Portal:Socialism/Selected quote/15

What the Captain of Kopenick means for militarism in the domain of practical swindling, the inimitable Gustav Tuch was for it in the domain of honest theorizing, towards the end of the eighties. In his bulky volume, "The Expanded German Military State in its Social Significance," he sketched a future society of which the all illuminating, warming, directing central sun is militarism, its heart and soul, the only true "national and civilized socialism"; where the whole state is transformed into the image of the barracks, the barracks being grammar school, high-school and a factory for producing patriotic spirit, the army an all comprising organization of strike-breakers. That ecstatic hallucination about the millennium of militarism was indeed mere methodical madness, but the very fact that it was a methodical madness, which imagined the militaristic aims and methods apart from all checks and carried them to their extreme conclusions, lends to it a symptomatic significance.

At least in one sphere of prime importance militarism, as will be shown more conclusively later on, is to-day already the central sun around which move the solar systems of class legislation, bureaucracy, police rule, class-justice and the clericalism of all denominations. It is the ultimate, sometimes recondite, sometimes patent regulator of all class politics, all tactics of the class-struggle, not only for the capitalist classes, but also for the proletariat, in regard to its economic organization no less than in regard to its political organization. ...Archive