Portal:Socialism/Selected quote/27

Marx disturbed German socialism at the very root. He stifled the seeds of a national socialism which were beginning to shoot in Wilhelm Weitling and, in another form, in Rodbertus. Marx's influence was characteristic: he was the ruthless dissector of the European economic system. A homeless man. He had no roots in the past yet he took upon himself to mould the future. We must now set about making good the mischief he effected.

Every people has its own socialism.

The Russians have demonstrated it. The Russian socialism if the Revolution gave birth to the new militarism of the Soviets. Those same millions who broke off the War because they wanted peace and only peace, allowed themselves to be formed into a new red army. There came a moment when the only factories in the country that were still at work were the munition factories. The Russian bowed his head in patient acceptance of the severe militarism of a new autocracy. He had shaken off the bureaucrats and police of the Tsar's autocracy which smacked of St.Petersburg and the West, and which had come to seem foreign and hostile. But he welcomed the autocracy of socialism; he had asked for it; he accepted it, Bolshevism is Russian, and could be nothing else.

Every people has its own socialism. The German working man does not believe it even yet. That is very German of him. Before the War he had hastened so gladly and so long to the comforting gospel of a union of the proletariats of all countries. He really beleved it when they told him that proletarians everywhere have the same class interests that they have more in common with each other than with the other classes in their own country. The German working man marched to the War because he obeyed the dictates of his own sound nature and the wholesome discipline in which he had been reared. That was also very German of him. He ended the War in his own way because he thought it was lost and the voice of the tempter came over to him, promising that a just peace would be granted to his people. That was also very German of him. Then he lost his head. He believed nothing. He did not believe his leaders. He has kept nothing but an idealism which will not admit that he has been betrayed. He must learn to admit it. He must learn to recognize that he has never been so enslaved as he is now by the capitalists of foreign nations. Having recognized this he must act accordingly. ...Archive