Graham R (Ed.) - Anarchism - A Documentary History of Libertarian Ideas Volume One - From Anarchy to Anarchism (300 CE to 1939)

The Interwar Years /393
change of conditions by a renewed spirit. But decrees can, at most, incorporate men
as government slaves into a new military-like economy; the new spirit of justice must
create its own forms of economy. The idea must embrace the needs of the moment
within its long-range view and shape them energetically. What was previously only
an ideal, is realized by the work of renewal born out of the revolution.
The need for socialism is there. Capitalism is collapsing. It no longer works. The
fiction that capital works has burst like a bubble; the only thing that attracted the
capitalist to his sort of work, to the risk of his fortune and the leadership and administration
of enterprise, namely profit, no longer attracts him. The age of the profitability
of capital, of interest and usury, is over; the mad war-profits were a dance of
death. If we are not to perish in our Germany, to perish really and literally, the only
salvation is work, real work done, performed and organized by an unselfish, fraternal
spirit. New forms of work must be developed, freed from a tribute payable to capital,
ceaselessly creating new values and new realities, harvesting and transforming the
products of nature for human needs. The age ofthe productivity oflabour is beginning;
otherwise we have reached the end of the line. Technology has placed both
long known and newly discovered natural forces at man's service. The more people
cultivate the earth and transform its products, the richer the harvest. Mankind can
live in dignity and without care. No one need be another's slave, no one need be excluded
and disinherited. Work, the means of life, need not become an arduous torment.
All can live in openness to spirit, soul, play, and God. Revolutions and their
painfully long, oppressive pre-history teach us that only the most extreme distress,
only the feeling of sheer desperation brings the masses of men to reason, to the reason
which, for wise men and children, always comes naturally; what horrors, ruins,
hardships, scourges, plagues, conflagrations and wild cruelties are we to expect, if
even at this fateful hour, reason, socialism, spiritual leadership and conformity to the
spirit do not enter into men's minds
... Our revolution can and should distribute lands on a grand scale. It can and
should create a new and revitalized fa rm population, but it certainly cannot give the
capitalist class joy in work and enterprise. For capitalists , the revolution is only the
end ofthe war: collapse and ruin. The capitalists, their industrial managers and their
dealers lose not only their income but also will lose their raw materials and world
market. Moreover, the negative component of socialism is there and no power can
remove it from the earth: the complete, hourly increasing disinclination ofthe workers,
indeed their psychic inability to continue to hire themselves out under capitalist
conditions.