Prussian Socialism and Other Essays

Oswald Spengler

• Publisher: Black House Publishing Ltd
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781912759682
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Political Philosophy

Oswald Spengler, in the aftermath of the Great War, gained international repute as a philosopher-historian whose apparently doom-laden forecast on the eclipse of Western Civilisation, The Decline of The West, struck a chord amidst a period of moral, cultural, social and economic decay, around which swirled increasingly violent forces of Left and Right. Yet if recalled at all today it is as a failed prophet, whose “decline of the West” did not eventuate, and whose forecast of an “age of Caesars” was promptly crushed by the technical power of the plutocratic states combined with the masses of the Red Army over-running Europe.

The optimism of Liberalism from the pre-1914 era was revived in the post-1945 era with the defeat of the Axis, and impelled ever-more with the recent implosion of the Soviet bloc to the extent that Liberal academics predict, to use Dr. Francis Fukuyama’s term, “the end of history, ” where humanity has reached the epitome of progress in a world hegemony of capitalist economics and political democracy. However, a deeper perception shows the West is in a terminal state, despite outward appearances of seeming “health” that require an increasingly glossed appearance to hide the sickness.

In this collection of essays, lectures and articles, some rendered in English probably for the first time, Spengler is shown as a key figure in the so-called “German Conservative Revolution”, who energetically promoted his views to a wide public, with particular appeals to youth. He counselled against the unthinking fanaticism of mass movements, and advised that the times required careful deliberation by a new leadership stratum that was up to great tasks.

Prussianism and Socialism

(1919)

Prussianism and Socialism, based on notes for Volume II of Spengler’s magnum opus, The Decline of The West, remains a very important, albeit overlooked work. Much, perhaps most, of the “Right”, even the so-called “Far Right” has long since succumbed to Free Trade capitalism. That was not part of the traditional Right, including Conservativism. The movement that is called the “Conservative Revolution” in Germany, of which Spengler was a principal figure, was acutely aware of the “socialistic” character of Conservatism: of the nation-people-state as a social organism; not as economically contending individuals (Liberalism) or classes (Marxism). Conservative socialism was antithetical to Marxism and other forms of class-war “socialism” which shared with English capitalism the same 19th century “spirit of the Age” (Zeitgeist) dominated by questions of trade, economics, and the weighing and balancing of all questions like a merchant weighing his gold. England was the leader of this Zeitgeist, which remains animated now by the USA, founded on the Puritan sanctification of capitalism. What Spengler called “Prussian socialism”, what the anti-Hitler National Socialists Otto and Gregor Strasser, both influenced by Spengler, called “German socialism”, and what can also be called “ethical socialism”, aims not to expropriate capitalism for another class, but to transcend capitalism; to relegate economic questions to a subordinate position, and to destroy the dictature of Money, which Spengler states in the closing pages of The Decline of The West, dominates at the end cycle of a Civilisation. This is why the “Right” remains the only genuine rebellion against capitalism, and why Spengler stated in The Decline of The West, The Hour of Decision, and in this essay, that Leftist movements, including the Communists, are controlled by Money.

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Introduction

This essay is based on notes intended for the second volume of The Decline of The West. The notes comprise, at least in part, the germinal stage in the development of the entire thesis presented in that work.

The word “socialism” designates the noisiest, if not the most profound, topic of current debate. Everyone is using it. Everyone thinks it means something different. Into this universal catchword everyone injects whatever he loves or hates, fears or desires. Yet no one is aware of the scope and limitations of the word’s historical function. Is socialism an instinct, or a planned system? Is it a goal of mankind, or just a temporary condition? Or does the word perhaps refer simply to the demands made by a certain class of society? Is it the same thing as Marxism?

People who aim to change the word continually fall into the error of confusing what ought to be with what shall be. Rare indeed is the vision that can penetrate beyond the tangle and flux of contemporary events. I have yet to find someone who has really understood this German Revolution, who has fathomed its meaning or foreseen its duration. Moments are being mistaken for epochs, next year for the next century, whims for ideas, books for human beings.

Our Marxists show strength only when they are tearing down; when it comes to thinking or acting positively they are helpless. By their actions they are confirming at last that their patriarch was not a creator, but a critic only. His heritage amounts to a collection of abstract ideas, meaningful only to a world of bookworms. His “proletariat” is a purely literary concept, formed and sustained by the written word. It was real only so long as it denied, and did not embody, the actual state of things at any given time. Today we are beginning to realise that Marx was only the stepfather of socialism. Socialism contains elements that are older, stronger, and more fundamental than his critique of society. Such elements existed without him and continued to develop without him, in fact contrary to him. They are not to be found on paper; they are in the blood. And only the blood can decide the future.

But if socialism is not Marxism, then what is it? The answer will be found in these pages.

Some people already have an idea of what it is, but they are so diligently involved with political “standpoints,” aims, and blueprints that no one has dared to be sure. When faced with decisions, we have abandoned our former position of firmness and adopted milder, less radical, outmoded attitudes, appealing for support to Rousseau, Adam Smith, and the like. We take steps against Marx, and yet at every step we invoke his name. Meanwhile the time for fashioning ideologies has passed. We latecomers of Western civilisation have become sceptics. We refuse to be further misled by ideological systems. Ideologies are a thing of the previous century. We no longer want ideas and principles, we want ourselves.

Hence we now face the task of liberating German socialism from Marx. I say German socialism, for there is no other. This, too, is one of the truths that no longer lie hidden.

Perhaps no one has mentioned it before, but we Germans are socialists. The others cannot possibly be socialists.

What I am describing here is not just another conciliatory move, not a retreat or an evasion, but a Destiny. It cannot be escaped by closing one’s eyes, denying it, fighting it, or fleeing from it; such actions would merely be various ways of fulfilling it. Ducunt volentemfata, nolentem trahunt. The spirit of Old Prussia and the socialist attitude, at present driven by brotherly hatred to combat each other, are in fact one and the same.

This is an incontrovertible fact of history, not just a literary figment. The elements that make up history are blood, race – which is created by ideas that are never expressed – and the kind of thought which coordinates the energies of body and mind.

History transcends all mere ideals, doctrines, and logical formulations.

For the work of liberating German socialism from Marx I am counting on those of our young people who are sound enough to ignore worthless political verbiage and scheming, who are capable of grasping what is potent and invincible in our nature, and who are prepared to go forward, come what may. I address myself to the German youth in whom the spirit of the fathers has taken on vital forms, enabling them to fulfil a Destiny which they feel within themselves, a Destiny which they themselves are. They must be willing to accept obligations despite hardship and poverty; they must possess a Roman pride of service, modesty in the exercise of authority, and the willingness to take on duties readily and without exception rather than demand rights from others. These conditions once met, a silent sense of awareness will unite the individual with the totality. Such potential awareness is our greatest and most sacred asset. It is the heritage of anguished centuries, and it distinguishes us from all other people – us, the youngest and last people of our culture.

It is to these representatives of German youth that I turn. May they understand what the future expects of them. May they be proud to accept the challenge.

I. The Revolution

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No people in history has had a more tragic development than our own. In times of serious crisis all other peoples have fought either for victory or momentary setback; with us the stakes have always been victory or annihilation. Witness our military history from Kolin and Hochkirch to Jena and the Wars of Liberation, when the attempt was made on French soil to win Prussia’s allies for Napoleon by proposing partition; to the desperate hour at Nikolsburg when Bismarck contemplated suicide; to Sedan, which just barely staved off a general offensive of the armies poised at our borders by preventing Italy’s declaration of war; to the frightful tempest of wars on our entire planet, the first thunderclaps of which have just died away. Only in Frederick the Great’s and Bismarck’s states was resistance at all feasible.

In all these catastrophes Germans have fought Germans. That it was often tribe against tribe or sovereign against sovereign is significant only for the surface of history. Beneath all these conflicts lay the intense discord that inhabits every German soul, an inner struggle that first erupted ominously in the Gothic age, in the personages of Frederick Barbarossa and Henry the Lion at the time of the Battle of Legnano. Has anyone understood this dichotomy in the German soul? Who has recognized in Martin Luther the reincarnation of the Saxon Duke Widukind? What inscrutable drive was it that made Germans sympathise and fight with Napoleon when, with French blood, he was spreading the English idea on the Continent? What makes us conclude that the riddle of Legnano is profoundly similar to that of Leipzig? Why did Napoleon regard the destruction of the little world of Frederick the Great as his most urgent problem, and in his innermost thoughts as an insoluble one?

Now, in the evening of the Western culture, we can see that the World War is the great contest between the two Germanic ideas, which like all genuine ideas are lived rather than expressed. Following its actual outbreak in the Balkan outpost skirmish of 1912, it first assumed the outward appearance of a conflict between two great powers, one of which had everybody, the other nobody on its side. It reached a provisional conclusion in the stage of trench warfare and the devastation of huge armies. During this stage a new formula was found for the unresolved inner discord in the German breast. Currently, owing to a nineteenth century habit of overestimating the economic factor, we characterize the conflict by the superficial terms “socialism” and “capitalism.” What is actually taking place behind this verbal facade is the last great struggle of the Faustian soul.

At the moment in question, although the Germans themselves were not aware of it, the Napoleonic riddle made its reappearance. With the goal of destroying this masterpiece of a state, our most genuine and personal creation – so personal that no other people has been able to comprehend or imitate it, hating it instead like everything daemonic and inscrutable – an English army invaded Germany.

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Believe it or not, that is exactly what happened. The lethal blow in this was not necessarily aimed by the preachers of cosmopolitanism or other treacherous elements. It was we ourselves who brought about this calamity – we Germans, with our almost metaphysical will, our stubborn and selfless determination, our honest and enthusiastic patriotism. This will of ours is by its very nature a handy weapon for any external enemy with the practical sense of the English. It is a precarious compound of political ideas and aspiration, one which only the English are really capable of mastering and implementing.

For us, despite all our passion and self-sacrificing zeal, it has led to political dilettantism; its effect on our political existence has been disastrous, poisonous, suicidal. It is our invisible English army, left by Napoleon on German soil after the Battle of Jena.

Our deficient sense of reality, so pronounced as to have the force of a Destiny, has counteracted the other instinct in the German people, and has caused our external history to develop as a steady sequence of dreadful catastrophes. It failed us at the height of the Hohenstaufen period, when the glorious rulers considered themselves exalted above the demands of mundane life, just as it did in the nineteenth century, giving rise to the provincial philistinism that we have personified as “the German Michel.” Michelism is the sum of all our weaknesses: our fundamental displeasure at turns of events that demand attention and response; our urge to criticize at the wrong time; our need for relaxation at the wrong time; our pursuit of ideals instead of immediate action; our precipitate action at times when careful reflection is called for; our Volk as a collection of malcontents; our representative assemblies as glorified beer gardens. All these traits are essentially English, but in German caricature. Above all, we cherish our private morsel of freedom and guaranteed security, and we are fond of brandishing it at the precise moments when John Bull, with sure instinct, would conceal it prudently.

July 19, 1917, was the first act in the drama of the German Revolution. Rather than simply a change in leadership, it was, as our enemies could tell by the brutal forms it took, the coup d’etat of the English element in us, which saw its opportunity at just that time. It was not a revolt against the power of an incompetent, but against power in general. Incompetence at the top level? It is nearer to say that these “revolutionaries,” among them not a single true statesman, beheld the mote in the eyes of the men in positions of authority. Did they, at that moment, have anything at all to offer in place of incompetence besides an abstract principle? It was not a popular revolt. The people looked on anxiously and doubtfully, though not without a certain amount of Michel-like sympathy for measures taken against “those at the top.” It was a revolution of the caucus rooms. The term “majority party” does not, in our sense, have anything to do with the greater number of the people; it is the name of a club with two hundred members.

Matthias Erzberger was tactically the most gifted demagogue among them, excelling at scandal mongering, intrigue, and ambush, a virtuoso at the child’s game of overthrowing ministers. He lacked the slightest trace of the English parliamentarian’s gift for statesmanship; all he did was borrow their tricks. He attracted a swarm of nameless opportunists who were after some public office or other. These were the late descendants of the philistine revolution of 1848; for them, political opposition was a Weltanschauung.

These were the latter-day Social Democrats, trying to function without the iron hand of August Bebel. Bebel’s acute sense of reality would not have tolerated this shameless spectacle. He would have demanded and achieved a dictatorship either of the Right or the Left. He would have capsized this parliament and put the pacifists and League of Nations zealots before the firing squad.

This, then, was the Storming of the Bastille – aufdeutsch.

Sovereignty of party leaders is an English idea. In order to put it into effect one would have to be an Englishman by instinct and have mastered the English style of conducting public affairs. Mirabeau had this in mind when he said, “The time in which we live is very great; but the people are very small, and as yet I see no one with whom I would care to go aboard ship.” In 1917 not one person had the right to repeat this proud, sad statement. This coup d’etat was entirely negative in character. It broke the oppression of political power, it refused to yield to decisions from above, but it lacked the ability to make new decisions. It overthrew the state and replaced it with an oligarchy of party subalterns who regarded opposition as a vocation and responsible government as a presumption. It undermined, shifted, and dismantled everything piece by piece, to the amusement of political opponents and the despair of observers on the inside. It tried out newly gained power on the most important officials like a native chieftain testing a rifle on his slaves. This was the new spirit that prevailed until, in the black hour of final resistance, the state disappeared.

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Following the assault by our English insurgents there came, of necessity, the uprising of the Marxist proletariat in November of 1918. The scene changed from the halls of the Reichstag to the city streets. Encouraged by the mutiny of the “Home Army,” the readers of the radical press broke loose, even though they had been abandoned by their leaders, who were wise enough by now to be only half-convinced of their cause. Following the revolution of stupidity came the revolution of vulgarity. Once again it was not the people who initiated action, not even the socialistically trained masses; it was a mob led by the vermin of journalism. The true socialists were still engaged in the final struggle at the military front, or lay in the mass graves of Europe. They had risen up in 1914, and now they were being betrayed.

It was the most senseless act in German history. One looks in vain for anything like it in the history of other countries. A Frenchman would justifiably reject a comparison with 1789 as an insult to his nation.

Was that the great German Revolution?

How drab, how feeble, how utterly void of conviction it all was! Where we expected heroes we found ex-convicts, journalists, deserters roaming about yelling and stealing, drunk with their own importance and impunity, ruling, deposing, brawling, and writing poetry. It is said that such types have sullied every revolution. Perhaps that is true. But in other revolutions the entire people rose up with such elemental force that the dregs simply disappeared. Here it was the dregs alone who went into action. Not a sign of the great mass, forged into unity by a common idea.

The party of August Bebel had militant qualities which distinguished it from the socialism of all other countries: the clattering footsteps of workers’ battalions, a calm sense of determination, good discipline, and the courage to die for a transcendent principle. Yet the soul of the party expired when its more intelligent leaders of yesteryear surrendered to the enemy of yesteryear, reactionary philistinism. They did this out of fear of responsibility, out of fear of succeeding in a cause they had championed for forty years. They dreaded the moment when they would have to create reality rather than combat it. When this happened, Marxism and socialism, i.e., class theory and collective instinct, parted ways for the first time. Only the Spartacists retained a modicum of integrity. The smarter ones had lost faith in the dogma, but lacked the courage to break with it openly. Thus we witnessed the spectacle of a working class divorced from the people by a few ideas and doctrines learned by rote. Leaders were actually deserters; fol...

Table of contents

• Table of Contents
• Prussian Socialism
• Oswald Spengler An Introduction to His Life and Work
• Political Writings
• Prussianism and Socialism
• The Two Faces of Russia and Germany’s Eastern Problems
• Pessimism?
• The German National Character
• Introduction to Decline of the Birth Rate by Richard Korherr
• Nietzsche And His Century
• Tasks of the Nobility
• Political Duties of German Youth
• Building of the New German Reich
• Is World Peace Possible?