What Is Socialism?
An insight into 'Socialism'.
Every reasoned modern political conception revolves, whether it be acknowledged or not, round the central factor of all future development—the Social Problem.
Social distress is more than a bread-and-butter question. If it were no more than that, the Marxist would had been right. The proletarian is not international out of any love for international admixing, but because of the tragic realisation that, formerly, there was no national solution of his problem of existence. Bourgeois selfishness and Jewish competition worked together, consciously and unconsciously, and produced that thing which steals from the people the very light and breath of life—the Class War.
Social distress breeds the passion for Security. Deep in the proletariat slumbers a love for Home, Soil, and Fatherland, which finds its expression in good as well as bad forms, always ready for the noblest sacrifice. Even under Marxism, the proletariat feels no hate for the Fatherland, but only for that bourgeois perversion of the Fatherland—the System. This System created indeed a condition in which Nationalism and Capitalism were one and the same thing. The struggle against internationalism can never be won with phrases. Social distress can only be solved through social action. The proletariat will continue to think internationally so long as they have no share in the Nation. How can one love and respect something which one does not know?
The Social Problem is a question of making the international city-proletariat once more conscious of their fundamental relationship with the soil. Man can only gain root in his own soil. He only feels himself related to that which is his own. The only effective struggle against Bolshevism is the elimination of Capitalism.
It shows the lack of political instinct in the middle-classes that they identified themselves with Capitalism, with which, after all, they had little enough to do. Capitalism is the immoral distribution of capital. Capitalism in economics is the same thing as democracy in politics: namely, the immoral distribution of power within the State. Both factors, Capitalism and Democracy—their relation is as son to father—are the sworn enemies of a new social organisation of the State. Up to the present, they were satisfied with ignoring the Social Problem, and evaded the issue as far as possible by a hypocritical profession of philanthropy. That is the tragedy of Liberalism—philanthropy: a conglomeration of bourgeois cowardice, sentimentality, sadism, and fear. The whole story of social ‘amelioration’ unfolds itself before our eyes as a terrible example of Liberal incapacity to deal with the Social Problem—much less to comprehend its depths. The Social Problem has nothing, absolutely nothing, to do with sentimentality and ‘Charity’. It is a problem of national necessity. It is not the mere fact that some millions go hungry that gives this problem its world-wide political importance, but that it may cause the collapse of the Nation. That alone gives continuity to social ideas. Sentimentality and ‘Charity’ are utterly unreliable of themselves. National necessity alone creates fanaticism and the fierce impulse of faith. So it is that the Social Problem is grounded in the structure of future political developments and gives youth new duties and new tasks.
From this realisation a truly social concept of the State emerges, which has as little to do with Marxist-proletarian as with liberal-democratic notions. I am thinking in a social sense when I wish for the oppressed classes of my fellow countrymen the attainment of their natural rights, as rights, and not as more or less voluntary gifts. I am thinking in a social sense when I demand these rights not from motives of bourgeois fear or sentimentality, but from the realisation of national necessity and social justice.
The Liberal man thinks as a bourgeois; the Marxist man thinks as a proletarian; the Social man thinks nationally, in terms of a national state designed to fulfil a common destiny. For him, national and social thinking mean one and the same thing: Love for the Nation, belief in its future; and the will to freedom.
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- Joseph Goebbels, ‘Fascist Quarterly, 1936-1940’.
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