The New Society | Page 9

richer than the Romans or
Greeks. The standard of well-being is set by the best-off of the
competitors, for he it is who determines the current standard of
technique and industry, the methods of production, the minimum of
labour and skill. We cannot, as we have already seen, keep aloof from
world-competition, for Germany needs cheap goods. We must therefore
try to keep step so far as we can.
Even if we shut our eyes and take no more account of our debt to
foreign lands than we do of the war-tribute, we must admit that the
average standard of well-being in America far surpasses the German.
Goods are not so dear as with us, and the wages of the skilled worker
amounts to between seven and ten dollars a day--more than 100 marks
in our money; and many artisans drive to their workshops in their own
automobiles.
If, now, we ask our Radicals how they envisage the problem of
competition with such a country, which in one generation will be
twenty-or thirty-fold as rich as we are, they will blurt out a few
sentences in which we shall catch the word "Soviet system," "surplus
value,"[6] "world revolution." But in truth the question will never occur
to them--it is not ventilated at public meetings.
Among themselves they talk, albeit without much conviction, about
"surplus value"--which has nothing whatever to do with the present

question, and in regard to which it has been proved to them often
enough that so far as it can be made use of at all, it only means about a
pound of butter extra per head of the population.
The economic superiority of the Western powers, however, goes on
growing, inasmuch as to all appearance they are getting to work
seriously to establish the new economy (which we have buried) in the
form of State Socialism. A healthy, or what is to-day the same thing, a
victorious economy, does not leap over any of its stages; it will work
gradually through the apparently longer, but constant, movement from
Capitalism to State Socialism and thence to full Socialism; while we, it
seems, want to take a shortcut, and to miss out the intervening stage.
And we lose so much time and energy in restless fluctuations forward
and backward, hither and thither, that this leap in advance may fall
short.
If anything could be more stupid and calamitous than the war itself it
was the time when it broke out. There was one thing which the big
capitalism of the world was formed to supply, which it was able to
supply, and, in fact, was supplying: the thing which not only justified
capitalism, but showed it to be an absolutely necessary stage in the
development of a denser population. This was the enrichment of the
peoples, the rapid, and even anticipatory restoration of equilibrium
between the growing population and the indispensable increase in the
means of production; in other words, general well-being. The unbroken
progress of America, and the almost unbroken progress of England will
demonstrate that in one, or at most two, generations the power of work
and the output of mechanism would have risen to such a pitch that we
could have done anything we liked in the direction of lightening human
labour and reconciling social antagonisms.
Alas, it was in vain! The rapid advance to prosperity of the people of
Central Europe, who had been accustomed to thrift and economy, went
to their heads; they fell victims to the poison of capitalism and of
mechanism; they were unable, like America in its youthful strength, to
make their new circumstances deepen their sense of responsibility; in
their greedy desire to store as much as possible of the heavenly manna

in their private barns they abandoned their destinies to a superannuated,
outworn feudal class and to aspiring magnates of the bourgeoisie; they
would not be taught by political catastrophes, and at last, in the
catastrophe of the war, they lost at once their imaginary hopes, their
traditional power and the economic basis of their existence.
Those who are now pursuing a policy of desperation are unconsciously
building their hopes on the breakdown which brought them to the top:
they are avowedly making the hoped-for revolution in the West the
central point of their system. If the West holds out, they will be false
prophets; but it will not only hold out, it will in the beginning at all
events, witness a great and passionate uprising of imperialistic and
capitalistic tendencies. If there is any one who did not understand that a
policy based on hopes of other peoples' bankruptcy is the most flimsy
and frivolous of all policies, he might well have learned it from the
war.
Germany must forge her own destinies for herself, without side-glances
at the