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“In Marx the ideas of development, of preparation, of the sufficiency of objective forces, are otherwise much clearer than those of his predecessors; but it was impossible for him to avoid the general influences that dominated the men of his time. Like them, Marx imagined that the world had set out to know finally the true nature of man, that it would no longer be determined by the laws which eschew its will, that reason would find its expression in a regenerated humanity. All this belongs to that part of Marxism that must be rejected, having been formed only from the remains of the old Utopianism”
- Georges Sorel (Social Foundations of Contemporary Economics)
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The Class Struggle as a Nationalist Demand - Karl Otto Paetel
The class struggle is not an invention of the ‘Jew Marx.’60
It is a fact of daily life, reflecting the labor contract between employer and employee, as well as the functions of press, state, and cultural life.
It is a battle line established by those who are in possession of the economic means of power, imposed on those ‘below’, who respond with fury. It does not require a moral judgement but instead a stated decision on which side we want to fight.
The class struggle is not some artificial construct. As everywhere in the life of cells, new, young life replaces the old and feeble; so too in the body of the Volk [Volkskörper] is the old leadership class, after fulfilling its function for the community over a certain period, replaced by new forces – usually with violence.
Thus is the class struggle, irrespective of the fact that this process is playing itself out amongst all peoples, a course of events in the life of the Volk [Volkslebens], a process of reversal against the leadership forces within a folk-organism.61 [Volksorganismus].
Just as every previous revolution had its sociological bearer – the clearest example being the ‘bourgeois’ French Revolution – so too does the revolution in which we are situated. The working class, which is today pounding at the gates of German history, will have to battle out the class struggle with the current holders of the economic resources and instruments of power so that it can have both transferred into the workers’ hands at the moment of revolution, thus being ready to declare itself a nation and to replace the old leadership.62
60 Incidentally: The Jewish question cannot be resolved at all without being incorporated into the overall racial question – and not at all in a purely negative fashion. Marx’s analysis (“On The Jewish Question”) that the entrepreneurial, usurious, exploitative ‘Jewish spirit’ can be liquidated only at the moment when it is deprived of the basis of the capitalist order is correct. In socialist Germany the Jews will face the decision to emigrate or to productively integrate themselves as a ‘national minority’ into the process of national construction (settlers, artisans). In völkisch-cultural life, like all minorities, their influence will be weak, represented only be a few men who have demonstrated their pre-eminence; for example, Friedrich Gundolf’s work on Goethe, Gustav Landauer’s writing on Hölderlin, or Maximilian Harden’s Heads [“Köpfe”] have proven their authors possible exceptions. In the political arena, like all minorities, they will have the right to vote in and stand for elections to the legislative organs, but not the right to stand for the executive. Rather, they will only be delegable to council meetings in their own cultural representative bodies.
61 Compare also August Winnig’s* “The Belief in the Proletariat” [“Der Glaube an das Proletariat”] and “Liberation” [“Befreiung”]. Winnig has in the meantime made it clear for everybody in his book From Proletariat to Workerdom[“Vom Proletariat zum Arbeitertum”] and with his essays in the Berliner Börsen-Zeitung that he has since moved into the camp of the propertied bourgeoisie.
62 Even Karl Marx in the “Communist Manifesto” states:
The class struggle is quite clearly grounded in nationalism, and – to make use of a word too often misused by charlatans – absolutely “organically”, as Ernst Krawehl†puts it 63:
“The nation appears to us as a universal collection of divisions that are characterized through their discordant stratification (horizontal-vertical, religions, professions, ideologies, and so on). One of its most significant structural principles is that of horizontally tiered layers, whose higher points are distinguished by attributes not considered suited to the lowly (tax exemption for the clergy, university education for the bourgeoisie, privilege to political offices for the nobility, economic excess for the capitalists). Each of these national strata develops its own special societal customs and mores – yes, they even form their own separate realm of life (proletarians marry only proletarians, nobles only nobles).
“But the entirety of these strata only latently belong to the nation. It is a historical law that, at any time, the nation is represented only by one specific group. Every action by this group, all of which serve only its own interests, are suddenly placed into a different light and maintain the most crucial significance for the entire nation.
“The ratio of stratification, as it presents itself at any given point in time – today, for example – was always based originally on the value and power relationship underlying the stratification’s structure. The group that is in power once incarnated the essence of the nation; it earned its position. Through the biological process, however, the ruling stratum always loses its vitality and its authority to represent the nation more quickly than it does its privileges, while at the same time drawing up new strata from below, to fulfil by itself the destiny of the nation. The ruling stratum has to return to dormancy, it has to become the wood and trunk of the nation, in other words, to go down in history while new cells are formed that assume the function of the life-giving rings. (This analogy seems a good one; it demonstrates that the formation of the wood is as essential as the steady growth of the bark; it also demonstrates the revolutionary act of infusion with fresh sap in spring, of bursting buds, followed by a period of peaceful growth).
“The Communists have further been reproached with wanting to abolish fatherland, nationality. The workers have no fatherland. One cannot take from them what they do not have. Since the proletariat must first of all conquer political supremacy, elevate itself to a national class, must constitute itself as the nation, it is itself still national, though by no means in the bourgeois sense.”However, when one reads on... Marx writes that later the nation will nonetheless be overcome. 63Socialist Nation, II/10.
“The lower stratum should on principle demonstrate its strength by infusing itself alone – something which it is dependent on, in most instances. Its fight against the old stratum, which refuses to give up the armchairs of power, is class struggle in the true sense of the term. It embraces all areas of völkisch life: cultural and economic.64
“Our present ascendant class, in whose hands lies the destiny of the nation, not only has the ever-present obstacles to overcome (acquiring education, entry into ‘good society’) but is also hindered by a certain objective state of affairs imposed over its young life: capitalism. This sets against every best intention an insurmountable obstacle.
“This class must therefore be given at least the ‘chance’ to prove itself, regardless of whether it proves useful or not; this should go unsaid. This can only be achieved through the elimination of capitalism. Only a new economic system can provide the guarantee for a völkisch life. That is to say that the struggle of the proletariat for those things that are all-encompassing – culture and economy – is in its modus a purely economic one. (Which is not to say that the prospective economy then from itself gives birth to a new culture; no, it only sets free the forces for its potential development.)
“But since capitalism, against which the fight for the proletarian class is directed first and foremost, is superbly held by the sinking bourgeois class (and, conversely, holds fast to the bourgeois class in turn), so is every struggle against the bourgeoisie (against their morality, art, religion, ethics) a struggle against capitalism, and at the same time a struggle for the proletariat. (Which is again not to say that capitalism necessarily conditioned or created this morality, art, religion, or ethics.)
“Through this version of the concept of class and class struggle it is not feasible to see any other outcome than that the proletariat, subsequent to its own time and economic system, is superseded by something new in the struggle. If it is possible to completely eliminate class divisions and bring about new strata which no longer have a class character, then it will be within these new social bodies that the class struggle continues, which is nothing but the 64
To legitimize the worker’s claim to power merely as a “Gestalt”, consciously ignoring sociological origin, as Ernst Jünger undertook in his magnificent book The Worker (Hanseatische Verlaganstalt), is a visionary and not a political point of view. The ‘new relationship to the elemental’ which separates ‘the Typus’ from the bourgeois says too little about concrete historical tasks. Quite apart from the fact that, within the framework of the ‘planetary planning’ at the head of which the ‘Typus’ is placed, the nation immediately vanishes. The Jüngerian portrayal, which is of the highest rank artistically and intellectually, is not a political but a psychological analysis, and therefore not capable of shaping history.
struggle of ascending and descending life – a cycle that will never stop, except when the world finally stops.”
The justification by which every semi-fascist rejects the class struggle is a simple conjuring trick: “The class struggle is the reality of capitalism, the Volksgemeinschaftthe reality of socialism.” To operate under this statement is nothing more than an intellectual dishonesty. For it is precisely because socialism is supposed to become a reality that the Volksgemeinschaft can only be preached as a goal, never as a sloganfor whitewashing the prevailing capitalist world as it exists today. To conclude: “We are socialists, hence against the class struggle,” is simply illogical, because one cannot abruptly assign a criterion of ‘tomorrow’ to ‘today’, cannot employ a goal to negate what is existent.
Even the opposing slogan of the 97% used by the ‘Tat-circle’ and the ‘Black Front’ is afiction‡. Even provided that Fried’s65 wealth and income statistics are correct, these 97% do not possess a shared consciousness§. The fight is led by those who want it. Of the statistically ‘disinherited’, as the politics of the day hourly prove, a large part of the 97% willingly defends the 3%. The slogan of the 97% is fantasy, the class struggle is fact. There are also the comments made by the Archive for Politics and History 66 as early as March 1925:
“The fundamental reality of today’s European social order is that the rift, the polarization from which socialist doctrine emanates, no longer passes through the nation’s bourgeois society, but instead runs through world society, through the nations of Europe, indeed it splits the whole world down the middle.
“The proletarian primal experience of bondage and slavery is in today’s Germany the national social experience – or at least it should be.
“Today there is no longer simply a politically free, economically and socially unfree, exploited proletarian class and alongside it an eternally oppositional class of exploitative, privileged property owners; or rather, this antinomy is relative to the world-historical polarization process of which we have been witnesses and victims, i.e. it has become secondary according to the ranked order of historical values.
65 Ferdinand Fried, The End of Capitalism [“Das Ende des Kapitalismus”], Diedrichs, Jena.
66 A. Salz: “Nationalism and Socialism in Contemporary Germany”. [“Nationalismus und Sozialismus im heutigen Deutschland.”]
“Instead there are now proletarianized and non-proletarianized nations, and this in the midst of Europe, which in the course of its long history never before knew this kind of antagonism, and at any rate would not stand for it in the long run.
“The momentous, world-historical document which has established or legalized this new status for Europe is the Versailles ‘Peace Treaty’.
“It is therefore essential to finally raise this new condition into the clarity of consciousness, so it can be made the basis of experience which determines our whole outlook upon the world.
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