Spaniards, which depopulated the Iberian Peninsula and lured millions of men away into the new world, cannot be explained exclusively by "the thirst for gold," however lively the greed of the individual may have been. When we read the history of the celebrated conqtrnta^ we recognize, with Prescott, that it resembles less a true accounting of actual events than one of the countless romances of knight errantry which, in Spain especially, were so loved and valued.

It was not solely economic reasons which repeatedly enticed companies of daring adventurers into the fabled El Dorado beyond the great waste of waters. Great empires like those of Mexico and the Inca state which contained millions, besides possessing a fairly high degree of culture, were conquered by a handful of desperate adventurers who did not hesitate to use any means, and were not repelled by any danger, because they did not value their own lives any too highly. This fact becomes explicable only when we take a closer view of this unique human material, hardened by danger, which through a seven hundred years' war had been gradually evolved. Only an epoch in which the idea of peace among men must have seemed like a fairy tale out of a long-vanished past and in which the centuries-long wars, waged with every cruelty, appeared as the normal condition of life, could have evolved the wild religious fanaticism characteristic of the Spaniards of that time. Thus becomes explicable that peculiar urge constantly to seek adventure. For a mistaken concept of honor, frequently lacking all real background, a man was instantly ready to risk his life. It is no accident that it was in Spain that the character of Don Quixote was evolved. Perhaps that theory goes too far which seeks to replace all sociology by the discoveries of psychology, but it is undeniable that the psychological condition of men has a strong influence in the shaping of man's social environment.

Hundreds of other examples might be cited from which it is clearly apparent that economics is not the center of gravity of social development in general, even though it has indisputably played an important part in the formative processes in history, a fact which should not be overlooked any

^ Fernando Garrido, "Z,d Esfana contemforanea.^'' Tome I. Barcelona, 1865. This work contains rich material, as do Garrido's other writings, especially his work, Historia de las Clases Trabajadores.

" Praxedes Zancada, El obrero en Esfana: Notas fara su hisioria folitica y social. Barcelona 1902.

more than it should be excessively overestimated. There are epochs when the significance of economic circumstances in the course of social events becomes surprisingly clear, but there are others where religious or political motives obviously interfere arbitrarily with the normal course of economics and for a long time inhibit its natural development or force it into other channels. Historical events like the Reformation, the Thirty Years' War, the great revolutions in Europe, and many others, are not comprehensible at all as purely economic. We may however readily admit that in all these events economic factors played a part and helped to bring them about.

This misapprehension becomes still more serious when we try to identify the various social strata of a definite epoch as merely the typical representations of quite definite economic interests. Such a view not only narrows the general field of view of the scholar, but it makes of history as a whole a distorted picture which can but lead us on to wrong conclusions. Man is not purely the agent of specific economic interests. The bourgeoisie, for instance, has in all countries where it achieved social importance, frequently supported movements which were by no means determined by its economic interests, but often stood in open opposition to them. Its fight against the church, its endeavors for the establishment of lasting peace among the nations, its liberal and democratic views regarding the nature of government, which brought its representatives into sharpest conflict with the traditions of kingship by the grace of God, and many other causes for which it has at some time shown enthusiasm are proofs of this.

It will not do to argue that the bourgeoisie under the steadily growing influence of its economic interests quickly forgot the ideals of its youth or basely betrayed them. When we compare the storm and stress period of the socialistic movement in Europe with the practical politics oFthe modern labor parties, we are soon convinced that the pretended representatives of the proletariat are in no position to attack the bourgeoisie for its inner changes. None of these parties has, during the worst crisis which the capitalist world has ever passed through, made even the slightest attempt to influence economic conditions in the spirit of socialism. Yet never before were economic conditions riper for a complete transformation of capitalistic society. The whole capitalistic economic system has gotten out of control. The crisis, which formerly was only a periodic phenomenon of the capitalistic world, has for years become the normal condition of social life. Crisis in industry, crisis in agriculture, crisis in commerce, crisis in finance! All have united to prove the inadequacy of the capitalistic system. Nearly thirty million men are condemned for life to miserable beggary in the midst of a world which is being ruined by its surplus. But the spirit is lacking—the socialistic spirit that strives for a fundamental reconstruction of social life and is not content with petty patchwork, which merely prolongs the crisis but can never heal its causes. Never before has it been so

clearly proved that economic conditions alone cannot change the social structure, unless there are present in men the spiritual and intellectual prerequisites to give wings to their desires and unite their scattered forces for communal work.

But the socialist parties, and the trade union organizations, which are permeated with their ideas, have not only failed when it became a question of the economic reconstruction of society j they have even shown themselves incapable of guarding the political legacy of the bourgeois democracy J for they have everywhere yielded up long-won rights and liberties without a struggle and have in this manner aided the advance of fascism in Europe, even though against their will.

In Italy, one of the most prominent representatives of the Socialist Party became the perpetrator of the fascist couf d'etaty and a whole group of the best-known labor leaders, with D'Aragona at their head, marched with flying banners into Mussolini's camp.

In Spain, the Socialist Party was the only one which made peace with the dictator, Primo de Rivera."Likewise today, in the glorious era of the Republic, whose hands are red with the blood of murdered workers, that party proves itself the best guard of the capitalistic system and willingly offers its services for the limitation of political rights.

In Englan d, we witness the peculiar spectacle of the best-known and ablest leaders~of the Labor Party suddenly turning into the nationalistic camp, by which action they inflicted on the party, whose advocates they had been for decades, a crushing defeat. On this occasion Philip Snowden charged against his former comrades that "they had the interest of their class more in view than the good of the state," a reproach which unfortunately is not justified but which is very characteristic of "His Lordship," as he is now called.

In Germany, the social democracy as well as the trade unions have supported with all their powers the notorious attempts of the great capitalist industrialists at the "rationalization" of industry, which has reacted so catastrophically upon labor and has given a morally stagnated bourgeoisie the opportunity to recuperate from the shocks which the lost war had given them. Even a pretentiously revolutionary labor party like the Communist Party in Germany appropriated the nationalistic slogans of reaction, by which contemptuous denial of all socialistic principles they hoped to take the wind out of the sails of threatening fascism.

To these examples many more might be added to show that the representatives of the great majority of organized socialistic labor hardly have the right to reproach the bourgeoisie with political unreliability or treason to its former ideals. The representatives of liberalism and bourgeois democracy showed at recent elections at least a desire to preserve appearances, while the pretended defenders of proletarian interests abandoned

their former ideals with shameless complacency in order to do the work of their opponents.

A long line of leading political economists, uninfluenced by any socialistic considerations, have expressed their conviction that the capitalistic system has had its day and that in place of an uncontrolled profit economy a production-for-use economy based on new principles must be instituted if Europe is not to be ruined. Nevertheless, it becomes even more apparent that socialism as a movement has in no wise.^rown to meet the situation. Most of its representatives have never advanced beyond shallow reform, and they waste their forces in factional fights as purposeless as they are dangerous, which in their idiotic intolerance remind us of the behavior of mentally petrified church organizations. Small wonder that hundreds of thousands of socialists fell into despair and let themselves be caught by the rat-catchers of the Third Reich.

It could be objected here that the necessities of life itself, even without the assistance of the socialists, were working toward the alteration of existing economic conditions, because a crisis with no way out becomes at last unendurable. We do not deny this, but we fear that with the present cessation in the socialistic labor movement there may occur an economic reconstruction about which the producers will have absolutely nothing to say. They will be confronted with the accomplished facts which others have created for them, so that in the future, too, they will have to be content with the part of coolies which had been planned for them all the while. Unless all signs deceive us, we are marching with giant strides toward anVpbch of state capitalism, which is likely to assume for the workers the shape of a modern system of bondage in which man may be regarded as merely an instrument of production, and all personal freedom will be absolutely extinguished.

Economic conditions can, under certain circumstances, become so acute that a change in the existing social system is a vital necessity. It is only a question in which direction we shall then move. Will it be a road to freedom, or will it result merely in an improved form of slavery which, while it secures for man a meager living, will rob him of all independence of action? This, and this only, is the question. The social constitution of the Inca Empire secured for every one of its subjects the necessary means of subsistence, but the land was subject to an unlimited despotism, which cruelly punished any opposition to its command and degraded the individual to a will-less tool of the state power.

State capitalism might be a way out of the present crisis, but most assuredly it would not be a road to social freedom. On the contrary, it would submerge men in a slough of servitude which would mock at all human dignity. In every prison, in every barrack there is a certain equality of social condition. Everyone has the same food, the same clothes, renders

the same service, or performs the same taskj but who would affirm that such a condition presents an end worth working for?

It makes a difference whether the members of a social organization are masters of their fate, control their own affairs and have the inalienable right to participate in the administration of their communal interests, or are but the instruments of an external will over which they possess no influence whatsoever. Every soldier has the right to share the common rations, but he is not permitted to have a judgment of his own. He must blindly obey the orders of his superior, silencing, if need be, the voice of his own conscience, for he is but a part of a machine which others set in motion.

No tyranny is more unendurable than that of an all-powerful bureaucracy which interferes with all the activities of men and leaves its stamp on them. The more unlimited the power of the state over the life of the individual, the more it cripples his creative capacities and weakens the force of his personal will. State capitalism, the^most dangerous antithesis of real socialism, demands the surrender of all social activities to the state. It is the triumph of the machine over the spirit, the rationalization of all thought, action and feeling according to the fixed norms of authority, and consequently the end of all real intellectual culture. That the full scope of this threatening development has not been grasped up to now, that the idea that it is necessitated by current economic conditions has even been accepted, may well be regarded as one of the most fateful signs of the times.

The dangerous mania which sees in every social phenomenon only the inevitable result of capitalistic methods of production has implanted in men the conviction that all social events arise from definite necessity and are economically unalterable. This fatalistic notion could only result in crippling men's power of resistance, and consequently making them receptive to a compromise with given conditions, no matter how horrible and inhuman they may be.

Every one knows that economic conditions have an influence on the changes in social relations. How men will react in their thoughts and actions to this influence is of great importance, however, in determining what steps they may decide to take to initiate an obviously necessary change in the conditions of life. But it is just the thoughts and actions of men which refuse to accept the imprint of economic motives alone. Who would, for instance, maintain that the Puritanism which has decidedly influenced the spiritual development of Anglo-Saxon people up to the present day was the necessary result of the economic capitalistic order then in its infancy, or who would try to prove that the World War was absolutely conditioned by the capitalistic system and was consequently unavoidable?